thinking is the new black

I took some time out from writing last week to run a research workshop with the Brighton team at iCrossing UK and then attended and presented at Transforming Audiences 2.

It is great to see the commercial world taking their research standards so seriously and the experience for me was having the best, most engaged seminar group ever, who responded to questions and discussion really thoughtfully. It’s very refreshing and to their credit that the team want to take the time to get beyond the surface of notions such as culture, community, tribe etc. that get used in quite a casual way in the industry sometimes, but not with these guys. It gives me heart that they’re are genuinely interested in the intellectual origins of such ideas and to use the terms in an appropriate way. As a result we spent a bit of time discussing culture as something we do, material culture and the idea and limitations of subculture. Also taking time to consider the value of the work of people like Foucault and Bourdieu, discourse, taste, agency online and power with a big P. Kudos guys!

so, Transforming Audiences 2

The pre-conference day at Transforming Audiences 2 on the presentation of the self in digital life was perhaps the most stimulating bit for me. I left at the end of the day having met some lovely new peeps engaged in research from all over the world: China, Canada, Australia and with pages of notes plus my brain on overdrive full of thoughts and ideas, which is the sure sign of a good conference.

There’s an excellent over view of the conf here from Britta ( also fyi Mark, David, Caro & co there are nice clean definitions of ontology epistemology etc..in a earlier post.)

There were some cracking presentations and it is clear there is great research being done by Ranjana Das and Sonia Livingstone on facebook at L.S.E. In particular I really liked Mia Lovenhein’s from the University of Oslo talk on blogs self representation and gender.

I asked a question during the discussion on what it means to be ’social’ e.g is logging on and looking at a news feed the same as blogging? Well obviously not..and this troubles me that a lot of what is talked about as social media and participation is not what I would call social. The idea of needing to define ‘participation’ was also raised during the closing session and final panel by others.
For me the technology and the institutional dimension of digital needs to be addressed more explicitly by research. Not to go all techno-determinsim but in my view there needs to be more consideration of how the technology both enables and limits – one might say curates even? Also there was no mention of the spectre of Google and the idea that users only to varying degrees understand their networks, how search engine optimization and digital traces.

In the days when we all used film we knew to a certain extent who and where we presented representations of ourselves, in a picture frame in the home, in a photo album, in a corporate brochure, in a gallery etc So to a certain extent we knew who our audience was and if we were not in total control of the representation we had some comprehension of the institution that was and the power relations that involved. I could go on and on here, so many thoughts…

I’m not a linguist. Phew.

I had a minor set-to last week with the discourse analysis section of my consumer interviews, which has knock affects on the overall final structure of the thesis. Being so near the to the end, at the time this felt somewhat of a minor disaster, and sent my bonce in a right old spin.
There are many styles of discourse analysis, all slightly different in nature and therefore consequence and, some favoured more by certain disciplines than others. My research is what is known as “interdisciplinary” and I have been feeling a little tugg of love between humanities and social sciences lately, perhaps confounded by the fact that I have 2 supervisors who’s areas of experience and expertise have a humanities/soc-sci split. This has actually worked really well for me up until now, but last week during a meeting, it became apparent that there was an atmosphere of concern over the way I have analysed the interview data. Obviously it is good to know these things now before submission and viva, and that it what supervisors are for. However it is an unpleasant feeling when the output of nearly 3 years toil is called into question.

Two pieces of advice that I’ve constantly echoing in my head (which actually come from the Gaunlett article I mentioned in a previous post) are

Don’t let the PhD over run 3 years, get it finished.
Stop reading, start writing.

So consequently I’ve been all 6s & 7s this past week because, I ‘ve been in the library doing desk work on theories of my method and have lost writing time, because I am reading. However in the words of Tammy Wynette I am going stand by my method. A little known fact is that Tammy originally wrote her famous hit about the insecurities she had over an emerging field of data analysis she was developing. At the very last minute she changed the lyrics from method to man, to avoid alienating fans without a university education.

Back to me. I went away after meeting the supers, with a sense of impending doom that I was going to have to review all my data and produce a corpus and would bankcrupt myself doing the PhD forever. I spent a day looking through all these hideous methodology papers on sociolinguistics, speech act theory, and pragmatics looking for clues. There were tables and graphs and metrics and grids and diagrams and, and, YER- UCK! You have to understand that it you cut a slice off one of my limbs, that it would say “qualitative” in sugary pink writing like a piece of Brighton rock. I am qualitative in the way Cathy was Heathcliff. I loathe numbers. I can’t even remember my mums phone no, which she has had for 15 years. Then I came across some comforting words on Foucault from the lovely squishy cultural theorist par excellence, Stuart Hall, that made me feel all warm and fuzzy.

“The first point to note is the shift of attention in Foucault from language to discourse. He studied not language, but discourse as a system of representation”.

That’s what I’m talking about, discourse as a system of representation. Language and practice – language and practice. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Discourse is something we do. No piece of software, or visualising metrics, table thingie is ever going to provide insight into the ideological biases and power relations explicit in discursive formation as far as I’m concerned. What good would a graph do in offering perception of socio-cultural context? Numbers Pah! It’s back to my first love of social –semiotics for me. I’ll be applying Saussure & Barthes on the ones and twos. Words as signs; iconic, symbolic, indexical. It’s denotation and connotation all the way. Yes sireeeee.

In the interests of balanced debate, here is an article from my friend Shirl biggin up graphs. Shout out to the graph collective. RRrrrspect.