[Ethnocomm] E-seminar: Ethnographies of encoding

[Munoz, Kristine L]

First, amen to thanks offered already to David, Tamar, Wendy and previous contributors. The gathering of updated bibliography is particularly appreciated.  I would like to dig in with Tamar's idea of encoding and Ilana Gerson's notion - noted by Wendy -  of remediation, i.e. choices between available media for performance of a speech event.  Although it is certainly the case that ethnography of communication traditionally focused largely, if not entirely, on face to face communication, for roughly the past 10 years it has become increasingly difficult for me to conceive of face to face interaction on its own. This started as an observation of the students I taught: when we talked about communication of any kind, they no longer distinguished between interpersonal and mediated forms. They knew the difference between a phone call and a movie, of course, but any interpersonal speech event they undertook involved the choice of medium: Would they send a text message? An email? Ever more rarely, they made a phone call or put pen to paper.  As time passed, choices multiplied and became more complex and ever more value laden. Processes of encoding became more material:  new devices, messages that could be traced, saved, forwarded vs those that could not, boundaries between public and private that blurred and wavered and threatened to disappear altogether.  Encoding became ideological as remediation got ever more complicated and central to the relational lives of the students, my friends and family.

This was around 2005, and I was also six years into a cross-cultural study of personal relationships.  Ethnographic theory and methods in their rich and varied forms provided supple resources to move in all the directions that the work was leading me, and the  technologies that were expanding the material possibilities for encoding speech events were also expanding the recording and storage affordances for data collection and analysis.  A well-meaning colleague suggested: "don't even GO there, it would take you another 10 years to finish this one book! Just stick with what you've got and wrap it up, and make (encoding and remediation) the next one!"  By then it was too obvious that people were really not doing personal relationships in the same ways as before, and to just "wrap it up" with what I had in hand would produce something trivial.

All this is (an admittedly self-serving) way of illustrating a concrete facet of the importance of ethnographies of encoding, and of the ideologically charged process of remediation, which I have observed picking up steam with every new app and device released into the global communication market.  As tempted as I was to produce this as a brief video posted to the web (come on, wouldn't you have enjoyed that more?), many thanks to those who have created this possibility for living the life of the mind.

Kristine















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