[Ethnocomm] E-seminar

[Katherine Peters]

I have enjoyed watching our e-seminar from the sidelines so far, and now feel compelled to add my own noticings.

The piece of Katriel's article that most intrigued me was her discussion of the materiality of new technologies like smart watches. The Apple watch and similar devices may signal a certain kind of status, in much the same way as a designer bag would, which indexes particular kinds of identities or modes of being rather than others.  In the course I teach, I had students who identified as iPhone-users describe the range of identities they would associate with users of that device. They provided a range from "trendy" to "conformist". Similarly, I asked the students who identified as Android-users to describe what it meant to be an iPhone-user, and their list ranged from "simple-minded" and "basic" to "conformist". Likewise I had both groups describe Android-users, with very different associations ("techie" to "cheap" to "non-conformist"). Through this conversation, an iPhone-user admitted that she didn't like her Android-using friends as much because the text bubbles are a different color (green) than everyone else's (blue). It has been my experience from these conversations and musings that the social and material are not completely separable, and I'm excited about encoding as a way to potentially theorize how this comes to be.

I think that it's also important to see and study how communication technologies can divide communities even as they bring them together. This is something that I tried to demonstrate through my study of video-conferencing technology used for meetings, which is included in Trudy's edited volume (Peters, 2015). The software this organization chose to use both enabled the presence of distant members and constrained the (inter)actions they could accomplish, like joking, which people who were also meeting face-to-face could do. Furthermore, the possibilities for acting also affected how members could relate to each other. For this organization, technology not only shaped the process of meeting, but also subsequently shaped culture and meanings.

This brings me to David's thoughts about process. If we do indeed turn to studying process and culture as emergent in those processes, then I wonder what happens to structure. My thoughts here are partially informed by moves in organizational communication that focus on the intertwined nature of agency and structure, such that the distinction no longer seems useful. Structure and organization are thus "grounded-in-action", and action, process, and agency become the focus of analysis. As I think through what this might mean for the ethnography of communication, I think that at the very least this would ask us to view technology (and perhaps even codes) as practice or process, and not necessarily separable into a structural level. Questions about technology and their affordances might thus turn to how the use of hardware, software, etc. "makes a difference" such that the use of them enables and constrains action in the moment (Cooren, 2010). I also wonder if turning to process, practice, or encoding as the focus of analysis might also ask us to conceptualize codes as an effect or trace of processes and relations, rather than something separable from its enactment and "held" by members. And if not, then at what point would we consider encoding "complete" and a code stabilized? Or are codes always, in some ways, in flux and changing in processes and enactment?

That's where these ideas have taken me so far, and I've enjoyed reading everyone else's reflections. I'm excited to see where these ideas and dialogue around them takes us!

Best,
Katie

References:
Cooren, F. (2010). Action and agency in dialogue: Passion, incarnation, and ventriloquism. Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins.
Peters, K. (2015). “Showing we’re a team”: Acting and relating in online/offline hybrid organizational meetings. In T. Milburn, Communicating user experience: Applying local strategies research to digital media design (pp. 63-86). Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.


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Katherine R. Peters, M.A.
Graduate Part-Time Instructor
Department of Communication
University of Colorado Boulder