Neil's E-learning and Digital Cultures Blog

I’ve been doing some maintenance work on my LifeStream prompted by the realisation that both the YouTube and Delicious feeds had stopped working, thereby making a mockery of my last summary!  While in the dashboard, tinkering tentatively with links, I noticed my spam comments.  Among other things, I have been invited to join several special cruises, design my own jewellery and contact someone called Mandy who has very kindly offered to increase my Google ranking; apparently I’m not getting the attention I deserve.

Which made me think about membership and belonging and how to carry out this latest assignment.  I don’t for one minute believe that Mandy is even real or that the people running the cruises are so heart-set on my joining them but, just for a split second, there was a flash of belonging.  I love the sea and I love being on the sea.  The message was chatty, friendly and almost human. 

Cunard's Queen Victoria arrives in Cochin, India.

There is a basic human desire to belong to groups.  However, as the readings highlight, the criticism from social constructivists of the holistic approach focuses on the constructed knowledge and personal history of the ethnographer.  In my time in the Arabian Gulf, I have noticed that many people arrive here with preset notions and, of course, find plenty of evidence to support their own preconceptions.  Germaine Greer toured Dubai on an open-top bus during a stopover and found plenty to criticise from her elitist viewpoint (the tour buses cost a fortune).  You don’t need to read the article subsequently published in The Guardian to know what she found; the heading is enough ”From its Artificial Islands to its Boring New Skyscraper, Dubai’s Architecture is Beyond Crass”

Taking comfort in the familiar in order to view the new

Admittedly, Greer does not claim to be an ethnographer yet her status as an academic, intellectual and cultural commentator might lead one to believe she would make an attempt at objectivity.  However, as Hine points out, there is a high level of subjectivity in ethnography.  “How can anyone document a reality external to self?  No-one is asocial and free from particular practices of knowing.”  As mentioned later in his text, there is the “distant ethnographer”, sitting on the verandah (or the top deck of an imported British tour bus) observing the natives as they go about their tasks.  Visitors to Dubai do the same thing and can be heard interpreting what they see within their own contexts.  It’s what we do when we encounter something new.  Our ‘a priori’

Would everyone recognise this as breakfast?

hypotheses, latent or blatant, quickly come to the forefront as we observe the groups before us; not being part of them, we perhaps feel a certain right to assess and pass judgement.  We also relate things back to what we believe to be the standard re Carol’s posting on Foucault: “The fundamental codes of a culture–those governing its language, its schemas of perception, its exchanges, its techniques, its values, the hierarchy of its practices–establish for every man, from the very first, the empirical orders with which he will be dealing and within which he will be at home”

In our Twitter feeds we’ve mentioned the role of arrival and Hine speaks about how this can anchor the ethnographer in the “culture” being visited.  My own personal experience of Gulf airports has always enhanced my attitude towards being here.  Compare Dubai with Heathrow and I know where I’d rather land.  And yet nowhere makes me happier than India; those airports are suffused with the tantalising smell of being there.  I feel the same about my online experience.  FB seems like a penance but it’s necessary to go there, from time to time, to keep in touch with people I like who would otherwise drift away.  There are sites I visit for work where I’m a signed up member and they fulfill a variety of needs, though I notice I usually switch off all chat entities as I want to go there, do what I need to do and then leave!  But my “happy places” online remind me of visiting my “happy places” in real life.  I sign in and relax as I chat with people, or root around looking for things or just listen to music or watch moving pictures. 

Not all means of arrival are the same.

That’s me as a member; my 3 categories of arrival are Heathrow, Dubai and Kozhikode: misery, efficiency, happiness.

As an ethnographer how to I slough off my attitudes?  Are all airports the same?  I know that they are not.  Are all online groups the same?   What I find most interesting at this stage of the process is the idea of not inhabiting space but following connections.  Initially I found Twitter twoublesome as the posts contain so many URLs.  The compulsion to follow every one was resulting in endless tangential journeys.  But with time and practice, it has become less of an ordeal and is a lot more enjoyable.  With the online group I have chosen to look at, I find that the same thing is happening.  Most of the posts contain links to other things outside the group.  Although you have to click a button to join the group, the membership process is not vetted and is instantaneous.  But it’s still a group and you still need to click that button, so it suggests a certain “walled garden” approach.  But the links paint a different picture of a porous organisation; less walled garden and more meadow where you may have to cross a stream to get there but it’s more of a burn than a brook.  So, there seems less need to arrive and a greater need to join the flow.

“Being there trumps all” and yet what does being there mean?  Despite my most fervent wishes, my tired old body still feels the physical reality of sitting on a chair at a desk or, if I’m lucky, lying on my bed.  My mind may wander around the virtual world but physical reality is also going to have an impact.  My “arrival” is coloured in a way that physical arrival is not.  Physical arrival is total submersion.  Everything from negotiating Customs to working out how to get from the airport to the next place you want to be requires the focus of all your senses and physical presence.  Online this is not the case; I can be aware of other events outside the realm of the online group and I can follow them; one eye on the news as I read the day’s postings or the secure knowledge that my dinner is sorted out instead of scouring the horizon for sustenance.  Sights, smells, sensations – all play a big part in arrival.  Can I, as amateur ethnographer, hope to experience the emotions, tensions, sounds and smells?  I can look, read, image and imagine but is that as deep an experience?  Referring back to the uncanny, I suspect that it can.  I remember once having a conversation with a friend broken into by, for want of a better word, a hacker.  The hacker was abusive in a silly way but even after I’d logged out, I felt the impact of having been harassed.  In a way, that gives me hope that my ethnography report is not going to be the dry stick it feels at pressent.