General ethnographic methods

In conducting these studies, students draw on some of the methods used in qualitative or ethnographic research on methods to study social contexts or sites. Glesne and Peshkin’s (1992) Becoming Qualitative Researchers, Longman, is a readable introduction appropriate for even high school students. Bruhn and Jankowski (1991) A Handbook Of Qualitative Methodologies For Mass Communication Research and Lindlof (1995) Qualitative Communication Research Methods contains discussions of methods specific to qualitative research on response to media.

For a glossary of terms used in ethnographic research:
fieldworking.com

For a discussion of general methods of different types of ethnography:
Amy McCleverty: Ethnography

For a discussion of methods for studying places or institutions employed in the very useful first year college composition textbook, Fieldworking (Cheresi-Smith & Sunstein, 2002):
Field Working Online
Field Working Online: URLs

Street-level Youth Media: young people using media to study community issues

The May, 2004 issue of Language Arts is devoted to articles on techniques for engaging students in ethnographic studies.

Folklore studies (research on local folklore is related to media ethnography in that it examines the ways in which local social practices reflect the culture of a particular place or region):

American Folklore Society

American Folklife Center

American Memory Project

CARTS: Cultural Arts Resources for Folk Arts in Education

Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage

Wisconsin Folks

Louisiana Voices: An Educators Guide to Exploring our Communities and Traditions

For further reading on general ethnographic/fieldwork methods with students:

Beach, R., & Finders, M (1998). Students as ethnographers: Guiding alternative research projects. English Journal, 89(1), 82-90.

Campano, G. (2002). Dancing across borders: Creating community in a diverse urban classroom.

Dunbar-Odom, D. (1999). Speaking back with authority: Students as ethnographers in the research writing class. In V. Balseter & M. H. Kells (Eds.), Attending to the margins: Writing, researching, and teaching on the front lines (pp. 7-22). Portsmouth, NH: Boynton-Cook.

Egan-Robertson, A., & Bloome, D. (Eds.) (1998). Students as researchers of culture and language in their own communities. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.

Pfitzner, A. (2002). Preparing students to become invested members of their community.

Sinor, J., & Huston, M. (2004). The role of ethnography in the post-process writing classroom. Teaching English in the Two-Year College, 31(4), 369-382.

Wolk, E. (2002). Pio Pico student researchers participatory action research: From classroom to community, Transforming teaching and learning.

For further reading on general ethnography methods:

Emerson, R., Fretz, R., & Shaw, L. (1995). Writing ethnographic fieldnotes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Fetterman, D. (1997). Ethnography: Step-by-step. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Hammersley, M., & Atkinson, P. (1995). Ethnography: Principles in practice. New York: Routledge.

Schensul, S., Schensul, J., & Lecompte, M (1999). Essential ethnographic methods: Observations, interviews, and questionnaires. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Schensul, J., & Lecompte, M (1999). Designing and conducting ethnographic research. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Silverman, D. (2000). Doing qualitative research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Van Mannen, J. (1998). Tales of the field: On writing ethnography.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

For further reading on audience research methods related to media (see also Module 4):

Abercrombie, N., & Longhurst, B. (1998). Audiences: A sociological theory of performance and imagination. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Berger, A. (2000). Media and communication research methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Bird, E. (2003). The audience in everyday life: Living in a media world. New York: Routledge.

Brooker, W., & Jermyn, D. (Eds.). (2003). The audience studies reader. New York: Routledge.

Dickinson, R., Harindranath, R., & Linne, O. (Eds.). (1998). Approaches to audience: A reader. New York: Oxford University Press.

Dochartaigh, N. (2002). The Internet research handbook: A practical guide for students and researchers in the social sciences. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Goldstein, J. (Ed.). (1998). Why we watch: The attractions of violent entertainment. New York: Oxford University Press.

Gunter, B. (2000). Media research methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Hay, J., Grossberg, L., & Wartella, E. (1996). The audience and its landscape. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Hine, C. (2000). Virtual ethnography. New York: Sage.

Jensen, K. B. (Ed.). (2002). A handbook of media and communication research: Qualitative and quantitative methodologies. New York: Routledge.

Jones, S. (Ed.). Doing Internet research: Critical issues and methods for examining the Net. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Lindlif, T.R. & Shatzer, M.J. (1998). Media ethnography in virtual space: Strategies, limits, and possibilities. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 42(2), 170-190.

Mahin, D. (2002). Ethnographic research for media studies. London: Arnold.

Mann, C., & Stewart, F. (2000). Internet communication and qualitative research: A handbook for researching online. Thousand Oaks, CA:Sage.

Markham, A. N. (1998) . Life online: Researching real experience in virtual space. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press.

Means Coleman, R. R. (Ed.). (2001). Say it loud!: African American audiences, media, and identity. New York: Routledge.

Morley, D. (2000). Home Territories: Media, Mobility and Identity. London: Routledge.

Riggs, K. (1998). Mature audiences: Television and the elderly. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press.

Ruddock, A. (2001). Understanding audiences—Theory and method. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Seiter, E. (1999). Television and new media audiences. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.

Tulloch, J. (2000). Watching the TV audience: Theory and method in reception studies. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.

Stokes, J. (2003). How to do media and cultural studies. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Wicks, R. H. (2000). Understanding audiences. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

The following are some types of media texts students could study:

Computer/video games

Students participate in a range of different types of computer/video games. In “shooter games” such as Quake, Doome, and others, players use various weapons to destroy their opponents.

Google: video games

In other on-line games, such as Sim City 3000, Populous, and Alpha Centauri, students are involved in constructing different aspects of community — housing, transportation, shopping, business, schooling, waste disposal, day care, etc. (For a description of 2002-released, The Sims OnLine)

One player, Melissa Maerz, in an article in City Pages, described her experience playing The Sims Online:

Released last December, the multiplayer game is a chance to play The Sims with hundreds of thousands of other people around the world. You construct a virtual you — choose a haircut and an outfit, select a hometown, find a house to live in and roommates who are just psychotic enough to live with you. And then you try to live the best cyberlife you can. Keeping your front yard in shape, buying a bigger television for the family, boosting your popularity by chatting up your neighbors — these are the ways you keep up with the virtual Joneses. There is no dragon to kill, no world to save, no magic mushroom to eat, no points to earn, no “winning” the game — just bills to pay, toilets to clean, and a job to work every day until you die.

In web-based computer games, players participate with other players with varied abilities and expertise, a characteristic that mirrors the reality of lived worlds. Within this social hierarchy, players advance as they learn new practices and strategies.

In studying these games, students may examine participants’ perceptions of differences and similarities between playing the game as a virtual reality and experiences in similar lived-world realities.

Game Research

Game Culture

The Education Arcade

Game Journals: blog about games

Game Studies: research on game participation

WomenGamers

Digital Games Research Association

For a study of female computer games:

From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Further Reflections

DVD: Gamers: Clans, Mods, and a Cultural Revolution (documentary on gamers)

Issue of M-C/Media and Culture on games

Ahuna, C. (2001). Online Game communities are social in nature

Assignment: conduct an ethnography of a New Media artifact

Fan members/clubs

Students could also study various types of fans or fan clubs organized
around television programs, films, rock groups, sports teams, or memorabilia. Being a fan involves active participation and knowledge of a particular media text or event, as displayed through logos, photos, clothes, etc. For example, an avid professional football team fan may attend events prior to the game, wear certain costumes associated with the team, actively follow information about players and games, and perform in certain ways during the game. For example, during the game, fans may engage in a whole series of different ritualistic cheers or chants.

All of this points to new, alternative ways of audience participation with television shows. Some shows actually encourage and foster audience participation of web sites linked to shows. Brooker and Jermyn (2003) cite the example of a British BBC2 drama series, Attachments, in which the characters participated in a web site that actually existed and could be accessed by audience members:

Attachments is a drama series about a fledgling dotcom company, run by married couple Mike and Luce, and the problems the team has in setting up and maintained a lifestyle and music site called Seethru. Viewers of the early episodes who typed in the Seethru URL they glimpsed during the show were often surprised to discover that the site actually existed, a simulacrum of the on-screen dotcom with no hint that Mike and Luce might be fictional characters. Designed to mirror the events of the TV programme, <Seethru> enabled viewers to enter the world of Attachments, reader the articles discussed in that week’s episodes, mail and get response from the show’s protagonists, watch unseen material from the programme on “webcams”, and follow up MP3 or internet links recommended by the fictional team (p. 322).

Similarly, Brooker and Jermyn note that the various sites associated with audience participation with Dawson’s Creek provided viewers with additional information about the program:

The “Summer Diaries” feature lets a Dawson’s Creek fan read her favorite characters’ personal journal, while Capeside.net presents a detailed simulation of the show’s fictional setting, complete with fake banner ads and college magazine articles written by Dawson and his friends . . . A more recent addition to the site allows visitors to explore a mocked-up version of the characters’ desktops, letting them root through Dawson’s deleted mail file and discover secret correspondence that never came to light on the TV show; another gives the visitor access to scribbled notes, supposedly written by the characters and passed under the table during their college classes. The page’s slogan reads: “Think you know everything that’s going on in Capeside High? Think again.” (p. 324)

Brooker and Jermyn conducted an analysis of audience’s postings and weblog interactions on the Seethru site, finding that the participants were engaged in a far more active/interactive mode that the typical television audience. The “went online to Debate its flaws, emailed its chracters, watched clips that were never shownon TV and wandered off onto other sites following the fictional team’s links and recommendations” (p. 333).

Web-based fan clubs are organized around highly interactive audience exchanges, transparent navigational links, and hybridity of texts, images, sounds, links, or references (Hocks, 2003). Members of the Felicity Fan Club share experiences with the discontinued program:

Ben & Felicity Online participates with the show’s official web site and share photos of their favorite actors on the show.

Media ethnography studies fan participation on these sites are themselves becoming increasingly hypertextual — framing reports of their data through web-based links. Mary Hocks (2003) cites the example of an online dissertation research report by Christine Boese (1998), a study of the fan culture of the television series, Xena, Warrior Princess.

This research report contains narrative constructions of program episodes, surveys, photos, 1,100 Web sites related to the show, data on fan conferences, and analysis of fan responses. Moreover, response of visitors’ own responses to the site have been added to the site. Boese uses this Web-based tool to demonstrate a primary finding — how female fans developed a sense of agency and social empowerments through sharing responses to the lesbian/feminist themes portrayed on the show and in the chat exchanges. These materials are linked together in a highly interactive way so that users themselves experience their own reflective sense of responding in a different mode other than simply reading a print report. In what could be described as an infinite expansion of response research, the users were adding their own meanings to the site and learning in the process. As Hocks notes, all of this challenges readers’ familiar mode of reading ‘by drawing explicit and sometimes playful attention to both the discontinuities and the continuities between older and newer forms of reading, writing, and viewing information” (p. 643).

A key element of the Xena: Warrior Princess program are the highly postmodern stances towards mythological and literary texts that serve as the basis for the storylines, characters, symbols, and themes in the program. For links to the mythological intertextual links, see Xena Online Resources.

Web-site links such as the Whoosh fan magazine provide funs with a lot of articles about background information on intertextual links. Gwenllian-Jones (2003) notes that the journal:

carries essays on a diverse range of topics: Boudicca, Alexander the Great, battle strategy, ancient weaponry, ethical and and thematic issues, hero figures, food and drink, geography, fauna and flora, ancient civilizations, spiritual beliefs, comparison between Zena and a variety of other fictional, historical, or mythological figures, and so on. (p. 187)

This demonstrates the ways in Web-based media serve as a useful basis for understanding intertextual links to these texts by fostering a lot of hypertextual connections related to participation with television.

For other Xena sites:

Oxygen.com
Xenafan.com
Xena.com
Xena Online Resources
XENA Logomancy

Television or rock band fan clubs are organized around on-line participation in which members assume certain roles, for example, related to reviewing previous shows, sharing information, speculating about future shows, or even rewriting the texts to create alternative plots. Soap opera fans displaying pictures of soap opera actors/actresses in their bedrooms, wrote letters to the actors/actresses, or attended conferences to meet the actors/actresses, practices that served to mark their identities as avid fans (Harrington & Bielby, 1995). Star Trek fan club members employed video editing to construct their own versions of Star Trek programs through editing clips from programs (Jenkins, 1997). Participation in these clubs require a high level of active participation in keeping current about the show or band, as well as events surrounding the show or band.

Star Trek fan clubs/activities

For further reading on Star Trek fans;

Irwin, W. & Love, G. (Eds). (1997). The best of the best of Trek: From the Magazine for Star Trek Fans. New York: New American Library.

Kozinets, R. V. (2001), Utopian enterprise: Articulating the meanings of Star Trek's culture of consumption. Journal of Consumer Research, 28, 67-88.

Staffford, N. (Ed.). (2001). Trekkers: True stories by fans for fans. New York: ECW PRESS

Tulloch, J. (1995). Science fiction audiences: Doctor Who, Star Trek, and their
fans. New York: Routledge.

Researchers also examine discussion forums to determine responses to specific films, such as an analysis of discussions of much anticipated previews for The Lord of the Rings films (Chin, B., & Gray, J. (2001). “One ring to rule them all”: Pre-viewers and pre-texts of the Lord of the Rings films. Intensities: The Journal of Cult Media, 2.)or Lordoftherings.net, the ‘lotr’ and ‘lord_OT_rings_movie’ lists on Yahoo Groups (groups.yahoo.com), and the message board of another website Tolkien-movies.com which moved its forum from Yahoo Groups to Ezboard.

For television program fan clubs:
Fandom.tv

Soap opera fan clubs:
About.com
Soapcentral.com

Shannon Delaney: Dominant Rock: Fan Theory and Power in Hard Rock Music

Article on a B-52’s fan club
citypages.com

Nicolas Gipe’s study of a rock band’s fan club
geocities.com

Bale, J., Virtual fandoms; Futurescapes of football.

Pradstaller, F. (2003). Virtual proximity: Creating connection in an online fan Community. Gnovis: Journal of Communication, Culture, and Technology.

For further reading on audience research on fans:

Baym, N. K. (2000). Tune in, Log on: Soaps, fandom, and online Community. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Bury, R. (2003). Stories for [boys] Ggrls: Female fans read The X-Files.
Popular Communication, 1, 217-242

Internet chat rooms.

Students also participate in on-line chat rooms within AOL or other sites, as well as MOOs — Multi-User Dimension Object Oriented, a subgroup of MUDs, multi-user, interactive fantasy games, or Blogging.

For on-line Cybercultures
Cybersoc.com

Blogging: other links
Corante.com

Dissertation research studies: Georgetown University Center for Communication, Culture & Technology

In these chat rooms, participants employ short-hand acronyms or lingo in order to keep pace with the fast-moving conversation, for example, AYT (“Are you there?”), YIAH (“Yes, I am here.”), Pmfji (“Pardon me for jumping in.”), BRB (“Be right back.”), PG11 (“Parent nearby.”), GTG (“Got to go.”), CYA (“See ya.”), POOF (Gone, left the chat room) (Ruane, 2000).

In chat-room conversations, participants often have no knowledge of others’ real-world identities defined by gender, class, race, age, or disability. They may therefore adopt totally different identities — males may pose as females and visa versa in order to carry on virtual romantic relationships without any of the consequences or accountability associated with “lived-world” relationships (Turkle, 1996).

Based on analysis language use in a “Cybersphere” MOO chat space, Angela Dudfield noted the following:

Language use in this text is highly complex and sophisticated. It is "both physical (letters on the screen) as it is in books, and fleeting and ethereal like speech . . . a strange middle ground between written and oral sensibilities" (Young, 1994). Users interact by "talking" with one another, but that talk is "talk written down." What occurs in this form of communication is an interface between oral and written language, with its own unique textual and linguistic features.

The text genre is also complex. It is similar to traditional science fiction, and its field, one of surviving in a postapocalyptic world, is realized by the use of lexical items common to that form. Yet, unlike traditional print, the descriptions of the characters are not explicitly woven into the text — they are prepared by users in advance and are accessed (by individual users) and transformed (by the character's creator) when required or desired. This process is also applied to descriptions of clothing, "locations" on Cybersphere, and various created objects. Successful interaction in this environment requires use of narrative, descriptions, dialogue, performative actions, labels, lists, and abbreviations, all within the context of the theme and genre of the MOO and all interwoven in nonlinear fashion.

Participants are in a constant flux of reading and writing to co-construct the text in imaginative, innovative ways. Each "encounter" is unique since the way it takes shape depends on which characters happen to be logged on, how often those characters have interacted previously, their own individual personalities (both in and out of character), and the nature of their in-character and out-of-character relationships within the community.

One positive aspect of the absence of physical markers is that adolescents intimidated by nonverbal markers of appearance or physical behaviors in face-to-face conversation no longer need be concerned about these markers. In their study of Sam, a 13-year-old female participant in AOL Instant Message (IM) interactions, Lewis and Fabos (1999) found that she experimented with a range of voices in order to build social ties with both her friends and with strangers. In talking with her close friend, Sam adopted what she described as a “softer and sweeter” tone, while giving shorter, more pointed answers to peers with whom she did not want to talk. She also mimicked the language of another participant who accidentally got onto her buddy list to maintain the connection:

Sam: This girl, she thinks I’m somebody else. She thinks I’m one of her friends, and she’s like “Hey!” and I’m like “Hi!” and I start playing along with her. She thinks that I’m one of her school friends. She doesn’t know it’s me. She wrote to me twice now.

Bettina: So she’s this person that you’re lying to almost ...

Sam: Yeah, you just play along. It’s fun sometimes. It’s comical. Because she’ll say something like “Oh [a boy] did this and we’re going to the ski house,” or whatever, and I’m like “Oh God!” and like and I’ll just reply to her. I’ll use the same exclamations where she uses them and I’ll try to talk like they do. (Lewis and Fabos, 1999, p. 7)

You could therefore study specific aspects of participants’ conversations in these chat rooms related to their construction of identity, varied social roles, and relationships. Through experimenting with language, Sam is developing confidence in employing different language styles, which may or may not transfer to her ability to express herself in lived worlds. Nick Karl studied the online community of one chat room and emphasized the awareness of language gained by participants: “. . . we judge each other by the way we “act” and by the way we express ourselves. This is important because it is the basis for social interaction online.”

On-line chat-room exchanges certainly provide you with a ready, unobtrusive access to public sharing of responses to a range of media texts. On the other hand, rather than assume that you are studying seemingly authentic exchanges of responses, you need to recognize, as Matt Hills warns in citing the “transparency fallacy” (p. 175) that these responses are mediated by the Internet technology which is shaping the practices of social exchange:

The “transparency fallacy” seduces critics into supposing that the Internet can unproblematically unveil those cultural processes and mechanisms which cultural studies has been positioning for the past two decades . . . It is as if the cyberspace ethnographer’s own desire to attain the position of a “lurker” — invisible and supposedly all-seeing — overwhelms or displaces any interest in the technological, social and historical processes through which this “invisibility” has itself been constructed as a specific nodal point within mediation. (p. 175)

Hills argues that the chat-room technology creates a different form of cultural performance that needs to be recognized as a performance mediated by the conventions and norms operating in chat-room exchanges, as well as the commodification of chat rooms associated with the promotion and marketing of the text. He describes this technological mediation as the “serialization of the fan audience itself” (p. 177) that creates a second-order version of an audience’s off-line experiences or stances.

Another interesting topic has to do with how participants perceive others’ identities in online chat rooms based primarily on language use and style, as well as how do they determine others’ social agendas and sincerity. For research on social perceptions in online sites:

The MIT Media Lab: Social Media Group
The Sociable Media Group investigates issues concerning society and identity in the networked world.

We address such questions as: How do we perceive other people on-line? What does a virtual crowd look like? How do social conventions develop in the networked world? Our emphasis is on design: we build experimental interfaces and installations that explore new forms of social interaction in the mediated world.

Online interviewing can be difficult, so you need to prepare your interview questions carefully and know how to engage participants in answering those questions. For a discussion of methods of online interviewing:

Crichton, S. & Kinash, S. (2003). Virtual ethnography: Interactive interviewing online as method. Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology, 29(2).

And, you need to address the ethical, research issue of studying online participants without their permission, a violation of research on human subjects rules; it is therefore important to request permission of participants in an initial posting (Bird & Barber, 2002). A key consideration is whether the site is a public site as opposed to simply your own private e-mails.
(For a discussion of what constitutes “public”: Beau Lebens, Ethnographic Ethics):

Research on Chat-Room Interactions

Bibliography on chat communication

Nancy Arnett, The electronic mail paradox

Baird, E. (1998). "Ain't gotta do nothin but be brown and die " - Introduction to the Internet and an American Indian Chat Room. CMC Magazine 5 (7).

Cerratto, T. & Wærn, Y. (2000). Chatting to learn and learning to chat in collaborative virtual environments. M/C. A Journal of Media and Culture,3(4).

Chen, L, Davies, A., & Elliot, R. (2001). Gender and identity play on the Net: Raising men for fun?

Chenault, B. (1998). Developing interpersonal and emotional relationships via computer-mediated communication. CMC Magazine

de la Harpe, R. & Mackenzie, A. (2002). Chat rooms as an academic teaching technique.

Lieberman, J. & Stovall, I. (1999). Strategies for using chat as a communication tool.

Murphy, K, & Collins, M. (1999). Communication conventions in institutional electronic chats. First Monday, 2(11).

Pargman, D. (2000). The fabric of virtual reality - courage, rewards and death in an adventure mud. M/C – A Journal of Media and Culture

Rintel, E.S., Mulholland, J., & Pittnam, J. (2001). First things first: Internet relay chat openings. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 6(3).

Tyners, B., Reynolds, L., & Bennett, D. Race-related Behaviors in Monitored and Unmonitored Chat Rooms

Organizations/resource sites focusing on research on audience use of the Internet:

Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication

First Monday

The Journal of Virtual Environments

Cybersociology

Journal of Online Behavior

Association of Internet Researchers

The Internet Studies Center

Center for Digital Discourse and Culture

Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies

Cybergeography Research

Cyberanthropology.org

Cyberculture, identity, and gender resources

Net Culture Site

Association of Internet Researchers: Listserves on Internet Research

For further reading on Internet audience research:

Ayers, M., & McCaughey, M. (Eds.). (2003). Cyberactivism: Online activism in theory and practice. New York: Routledge.

Bell, D., & Kennedy, B. (Eds.). (2000). The cybercultures reader. New York: Routledge.

Chayko, M. (2002). Connecting: How we form social bonds and communities in the Internet age. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

Flanagan, M., & Booth, A. (2002). Reload: Rethinking women + cyberculture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Hawisher, G., & Selfe, C. (2000). Global literacies and the World-Wide Web. New York: Routledge.

Holeton, R. (1998). Composing cyberspace: Identity, community, and knowledge in the electronic age. Columbus, OH: McGraw-Hill

Jones, S. G., (Ed.). (1998). Cybersociety 2.0: Revisiting computer-mediated communication and community. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Katz, J.E., & R.E. Rice. (2002). Social consequences of Internet use: Access, involvement and interaction. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Klotz, R. J. (2004). The politics of Internet communication. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Kolko, B. E., Nakamura, L., & Rodman, G. B. (Eds.). (2000). Race in cyberspace. New York: Routledge.

Lueg, C, & Fisher, D. (Eds.). (2003). From Usenet to cowebs: Interacting with social information spaces, Readings in Cscw. London: Springer Verlag

McCaughey, M, & Ayers, M. D. (Eds.). (2003). Cyberactivism: Online activism in theory and practice. New York, NY: Routledge.

Miller, D., & Slater, D. (2000). The Internet: An ethnographic approach. Oxford, UK: Berg.

Nakamura, L. (2002). Cybertypes: Race, ethnicity, and identity on the Internet. New York: Routledge.

Rheingold, H. (2000). The virtual community: Homesteading on the electronic frontier. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Smith, M. A., & Kollock, P. (Eds). (1999). Communities in cyberspace. New York: Routledge.

Sudweeks, F., McLaughlin, M., & Rafaeli, S. (Eds.). (1998) . Network and netplay: Virtual groups on the Internet. Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press.

Turkle, S. (1996). Life on the screen: Identity in the age of the Internet. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson.

Wardrip-Fruin, N., & Montfort, N. (Eds.). (2003). The new media reader. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Werry, C., & Mowbray, M. (Eds.). (2001). Online communities: Commerce, community action and the virtual university. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Talk-radio shows

Many of call-in, morning radio program shows geared for adolescents consist of “shock/jock” talk-radio in which hosts engage listeners in “hot-button,” provocative topics only to subject them to ridicule or challenge as a form of entertainment. Or, the sports talk-show often consists of callers sharing technical expertise about players, rules, and “stats.” These radio talk shows serve as a virtual world of conversation in that students could potentially call in and participate in a conversation, but, unlike “lived” world conversations, they have little or no control over the direction of that conversation. Hosts may marginalize, trivialize, or dismiss guests’ comments or create an adversarial stance that reflects what Deborah Tannen has described as a “culture of argument” (Tannen, 1998). Many male hosts of these programs also demean women in an attempt to maintain a male audience. Students may contrast the topics, conversational modes, and roles on these shows, again, as with chat-room talk, comparing it to “lived-world” talk.

For links to various radio talk-shows:

Yahoo.com Directory: News and Media: Radio Programs

Ruohomaa, E. (2002). Radio as a (domestic) medium:
Towards new concepts of the radio medium.

For further reading:

Barnard, S. (2000). Studying radio. London: Arnold.

Fitzgerald, R., & Housley, W. (2002). Identity, categorisation and sequential organisation: the sequential and categorial flow of identity in a radio phone-in’, Discourse and Society 13: 579-602.

Hester, S. & Fitzgerald, R. (1999). Category, predicate and contrast: some organisational features in a radio talk show. In P. Jalbert (Ed.). Studies in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis No 5. Oxford, MD: University Press of America.

Hutchby, I. (1996) Confrontation Talk: arguments, asymmetries and power on talk radio. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Scannell, P. (Ed.). (1991). Broadcast talk. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Thornborrow, J. (2001). Questions, control and the organisation of talk in calls to a radio phone-in. Discourse Studies 3 (1).

Tolson, A. (Ed.). (2001). Television talk shows: Discourse, performance, spectacle. Mahwah NJ: Erlbaum

Teen e-zines/Web pages

Students also participate in the context of various teen e-zines or Web pages geared for adolescents, for example:

Blast! Online

Feed (hip hop)

gURL

Politics4teens

Everytn.com

Get Help

Teenink

Grip Magazine

Teenmag.com

Teenreads.com: The Book Bag (information about young adult novels, authors, and entertainers)

Yo! Youth Outlook (issues of concern to adolescents)

Wave

In studying these e-zines or Web pages, students may examine how these magazines or Web pages appeal to adolescent audiences and reasons for their interest or engagement. One study of three female adolescents (Guzzetti, B., Campbell, S., Duke, C., & Irving, J. (2003), Understanding Adolescent Literacies: A Conversation with Three Zinesters, on readingonline.org:

Corgan, Saundra, and Jeanne (self-selected pseudonyms, as are the last names in the article byline), [are] young women who have created three issues of the zine Burnt Beauty, which includes a balanced mix of social justice issues, liberal politics, humor, entertainment and reviews, and personal reflections. The girls both write and solicit others to write articles and poetry for the zine, and they create backgrounds and illustrations for all pieces. Saundra has also produced two issues of her own zine, focused on music and entertainment.

During the interview, the girls described the content and distribution of their zine, their readers' reaction to it, the zines they read themselves, and the possibility of including zines in school-based literacy instruction. Their discussion about the out-of-school literacy practice of zining lends insight into the multiliteracies of adolescents, and the literacy practices young people engage in by choice. Their remarks also demonstrate how adolescents use and develop literacy skills both to form and to represent their identities. Insights gained from these girls' discussion can help teachers facilitate literacy instruction and assignments that are motivating and meaningful to students.

Another study by Barbara Duncan and Kevin Leander (2002), “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun: Literacy, Consumerism, and Paradoxes of Position on gURL.com,” also on readingonline.org, examined the:

writing spaces created by two teenage girls, “Whispered Secrets” and “Honesty,” Web pages that reside within the gURL.com online community, a popular site for online teens. (Both Web pages were taken down from the site during the writing of this article.) While this textual space is an important new domain for young adolescents, it contains both the seeds of resistance and a firmly-situated consumerist ideology in its everyday writing of the ordinary. In the following, we consider the contradictions and ironies of identity and literacy practice in such online spaces. These contradictions are analyzed within the spaces created by the girls, and also across the network that links gURL.com to other consumer-oriented Web sites.

For collections of zines produced primarily by females (Knobel & Lankshear, 2002):

The Book of Zines
Zinos
Sleazefest.com
E-Zine List

For further reading on female zines:

Bayerl, K. (2000). Mags, zines, and gURLs. The exploding world of girls’ publications. Women’s Studies Quarterly, 29 (3-4), 287-292.

Comstock, M. (2001). Grrrl zine networks: Re-composing spaces of authority, gender, and culture. Journal of Advanced Composition, 21(2), 383-409.

Driscoll, C. (2002). Girls: Feminine adolescence in popular culture & cultural theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.

Drive Slowly, Appear Quickly. (2001). Exhibit at Space 1026 Gallery in Philadelphia, PA.

Duncan, B. J. (2001). Cyberfeminism, zines, n’Grrls: Identity and technology: Cyberfeminism in Online “Grrl Zines”.

Green, E., & Adam, A. (2001). Virtual gender: Technology, consumption and identity. New York: Routledge.

McRobbie, A. (1999). Shut up and dance: Youth culture and changing modes of femininity. In M. Shiach (Ed.), Feminism and cultural studies. New York: Oxford University Press.

“Riot Grrrl Retrospective.” EMP collection.

Robbins, T. (1999). From girls to Grrrlz. A history of women's comics from teens to zines. San Francisco: Chronicle Books.

Schilt, K. (2003). “I’ll resist with every inch and every breath”: Girls and zine making as a form of resistance. Youth & Society, 35(1), 71-97.

Scott, K. (1998). “Girls need modems!” Cyberculture and women’s Ezines.

Stern, S. R. (2002). Virtually speaking: Girls’ self-disclosure on the WWW. Women’s Studies in Communication, 25(2), 223-253.

Music clubs

Audiences also participant in shared, community experiences in music clubs and rock concerts through dance, singing along, or Karaoke singing. In an analysis of adolescents’ “clubbing” in rock clubs, Ben Malbon (1998) examines how participation in highly sensuous dancing in the club creates an alternative sense of space:

Dancing can provide a release from many of the accepted social norms and customs of the “civilized” space spaces of everyday life, such as social distance, conformity and reserve or disattention. Dancing might be seen as an embodied statement by the clubber that they will not be dragged down by the pressures of work, the speed and isolation of the city, the chilly interpersonal relations one finds in many of the city’s social spaces (p. 271).

Malbon noted that in congregating together in large numbers in the club, adolescents created a tribe-like sense of communal, ritual participation through their dance and dress. In the dark lighting, they perceived each other in a different manner. And, within the continuous, pervasive sound of the music, they experience a mesmerizing sense of “‘losing it’ or ‘losing yourself’” (p. 274).

Sociology of Rock Music

Assignment: Studying Jerry Garcia fans

For further reading:

Berger, H. M. (1999). Metal, rock, and jazz: Perception and the
Phenomenology of Musical Experience. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

Shank, B. (1994). Dissonant identities: The rock’n’roll scene in Austin, Texas.
Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

Thornton, S. (1995). Club cultures: Music, media and subcultural capital. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Sports events/rock concerts

The contemporary sports event/rock concert is highly mediated through a range of multi-media stimuli designed to continually “entertain” audiences through music, commercial messages/images, lights, sounds, color, digital productions, video screens/reruns, games, etc. . Students could study how audiences at football/baseball/basketball games, wrestling shows, NASCAR races, and rock concerts are continually positioned by the multi-media stimuli, and how they react to this positioning. To some degree, audiences may have simply grown accustomed to continually being “entertained” throughout a sports event or concert. Students could also examine the intertextual links in the promotions of commercial agendas, particularly media outlets which use sports events and rock concerts to promote their image, for example, radio stations sponsoring half-time contests. And, by observing and interviewing veteran versus novice fans, they could examine how fans are actually socialized through various cues, prompts, and messages to become active, experienced fans who participate with the crowd in joint cheers and events.

Central to understanding fan social practices is the concept of performance interaction with other fans working together in a collaborative manner. William Beemman (1997) applies performance theory to note how an audience is constructed by a performer, which in turn influences the performance of that performer:

An audience, whether it be 25,000 people, or one person sets conditions for the performer to deal with. The performance event is, in any case always an act of co-creation between performer and audience. The situation is complicated in considering ritual where the "audience" may also be the performers. "Funny" audiences are those whose ensemble work with performers falls outside the predicted bounds. (p. 13).

Beemman argues that these performances are learned and executed in a ritual-like manner:

Richard Schechner describes all performance as "twice behaved." performative--twice behaved--rehearsed--prepared--done again--with no clear "original"--behavior…. In a set performance routine much of the performance routine is boilerplate, because it has been done so often and with so many people that the probability of predictable shape in ensemble work with the audience is very great. They will provide a predictable range of "reactions" to elements of the performance. (p. 13).

For reading about Richard Schechner’s performance theory:

Schechner, R. (2003). Performance studies: An introduction. New York: Routlege.

Fans may also gain pleasure from identifying with certain sports stars, as well as becoming caught up in, for example, the drama of revenge at a professional wrestling match associated with their own real-world conflicts. In her study of television wrestling fans, Barbara Burke (2001) notes that:

Wrestling fans said that real meaning could be found in actions that told about life struggles using understandable tensions which resonated with their everyday experiences, and which offered conclusions and relief. The shows were offered as displays viewers could use to construct ideas about masculinity and men’s lives. The wrestling programs contained stories about morality, duty, loyalty, and honor. Fair play and hard work were balanced against opportunity and tricks; with a logic and value system specific to wrestling fans, but nonetheless consistent and recognizable. Most importantly, the groups of viewers commented, once assumptions about evaluating realism could be discarded, they were able to identify with characters, and find pleasure in wrestling performances. (p. 17).

Defining fan identity is also related to adopting discourses of race, class, and gender. For example, James Todd, a graduate student at University of California, Santa Cruz, studied the NASCAR race track fan culture by observing fans social practices, particularly in terms of how it reifies their identities as White, often working-class, Southerners.

Emmons, M. (2002, June 23). A question of culture: UC-Santa Cruz student examines the drive behind NASCAR fans' loyalty. San Jose Mercury News.

Example of one fan’s observation of the culture of a NASCAR race:

What I saw being the main difference of culture between the infield and bleachers was the amount of Money spent at the track. From the president's suite and all the infield suites the owners RV, drivers RV there is a lot of money spent on a race weekend. The cost of being in the bleachers is chicken feed to the infield. The infield pays for tickets plus their camping costs at the track. Just as you would buy tickets to a Baseball game one of the cultural differences is that they do not have camping or motor homes at the Stadium. What I mean by that is there are places to camp, which there are none at the baseball games and yes I do know there are tailgate parties in the parking lot of the stadiums. This event is setup for more than one day of racing. It is a weekend of racing culture everyone their to have fun whether it rains or shines. The owners, and drivers are out to win millions at the races and they hope there sponsors will fund their existence at the track. What sponsors get out of it is advertising. The sponsors have their Logo on different places like the hood which is usually the main sponsor. The logo that is closer to the front of the car is the car manufacture Ford, Chevrolet, Pontiac, and this year now also Dodge. Their are banners all over the track and commercials about the different products are abundant when the race is broadcasted on TV. The coverage is now even more intense now that FX and Fox have been covering the race broadcast. For the sound enthusiast Fox has Crank it up in surround sound which is Fantastic, the cars rip past you in your living room. All of the cultures that exists in the infield, bleacher, or even at home can get a good sense of racing. No matter where you are, going to the track is just an experience you will not forget.

Field ethnography

NASCAR

Family of NASCAR fans (fan site)

Wright, J. (1999). Fixin' to git: One fan’s love affair with NASCAR’s Winston Cup. Durham, NC: Duke University Press (read update since the 1999 publication:

Joel Miller, A Study of the Social Interaction of the Oxy Men’s Soccer Team (analysis of gender role perceptions)

For further reading:

Brown, A. (Ed.). (1998). Fanatics!: Power, identity and fandom in football. New York: Routlege.

Carney, G. (Ed.) (1995). Fast food, stock cars, and rock-n-roll: place and space in American pop culture. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Cavicchi, D. (1998). Tramps like us: Music and meaning among Springsteen fans. New York: Oxford University Press.

DeNora, T. (2001). Music in everyday life. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Jenkins, H. (1997). “Never trust a snake!': WWF wrestling as masculine melodrama. In A. Baker and T. Boyd (Eds.). Out of bounds: Sports, media, and the politics of identity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. (cited also in Module 4).

Maze, S. (2001). Professional wrestling: Sport and spectacle. Oxford, MS: Mississippi University Press.

Queenan, J. (2003). True believers: The tragic inner life of sports fans. New York: Henry Holt.

Real, M. (1996). Exploring media culture: A guide. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage (chapter on Super Bowl fans).

Vass, J. (2003). Cheering for self: An ethnography of the basketball event. New York: iUniverse.com

Theme or amusement parks/shopping malls

Theme or amusement parks such as Disney World, Disneyland,
Disney Destinations
Disney World

Mickey Mouse Monopoly
Six Flags
Universal Orlando
Camp Snoopy
Paul Bunyan Center

These parks attempt to simulate realities, but often in highly controlled, artificial ways.

As visitors to Disney World, a group of academics (The Project on Disney, 1995) noted that while they were being told that they were entering into a “magic” set of virtual worlds, their experiences were continually being positioned or mediated by a highly controlled environment. As one of them noted:

The erasure of spontaneity is so great that the spontaneity itself has been programmed. On the “Jungle Cruise,” khaki-clad tour guides teasingly engage the visitors with their banter, whose apparent spontaneity has been carefully scripted and painstakingly rehearsed. Nothing is left to the imagination or the unforeseen (p. 184).

As visitors in these parks, students could observe various attempts to simulate “lived-world” realities and their own reactions to any disparities between the simulation and these realities.

Shopping malls provide “entertainment retail” — entertaining shoppers through participation in and with products in order to encourage them to buy those products. The Mall of America contains various entertainment sites designed to attract shoppers to its stores

And, the stores themselves actively engage shoppers in trying out products. For example, in sports outlets in the Mall of America, shoppers can shoot baskets/pucks or try out various products.

Students could conduct studies of their peers and/or their own shopping practices in terms of what gives those practices meaning within the larger context of a consumption culture. These practices are often social in that people shop together as a social activity. They also construct their identities around not only the goods or brands they purchase, but also their ability to employ certain shopping tactics or strategies, i.e., being a “saavy consumer” or a “bargin hunter.”

Given the decline in public spaces for adolescents, the mall is one of the few relatively safe sites for adolescents to congregate. Students could also examine the larger issue of how adolescents are often monitored or controlled in shopping malls given the assumption that in a “controlled environment,” these adolescents may seek to disrupt social norms by exhibiting deviant behavior. They could examine the official and unofficial norms for appropriate practices operating in a mall, how and who defines those norms, and how they are enforced.

Course syllabus: Susan Seizer, Scripps College, Malls, Movies, and Museums: The Public Sphere in Modern America

Webquest: Should Teens be Banned from Shopping Malls

Webquest: A Place to Advertise

For further reading:

Campbell, C., & Falk, P. (1997). The shopping experience. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Farrell, J. (2003). One nation under goods: Malls and the seductions of American shopping. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute Press.

McDowell, L. (1999). Gender, Identity, and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Miller, D. (Ed.). (1998). Shopping, place and identity. New York: Routlege.

Pahl, J. (2003). Shopping malls and other sacred spaces: Putting God in place. New York: Brazos.

Underhill, P. (2004). Call of the mall: The author of Why We Buy on the geography of shopping. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Wrigley, N., & Lowe, M. (2002). Reading retail: A geographical perspective on retailing and consumption spaces. London: Arnold.

In studying these often homogenized places, students could study the ways in which “place” or “space” is often mediated by media representations which shapes audiences’ participation in and responses to these places and spaces—shopping malls, rural/suburban/urban areas, neighborhoods, community centers, schools, houses, tourist destinations, etc. For example, as noted in Module 5, the world of rural America is often represented in a larger negative manner.

W. W. Kellogg Foundation Study: Perceptions of Rural America in the Media

From an ethnographic perspective, the question is how audiences’ perceptions of place and space are influenced by media representations. For example, if audiences believe that casinos are places for entertaining, “fun”/”fantasy” experiences, do they accept that representation and how does that representation influence their perceptions of gambling.

Students could also study the ways in which places and nature are represented and construction in films and literature in terms of how characters’ experiences are shaped by those representations and constructions, an approach associated with “place-based” writing or “ecocriticism.” Part of this interest in the influence of representations of place on people’s practices stems from environmental concerns with how people perceive environmental destruction through global warming, as portray in, for example, the science fiction film, The Day After Tomorrow.

Cross, J. (2001). What is "Sense of Place"?

O'Neill, E. "The Dichotomy of Place and Non-Place in You've Got Mail."

Sacred Space: Learning About and Creating Meaningful Public Spaces

Perception of Place

The Evolution of Cultural Landscape

Explore the Spatial Patterns of Your Hometown

Cultural Symbols and the Characteristics of Place

Spaces and Places (younger students)

Street as Method: Teaching documentary and observation techniques

Course on surburbia

Lots of links on topics related to suburbia

Soul of Los Angeles Project

Betti-Sue Hertz and Lydia Yee Urban Mythologies: The Bronx Represented Since the 1960

Street-Level Youth Media: Chicago youth study their neighborhoods

Geo-literacy: Forging New Ground

Document Durham: Neighborhood Projects

Exploring Your Community (grades 6-8).

Webquest: studying an urban neighborhood

For further reading on place/space in film/literature:

Couldry, N. & McCarthy, A. (Eds.) (2003). MediaSpace: Place, scale and culture in a media age. New York: Routledge.

Davis, M. (1999). Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. New York: Vintage.

Gauntlett, D. (1997). Video Critical: Children, the Environment and Media Power. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Hochman, J. (1998). Green Cultural Studies: Nature in Film, Novel, and Theory. Boise: University of Idaho Press.

Ingram, D. (2000). Green Screen: Environmentalism and Hollywood Cinema. Exeter: University of Exeter Press.

Lauter, P. (2001). From Walden Pond to Jurassic Park: Activism, Culture, & American Studies. Durham: Duke University Press.

Low, S. M., & Lawrence-Zuniga, D. (Eds.). (2003). The Anthropology of Space and Place: Locating Culture. New York: Blackwell.

MacDonald, S. (2001). The Garden in the Machine: A Field Guide to Independent Films about Place. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Martin, D. G. (2000). Constructing place: Cultural hegemonies and media images of an inner-city neighborhood. Urban Geography 21(5), 380-405.

Owens, L. (1997). Mixedblood Messages: Literature, Film, Family, Place. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

Rosembaum, J. (1995). Moving Places: A Life at the Movies. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Scharff, V. (Ed.). (2003). Seeing Nature through Gender. Lawrence: U of Kansas P.

Wilson, C., & Groth, P. (Eds.). (2003). Everyday America: Cultural landscape studies after J. B. Jackson. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Zonn, L. (Ed). (2000). Place Images in the Media: A Geographical Appraisal. Lanham, MD.: Rowman & Littlefield.

Module 8: Word document

Active Audience Response in a Media Culture

Methods for Conducting Media Ethnographies

Methods for Conducting Media Ethnography Studies

References