Exploring Inclusive Ethnography as a Methodology to Account for Multiple Experiences
Sartoretto shows the necessity of ethnography inspired methodologies that are attentive to communication as an open-ended process to better understand media related practices. The chapter highlights the ways multimedia ethnographic fieldwork is useful to
- PDF / 293,865 Bytes
- 17 Pages / 419.53 x 595.28 pts Page_size
- 69 Downloads / 221 Views
Exploring Inclusive Ethnography as a Methodology to Account for Multiple Experiences Paola Sartoretto Studies of the relation between media and social or political action, particularly those looking into activism and mobilization, usually focus on one medium, configuring what Alice Mattoni and Emilano Treré (2014) have called a one-medium bias. This trend has become stronger in recent years, when certain devices such as mobile phones, or popular online platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, have received almost unfettered attention from media researchers exploring activism and social movements. Recent studies of social action, political activism, and social movements have tended to focus heavily on new digital media (see, for example, Castells 2012; Bennett and Segerberg 2012) and analyze activist action from the perspective of media usage. Interviews, netnography, and content analysis are commonly utilized methods, which undeniably provide an in-depth view of patterns of social action related to these particular media. However, what such methods tend to overlook is the complex array of practices and processes that occur in the interplay between mediated and direct communication.
P. Sartoretto () Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2016 S. Kubitschko, A. Kaun (eds.), Innovative Methods in Media and Communication Research, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40700-5_10
189
190
P. SARTORETTO
On a different dimension, too strong a focus on new technologies that are unequally available across different groups tends to give an skewed view of the democratizing potentials of these technologies; a view that is predominantly Western and based on the habits of the middle classes in the Euro-American context. Such a strong focus on technologies that are not widely available ignores the experiences of the have-nots, or the have-less (Qiu 2009). In order to tackle this imbalance, I argue for the relevance of a more holistic approach that is attentive to communicative processes and transcends the materiality of media. By focusing on the experiences of marginalized groups that are geographically isolated and do not have access to the most advanced technologies, it is possible to broaden the horizons of analysis of the interplay between social action and media. A socially situated analysis of communicative processes can thus benefit from an ethnographic outlook strongly anchored on social theory. As Jack Qiu (2009) notes, as soon as we start talking about developments in information and communication technologies (ICT), there is a tendency to ‘immediately think about the digital divide’ (Qiu 2009, p. 1) between the information haves and have-nots. This binary thinking, Qiu argues, is over-simplifying, because not having gadgets or skills does not mean that people will not find strategies and ways to overcome social exclusion and participate in communicative processes using the resources they have at their disposal. It is understood that research methodologies alone cannot solve a pr
Data Loading...
