THE SHIFTING PROJECT, THE SHIFTING SELF

 

Annette N. Markham, Ph. D.

 

Final Draft of Chapter 2

 

Final version appears in the book

Life Online:  Researching Real Experience in Virtual Space

published by Walnut Creek, CA:  AltaMira Press, 1998.

All rights reserved.

 

 

So that was my initial engagement with the online world.  Odd to think I’ll never be there again.  The Internet changes so rapidly--few aspects of it now resemble the online world I first knew, or the online world I studied.  This is not significantly different from any other ethnographic site, but perhaps more noticeable because the foundations shift so radically and frequently--after all, everything about these contexts is constructed through the texts of participants.

I address here some methodological issues related to the study.  After describing the logistical nightmares of collecting data in online contexts, I share my thoughts as I progressed through the initial stages of interpretation and tried to make sense of the relations among the users, the project, the context, and me.  You’ll find out, as I found out, that this ethnography seems to have a life of its own—a life that is intimately connected with mine, yet inseparable from the dialogues that constitute it.  It continues to change, even as I write these words. 

Deciding how to frame and present this ethnography was a process of attempting to maneuver it into a traditional report and then accepting it for what it wanted to be, a study that honestly came into being through me.  I have spent several years learning about and interrogating the practices and processes of ethnographic inquiry.  I am informed and intrigued by the contemporary debates among ethnographers regarding the practices of coming to know and write about others.  And I have spent time exploring alternative modes of ethnography.  Not surprisingly then, as I discuss below how the study progressed, I raise several concerns:  the elusive goal of trying to validate and legitimate my project using traditional social scientific norms; the ongoing dilemma of trying and failing to separate artificially the “official” interview texts from myriad other texts influencing my interpretation; the quandary of trying to represent adequately and honestly the voices of the participants; and the paradox of conducting a non-traditional ethnography in a non-traditional non-space with traditional sensibilities.  These issues are important in any interpretive ethnographic study and they certainly plagued me here. 

However, perhaps the most difficult issue I faced throughout this project was that my original assumptions about online experiences significantly influenced the way I framed and asked questions in interviews as well as the way I tried to interpret the interviews.  Although my goal was to learn about the ways people experience Cyberspace, I tried to fit their experiences into my own conceptual and grounded understandings of social life, even before I met them.  I believe all qualitative researchers must at some point face this struggle between wanting to be open yet needing to design and justify a study; so I talk about it here.

 

Setting up the interviews

Over the course of this study, I experienced a shift of perspective that significantly altered the trajectory and design of the project.  I realized as I moved closer to the project that I could not work with abstracted texts to address meaningfully the questions I had set before me.  I wanted to know how users were making sense of the concepts of identity and reality in computer-mediated contexts.  But I realized I was not talking with users and asking them this question.  Instead, I had sought to study them from afar.  In other words, I was trying to get at the question without directly asking the question.  Only after the study began did I realize I needed to participate online to truly get at their understandings of their experiences.

After consulting with several colleagues about how to generate texts for analysis, I decided to conduct what I call “User on the Net” interviews, following the general concept of Studs Terkel, whom I admire for his rich and nuanced interviews of everyday people.  Rather than selecting participants and bringing them to his office for interviews, Terkel simply carries a tape recorder with him wherever he goes and lets “improvisation and chance” play their roles in helping him find people to talk with (1974, xxi).  Terkel’s books (such as Working (1974), “The Good War” (1984), and Race (1992)) address current issues from the perspectives of the people experiencing these issues in their everyday lives.  My goal was similar.  The scope of my research question, “How do users make sense of reality in online contexts?” allowed me to choose participants from many randomly encountered online contexts.  I did not want to confine the participants to one group or community online; instead, I wanted to head out into the net with keyboard in hand, so to speak, talk with people, and get them to tell me stories about their experiences. 

It seemed so straightforward….  I contacted colleagues and asked them if they knew people who would consider themselves “heavy users.”  Although many people gave me the names and email addresses of users who might be interested, I found it immensely difficult to:  a) contact and correspond with potential participants, and b) set up and accomplish the actual interviews.  I realize now that I was fairly naïve to expect to complete the interview portion of the ethnography within a few weeks (no doubt many of you are saying to yourselves, “Wow, what a naïve expectation for the interview portion of any study!”).  I asked myself, “How hard could it be to do ten interviews online?”  Just go there, chat with people, get them to interview with me, right?  Even with complications, I figured the entire process would take no more than three weeks.  I even developed a series of logical steps to follow:

Step 1.  Create or find a way to conduct interviews.

a)       Must be accessible to both interviewer and interviewee.

b)       Must allow real-time (synchronous) interaction.

c)       Must allow interviewer to log and archive the transcript.

Step 2:  Establish contact with participant.

Step 3:  Negotiate date, time, location of each interview.

Step 4:  Go to agreed upon location, meet participant, conduct interview.

These steps seemed straightforward, until I moved from thought to action.  Step one caused me many nightmares, some of which you heard about in the last chapter.  Before I could tell people where to go for an interview, I had to figure out where to go myself, how to manage the setting once I got there, and how to communicate in this setting.  For example, I didn’t know how to get to an IRC or a MOO.  And when I figured out how to get there, I didn’t have the right software to interact easily in these environments.  So I had to go online (mostly to the Web), learn about what software people used, and find out where they got the software. 

But this was only the beginning.  Most people who have the nerve to say they study computer-mediated communication know how to “download” software.  I did not.  I had to learn how to get the software from the Internet to the computer in my office.  Once on my machine, I had to figure out how to “unzip” it or “decompress” the software so it would run on my PC (which required that I download yet another software program called WinZip…I had to get help on that one).  Finally, when I got the interface or “client” programs running on my computer, I had to learn how to use them:  Make sure I could get to a MOO through the client (“zMUD” is the name of the client I chose), learn how to work the zMUD commands, learn the basic commands common to most MOO environments, and be able to teach it, if necessary, to a potential participant, so they could participate in the interview.  All in all, slightly more work than setting up another chair in the office next to the microphone.

As I set my mind to these challenges, I began contacting possible participants and setting up interviews, a process that is still giving me headaches.  You see, when we plan meetings with someone over the phone or face-to-face, we take for granted the ease and speed with which details and logistics can be negotiated in a simultaneous communication environment.  Not so with email, which was my method of contacting and communicating with participants. 

At this point, I began to realize how unrealistic a three-week projection for interviewing was, but at the time, it seemed a very reasonable expectation.  I can attribute part of my vast underestimation to my overly optimistic nature, but the medium itself and the way we deal with online information (and overload) contributed significantly to my misunderstanding.

We frequently and commonly make the error of conflating information transmission with communication, and believing that because information gets transferred instantaneously between people, or their computers, communication speeds up as well (or communication happens, at least).  This is not always the case. 

As I figured it, the entire data collection process would be expedited through online communication.  Besides the great benefit of not having to transcribe the interviews after conducting them, I could do several things at once.  As I was contacting one potential participant, I could simultaneously be in contact with another participant, setting up an interview.  Feasibly, these two tasks could be taking place as I was interviewing yet another participant.

I also thought that contacting people would be a simple matter of sending one email message, getting a response, and nailing down details in a third or fourth message.  This would surely be faster than using the telephone.  I could send a message at any time of day and it would be waiting for the other person as soon as they logged in.  As well, I could do the interviews at any time of day they were available.  Finally, because we wouldn’t be meeting physically, getting to the interview was a simple matter of running the correct software.

I suspect my reasoning is not so different than many who mistakenly equate information transfer with communication.  Intellectually, I know this is not the case.  But the medium—the promise of instantaneous communication with others—is very deceptive, as I came to find out the hard way.  I envisioned my packets of information zipping around the globe at unimaginable speeds, making connections with others as easy as the press of the enter/send button on my keyboard.  Instead, I should have envisioned piles and piles of post-it notes, some personal, some official, some important, most unimportant, growing higher and higher on everybody’s desks. 

If you are really on the ball, you go through each message as it arrives, deciding whether to read it or not, and then if and how to respond.  Others like me, read through all the messages, think about responding to them, and put off the entire project till later….and later, and later.  Still others accidentally delete messages, or don’t respond because they don’t know you personally. 

By this point, you probably understand what was really happening, and why three weeks was a naïve timetable for this stage of the ethnography.  Negotiating a simple detail like “What time will we meet?” takes multiple messages online at best, sometimes days or weeks, depending on how often people check their email or how complicated the two schedules are.  In general, the people I contacted were willing to be interviewed.  However, establishing a date, time, and place for the interviews was more complicated than I ever suspected, as the following two examples illustrate:

February 13, Annette writes:

Hi Sherie,

I'm Annette Markham.  I've been working on an ethnography about cyberspace and my colleague told me you were in her class.  I know your name from an online list, where I have occasionally lurked about.  I would love to talk with you sometime about your experiences.

Anyway, the purpose of this message is to ask if you would be interested in being interviewed online for a study I’m doing.  I am using a "user on the street" approach, sort of in the Studs Turkel fashion, and interviewing people that tend to use the internet a lot.  I thought you would have some interesting perspectives.

What are your thoughts?  I can give you more info if you are interested.  Let me know.

February 15, Sherie writes:

I'd be glad to. How do you want to set this up?

February 15, Annette writes:

Great!  Thanks!

I'm trying to get my office computer set up for interactive sessions that will also log the interviews, and the tech people here are working on it at this very moment.  For our interview, since you are on a linked system, we could try the talk function, although I have never been able to get my talk function to work.  Anyway, when they get my computer's capabilities figured out, I'll let you know. 

If you have any suggestions, let me know.

February 25, Annette writes:

Sherie,

Sorry to delay getting back to you...was out of town for a few days.  I have a PC platform, on which I have set up netmeeting, which allows real-time talk.  Do you have a PC or Mac?  If you have a PC and netmeeting, we're set.  If you don't have netmeeting, I can tell you where to download the shareware  (it's very easy...if I can do it, anyone can).

Let me know what your preferences are.  I have a very flexible schedule and could meet almost any time.

February 26, Sherie writes:

i have a pc but don't have netmeeting, so you'll need to tell me how to download it. in terms of scheduling, weekends are generally best. also, i'll want to ask you some technical questions because i have a similar idea in mind for a project. but i don't have time to go into it right now.

February 25, Annette writes:

on netscape, go to http://www.microsoft.com and under free stuff or products, find netmeeting.  pretty user friendly from there.  If you have trouble, let me know. weekends are good for me too.  And ask away on the technical stuff.  Not sure if I can answer it or not, but I'll try.

just tell me a date, and I’ll work things out.

March 9, Annette writes:

Hi Sherie!

Just wanted to let you know that I can do the interview any time you like.  Also, I now have another alternate location for us to do our interview.  I have a room in a MOO (diversity University) that we can use for real-time interviewing.  If you have a MOO or MUD client, it will be easy for you to use.  You can also log in as a guest from through the web.

If you go to my home page, I have a direct link to Diversity University).  If you log into DU from the web, you can simply Telnet in...not as user friendly, but workable.  Also, you could easily download a mud client (I did it, so I know most other people could).  I downloaded zMUD and really like it.

Anyway, I'm here all of spring break if you are around.  If not, maybe when you get back, eh?

Let me know how it's going.

March 19, Annette writes:

Hi Sherie, 

Hope you had a restful spring break!  Thought I would let you know that I now have three options for interviewing.  IRC, MOO (Diversity University), or NetMeeting.  Just let me know what medium works best for you and I'll work out the details. 

I'm free all week and weekend for interviews, except St Patrick's day.  Let me know what works for you or if you're too busy we can do it next week.

March 19, Sherie writes:

The moo might work best for me. As for the best time, Thursday evening might be best.

March 19, Annette writes:

Hi Sherie!

How about 8:00 p.m. Thursday?

March 19, Sherie writes:

that sounds good.

Here’s another example, where I’m trying to negotiate a meeting with another participant, Gargoyle:

February 27, Annette writes:

Hi!  My friend Kelly told me you might be interested in participating in an online interview for a study I'm doing.

If you are, let me know and I'll set something up!

I am free almost all the time during the next week or so.  I could easily work around your schedule, day or night.

The interview would take about an hour, depending on how much you want to talk.  And it would be strictly confidential.

Let me know if you're interested, or if you need more information.

Thanks very much,

March 8, Annette writes:

Hi!

I wonder if you are still interested in interviewing with me about your online experiences.  Please let me know either way.  If you’re not interested, I’ll definitely stop bugging you : )

March 12, Gargoyle writes:

Sorry it took me so long to get back to you.

I would be more than interested, but could I find out a little bit more info like what I would be questioned about???

March 12, Annette writes:

Hi!  Thanks for getting back with me.

In the interview, I would be asking questions about what you do, where you go, who you meet.  Questions about what it's like for you to be online.  I would also be asking you to compare your online experiences with your off-line experiences.  AT ANY TIME during the interview, if you decide you don't want to participate, you can disconnect and I will never bother you again...but really, it won't be that kind of interview.

Basically, I am collecting stories and experiences from all kinds of different users. 

If you are worried about anonymity, I guarantee I won't refer to you by any of your real or online names.  Also, I will never reveal where you live or work or any of that.  Nobody would ever be able to trace what I write about back to you.

Hmmm...anything else you would like to know?

Let me know what works for you.  The only times I am not available are Thursday (March 13) afternoon through Saturday late afternoon (out of town for spring break).   Oh, and I can't do it St. Patrick's day....going to a concert.

March 14, Gargoyle writes:

How about tonight???  Could it be in a chat room or something, as I am at work right now, but if you would like we could do it tonight???

March 14, Annette writes:

That's cool :)

You will have to walk me through the chat room thing......I have mIRC so I think I'll be able to get there, but as far as going to a private location, you'll have to be the guide, okay?

Where should we meet?  When?

March 14, Gargoyle writes:

I will be on  at the server irc.warnerbros.com as the user Gargoyle  I plan on being there in about 1/2 hour - an hour.  just look for me and I will be there.

March 14, Annette writes:

Where will you be?  What channel?  I'll look for you....hopefully I'll get there :)

March 14, Gargoyle writes:

I'll set one up called #interview

 

Setting up the interviews was, needless to say, a complicated matter of accommodating the participants and getting them to commit to a date and time.  I became very frustrated with the process before I ever conducted a single interview.

 

Conducting the interviews

The actual interviews ranged from under one hour to over four hours.  During the first interview, I followed the interview protocol fairly closely, modifying various questions and probes as I went along.  My mentor and colleague Bill sat in on the first interview to help me formulate follow-up questions and for general moral support.  About halfway through the interview, we both realized that online interviewing is a singular, frustrating, and exciting experience.  Two specific issues are worth commenting on in further detail:  1)  Online, I only see the text—not the nonverbals, the paralanguage, the general mannerisms or demeanor of the participant.  2)  Writing takes much longer than talking, and being a good interviewer means being patient.

 

Online, you can’t see their faces

Online, I can’t see the other person’s face, hear their tone of voice, or get any sense of who they are outside the words I see scrolling up my own screen.  This does not mean the interview is less interesting.  Through their words and through my interaction with them, I could sense joy, anger, passions, bitterness, happiness.  In fact, I was surprised and impressed by the intensity of the conversations.

However, I found it difficult to manage the basic elements of conversation, such as taking turns at the appropriate time, nodding, or mm-hmm-ing to imply, “Go on, I’m listening.”  I couldn’t give a questioning glance or wrinkle my forehead or frown slightly to let the other person know I didn’t understand what they were getting at.  I couldn’t smile, chuckle, or laugh spontaneously.  Indeed, if I wanted to react (without interrupting the flow of the story) to something I found amusing, funny, striking, or in some other way noteworthy, I had to type something such as, “emote smiles” or “emote grimaces understandingly.”  Then a message would appear on their screen that read “markham smiles” or “markham grimaces understandingly.” 

Each time I felt compelled to react “nonverbally” to something the other person said, I had to decide whether or not to risk disrupting their thoughts to let them know I was listening and was engaged in the conversation.  This issue became less troublesome as the interviews progressed, but not less salient….How much of good conversation is based on reading the other person’s face?  How much of good storytelling relies on the listener’s nodding head, chuckles, gasps, or raised eyebrows?

During one interview, the participant answered many of my questions with very few words:  “Yes.”  “No.”  “It was nice.”  “It was different.”  “Not much time.”  “OK.”  I thought she was shy.  For almost two hours, I tried every technique I could think of to get her to talk more.  I was struck by the disjuncture between her obvious reluctance to open up, and her statement that, “my net sense of self is myself in language.  i get to express myself as a writer, in writing, more than in any other aspect of my life.  i'm a good writer.”  I asked for specific instances, descriptions of events, examples of what it felt like.  I finally gave up.  Toward the end of the interview, she told me I would never understand what she was talking about unless I read the things she had already written (and published).

I’ll never know if she was shy, bored, or put out by the interview.  But at that moment in the interview, I decided I had just wasted two hours with a rude, pretentious, self-absorbed, cerebral person who felt she was too far beyond and above me to engage my questions with more than monosyllabic responses.  I felt as if she were telling me that if I wanted to know what she felt about being online, I should read her publications rather than pester her with questions that are so simplistic they could be answered with mere yes/no responses.

My reading may be harsh, but I only have her short phrases, a painstaking dialogue, and my interpretation of the text.  Perhaps she spoke more in those few words than she ever had in a face-to-face conversation.  My point here is that I might know other things, or reach other conclusions in a face-to-face interview.  But I was working from my own experiences of conversation, thus drew conclusions from that reference point.  I’m convinced that the absence of body language, tone of voice, and other quintessential elements of conversation makes a difference (clearly a judgment on my part here--many users of this technology would disagree).  Whether this difference is relevant or not is a good question for future study.  Regardless, in this study, I was frustrated by the lack of face-to-face cues.

 

Writing takes longer than talking

Beth-ANN smiles

Markham nods understandingly

Beth said, “I think I like it this way because I can just type what commes to mind and not have to think about it as much thinkgs seem to be communicated better through my fingers then my voice.”

I tried my best not to immediately type something back, because I had been running over Beth’s sentences constantly since we started the interview.  I just couldn’t stop myself; I tend to jump in on conversations in RL (real life) too, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

Sure enough, Beth eventually continued, “that's why I like being on here so much.”

I asked, “do you think that talking with your fingers better than your voice is the major difference between RL and online communication?”  And then, as an afterthought, I added, “for you, I mean?”

I had been talking with Beth for almost an hour when Bill knocked on my office door.  “Come on in,” I yelled through the door.  I distractedly pointed to an empty chair and Bill sat down.

“Hang on, Bill.  I’m talking with Beth. . . .  Hang on.”

“Hey, no problemo.  Take your time.  I’m just here to help.”

Bill, my advisor through this part of the project, had agreed to help me through the first interview, because I was nervous about conducting interviews online and wanted his expertise to guide my initial forays into this new interview space.  He had not conducted interviews online either, but he had spent many hours interviewing people from all walks of life.  I was glad he was there.

Beth wrote, “I use the internet for a lot of things even now to find information, chat, look for things just use it for everything but I haven't bought anything off the Internet yet.”

“Is this your interview protocol?”  Bill asked, gesturing toward the sheets of paper hanging from a clip attached to the side of the computer.

“Mmhmm...  Just a sec... Yeah, yeah,”  I mumbled, distracted.  I was typing a message to Beth, and was having trouble concentrating.  I wondered if Beth meant to type ‘bought’ instead of ‘brought.’  I typed, “What do you mean by brought off...”  I considered for a moment, then erased the message.  Better to buy myself some time, I thought, and wrote a different message.  “Beth, can you hang on a minute while I use the restroom?”

Beth said, “yes it is because I can type what i'm feeling better then I can voice my;m”  A few seconds passed, then Beth continued, “feelings it just comes a little easier seeing things to answer then hearing and having to answer I like to worrk with my hands a lot.”

Hmmm.....good thing I hadn’t pressed on with the question I was getting ready to ask.  As usual, I was racing ahead of Beth and she was plodding along, answering questions in the order I asked them. 

“yes I can!”

Ah-ha.  She means, Yes, she’ll wait while I’m in the restroom.

I quickly typed, “thanks!  back in a flash!”

“ok taht’s cool”

I sighed with relief, leaned back in my chair, and looked over at the person physically present beside me.  “Hi!  Hey, I’m glad you’re here!  Okay, we have a few minutes to talk while I’m in the ‘restroom.’  You won’t believe this.  Very cool!  I had to start without you, because Beth was waiting for me.  But it seems to be going okay.”  I started scrolling back through the logged transcript, pointing out some of Beth’s more interesting comments to Bill.

“She takes forever to answer questions, Bill.”  I said excitedly.  “And sometimes she repeats herself.  I think when I send a message to her, it just appears on her screen and it interrupts her own writing of her message.  She doesn’t have the same interface program as I do.  I think she’s using Telnet--”

“Wait, wait!”  Bill interrupted me, laughing.  “Slow down!  I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

I laughed.  “Okay, okay.  How are you?”  Without waiting for an answer, I went on, “Let’s just get to the interviewing part.  I’m only on the second page.  And I’m having trouble sticking to the questions.  Look here--”   I showed Bill places in the transcripts where I had strayed significantly from the protocol.

“Well,” he said, “I can’t stay for very long.  Let me watch for awhile.  I’ll see if we can’t stay more on track.” 

I noticed a message had come on to the screen from Beth,

You sense that Beth-ANN is looking for you in Hut X

Beth pages, "is a girl who's at Purdue and it's on here that she's interviewing"

I quickly sent the message, “hi again”

Beth replied “hi.  your back.  that’s cool.”

Beth-ANN smiles

Markham smiles back

From my side, Bill asked, “How long has it taken for you to get through each page so far?”

As I typed, I replied, “I don’t know.  Maybe 30 minutes?  I’m not sure.”

I wrote to Beth, “what do you do mostly when you are online?  Where do you go?”

“I'm usually on the MOO when I'm in my room.  But I go all over the place I have lots of bookmarks on my computer. I just love to look aroud at everything and anything aplus my teacher my English professor likes us to search for things in class for projects and stuff she's an Internet junky too.”

“mostly the moo?  or do you irc too?”

Bill flipped through the interview protocol silently for a few moments, then pronounced, “At that rate, the interview will take over four hours.”

“Well,” I replied worriedly, “I’m not sure if I can go any faster.  Do you think there are any questions I can cut out?”

Beth continued her response, “I love the internet and my professor likes it that I like thae internet because she says it's the wave of the future and there are not enough women on the Internet.  The  Internet is a place we can make the most impact”

I gave Beth time to catch up with my questions, which gave Bill and me time to discuss various questions we could collapse or delete.

“I only moo you can't IRC very well from my room and I'm too busy in the computer lab to do it so I'm just here and it keeps me busy.”

Thinking Beth had finished her response, I asked another question, “How do you think women can make the most impact online?”

 Noticing the question I had just asked, Bill commented, “Annette, maybe you should get to the next question on the protocol.”  Then he added, “I can’t stay that long, you know.”

I shot him a sidelong glance.  “Yeah, I know.  You told me that when you came in.”  I turned away from the computer, frustrated, and looked my mentor straight in the eye.  “Bill, I can’t just do the questions.  I know I keep getting off track, and I’m not going very fast.  But I don’t know how to go faster.  I think it just takes longer to interview this way.”

He nodded, “Maybe so, maybe so.  But these interviews could take a long time, given where you’re at now.  Do you think the participants will agree to such long interviews?”

“Well, look,” I said, trying to explain.  “It’s like small talk.  I can’t just ignore the small talk to jump into the interview.  And every time I smile, I have to type it.  Every time I say “mmhmm” I have to type it.  Every time I say anything or nod or do anything, I have to type and send a message.”  I sighed, feeling exasperated, “You see? It takes forever to do the things that you just take a few seconds to do in a face-to-face interview.”

Bill had been nodding throughout my outburst, and I knew he was trying to understand.  “You’re right,” he said thoughtfully.  “That never occurred to me.  I guess I do the same thing in my interviews, but I don’t have to think so much about it.”  He smiled and started to chuckle as the implications struck him.  “It’s a good thing I don’t have to type everything that I do and say in an interview!  It would never get done!” Bill exclaimed, and suddenly burst into laughter.

Beth asked, “is that clear enough?”

I realized I had taken too long to send a message, and now Beth was reminding me that I was supposed to be focused on a different conversation.

I quickly typed and sent another message, “very clear,” and then asked another question.

Bill and I realized that when I strayed from the questions, I still was accomplishing a vital part of any interview; allowing the participant to relax, encouraging a conversational mode, and letting the conversation guide the questions rather than the other way around.  Whether it was small talk, comic relief, or a new conversational direction, we came to realize all interviews have these elements; they are just less noticeable in face-to-face contexts--and less time-consuming.  Here, even clarifying a participant’s response took time to write and several messages back and forth to complete.  In short, the basic elements of good conversation seem to steal precious time from what I had been taught was the heart of the interview, the set of protocol questions.  The solution was fairly simple… accept it, and make sure everyone involved knew that the interview could take much longer than expected. 

I also had to learn to slow down to give participants enough time to respond fully to the questions.  When I was interviewing Beth, I would ask a question and wait for what seemed like a long time for her to respond.  Sometimes, if I didn’t see writing on the screen shortly (don’t ask me how I define “shortly”… I’m sure the actual passage of time was much shorter than the multiple minutes I imagined), I would wonder if she had received the message.  Then I would wonder if she was still there.  Then, to make sure she was there, I would send the same message again or another message asking if she got the first one.  I’m sure it drove Beth crazy.  At other times, after Beth would send a message, I would ask the next question (a logical enough conversational move, I thought), and Beth’s response would be a continuation of her previous message. 

In effect, I interrupted almost every story she tried to tell.  She would be warming up to the question, getting started on an in-depth answer, and I would abruptly ask a different question.  I couldn’t help myself.  I felt compelled to fill the blank, black void with more green writing.  I couldn’t stand what I thought to be silence.  Meanwhile, Beth was chatting away . . . I just couldn’t hear it yet.

To solve this problem, I forced myself to focus on other things.  I started writing a research journal at the same time so that she had time to respond in peace.  Learning to be patient was crucial for another reason as well.  If I asked a question, got a complete response, and still remained silent, the participants would often fill the empty space with more stuff—more detail regarding their previous answer or another related story that occurred to them during the silent period.  Most interviewers learn to do this in face-to-face contexts, but here it took concentrated effort to not type.  Sometimes I resorted to sitting on my hands.

In general, interviewing online took more planning and time than I thought it would.  However, I want to mention one significant advantage of online interviewing:  Time to think of good follow-up questions.  I could see the story unfolding or the response developing as the participant sent segments of text.  This meant I could attend to the message more than once.  I could re-read what the participant had just sent, and while they were composing their message, I could think of possible follow-up questions. 

Not only did I have more time to consider the direction of the discussion, or scroll back to previous comments, I could revise the form of the question to make it more precise, open, and evocative.  For instance, I could ask Sheol a closed-ended follow-up question, “Are you an addict?” or, after seeing it, think more carefully about what I wanted, and ask a more open-ended question instead, “What would define ‘addict’?”  In another instance, I started to ask (write), “Why did you start using the Internet?” and changed it to, “What drew you to the Net?” because I thought Sheol would be more enticed by the second question.  These questions vary only slightly, but as any interviewer knows, the form of the questions is vital for facilitating participants’ responses. 

Having more time was good for another reason as well:  If I was having trouble formulating a question or deciding what direction to go next, I could pretend I had been interrupted by the phone or something (which I learned by actually being interrupted by people who didn’t realize I was conducting an interview while sitting at my keyboard).  These contrived interruptions gave me time to think without looking like an inept or amateur researcher.

 

Everything changes, but should the researcher admit this?

May 1997:  Reading through the interviews, I am realizing a number of things about my project and my preconceptions about Cyberspace.  First, I changed my interviewing style significantly over the course of the ten interviews; not only did my questions shift but the responses changed also (perhaps because the questions were asked differently).  Second, the interviews do not say what I thought they would.  Third, I am beginning to question my own methods as well as traditional methods of collecting and analyzing discourse and reporting research findings.  Now that I’ve noted these realizations, let me explain the significance of them to the course and shape of the study and my understanding of the research process. 

If these thoughts seem non-linear as you read through them, it is because they are.  I cannot in good faith write a completely orderly narrative of precisely how I collected, encountered, and made sense of (am still making sense of) these texts.  The ethnography is taking me in particular directions—directions I did not predict or expect.  Even as I write, I continue to make sense of the entire project, process, and product in shifting ways. 

The interview protocol changed significantly as the interviews progressed.  Because I concentrated more on the conversation with the participants and less on the protocol, I ended up with richer discourse.  (Of course, the protocol didn’t like this.  I could sense it glaring admonishingly at me from the side of the computer, waiting impatiently for me to get back to the proper questions.)

For awhile, I worried about the potential problems associated with straying from the interview protocol; many methods teachers had warned me against such deviations.  One suspicion and two realizations have eased my mind considerably.  I suspect all researchers stray from their interview protocol to a certain degree…and I realized that to conclude that one has strayed “too far” is a matter of interpretation.  Indeed, many researchers don’t even begin with a standard protocol at all, so “strayed too far” might never even enter their minds as they engage in richly generative conversations with others.  I also realized that although I set up a research question to guide my investigation, I really am not trying to get a set of answers to a standardized set of questions.  I just want to get people to talk about their experiences, to tell me stories.  Indeed, adhering strictly to a standardized protocol mostly impeded my progress toward this goal.  The users I interviewed are very different; different ages, different stages of life, different reasons for going online, different ways of talking.  We all are prompted to tell our stories at different moments, depending on numberless contextual factors.  I would be presumptuous to expect them to respond exactly the same way (or even necessarily comparatively) to the same set of questions.

In fact, as I continue to struggle to make sense of this project (both make sense of the context I am studying and the process of studying it), I am beginning to question at least two underlying assumptions of traditional research reporting:  That the researcher can and should separate the planning from the doing from the presenting of research; and that the researcher should present research projects as if they were a sensible linear process, when in fact they are most often made sense of retrospectively. 

March 30, 1997:  I have gathered all my interviews and have been reading and re-reading them, looking for themes, patterns, or whatever seems salient.  This is a difficult process, as any qualitative researcher knows.  Interpretive research is generally thought to be inductive and emergent.  I look through the data until something comes to me, theoretically.  But as many scholars have noted (Ashmore, 1989; Grumet, 1991; Van Maanen, 1988; Wolf, 1992), the process is not so neat and linear in practice.  Certainly, I look for themes and patterns to emerge from the texts.  But I also follow hunches (some of which came out of my research questions long before I actually went online, some of which came out of my interactions online) with my nose to the ground.

For example, in my research proposal, I asked “How do online users make sense of the concepts of reality, identity, and community?”  As I began researching literature for this project two years ago, I became intrigued by the issues of reality, virtuality, and hyperreality.  I found that many scholars theorizing about Cyberspace and computer-mediated communication focus on the difficulty of determining what is real and what is virtual, or the blurring of the two in or through various technologies (e.g., Baudrillard, 1988; Benedikt, 1991; Gibson, 1984; Jameson, 1991; Rheingold, 1991, 1993; Slouka, 1995; Woolley, 1993).  Still other scholars focus on the identity(ies) of users, as these identities are fragmented, multiplied, disembodied, or decentered through their interaction with various technology (e.g., see those listed above, as well as Turkle, 1984, 1995; Stone, 1991). 

As I continued  to engage the project, I realized I really wanted to listen to people’s stories.  I knew what the theories suggested they would say, but I wanted to hear about lived experiences.  I wanted to know how they would answer the question, “What is Real?”  To get at these questions, I developed an open-ended interview protocol that would get participants to talk about what it was like to meet others and be with them online.  I wanted to ask them questions that would get them talking about their perception and presentation of self both on- and off-line.

Many of my questions were crafted so that participants would compare their online and offline experiences, identities, relationships.  I asked, “How would you compare your sense of your self as a person online with your sense of self offline?”  If they indicated they feel differently, I asked the follow-up question, “What about your online experiences makes you feel as though you are a different person from when you are offline?”  I asked, “How real are your experiences online?” and “How would you compare communicating online with communicating IRL?”

Now, as I look through the transcripts, I don’t quite know if I am more interested in what they say about these issues—reality and identity—or what they do while they’re online and what they think about their experiences online.  I’m not sure, but it seems I am not getting what I thought I wanted out of the interviews.

 

What am I looking for?  And is this the same question as “What am I finding?” 

Frankly, most of the participants do not think about being online in the ways I assumed they would before I talked to them.  Some users perceive computer-mediated communication as a means of keeping in touch with friends and relatives inexpensively.  Others talk about the Internet as a vital connection to the rest of the world, a place where they can be more like themselves because they can backspace and edit their words prior to uttering them.  Cyberspace allows them to interact as and with words rather than bodies.  Some users seem to separate their ‘Real Life’ selves from their ‘Online’ selves.  Of course, some of the people I interviewed would not have distinguished between the two if I had not pressed them to think in those categories.

March 31, 1997:  I keep reading the transcripts, wondering vaguely what I am looking for, now that I’ve determined they don’t say what I thought they would.  I see many possible themes:  1)  CMC is a tool for virtually all the participants; 2) The Internet is a window to the world—a way to get connected to more things and people; 3)  Online communication is real, friendships and relationships are real, but “being” is located in the physical body, mostly; 4)  Across the boards, the online self is more outgoing, more eloquent, more confident; 5)  Each user is different and unique.

This last item is most bothersome at the moment.  You see, if they are all different, how can I say they have similarities?  Why don’t they all talk about the same issues?  I am attempting to say something meaningful about online users of online communication.  But I’m not sure what I can legitimately begin to say about them as a group, based on these interviews.  Let me back up, recap my goals.  By conducting “User in The Net” interviews, I am addressing the question “How do users make sense of identity and reality?”  If I am pressed, I say I’m looking for themes or patterns in their discourse; otherwise, what’s the point?

Basically, this goal seems incommensurate with the type of interviews I conducted.  This project is somewhat analogous to trying to say something about Americans by talking on the phone with a dozen people who claim to be American.  I am interviewing self-described “heavy users” who spend a lot of time online, perhaps even live much of their lives through computer mediated communication.  But I have found that heavy use is individually determined, and “a lot” can range from two to eighteen hours per day.

***

This entire discussion, of course, emerged just as the interviews were ending.  I was trying to make sense of them prior to interpreting them.  The process of interpretation is a never ending cycle of reading, thinking, interpreting, writing, questioning, and re-reading, reinterpreting, thinking, finding patterns, rejecting patterns . . . and so on.  Clearly, this process evolves as the project does.  Do we include all the stages in the final presentation of research?  Not usually; we present findings as if they came through a logical process of making sense of the data.  But here, I want to share my interpretive dilemmas, crucial moments in the research process where I questioned the research process itself.  Besides, discussing these moments allows me to explore a methodological issue very relevant to conducting interpretive research, namely:  “How do you justify the choices you’ve made?”

If my goal is to find themes and patterns, and I don’t seem to be finding these in the discourses I have collected, can I really say anything meaningful with these texts?  Do I just present eight stories, eight sets of sensemaking practices?  I asked a colleague this question recently, and he suggested I collect more interviews.  This sparked a long conversation about the number of interviews required to justify interpretations.

My colleague believes I should keep interviewing to reach “critical mass.”  I asked him what this meant, and after much discussion, I learned he meant several things:  that I should interview until I see patterns repeating, which is fairly standard practice in qualitative research.  In other words, more interviews might yield critical insights that tie the rest of the interviews together.  He also said that more interviews would be a strategy to gain some credibility for what I did eventually decide to say (my term--he wouldn’t say ‘strategy’).

I was and still am confused by this discussion.  More importantly, I am confused by my own (and many of my professional colleagues’) conviction that enough discourse is something we can somehow quantify, even as we spend seemingly endless amounts of time and reading trying to convince our social constructionist, interpretive, anti-hypothetico-deductive selves otherwise.  What is enough?  How much is critical mass?  How many equals saturation?  How many interviews does it take to validate the results of a qualitative study? 

These are not trivial questions.  Indeed, they invoke heated discussion even among the most agreeable of colleagues.  I have asked these questions for several years and have yet to receive an adequate answer, not because those whom I ask give inadequate answers but because they, too, struggle with these issues and do not profess to have the definitive answers themselves.  The most common answers seem to be:  “You will know when you have enough,” and “Ten.”

In the final analysis, the questions still remain; how do we know we are saying something meaningful?  How do we represent and speak for others adequately and honorably?  I think it is important to confront these questions throughout the research process, not because I can find definitive answers, but because the honest pursuit of these questions leads me to a fairly honest conclusion; we can never get to the bottom of it, we can never have enough, we can never know it all.  Even if I am saying something meaningful about a particular context, I am not saying an infinite number of other things.  I can never exhaust all possibilities.  Yet, as Geertz says, “it is not necessary to know everything in order to understand something” (1973, p. 20).  In other words, all social inquiry focuses on particular aspects of social life at the expense of other, potentially interesting features.  This is a good thing.

 

So what am I really studying?

June 1997:  At the moment, I consider myself a newcomer to the Internet.  My view of this world is as an outsider.  I see Cyberspace in particular ways.  You, the reader, undoubtedly see it in other, singular ways.  My research is centered in Cyberspace, but it is also centered in me.  Considering all the things in my life that influence my research and writing, my research becomes a polyvocal, dialogic process of retrospective sense-making and story-telling. 

I created research questions that I was interested in exploring.  I created an interview protocol that led interviewees in particular directions—directions I chose.  Yet as I engage this context to study it, the very context changes.  Each interview changes slightly, because I get to a different place in my own understanding of the context and, as a result, I ask different questions.  I am changing as a result of my interaction with this context.  In turn, this changes the way I see the participants, changes the way I seek out and obtain participants, changes the way I interview the participants, and most importantly, changes the way I interpret the transcripts of the interviews (I should add that writing for different audiences also has altered my interpretation of the interviews, and the version you will read is another rendition of this ongoing process of making sense of Other). 

Texts I have written, texts I’ve encountered, texts I’ve generated with others online.  Layer upon layer of dialogue--among me, the texts I bump up against, the Others I meet, the various selves I perform and embody. 

Frankly, it’s a complicated but challenging mess.  I am studying other peoples’ dialogues with each other.  Simultaneously, I am influencing and altering their conception of themselves and others as I converse with them.  I also am contributing to the shape of Cyberspace through my presence and interactions.  Meanwhile, I am reconsidering my own understandings of identity and reality as I encounter and engage this world . . . and my transformation of self influences every aspect of the project.  What is part of the research and what is not?  What do I consider part of the ethnographic experience and what do I edit out as irrelevant?

My understanding of Cyberspace comes in moments, fragments, glimpses, and dreams.  I might perceive and experience it one way and completely revise my understanding of it based on any number of things that happen; conversations I have that spark new ideas, scents on the wind that provoke particular memories, Cyberpunk novels I read, a student’s speech about nanotechnology, the titles of books that glare at me when I’m trying to think.  (What do I do with this dream I had after a particularly long night online, where I was asking someone a question and I could see the words coming out of my mouth, letter by letter, to form themselves in sentences superimposed over my vision?).  We might come to understand our experiences as a coherent narrative, but the process we go through to get to that semblance of organization is not as linear as we might like to think, and the experiences we remember and retell are not the same as the experiences themselves.

May 10, 1997:  I should have expected that the reporting part of this project would get complicated.  This is not a linear process, and the more I find out, the more I realize how little I know.  Some colleagues tell me I just need to stick with it, stay there until I have discovered and recorded enough facts, and then stick to those facts.  But for me, embedded as I am in this study at this moment, this traditional stance to ethnographic inquiry (voiced to me in many books, personal conversations, and a decade of social scientific  education), is limiting.  I cannot quell the voices of innumerable texts, each influencing and being influenced by the project.  My colleague Bill urged me the other day to stop trying to figure out the ending.  He said “just follow your lights.”  He said I should stop trying to encapsulate the project based on traditional ethnographic research.  This is good advice.  (But order, tradition, and narrow conceptions of validity keep peering over my shoulder as I write …)

Even as I do this ethnography, I am not separate from it.  The more I become a part of the ethnography, the more it becomes a part of me.  In the end, I am not sure if I will have learned more about Cyberspace, the participants, or me.

January 1998:  How do we study and come to know “Other?”  And how--when we think we know something--do we write what we think we know?  Throughout this project, I have grappled with questions like these, sometimes because I wanted to, but mostly, because I couldn’t help it.  During the early stages when I was preparing for the study, these questions did not seem so important.  When I wrote the first version of this manuscript, and I was writing the Other into my text, though, the questions were crucial.  Now, many months later, as I reflect back on my experiences and retell the stories of the participants for the book you now hold in your hands, I believe the questions of how we represent others in our research are paramount.  In the end, though, it is not so important to find the answers; I gain insight and humility just by considering the questions.

Sheol says it beautifully:  “What I know is like filling a thimble full of water, and saying I hold the ocean in my hands.”  These words give me strength.