Brenda's P3 Review

Brenda Kane
Personal, Portable, Pedestrian Review
Digital Research Methods
October 7, 2009

The Domestication of Keitai as Technocultural Phenomenon and
Research Topic Explored in Personal, Portable, Pedestrian

While the impetus for Personal, Portable, Pedestrian (P3) is keitai, a geographically specific technosocial artifact contextualized within Japan, the themes that emerge from this collection offer insights significant to internet scholarship on a broader scale. Several of the themes explored include: 1) the cultural specificity of technology, in terms of the ways in which it is perceived and integrated into society, 2) mobile communication technology and its negotiation of space (public, private, online, and offline), and 3) the potential for new technologies to either transcend or reinscribe societal norms. The chapter entitled “The Gendered Use of Keitai in Domestic Contexts” encompasses all three themes, particularly the third, in that it is a study of the cultural integration of technology into a private space and the resulting social dynamics. It recontextualizes keitai within the domestic sphere and critically engages interviews with Japanese housewives about their use of keitai. This chapter exemplifies cutting-edge internet scholarship, both in terms of its theoretical framing and also, its methodological approach. To better understand this study’s contribution to internet scholarship, it is important to first examine the ways in which it draws upon P3’s aforementioned themes.

The discussion of keitai in P3 as a sociocultural object and techosocial phenomenon demonstrates the theoretical and methodological flexibility necessary to holistically research communication technology within a specific cultural context. The strategic approach of this collection is that of “sustained engagement with one national context.” (Ito, 2006, p. 4) At the same time, the essays, compiled by primarily Japanese intellectuals, draw upon interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks – historical, technological, scientific, cultural, sociological, etc. – to form a multifaceted exploration of the evolution of mobile media in Japan and the ensuing societal ramifications. While initially a social disruption, keitai has become assimilated into everyday life in Japan, and is now synonymous with modern Japanese culture; more than just a tool, it is now a way of being. Beyond the collection’s overriding theme of keitai as ubiquitous technology that simultaneously produces and is produced by Japanese culture, P3 also brings to light important subthemes relevant to internet scholarship, which are also highlighted in Internet Inquiry: Conversations about Method in its discussion of quality internet research design.

One important theme that arises from both P3 and Internet Inquiry is the cultural specificity of technology. The essays demonstrate the ways in which technology is not deterministic, but rather, contingent upon cultural context. The development of technology is highlighted as a social process with flexible interpretation, in which “social dynamics are at the heart of new technologies.” (Hine, 2009, p. 3) Even as the focus of P3 remains situated upon Japan, it also considers the multiple lenses through which non-Japanese cultures view keitai, the cultural politics of “techno-orientalism,” and the mixed global sentiments of technophilia and technophobia. (Ito, 2006, p. 3) On one hand, Japanese technoculture on the global stage has been seen as the future of mobile technology, something that should be emulated, but on the other hand, it is also feared for its foreignness, its disruption of the public space, and the ways in which it challenges the East/West or ancient/modern paradigm. (Ito, 2006)

Another significant theme in P3 that is also addressed in Internet Inquiry is the mobility of communication technology and its negotiation of different spaces: online, offline, public and private. Keitai use exemplifies the simultaneity of online and offline culture and, in turn, the fusion of online and offline internet scholarship, which is becoming increasingly prevalent. (Hine, 2009) In a sense, keitai embodies both online and offline culture in that it is quintessentially a pedestrian technology. P3 editor Mizuko Ito says that, in relationship to keitai, the term pedestrian “plays on both the meaning of ‘while walking,’ as well as the meaning of ‘ordinary and everyday.’” (Matteo, 2009) In this way, keitai has become so embedded within Japanese culture that it navigates through a multitude of spaces: physical, virtual, public, and private. While P3’s scholarship also makes connections to stationary PC Internet, it recognizes the disparities involved in researching the two domains – mobile versus stationary. P3 exerts the different theoretical and methodological approaches the study of these two virtual spaces demand, including analysis of their foundational sociocultural dynamics. Unlike PC Internet, for example, which was developed primarily by a privileged group of educated, white males, mobile technology has been embraced and promoted by diverse subcultures. (Ito, 2006) Perhaps that is why the following study of a peripheral group is well suited for understanding keitai as a mobile communication technology.

The third and final theme gleaned from P3 and best understood from the framework of Internet Inquiry is the power of new technologies to either transcend or reinscribe societal norms. This theme is explored in depth in Shingo’s Dobashi’s essay, “The Gendered Use of Keitai in Domestic Contexts,” which demonstrates apt internet research design, with a combination of sound research questions, phenomenon, and method. (Markham, 2009) Dobashi approaches the study of Japanese housewives, a group that has received little scholarly attention, and their use of keitai from the framework of actor network theory. This theoretical stance views society as not strictly social, but also, inherently composed of technological elements. Dobashi asserts that this perspective is “an appropriate lens for viewing communications technologies like keitai and their increasingly central role in mediating our relationships and activities.” (Dobashi, 2006, p. 233) Dobashi views technology and society as interdependent, with neither functioning in isolation, and each one constructing the other. Furthermore, just as keitai demonstrates the cultural contingency of technology, so too does Japanese housewives’ use of keitai demonstrate that this technocultural artifact “takes on different characteristics for users in different social positions.” (Dobashi, 2006, p. 234) That is, the meaning behind Japanese housewives’ use of keitai and its implications are not the same as those of another population, such as Japanese youth.

Dobashi poses several questions relevant to the subjectivity of keitai usage in Japan, specifically as it relates to women and the domestic sphere: “How are keitai used and perceived within the home? How, if at all, does this domesticated technology contribute to the creation and preservation of the home?” (Dobashi, 2006, p. 221) These questions emerged from her viewpoint that the home is more than merely a physical space, but rather, a cultural space in which values, norms, and power are negotiated. The use of keitai within the domestic sphere as a private space, then, can be contrasted to more public uses of keitai, and it can be used to understand the ways in which the meaning of technology in the public realm is redefined once it is established within the home. Dobashi utilizes several methods for this study, including drawing upon similar studies that investigate the domestication of technology, making an historical account of the ways in which housewives’ use of new technology has transformed its production and distribution, and, most importantly, engaging in conversations with Japanese housewives about their use of keitai. By conducting a series of interviews within twenty households on how communication devices were used in the home, Dobashi found that keitai ultimately reproduces traditional gender roles. While keitai adds new dimensionality to the lives of Japanese housewives, such as increased contact with husbands and children, and also integration with housework due to increased mobility, it ultimately reinscribes social roles and reproduces the domestic gender order. (Dobashi, 2006) While this study is a microcosm of keitai culture overall, it speaks to important overriding themes, and also, problematizes the often utopian “techno-imaginings” associated with Japan. (Ito, 2006, p. 3)

P3 demonstrates well the ways in which researchers have developed methods and theoretical frameworks for studying technocultural phenomena. As new technologies emerge, so too do new methodologies for understanding them. By limiting its scope to one national context, P3 ultimately demonstrates the subjective quality of technology, which was once thought to be independent of social and cultural influence. (Hine, 2009) This collection brings to the forefront the shifting nature of space, culture, and technology, using keitai as its compass. Essays such as Dobashi's give voice to individual experiences surrounding culture and technology, bring theory to life, and culturally locate these emerging topics in internet scholarship.

Works Cited:

1. Baym, Nancy K. and Markham, Annette N. Introduction to Internet Inquiry: Conversations about Method, edited by Annette N. Markham and Nancy K. Baym, vii-xix. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications Inc., 2009.

2. Bittanti, Matteo. “Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Critical Studies in New Media.” http://humanitieslab.stanford.edu/44/196 (accessed September 29, 2009).

3. Dobashi, Shingo. “The Gendered Use of Keitai in Domestic Contexts.” In Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life, edited by Mizuko Ito, Daisuke Okabe, and Misa Matsuda, 219-236. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.

4. Hine, Christine. “How Can Qualitative Internet Researchers Define the Boundaries of Their Projects?” In Internet Inquiry: Conversations about Method, edited by Annette N. Markham and Nancy K. Baym, 1-25. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications Inc., 2009.

5. Ito, Mizuko. Introduction to Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life, edited by Mizuko Ito, Daisuke Okabe, and Misa Matsuda, 1-16. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006.

Even YouTube does research

Found this post in my RSS of all things online video today.

YouTube Grows to Embrace (and Maybe Apply) User Research

They had user groups use an interesting method to generate the data. The users were given magnets with various potential parts of a YouTube website to "build" their ideal page layout.




The actual YouTube post can be found here.

Question 5

How Can Qualitative Researchers Produce Work That is Meaningful Across Time, Space, and Culture?

Markham says that "the product of our research is several times removed from experience" and that "our theory about how the world works is bounded by invisible frames" that we can not control or ever really grasp and define.

She argues against the question of the chapter, that it's not really possible to do given the invisible frames.

Markham offers reflexivity as a way to offset these frames. Researchers should think about where they are coming from in order to interpret other information, even going so far as "othering" themselves.

Defining the term "global" is important because it is an all encompassing term.

She says that "any study of communication will be both local and global (glocal), but the power of qualitative approaches is most aptly realized at the local level." Meaning you cannot really think globally until you think locally, then apply that knowledge to a global context.


Basically, think about who you are, why you have the views that you do about the research you are conducting, about all the categories of human you fall under, class, nationality, gender, sex, marital status, omnivore, vegetarian, age, etc. before you start to think about what all of it might mean. Talking to people, peers, mentors, research subjects, and conducting writing exercises might help. It could confuse you more and change your questions, but you need to embrace change and just go for it.

Questions:

1. What do you think, is it pointless to really try to do research globally, even if you do try to define "global?"

2. What do you think about "glocal?" Is the internet breaking down enough walls to have this hybrid.

Question 5 Discussion Post

Question 5: How Can Qualitative Researchers Produce Work That Is Meaningful Across Time, Space, And Culture

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Markham reiterates the chapters question: “Is it posible to make one’s research more global and meaningful across time and cultural boundaries? […] should this be a primary goal?”

• Markham purports that global scope and universal mutual understanding are impossible.

• The author argues that no matter what, our research is grounded in cultural frameworks, invisible to us.

• Global scale does not entail global understanding.


• Markham suggests that key “global” ethnographies advocate work that is local in scale, and global in sensibility not scope.


• She asserts that the best we can hope for in our research is similar shared experience transcending audience and trans-cultural compatibility.

Markham advocates a deeply reflexive research process that locates the self in research, and searches for incompatibilities with other audiences.

• She argues that Internet research involves what is always intrinsically a local socio-cultural phenomenon. She continues that local contexts illuminate larger contexts.


• Internet Research:

Local Social Phenomenon vs. Research with global sensibilities

• Research reflexivity includes an understanding of what “global operation” one is hoping to achieve. (See the muddy list of global operationalizations on p. 137-138)


• The author also proposes praxis of othering one’s self (and locale) to gain clarity on personal location.


• Reflexivity as a defining force methodologically and rhetorically includes:
  
  
  1. Make the object of research situated in relation to other people places and things.
  
  
  2. Make work as accessible and meaningful to other cultures and locations as possible knowing that complete trans-cultural understanding is impossible


• Markham spends the rest of the chapter laying out valuable questions to help frame your research reflexibly with global sensibility.

Lally’s Response:

• We need to find rhetorical “tricks” to bring our preconceptions to the foreground


• Research is a creative process

Srinivasan’s Response:

• The personage of the researcher embodies a meaning, which is culturally and contextually created outside and in lieu of research


• Internet research must maintain its trans-nationality (global quantity) without sacrificing local reflexivity.


• We should consider trans-national 3rd spaces, social networks, and virtual worlds as part of the Internet global and local to understand the cultural context of phenomena.


• Srinivasan proposes that some aspects of research method building be participatory with users/audiences.

Discussion Questions:


1. What does global sensibility vs. global scope mean or entail in research?


2. How would one go about othering one’s own approach and locale?


3. How does creativity factor into research outside of pure methodology? (i.e. not simply what tools to use for research)


4. What would participatory research method construction look like? How would this be implemented? How would this refine the researcher’s perception of self, local(e) and global?

Internet Inquiry - Question Six

Chapter Summary: Internet Inquiry, Question 6

Baym, who is one of the editors of the book, concludes the book with a summary of each chapter and her own synthesis of the material and issues covered.
Her concern is with the overarching consideration of “quality” as it is framed within internet research and more generally in any kind of research.
She initializes the dialog by stating, “doing qualitative research well is a matter of finding practical and defensible balancing points between opposing tensions”. She then offers some guidelines for conducting good research, referring to the examples within the book.
This idea of balancing tension is explored in great detail. She suggests researchers employ a dialectic approach, as this method allows one to approach relationships as a dynamic process. In this framework she indicates that the goal of qualitative research is “not to catalog the definitive set of contractions in personal relationships but to understand… how couples deal with dialectical tensions”. The importance is placed on understanding processes for dealing with these tensions.

She sets up the dialogic approach with a series of “methodological dialectics”:
1. Rigor and imagination
2. Fact and value
3. Precision and richness
4. Elegance and applicability
5. Vivification and verification

Baym then reviews the dialectics that are attended to in the book:
1. Tidiness and messiness
2. Depth and breadth
3. Local and global
4. Risk and comfort

Some general points she makes:
With regard to depth and breadth she indicates that one has no choice but to bound a project, create tidy interpretations of a modest slice of the field bypassing other interesting avenues along the way. Generalizability is neither relevant nor possible. She claims that it more important that one can offer analyses that can be coordinated with others. With regards to comfort she says, “Intellectual benefits are often accrued through taking practical, intellectual, logistical and emotional risks”.

Baym then discusses the very possibility of whether there can even be standards for quality in a worked of multiple social meanings. And then makes some concrete recommendations.

Baym revisits what we have been noticing in all of our class discussion, with the reduction of the analyses always settling into a solid statement of “it depends”. However she does take great pains to clarify that just because there “are no right or wrong methods” does not mean that all research is equally as useful or relevant. She bemoans the condition within which researchers struggle that has resulted in the foundations of methodology becoming so unstable that the rigor and value of the research is open to challenge by critics.

In a climate where judgment criteria are always open to reinterpretation Baym argues that there are still strategies that yield better or worse results. She states that just because “there is no direct access to truth does not mean that all studies are equally compelling”

Baym lays out a list of criteria that she believes contribute to successful internet studies:
1. Grounded in theory and data
2. Demonstrate rigor in data collection and analysis
3. Use multiple strategies to collect data
4. Takes into account perspective of participants
5. Demonstrates awareness and self-reflexivity regarding process
6. Considers interconnectiveness between internet and “life-world”

Baym then lays out a concrete explicit program that includes:

1. Connect to History
2. Focus
3. Be Practical
4. Anticipate Counter-Arguments

• a. Problematize Core Concepts
• b. Listen to Participants
• c. Attend to Context
• d. Attend to Yourself
• e. Seek Contrasts in the Data
• f. Limit your Claims
• g. Document your Research Process
• h. Frame the Study for Diverse Readers

5. Develop Compelling Explanations

Baym concludes by restating the aim of qualitative research being “not to find a single explanatory element but to reveal the complexity of our subject.” She returns to her claim that qualitative internet research should be considered as a process of managing dialectical tensions. In so doing we create the possibility of adding a thorough, grounded, trustworthy voice that adds to a meaningful conversation, and that others can build on.

Questions:

1. Is the dialectical framework that Baym suggests too simplistic, flat and 2-dimensional?
2. Is Baym’s list of criteria appropriate for a study that hopes to question methodological convention?
3. Does the pre-emptive practice of preparing for criticism of one’s methodology place the researcher in an unnecessarily defensive position and begin to alter the nature of the inquiry (i.e. structuring the questions so as to make them more defendable?)

Is Online Privacy a Generational Issue?

Posting over at Wired.com with some numbers and some ideas for possible research or issues to consider in regard to method?

http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2009/10/is-online-privacy-a-generational-issue/

Two-Thirds Oppose Being Tracked on the Internet

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/30/business/media/30adco.html

Interesting study done by the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California, Berkeley about Internet privacy.

"ABOUT two-thirds of Americans object to online tracking by advertisers — and that number rises once they learn the different ways marketers are following their online movements."