Reflections on Readings for Week 14

Sometimes I read things and assume I must be overlooking something crucial to my understanding of these texts. For example, I wonder if Richard Beach's Module 8: Media Ethnographies is really telling me to believe that the participation of consumers in commercialized “mediascapes” means that “markers of class, race, and gender become less important in defining one’s identity than lifestyle or appearing 'cool' through the uses and display of products.” Similarly, a passage about virtual worlds states that participants “experiment with different roles and stances by using alternative forms of language without concern for the constraints of gender, class, race, age, or disability markers that inhibit their participation in lived-world, face-to-face interaction.”

The study about commercialized mediascapes is from 1998, when I happened to be a 13 year old. If they had asked me back then, I would not have said that class, race, and gender were less important than coolness. I would have said that class, race, and gender are often reflected in our choices of what we believe is cool or not. There’s a reason I was called a “whitewashed” Asian American girl in my teen years, that somehow I was being “less Asian” than others were, and it was clearly directly related to my choices in media and product consumption. It’s such an obvious thing, that one’s background can often be related to the media one consumes, that I definitely feel like there is a level of detail missing from the module to make the regurgitated findings more believable for me.

I wonder if this is the sort of problem Elizabeth Soep is referring to in Learning About Research From Youth Media Artists when she writes that “Often young people are asked to provide raw data—stories of their personal lives that can, if we are not careful, translate into sensationalized narratives.” Not to say that there is something sensationalized about the resulting narrative, but I think there is a lack of nuance in the way the narrative has been constructed. I don't doubt that great care was taken in collecting data, but there's a narrow focus and little regard for other possibilities outside the desired findings.

As another example, let me explain more about the stated idea that virtual worlds allow people to experiment with roles outside gender, class, and other constraints. The study fails to account for frequent exceptions to the rule. For one thing, I’d like “virtual worlds” to be explained more as a term, similar to the way danah boyd muses on the term “youth” for her own study. And perhaps if the studies being cited were more recent, it would account for more recent technological developments that prevent users in virtual worlds from hiding things like their gender, such as voice-over IP software used by MMORPG players to more smoothly coordinate group actions. Females have a much harder time avoiding the question of gender when it comes time to chat verbally during raids. And in many instances, you couldn’t tell people more about yourself even if you wanted to. You wouldn’t want to encounter racism, sexism, or other kinds of discrimination, so you just stay quiet and avoid mentioning your age, gender, sexual orientation, or race unless you wish to run the risk of constantly being called a fag or eloquently being demanded for topless photos with the phrase “tits or gtfo”. There's this "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" form of identity creation in virtual worlds, one that forces people to conform to unspoken norms, that makes me question the notion that virtual worlds allow most people to play with identity all that much. I don’t mean to say the second citation about virtual worlds is incorrect. I just think there’s something to be said for the fact that a lot has changed in 10 years and that there's a lot more going on if you are willing to at least acknowledge it.

On the other hand, there’s something transparent and ultra-readable about boyd’s writing. Her findings stay grounded and never stray into some far-flung conclusion that’s difficult to support. Soep mentions that researchers juggle “collaborating in a meaningful way with research ‘subjects,’ and delivering articles that will pass rigorous procedures of peer review for publication” and I wonder if boyd has found a way to do both without alienating anyone.

She makes a lot of caveats without seeming like she’s backtracking. She’s just trying to represent reality in all its complicated glory. boyd mentions that not all teens are on social networking sites and even mentions that MySpace will not reign forever over teens’ hearts. She has qualms with the term “youth” and just how many “young people” that term really encompasses, proving she’s a researcher after my own heart. With her dissections, she takes a knife to the vagaries of language or statistics and ends up with an exactness I admire in her writing. While doing this, she mingles collected data with an acknowledgment of ongoing history, connecting the two in a vital way.

I realize that Beach's module is not meant to be comprehensive and that I am supposed to look at the actual cited works, so I plan on digging up the research.