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
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.
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.
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 “
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.