Cross-posted from Ethnography Matters

I arrived in Nairobi last night after an absence of about five years. As I left the plane through the walkway, I took a deep breath and inhaled the familiar southern African smell that I always miss so much living in America. I walked through to customs and baggage claim and to my taxi and hotel and became aware of all the things I was noticing: my slight frustration at the absence of instructions about which line to stand in at the immigration hall; the fact that there was not enough room for my place of birth in the immigration paperwork; the fact that, in stark contrast to the Amsterdam Schiphol Airport that I had come from, this airport seems not to have changed in a decade or so.

I noticed how long we had to wait for our bags to come through, the nationalities of the people coming here, how closely they stood next to one another. And my driver, patiently waiting for me, familiar sign in hand. On the car ride to the hotel, I looked at billboards and noticed what was being advertised and who was being represented, the state of repair of the roads and the roadside flowers and how people drive and the smells of food and industry and bodies.

I thought: Is this the collection of noticings that constitutes a place? And if what defines a place is its signposts, its boundaries, the taken-for-granted ways of doing things, the expected and the unexpected, what are the equivalents in online spaces? How do we know that we have left one space and arrived at another? How does the experience of outsiders (or n00bs) differ from that of locals?

This new way of thinking about social media (new for me, at least) came about when I was asked to speak at a conference about the ‘crucial role of social media’ in the Middle East and elsewhere. Buried in the description of the session was the question: ‘Does what happened in the London Riots diminish the power of social media?’ As I thought about what to say and what was expected of me, it struck me that the problem with the current way questions around social media are framed is that they require defining technological artefacts as good or bad, when it might be more appropriate to talk about technology as a place where good and bad things can, and do, happen.

If we frame social media as places, we can understand more fully the role of people in those places, rather than talking about the technical characteristics of Facebook or Wikipedia as determining a particular type of behaviour. Looking only at the “bad” privacy features of Facebook, for example, we are tempted to assume that “privacy is dead” because of the “forced sharing” that is happening through changes in the technology. But this view fails to represent the ways that people self-censor or move to more intimate spaces in order to protect their privacy, something I noticed in my study of privacy in an educational context, for example.

Framing social media as places enables us to realise how we move between platforms (for example, Facebook and Google+) not only because of the new shiny gadgets we find there, but because of the people who inhabit those spaces. It is the flow of people and practices that defines the place as much as it is its landscape and architectural features. Facebook, for example, is defined by particular boundaries (my page, your page, a photograph that belongs to a particular group), taken-for-granted ways of doing things that define deviance and compliance among particular groups (don’t friend your teacher, don’t send too many updates and flood your friends’ streams, don’t tag drunk pictures of friends) and artefacts (the activity stream, wall and photo albums) that, taken together, define the place.

It seems kind of obvious when you think about it, and it isn’t a new way of thinking about technology: we’ve been talking about going online and migrating from different operating systems for a while. But the fact that we’re surprised that Google+ isn’t currently teeming with people, or that more Kenyans aren’t contributing to Swahili Wikipedia, or that women make up such a small percentage of Wikipedia edits suggests that we are thinking too much of social media as things rather than as places. If we thought about Google+ as a big, shiny, new complex, we’d begin to understand that people won’t necessarily move there just because the technology is better when few of their friends are there.

The key aspect that we miss in thinking of social sites as technological artefacts is that we tend to ignore culture and power – two really big and slippery aspects of what makes certain types of people have certain types of conversations in particular online spaces, and of what defines who feels welcome or unwelcome to participate. It has caused us to define Wikipedia or Facebook at a level of granularity that isn’t deep enough to really get an understanding of what is happening there, where the power is located and how we might engineer to encourage particular creations and conversations. This is not just about understanding the affordances of the software. In order to understand Wikipedia collaboration, I can’t only look at the MediaWiki software – in the same way that to understand Kenya, I couldn’t just read about its legal framework or look at the statistics about the country. Being there, experiencing how people to speak to me, noticing what the signposts say and what they leave out, is part of the necessarily long journey toward a full understanding of the place.

Perhaps most importantly, it is the culture of a place that will dominate my decision to come back or not. And this, in its essence, is at the heart of what every online community seeks, and is the same reason why it’s so hard to control. The government of Kenya can build better roads and speak on television about being welcoming to tourists, for example, but the majority of the experience of being in Kenya as a tourist or a local, is outside of government control. Culture, we find out, is a mysterious mix of so many different qualities in varying proportions that act together to define a place. Understanding culture is probably more art than science, but however we learn about it, it’s an important part of what makes us stay in some places to become loyal nationalists or merely return as tourists.

Rachelle Annechino and I are recent graduates of the School of Information at UC Berkeley. We met one cold, sunny summer day in August (only in San Francisco!) when I arrived to find friends to learn Python with. Rachelle and I meet to co-work and chat at Brown Couch Café in Oakland where we talk about fascinating bits and pieces from our lives and work. For her final project, Rachelle and her project partner, Yo-Shang Cheng interviewed San Francisco residents and asked them to draw pictures of their internal images or “mental maps” of the neighborhoods they lived in and of the city as a whole. They then visualized these mental maps according to concepts like ‘corridors’ (where are the hearts of each neighbourhood?), ‘barriers’ (is it really that close? It’s not always as simple as it looks getting from one neighbourhood to another in San Francisco) and ‘boundaries’ (what neighbourhood are you in? according to whom?). Rachelle is simply one of the most insightful, brilliant people I know. And she rocks at Python – which makes her a good friend to have.

I met Jenna Burrell when Rachelle and I took her Qualitative Research Methods class last year. Jenna has been doing research on Internet use in Ghana for the past decade or so and was one of the most inspiring teachers that I had at the I School. Jenna’s forthcoming book ‘Invisible Users: Youth in the Internet Cafes of Urban Ghana’ is an incredibly rich contribution to our understanding of African Internet culture. Mostly when I think of Jenna, I think of the fact that while I was in Accra speaking in staid conference rooms during the Africa preparatory conference for the World Summit on the Information Society in 2005, Jenna was also out talking to young Ghanaians in Internet cafes and in the streets who were disconnected from a discussion which was ostensibly about them. Jenna is an incredible mentor and her writing about ‘The Fieldsite as a Network’ has been so helpful in thinking about how to ‘do’ digital ethnography. She continues to push the boundaries of the discipline and ask important questions about how digital technologies might become part of the grassroots, self-organizing efforts of populations marginalized from the global economy.

Tricia Wang was introduced to me in one of Jenna’s classes when Jofish Kaye suggested I read about the work she had done on Internet censorship in China. I looked her up and just knew we would be friends. Tricia’s critique of the Google China debacle and her calling for Google to employ more ethnographers in order to better understand the Chinese internet culture was so powerful, and her PhD work on migrant workers is inspiring to say the least. As I write this, Tricia is in China doing her fieldwork, sleeping in Internet cafes and accompanying migrant workers as they move through the city. She’s trying to understand how the use of technology changes how people interact with the physical city, a concept she calls’ digital urbanism on the margins’: migrants’ urban lives mediated through communications technologies like mobile phones and computers in Internet cafes.

And then there’s me, the budding ethnographer, finding herself lucky to know these incredible people and looking forward to the little journey we’re going to go on at this site. Ethnography Matters will be a place where we can share what we’re reading and writing about, how we’re thinking about ethnography, and hopefully giving a little insight for others who are thinking about a career in ethnography into what this even means today. We’ll have others join us in the future, and if you’re interested in contributing, please let us know. We’re looking forward to walking around in your shoes too!

I’ve been spending the last few days thinking about my upcoming research into how Wikipedians currently use and understand sources and citations in different situations (directly after a major international news event like the Japan earthquake and in conflict situations such as the Middle East conflict) and what kinds of software tools could be helpful in advancing some of the goals and philosophies of Wikipedia globally. I’ve learned that there are a number of problems that Wikipedians encounter with the current policies and tools – including what some view as conservatism around sources (bias in favor of traditional, often inaccessible print-based materials and against online sources and commercial research, for example) and some specific observations of how blunt a tool MediaWiki is at supporting citations in emotionally-charged edit wars and in rapidly evolving events.

The big questions that I’m trying to answer in this research are:

1. What debates are Wikipedians having around sources and what does this say about how Wikipedians understand the verifiability policy?
2. What is the effect of the technical features and affordances of current wiki tools on issues of quality (for example, the ability of Wikipedia to be a current and accurate source of information on rapidly-evolving events) and diversity (how Wikipedia might incorporate a wider range of viewpoints that may be situated outside of traditional academic publications)?
3. How might alternative policies and tools affect those principles of quality and diversity?

These are great questions! And great questions are always a good place to start. But deciding on how to answer these questions with limited time and resources is where I need to get creative and hopefully ask for help from wise academics, Wikipedians and friends. These are some of my initial ideas and as a newbie ethnographer I’m hoping for some kind but realistic responses.

I was originally going to start off with a bunch of interviews of Wikipedians working on topics related to big international events. But after chatting to a number of Wikipedians at Wikimania and doing a few more open-ended interviews, I’ve actually realised that starting with particular articles and telling the story of those articles could actually get me to a better understanding of what’s going on in “source talk” a lot quicker. I think that I was initially caught up in the regular social science and usability methods of conducting research where you decide on your sample, go out and collect responses to a specific set of questions and then analyse the data. Spending the past two days reading and analysing talk pages for the ‘hummus’ articles in English, Hebrew and Arabic has made me realise that there is a wealth of incredible data about how Wikipedians actually talk about sources and that a better approach could be more like a detective – starting with the little pieces of evidence and then following the story as I interview the characters reflected in the articles.

Like a detective (or at least the ones in the movies) I’m working towards understanding motivations in order to piece together narratives about what happened and why. When I first thought of Wikipedia article debates, I envisioned a large boardroom table with people sitting around it rationally discussing what to add and what to leave out. Actually, the debates are much more like noisy town hall meetings. You have the crazy person who keeps shouting all sorts of completely irrelevant details and then complaining that they’re being systematically ignored, the exhausted public administrator who has seen the same arguments play out over and over again and who is snippy and terse when newcomers try to cover old territory. There’s the polite newbie who is surely too polite to be making genuine statements, and the loud Westerners who drop into the meeting to make sarcastic remarks about how stupid everyone is for fighting about such trivial matters. I think that these narratives — who is allied to who, what happens to the debate when related national or international events hit, how disruptive editors can deadlock entire articles — are actually at the heart of bigger questions about verifiability and that, especially when we’re thinking of designing new tools to fit into current working methods of users and not the other way round, then understanding exactly how the articles tick makes sense to me.

I started by printing out articles and talk pages for ‘hummus’ in WP English, Hebrew and Arabic (Google translated version at least) and did some rough analysis and coding (using present participles to denote what I thought was happening) plus notes relating to what was interesting in comparison to the other language versions. I will go over this again and then type up themes with related quotations and summarised stories, then follow up leads with some of the editors who were involved, code all of their interviews, add to the thematic groupings and then do the final analysis.

After I’ve done the same thing for a page relating to an international news event (either the 2011 Egyptian Revolution or the 2011 Japanese Earthquake which I have started to look at), I’m hoping to be able to make some good conclusions about how Wikipedians understand verifiability and what the effect of current policies and tools are on issues of quality and diversity. You’ll notice that I’m choosing to go deep rather than wide but in order to really ‘people’ this analysis and understand who is behind the pages and what the dynamics are, I’m thinking that this might be the best way of going about it.

Would love any (kind) thoughts, suggestions and even, yes, encouragement in my lonely space over here 🙂