Monthly Archives: February 2006

more reasons to love Jean Lave

Sometimes, people tell you what you need to hear at the exact right moment, even when they themselves do not realize it. As i mentioned before, i’m taking this amazing course this semester. What i’m beginning to realize is that it is not the brilliant readings that are of value to me so much as the ways in which it is helping me frame academia and research. As i am starting to admit that i won’t be in graduate school forever and taking steps towards dissertation, all of my neuroses about the academic process are coming out full force. (Of course, this is not helped by the layers of bureaucracy and hoops that are required to move towards graduation.)

Last fall, i submitted my IRB (“human subjects”) forms for approval. The stack was a small tree. On Tuesday, shortly before class, i received “conditional” approval for my work and was told that i would know what i needed to change within a month. How i love the slowness. These IRB forms have been weighing on me. In order to step through that hoop, i had to list every question i would ask my subjects in a sort of formalized script, exactly how i would recruit my subjects (including the exact wording), the hypothesis of my research that i am testing, etc. These forms fundamentally conflicted with how i believe good ethnographic research works. Sure, i could do an interview study from this but my whole project is about hanging out amongst youth, both online and off. Of course, interviewing will be a part of it, but there’s so much more. But to say exactly what that will be has felt so unreasonable that it took me six months to file the damn forms because i had a complete panic attack every time i looked at them. I finally sucked it up and tried to articulate everything i could. Yet, i still felt as though i had failed. I failed to account for the times when i sat on the 22 overhearing teenagers’ commentary following school. I didn’t account for the invitations that i receive to sit in on people’s classrooms, special programs to keep teens off the streets. I didn’t account for the times when teens saw my MySpace shirt and came up to me to tell me their story. Eeek!

And then, in discussing Beamtimes and Lifetimes, we started talking about the process of doing ethnography and the dangerous assumption that ethnography is the same thing as an interview study. Having been involved in a backchannel about how Traweek’s project could’ve possibly gotten through IRB, i piped up and said that i thought that people conflated the two because of the amount of formalism required to get through IRB. Jean’s response was priceless. In essence she said that you have to submit the forms to the best of your ability but “you don’t have to do what they say.” IRBs are there to protect the university, to make you think about ethics, but they don’t know how to handle ethnography and the most important thing is to create a list of your ethics and to stick to them, to really be accountable to yourself – “everybody ought to write their own ethics statement and follow it.” I told her about the formalism of the forms and she laughed and said “gracious me, throw that stuff out the moment you’re done.” She reminded us that ethnography can’t be done that way, that we will all fail ourselves. “Be careful, if you say you’re going to do this tight-assed medical model stuff, you might end up doing it.”

At one point, one of the students spoke up: “remember, you’re being recorded.” She laughed, smiled and said, “that’s okay, send it to the committee.”

girls in boy-wear

I loved the fact that the girls could do grunge and skater just like the boys – flannels, phat pants, etc. Many of the butchy girls i knew wore boxer briefs and bought all of their clothes from the boys’ shelves. I’ve been utterly fascinated by contemporary boys’ street wear, in particular the style that involves wearing big pants with no belt below your ass (where your ass shows your underwear) combined with a long baggy T. This outfit typically requires holding onto your pants so that they don’t fall down and yanking them up every few minutes. While i know many a-parent sees this and screams, “WHY?,” my reaction is, “Where are the butchy girls?” I have yet to see a girl sporting the same style. Hell, i see very few girls sporting any form of baggy pants these days. Has streetwear moved to being completely gender divided? It sure seems like it. 🙁

On that note, check out this Pink video about “stupid girls.” (tx Tom)

how DRM fucks academics

One of the cardinal rules of doing ethnography is that you keep everything. Normally, this concerns the physical world so you keep letters, receipts, photos, anything that you can possibly get your hands on. We’re all still trying to figure out what this means in digital land. During my work on Friendster, i was terrible about keeping records. I should’ve kept copies of Profiles; i didn’t. I should’ve kept copies of funny videos and other such stuff; i didn’t. I very much regret this, because so many of those Profiles were deleted and now i have no record of what all happened. But then again, i didn’t think i was doing research. Mistakes made, lessons learned.

So, now, i’m really doing research. And i’m trying to keep copies of things that i analyze. Of course, saving every webpage is difficult so i fully admit that i’m doing a poor job of this. But my bigger problem is that i want to keep copies of the video that i run across. The bulk of it is on YouTube locked down by DRM. Although there are ways of getting this out of YouTube, going from flv to something usable is a bitch on a Mac. And damned if i can get .flvs working on a Mac.

The thing that is going to kill me about all of this DRM bullshit is how it completely eliminates fair use. I should be able to keep copies of these videos and mark them up as artifacts. Instead, i’m locked out. Unfortunately, explaining the DRM problem to committees who want to know why you aren’t storing the artifacts is impossible right now. Gah. Frustrating.

how to kill email

Rumors are (once again) flying around that people are going to be charged for sending email, postage stamp style. The details are uncertain, although the NYTimes has their version; apparently, Yahoo! and AOL are involved in this and there will still be free email, but paid for email will be given priority. The logic is (always has been) that companies should have to pay for bulk mail in order to minimize spam. There are arguments concerning the effectiveness of this and there’s the issue of variable global economies and how this might hinder poorer companies, non-profits, and anyone who doesn’t have the economic capital of the porn industry. There are lots of good arguments on both sides, but i don’t want to focus on that.

What i want to highlight instead is an aspect i haven’t heard discussed in the context of this: email is already dying amongst youth. Right now, most of us in our 20s view postal mail as the site of bills and junk mail; the occasional letter and package is super exciting, but we can almost always predict those (they are usually correlated with birthdays, holidays and the one-click button). For youth, it’s the same story with email – you get notices from parents, adults, companies, junk mail, and the occasional attachment that was announced via IM. Add postage stamps to this and email will become even less valuable; your friends won’t pay for it so the system will highlight the companies over your friends – yuck. Even those who appreciate sending email will be alienated by turning this into a capitalist enterprise. Yuck. Bye bye email, hello IM and SMS and alternative asynchronous message systems. There’s nothing like giving corporations a preferential position in the system to destroy a communications platform.

defining religion

On Friday night, i got into a discussion with a group of friends that reminded me of the kind of discussions that used to keep us up all night long back in college. The discussion centered around religion (from fundamentalism to spirituality). Being in the heart of LA, one of my friends was trying to assert that worshipping the TV is religion. I challenged him to define religion. In doing so, i had a flashback to a comparative religions class where we spent the bulk of the semester trying to do so.

Like many categories (i.e. “game”), religion is difficult because there are no clean boundaries or common qualities. At the same time, i realized that i have an operational definition because of a single conversation i had three years ago. Religion has three components: primary religious experience + core tenets/scriptures/narratives + rituals.

Broken down, all religions have a conception of a primary religious experience – an altered state where the individual communes with a higher being (“God”). In some religions, everyone experiences (or aims to experience) the primary religious experience (i.e. “enlightenment”) while in other religions, there are a handful of enlightened people who have a direct channel to the higher being and you must speak through them.

Religions also have scriptures or stories that are collectively understood and passed down in the form of text or stories. These typically include the religion’s ideas about live and death, moral norms, ways to live life, and methods of relating to the primary religious experience. Embedded in this component is the assumption that religion is not the same as individual spirituality because it involves community and collectively understood conceptions.

Finally, religions have shared rituals and traditions that are shared by all participants. These help solidify the narratives and form the foundation for how the individual interacts with the primary religious experience. Rituals and traditions also glue the community together. Of course, the “culture” of religions comes from the combination of rituals and narratives all in relation to primary religious experiences.

As i was reading New Scientist this morning, i ran across a scientific article about the values of religion in terms of health (written by none other than Robin Dunbar, the gossip/grooming guy who is connected to the 150 number). It made me wonder about the term “religion” in academic analyses – what definition are people using? What constitutes a religion? What doesn’t?

What about in everyday language? This is a term that we throw around all the time, mostly as a way to debase others’ practices. Could American TV worship really be conceptualized as religion? Baroo?

Anyhow… that’s my thought for the weekend. What other definitions of religion do y’all use?

a funny dodgeball moment

Last night, i landed at Oakland and decided to announce that i was there so that i could switch Dodgeball back to SF and hear what folks were up to even though i was feeling quite asocial. Just as i received a confirmation email saying that people got my message, i got a message from an old friend announcing his presence at OAK. Now, normally, i don’t drive to the airport but i was running uber late last week so i called up this kid and asked if he was just arriving and if he wanted a ride back to SF; he was totally taken aback and laughing – he had just come back from an interview with Red Burns (ITP, where Dodgeball was created). It was particularly hysterical because while i’ve passed him on the streets in SF, i really haven’t hung out with him at all since college. (Why is a longer issue involving issues of confidence and head space.) Driving back to the city, catching up, he got a call from a girl i used to hang out with freshman year in college – she was living in the city and wanted to see a movie. The end result was that i got to catch up with a whole group of college folks that i hadn’t seen in years. I have to admit that it was utterly wonderful to see this group and realize that i am back on solid ground again.

While Dodgeball has certainly been useful in social settings, this was the first time i had the opportunity to see it be useful beyond just the basic bar hopping scenario. It reminded me of a time when two friends realized they were in an airport together because they saw each other’s music on iTunes. I think that funny points of synchronicity is only going to get more interesting as technology become mores infused into society.