This post from Savage Minds, now several weeks old, has an interesting discussion of trying to get ethnographic research approved by institutional review boards. The comments are a particularly good read. At Berkeley we certainly have our share of issues with IRB, but at this point I think they're more about institutional process than about ethnography in particular. I find that this is one of those frustrating situations where I can see both sides of the story. On the one hand, the University needs to protect itself from liability – its interest is certainly in protecting research participants, but perhaps moreso avoiding the consequences of our country's litigous ways. And who can blame them? The world is full of irresponsible researchers.

But on the other hand, many of the requirements and restrictions of IRB review and informed consent are so cumbersome and innapropriate for ethnographic practice that, even when researchers are diligent about the review process, they inevitably get tossed out the window once approval is in hand and research begins. IRBs aren't doing anyone any favors by requiring social scientists to abide by practices that, though they are more general now, are based on the needs of biomedical and psychological research. They might actually be making things more dangerous for participants because they are encouraging researchers to design protocols that they can't possibly follow.

During a recent fight with Berkeley's CPHS, which, thankfully, turned out well, I basically said to my representative, as I explained how ethnography works (again): 'How could it be that you don't have a policy for dealing with this?' I never got a response, but I think it's more critical than ever, especially now that many folks in the IT & design worlds are adopting qualitative methods. Here are a bunch of folks who are not used to thinking about the ethical obligations to research participants in the way that dedicated social scientists are, if only because the focus of their education has been about devices and not people (although this is changing). The ones I encounter mean well, but are often surprised that human subjects protection is something they need to deal with. My feeling is that must choose not to deal with it. Another CPHS representative at Berkeley said that he is positive that most people don't submit protocols for their research, because if they did, the office would be so swamped in proposals they couldn't get in the front door.

I want to draw a link between two recent posts I saw via Slashdot. Maybe there's something to this whole 'fun' thing…

Americans Using Internet Just for Fun

CNET News.com reports that nearly one-third of American Internet users go online just for fun." From the article: "A survey of 1,931 Internet users conducted by Pew Internet & American Life Project in late November and December 2005 found 30 percent of respondents said they went online "for no particular reason" on the previous day. That was up from 21 percent in a November 2004 survey. The survey also showed that 34 percent of online men were surfing for fun on an average day in December, compared with 26 percent of women.(/. Link)

Does Having Fun Make IT More Enjoyable?

ComputerWorld is running an article stating that some senior managers in IT think the answer to boosting morale is to have more fun on the job. The IT managers interviewed for the article claim making people laugh contributes to successful businesses and reduces turnover. How do you have fun? According to the article, Dale Sanders, head of IT at Northwestern Medical Faculty Foundation, 'has posted photos on the intranet of staffers caught in awkward moments installing cables or servers, for instance. Sanders encourages others to add funny (and tasteful) captions.' John Wade, CIO at Saint Luke's Health System Inc., sometimes dresses in drag and encourages other unusual behavior. Other potential tactics for laughs include encouraging self-expression, encouraging 'serious play', and asking potential hires their favorite funny movies or comedians." (/. Link)

The recent posts (Joe's 1 / Doug Tygar's 1, 2 / Mine) about the real or perceived changes in popularity of email and IM (among some unknown and unnamed group of 'youth') beg for a couple of driving questions to be answered:

• The word use – as in, 'Email use is almost constant at around 90% of all online Americans' – is clearly a placeholder for much more complex and situated behaviors and ideas. What do we really know about what 'use' and similar phrases mean in the lives of people?
• If it turns out that 'use' is mostly the same across boundaries, then fine, but if it doesn't, and I don't think it does, then we have to ask: what should we really glean from broad statements about what people are or are not using?

One way to understand how useful something like the Pew studies are with respect to these issues is to look at more than the bulleted findings that the PR department puts out – at the actual questions. Pew is actually pretty great about publishing its datasets. Many organizations don't do this at all. You can find all the data Pew makes publicly available here.

The data for the 'Generations Online' report that Joe references comes from Pew's 2004 Teens & Parents Survey as well as a bundle of surveys they did in 2005. The 2004 dataset (zip file containing MS Word document) is a fascinating read. I don't intend for this to be an in-depth analysis, but we can quickly infer that many of the questions that inform the bullet-points about IM and email use take the form of 'Have you ever…' Now, these are carefully crafted surveys, and I just think what we infer from them should be just as carefully crafted. It is certainly interesting to see these statistics, but by looking at the questions we can tell that they are perhaps not very useful for talking about what actually goes on, in terms of 'use', in the life of any individual person. (Insert your favorite argument about the importance of a mixed-methods approach here…)

Finally, I want to copy two particularly fascinating sections of the 2004 dataset. Both teens (the 1st set of data) and their parents (the 2nd set) were asked the same set of questions (to save formatting headache, I took screen captures of the dataset, which is an MS Word file):

(Teens)

(Parents)

Check out this interesting synthesis from Joe about recent discussions over the fate of email and IM in the hands of young people.

I think this is a fascinating development, and even if Paul Saffo's comments are unfounded, that doesn't mean they're wrong. I think he and danah are in many ways saying the same things. I take these two things from the discussion, both of which are supported by work I did with Ben Gross last year: (side note, we are presenting on this research at next month's meetings of the Society for Applied Anthropology)

1. The emerging pattern is that a simplistic categorization of electronic mediums is getting more useless all the time. Email and IM aren't the same kind of asynchronous communication, and they don't seem to be perceived to be. This distinction probably has very little to do with the technical differences in the two systems, and so infrastructural or organizational changes like Goodmail might have little influence on actual practices – except in situations where it's actually the young people themselves who are footing the bill. (I've heard stories, but does anyone have any concrete data about how many young people are actually paying for their mobile devices or internet access out of their own pockets?) The important and useful factors are things like context of use, sense of ownership of the medium, etc.
2. Because it's the contexts and perceptions that are the important factors, it may be that we shouldn't be saying that e-mail is dying, but instead that its boundaries are fading. Again, I don't think the technocentric view of this as 'convergence' in the sense of devices or systems is useful. More I'd say it's that the contexts of communication are merging so that an identity or a social connection is the same regardless of technological medium (email or IM, e.g.).

This is the introduction to a series of posts about the practice of being a graduate student and becoming an academic. When I moved from a graduate program in anthropology to another in informatics about two years ago, I joked with friends about using it as a chance to do an ethnography about the peculiarities of academic practice, but I never got around to writing about it. It's sort of been percolating in the background all this time, though. Of course, it may turn out that these comments reflect only the particular departments and communities in which my academic life has existed, but somehow I doubt it.

An academic department is in many ways a neat little diorama of the wider world. But I'm not so much interested in a description of the process by which we learn to become members of our departments or the academic community as a whole – others have done that too well for me to offer much. I'm more interested in how everyday interactions work and change on a much smaller level – in how we learn to perform the talk and the movement of everyday academic life and, just as importantly, to interpret it. As such, I'm going to focus on three central themes, with the option for more as time goes on. Those themes are:

• Body Language
• Discourse
• Social Games

I suspect none of these observations are particularly original, and I imagine that most graduate students and academics will think them obvious when I point them out. But I consider the 'duh' response to be a mark of success in ethnography, and in talking informally with lots of my colleagues, I've found that these are the sorts of things that are obvious when we talk about them, but we just don't talk about them.

Disclaimer # 1: I know there is a wide and fascinating array of writing out there on this topic – academics do love to study other academics, after all. It's awfully convenient! I fully admit to having read almost none of it. I'm just thinking out loud, which is what I imagine blogs are for anyway.

Disclaimer # 2: I don't mean for any of these comments to have value propositions attached, although I realize it's inevitable that some of them will be seen to have.

Posting this introduction is partly meant to motivate me to continue writing my thoughts on the three themes. I also want to welcome discussion from you few out there – it'd be fun to get a real diversity of views on this. So I hope to make the first post on this topic very soon – stay tuned if you care!

I challenge you to find a better closing sentence than the one that ends Sharon Traweek's ethnography of high energy physicists, Beamtimes and Lifetimes:

I have presented an account of how high energy physicists construct their world and represent it to themselves as free of their own agency, a description, as thick as I could make it, of an extreme culture of objectivity; a culture of no culture, which longs passionately for a world without loose ends, without temperament, gender, nationalism, or other sources of disorder – for a world outside human space and time.

Last week's New Yorker has a great article by Malcolm Gladwell about the trouble with generalizations. Basically, Gladwell uses the examples of aggressive pit-bulls and policing and profiling tactics to show how problematic generalizations can be. It's really worth a read.

Gladwell's column in the New Yorker is called 'Fact', which may explain why his article is mostly a straight report of some interesting contradictions and oversights. The interesting thing that he didn't even get into, though, is why people choose to abide by generalizations, often without any supporting evidence at all. I suppose that's a combination of sociocultural and psychological, and it's at least as complex as what the article does get into. But my theory is that people choose to abide by generalizations, even when they are seemingly illogical (as they often are), for two main reasons.

1. Most people believe things that support things they believe already. In other words, people don't like to contradict themselves, at least not internally. It sets up too many upsetting complexities and ironies. Generalizations allow people to be consistent about their attitudes at a much lower resolution, which is nice for them.
2. No one likes to blame themselves when they can get away with blaming other people. Or, in the case of pit-bulls, no one likes to blame people when they can blame animals. Generalizations are based on extrapolating the details of a small number of situations out to a very large set of situations. Sometimes this is fair, granted. We wouldn't get far in the world without some degree of generalization. But in the process, all the pesky little details (like the negligent, animal abusing owner who made that pit bull go crazy) tend to just go away.

Via Bonnie Nardi I heard recently about two emerging centers I'd like to share:

First, several wonderful folks at UC Irvine, most notably recent arrival George Marcus (of Writing Culture fame), are starting up the Center for Ethnography. They already have an impressive calendar of events. From their homepage:

The Center for Ethnography Initiative will work to develop at the University of California, Irvine a series of sustained theoretical and methodological conversations about ethnographic research practices across the disciplines that will have a broadly transformative effect on ethnographic research methodologies and theoretical developments. The Center will support innovative collaborative ethnographic research as well as research on the theoretical and methodological refunctioning of ethnography for contemporary cultural, social and technological transformations. One aim of the proposed Center is to foster methodological innovation in ethnography across the campus. More broadly, however, its goal is to situate the University of California Irvine at the center of such innovations internationally.

Secondly, a distinguished list of faculty have started up the Laboratory of the Anthropology of the Contemporary (LAC), based here at UC Berkeley. I don't seem to be able to find much about it, except that it involves Stephen Collier (New School University), Andrew Lakoff (University of California, San Diego), and Paul Rabinow (University of California, Berkeley), and that their first project involves biosecurity.

(Via Boing Boing):

The Lemelson-MIT Program released the results of its 2005 survey of teens – see this MIT news release. They asked 500 teens about their perceptions and attitudes about science, technology, innovation, and invention. Some thought provoking results:

The 2006 Lemelson-MIT Invention Index, which gauges Americans' attitudes toward invention and innovation, found that a third of teens (33 percent) predict the demise of gasoline-powered cars by the year 2015. One in four teens (26 percent) expects compact discs to be obsolete within the next decade, and roughly another one in five (22 percent) predicts desktop computers will be a thing of the past.

Teens are also optimistic that new inventions and innovations will be able to solve important global issues, such as clean water (91 percent), world hunger (89 percent), disease eradication (88 percent), pollution reduction (84 percent) and energy conservation (82 percent).

…

The Lemelson-MIT Invention Index found that teens believe they have developed some of the critical skills that will be needed to address these problems. More than three out of four teens surveyed (77 percent) believe they have learned problem-solving skills well while in school. They also feel prepared to work in teams (72 percent), think creatively (71 percent) and lead others (61 percent). However, they fall short when it comes to budgeting money. Only 32 percent of teens said they feel they learned that skill well while in school.

Also check out these awesome information graphics:

This is some truly fascinating stuff. I think this kind of survey is great because it focuses on what teens think and percieve from their own perspective. Tech. firms ought to be paying special attention to this as at least a window into what kids believe, however, partial and imperfect. But focusing on perceptions is a double-edged sword for a survey like this – the self-reporting bias becomes huge. I think that's especially true for the quesitons about what kinds of skills kids feel they've developed in high school. The MIT news release goes on to mention that these findings contradict other studies that show that college professors are much less convinced that most kids have developed these skills. This isn't surprising to me. As usual, I'd love to see the survey itself.

Via Boing Boing:

This is a very cool implementation of the Dance-Dance Revolution idea to teach kids about DNA. Not only that, it's called 'The Codon Hoedown'. (See this news release.)

I recently had a meeting with a non-profit group I work with, and I was trying to get them to incorporate mySpace into their cirriculum. Why? Because, as the CEO of the group said, 'it's where the kids are at.' If we can have the perspective to adapt our ideas about what counts as learning, creativity, and expression, we can create all kinds of new technologies that engage kids in learning without beating them over the head with it!