February 2010 Archives

The other day in our research class my adviser referred to me as an ethnographer. It wasn't so much as she said it. It was more in the way she said it. Sort of offhand, like it was obvious. Like the sun is going to come up. It was the way it was such a given to her that through me. You see I had not begun to think of myself that way. And it called to mind a favorite quote from a favorite author Kurt Vonnegut, who said, "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be."

Vonnegut's quote is all about self-actualization. And I'm all about that. I love the human capacity to continuously reinvent oneself. To learn from our past and use it to make a better future. In my life I've pretended to be a lot of things. Some good. Some not so much. Recently I've been pretending to be a marathoner, an educator, a writer. Now an ethnographer.

And so it goes.

So lately I've been thinking a lot about communities in general and my running community in particular, No surprise since this is the focus of my dissertation. But what is a little surprising is the difficulty I'm having teasing out my community of runners from my other communities, such as what I would consider to be my work, or professional, community. 

You see, we are a community inter-weaved within a larger community. I believe this is primarily due to two factors. There is the continued blurring between virtual and terrestrial worlds brought about by  social applications, mobile devices, and the seemingly ubiquitous connectivity. We no longer see a difference between the worlds rather they are two sides of the same coin.

Second, and more pertinent to my study, is the fact that online communities are no longer limited to being single application-based. We are dispersed across several applications, Twitter, Facebook, our own blog spaces, and iTunes. This is a recent phenomena. Until a few years ago communities could be safely defined and tied into a single application. This afforded a sense of privacy. Kind of like a separation of church and state. I go to this application to be Jeff the Penn State employee and another application to be Jeff the runner. But now, my running connections flow freely amongst my other connections, be they work, family, friends, school, or other interest groups. I found this also to be true for the others I would consider to be part of my running community.

This raises some challenging concerns. Regarding my research, it makes it more difficult to define my running community for the purpose of my dissertation. Lacking the defined boundary of a single application I'll need to rely on my own constructed definition to frame the subjects. How do I label one as a member of my running community? Is it by role? Are they a fellow runner? I believe that will have to be the key. I can't base it on interaction because of how these relationships overlap. I have non-runner friends who offer support, encouragement, advice on my running and fitness, as well as other things and I have runner friends who play integral roles in other areas of my life.

The second challenge transcends my studly, although it will impact it greatly. That is the need, real or perceived, for self-censorship. Because our discourse is so public and so inter-twined we all self censor out of a feeling of necessity. Will something I say in the context of my running affect my job or my personal relationships? For example, I tend to do my weekday runs over lunch. Does posting them to Twitter and Facebook, including the time of day, impact my co-workers perception of me and the value I bring? Nothing has ever been said to me yet to substantiate my fears but that doesn't quiet the little voice in the back of my mind. Do others censor themselves because of the overlap of communities?

The other day I made two updates on Twitter that combined drew a unique response.

The first concerned the release of the latest Pew Internet report on social media and young adults. My tweet included a link to the report as well as an editorial comment that Pew puts out interesting stuff.


Tweet 1 about the Pew Internet report

The second wan an RT (re-tweet in the vernacular) about an article on a class two colleagues of mine are teaching on disruptive technologies in the classroom. Again I included the link along with the editorial comment, "cool stuff by cool guys."


Tweet 2 about the Disruptive Technology class

To which another colleague responded that she found the contradiction in my last two updates "amusing." And I thought, What a perfect response!

Life is nothing if not a pool of contradiction. A visceral pool where right-wrong, good-bad, yes-no, happy-sad make up the water we swim in. These dichotomous waves smash up against each other creating the beautiful gray world in which we live. The ebb and flow of chance and circumstance is why what is right today can be wrong tomorrow all depending upon which part of the pool you happen to be in at any given moment. Simultaneously, someone swimming in just a slightly different part of the pool may see things quite differently.

Yet somehow it all works.

Both of my updates centered on the notion of social applications and young people and on the surface contradicted each other. According to the Pew report young adults (18-29 yrs) do not blog much nor do they use Twitter. Preferring instead to use social networking applications such as Facebook to communicate with friends. Yet, the outcomes of the Disruptive Technology class showed that, in particular, Twitter really caught on as the tool of choice. Students were also required to blog but these posts did not generate as much buzz as the students Twitter updates according to the article.

So how can this be?

I think there are several factors at play here. First off, while the technologies may no be familiar the devices the students use to access them, smart phones and laptops, are so there is a measure of familiarity with how the tool may work.

Second, I think it may have helped the class that these spaces were not where the students prefer to hang out. Separation of personal and professional space could be like separation of church and state. This may have helped keep an air of formality for the class space and eliminated the creepy factor of faculty hanging out where the students live.

Third, I think human nature came into play. People, in this case the students, want positive experiences so most will look at the situation through this lens and remember it that way.

But there are still some outstanding questions. Does this approach facilitate learning? Particularly when the class is not about the technology? Are professors willing to go where the student input takes them? Is there still time for reflection?

But these are questions for another post. My point here is to illustrate a good example as to why data at a meta level may not be so in any given classroom. I'll bet most of the students in the Disruptive Technology  class did not blog or tweet prior to the class and most probably won't continue to do so after the class ends. But if it worked for that particular experience, if the students got what they needed, then wasn't it worth it?

A beautiful contradiction.