This is such a nice break from what I'm supposed to be doing at the moment... I can certainly relate to John's description of muddling through, and how to convey this style of knowledge construction to others, particularly those who want clear answers, which generally means filtering or translating 'findings' through precisely the categories we have been so enthusiastically destabilising in the field: these will be the categories that make up our shared and naturalised narratives, such as the notion of virtuality as a way of making sense of new media from the early 90s onwards. However, the issue of what to do with observed similarities between places that are both divergent and that one is committed (politically, methodologically, personally) to addressing as unique particulars is a profound one that has been obsessing me for a long time. It goes to the heart of several issues, including the project of comparative ethnography. At this point I usually turn to STrathern, as Gender of the Gift is clearly the most sustained and meta-meta-meta commentary on difference and similarity in encounters between cosmologies. What it points to (I think?!) are multiple and strategic encounters between similarities and differences, a wide range of ways of making use of them, rather than a reductive or truth-oriented problematic. Overall, a similarity between Malaysian and Toronto suburbanites maybe used to make all kinds of sense, and needn't be reduced to 'we're all the same', 'the technology determines', 'it's all about globalization', or 'that's weird'. The similarities can only be perceived and articulated within a long history of already-shared dialogues, which is underpinned by some intention to share meanings as well as to emphasise (and sometimes absolutize) difference. Ethnography was defined somewhere, sometime, as a dialectic of closeness and distance, which is right so long as there is a lot of stress on the word 'dialectic' or your preferred alternative. As I understand it, one of Strathern's alternative terms is 'heuristics': in my cruder version, these observed similarities are useful for leveraging a lot of potential meaning out of baffling encounters so long as they are used strategically rather than simply as undermining our sense of the uniqueness of different experiences. In that vein, rather than try to analyse an 'issue' into resolution, some stray notes on what to do with it: 1. 'Alternative modernities': People I've engaged with *anywhere* I've worked relate the internet to 'the globe' or 'the world', and we can share an imagery of theoretically limitless connection, convergence of spaces, etc. This doesn't mean either reduction to a northern generated imaginary of globalization, or recourse simply to the spread of the discourse of globalization (though that is clearly part of the picture, and can be tracked through the media and personal encounters of people all over the world - that language has spread wide). Rather, what we share is that we all make connections, that these connections exist in space at different degrees of remoteness and proximity, and that therefore we are all engaged in scaling practices and in constructing maps. Moreover representing our own particular categorizations of connections in space (ie, making 'maps') involves conveying those categorizations through (at least apparently) meaningingful language/imagery. What seems to me fruitful - in the spirit of heuristics, or leveraging these conversations - is to get at the different notions of long-distance connection (which lead to imagery of 'wholeness' - the planet, the globe, the world, etc), which are also notions through which people articulate visions and explanations of where the world is going, what it is becoming (or in my sphere, what is 'development'), and how they imagine connections to people who may be very different to them. There is also a clearly reflexive dimension to this: through material cultures like internet, which crucially involve the idea of connection at a distance, people connect new spatial developments to their own narrated past and collective projects, making internet through this unique history, and re-interpreting this history through the internet as a new object. That's pretty much entirely what Danny and my book on Trinidad was about. It is in the interplay between affordances of the object and its specific assimilations that one can leverage a wider, more open-ended sense of what 'global connection' might mean (certainly wider and more democratic than the impoverished versions of a Giddens or a Castells). 2. However wooly, the notion of affordances does nicely break with both social construction and techno determinism, just as Bruno promised. And similarities of technology use point us very appropriately to the material properties of the object in question. I've got a weird 'observed similarity' for you that I've been pondering for several years now: a group of young Moslem women in a UNESCO ICT project in Delhi, are presented with computers which are framed as 'useful for learning and marketing traditional crafts'. On day one of the project, they start framing ICTs in terms of something much closer to graphic design than embroidery, they explore multi-media story telling through Flash animation, they turn the centre into a fluid, network, convivial space of conversation, brainstorming, project-based cooperation and all kinds of other new economy style modes of social organization. To its undying credit, the project tears up its plans and responds to this. An enormous range of factors play into this development (the girls had read women's magazines with alternative images of sociality; they were very assertive - and supported; because of age and domestic situation, I think they were more excited by the possibilities of exercising imagination than of generating income; etc, etc). However, the technology seems to play an irreducible part in this little drama: as material culture, as affordance structure, it was apparently 'good to think' ways of being social and organized that were also thought in places like Silicon Alley and MIT. So these apparent similarities may be deployed heuristically to interrogate - and assert - the object itself. 3. Does the idea that suburbs have some similar properties (and therefore (?) comparable internet practices) in Kuala Lumpur and Toronto necessitate recourse to concepts of macro structure and global processes? Don't think so, in which case I'm not that bothered. I've probably got a very complicated process to unravel, and vast range of contingencies to track, so that I can see how these similar properties might arise from similar architectural and spatial arrangements, work/life relations, domestic arrangements (nuclear family?), class cultures, the practices of transnational corporations, and so on. And on, and on. Many of us have found the notion of 'practice' very useful in many of these studies as it posits an elementary unit of analysis that embraces so many features of a social setting without reducing them to structures. The problem is in many respects more pragmatic than conceptual, and is a huge issue for ANT - given that I cannot (in one research budget, one article or book-length text, one lifetime) reconstruct the actual story through which all these things were assembled, how do I gloss it in ways that are not reductive, and don't impute explanation to a structural level. More simply, 'globalization', eg, might efficiently gloss all this, and summarise it one word, which is great for addressing the Swedish political scientist John mentions - but at what cost!!! Part of the answer appears to be textual: whatever terms you use, the text needs constantly to undercut and question them rather than naturalize them, so that difference is an-always implicit possibility. Also textually, we need to give as much voice to the way in which the researched understand and explain similarities and convergences as to our own concptualisations, rather than consign the researched to representing 'difference', whereas we the researchers - with our universalistic conceptual languages - represent generalization and abstract truth - identity thinking (or as many southern intellectuals put it, they live in an international division of intellectual labour in which the North does theory and the South provides empirical particulars - data). This also means being very clear about the similarities and differences between our use of terms like 'globalization' and its various uses by a range of actors that make up our field. Anyway you can see that John's remarks touch a very sensitive nerve in my own work. don _______________________________________________ Don Slater Reader in Sociology, Doctoral Programme Director, Sociology London School of Economics Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE Tel: +44 (020) 7849 4653 Fax: +44 (020) 7955 7405 ______________________________________________ -----Original Message----- From: air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org [mailto:air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of John Postill Sent: 06 February 2009 11:42 To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-L] virtual ethnography and online fieldwork My own experience of doing ethnographic fieldwork on internet and residential politics in a suburb of Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) chimes with Don Slater's account of the open-ended and muddling through nature of ethnographic research. Early during field research I was queried by a Swedish political scientist about what exactly I meant by 'local governance', since that seemed to be a key element of my research strategy. To his frustration, my reply will be familiar to other ethnographers - that it was still early days and I would have to see what local activists, residents, politicians, etc, made of this notion, if anything, and see where the research led me before even deciding whether this notion was even applicable to the actualities on the ground. As it happened, my findings led me in other directions. This muddling through can also reveal unexpected parallels in internet-related practices across vast geographical stretches, sometimes cutting across the North-South divide mentioned by Don Slater. For example, I didn't set out to study suburbia but it turns out that the internet uses by local activists in suburban Kuala Lumpur are not that dissimilar to those in other suburbs (e.g. of Toronto, Melbourne and Tel Aviv) - they are all shaped by the imperative to build and sustain an environment conducive to the reproduction of middle-class nuclear families. This is all very different from the kind of young urban transnational activism described by Juris (2008) in his recent monograph Networked Futures, based on ethnographic research among Barcelona-based antiglobalisation activists. John Dr John Postill Senior Lecturer in Media Sheffield Hallam University Sheffield S11 8UZ United Kingdom j.postill@shu.ac.uk http://johnpostill.wordpress.com/ _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/ Please access the attached hyperlink for an important electronic communications disclaimer: http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/secretariat/legal/disclaimer.htm