Learning the great art of (online) ethnography

Supposedly I am an apprentice of sorts. During my undergraduate studies someone once told me that the PhD is like undertaking an academic apprenticeship (and Google confirms that this is quite an established concept (see Green, 2005: 50)). Sure, I guess that sounds about right, but if this is indeed the case, I’m yet to figure out to whom I am an apprentice – who my guide/instructor/wise mentor/Mr Miyagi is. My supervisors/advisors I hear you say? – not in my experience. While I have been envious of those I’ve met along the way who research and publish alongside their advisors, that’s not my own experience at all. I’ve met people from MIT’s SENSEable City Lab , and a host of other schools that are dedicated to researching in the specific area of the PhDs – again, not my own experience at all.  I’m just here, rather blindly foraging on my own, given a couple of years, and expected to have it all together and figured out before the scholarship runs dry.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m doing this. I will get there. I rejoice the days I feel as though this thing is moving forwards….and I can’t bear to look back on months that pass and nothing seems to have changed. I am indeed grateful for the funding my school has given me….and when you think about it….I really have one of the more desireable ‘jobs’ around. I enjoy that feeling of my mind twisting and I love going to ‘work’. After all, I’m the one always telling people to do what they love (and quit if you don’t!) – and I can’t wait to get back to tutoring.

Regardless of who my teacher may be, I’ve been spending the meantime learning to take baby steps of my own. If I could have explained to you what my research was about at the beginning of the year (some of the dusty corners of this blog probably still do to some extent), it would be nothing at all like what I would tell you now. Most significantly of late, I’ve been teaching myself the ways of the ethnographer. You don’t learn this stuff in the undergraduate courses at university, maybe not even in a condensed year of Master’s research. The further I walk down this road, the more , for the most part, things begin to make sense – but time moves quickly in digital realms (Did you see what a central role Twitter played on the red carpet of last night’s MTV VMAs!?).

From early proposals with the intention of sitting in WiFi parks, approaching laptop users, then interviewing them and pressuring them to further communicate with me and provide me with things like photographs – my ethnography quickly led me online, into digital worlds and spaces already quite familiar to me where communications seem to occur more naturally. Unlike the social scientist who visits foreign civilisations and new worlds, my research space felt normal – a part of my existing everyday life. I needed a way to separate my ‘life’ from my ‘research’, or at least, a methodology that was sympathetic to my embedded position. It became less about arriving at a particular outcome, and more about exploring the ways in which I was  trying to get there. The real work lays in now understanding the effectiveness of my methodology as a tool for understanding social/spatial relationships as they might relate to existing theoretical currents – perhaps illuminating some potential shortcomings and/or suggesting a minor change or two.

I’m not sure where I was going with this post other than to point out the changes that take place as one goes about social research. Good social research. Messy social research. My ethnographic stroll has meant that I’ve been spending increasing amounts of time just ‘being’ in online public spaces as much as physical material ones. I realise that many people would disagree. Others perhaps don’t know it yet, but certain social media, especially Twitter, are very much like the more traditional conceptions of a public space. I’m not sure the academic literature has gone there at all yet. Indeed, it is talking and listening in public spaces that are perhaps the oldest form of democracy. These things are not disappearing, or a dying art. They are very much alive – the job of the ethnographer might be to show this to the others.

Slowly, I am learning the great art of ethnography. An ethnography that is by no means established; rather, one that is evolving and seems to provoke me as much as I attempt to shepherd it.