teachingbytes-mls

[teachingbytes-mls]

How do we do diginographies

I experienced a good dose of culture shock when I went from burning hot, deep south Texas to blizzard cold Minnesota. I went there to study theology. It sounded good at the time.

Soon thereafter, I stumbled upon a cultural anthropology class and it’s professor, Dr. Correll, and found myself exploring what it meant to be a human being in a collective society. Not good news for the reverend back home.

One of the first books Dr. Correll introduced us to was James Spradley’s, “You Owe Yourself a Drunk.” It demonstrates the importance of paying careful attention in any discipline. It’s the art of the ethnography.

Despite giving up my degree in Cultural Studies (after significant coursework) for the alluring and seductive voices of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, I never lost my love for the social sciences. After getting a degree in Philosophy and feeling sick of books and theories, I dove into social work full-time. And what better way to study social science.

A friend of mine wonders why someone who contemplated becoming a Benedictine monk, studied cultural studies and philosophy in college is now passionately interested in technology, programming, data and information science. Bits and brains. Makes some sense to me. I see the connection(s).

I’m interested in the interaction and intersection of the connections between bits and brains; but in a Buber-esque space kind of way, maybe. I-It for now and maybe I-Thou soon to come…

I’m interested in the ethnographies of the internets, the people and non-people groups and the spoken and unspoken norms floating fluidly about. The search, the stories, the theories and the ideas, the questions of the ideal and the actual going, or gone digital.

Forget drunks and cocktail waitresses. Or maybe not. Actually, definitely not. And the thing we used to call the circus, with varied people groups exhaustively ethnogra-fied (I know, not a word) has invaded our backyard. While the other circus of so-called normality that we used to hide so not-so-well has now walked out the front door, trousers in hand.

A good day for the detached observer. Or jump in and participate. Actually, a participatory observation is the only option, now. Time for quite the interesting and complex multidimensional digi-ethnographic research. On instabook, facegram, and the new Tube, simple self-developed auto-biopics have turned into hyper-media ethnographies that blend together to morph into giga-media-ecologies in ultra-hd. Digi-ethnographies that are not of the analog type. This is the bandwidth type, but who’s measuring. The bits are moving way too fast for the brains.

I’m definitely not any kind of expert at ethnography or technology Far from it. I am, however, a learner and an educator. I’m interested in exploring hardware, software, programming and data just as much as I’m interested in exploring complex social realities and interactions and these social complexities require quite a bit of troubleshooting of their own. Complex and beautiful systems of anthro/psycho/social interactivity. You know, human mess.

So, in the midst of that lack of expertise and specialization, I found myself teaching in a classroom in South America. c.2000. I was considering the priesthood and instead, I was christened, Profesor de Sistemas. Meanwhile something was happening at this time. A shift. What was causing this shift? Something called the world wide web, maybe; that included something called wikipedia, perhaps. And then something called Google…and…and…something shifted super fast at about this time, as the annoying dial-up sound faded fast.

And, in just over a few years, the tipping point did happen. And then learning, sociology, philosophy, databases, poetry, code, art, ninjas, grammargirls, algorithms…and yes, even pornography and online confessionals started integrating in some messy (some would say unstructured) yet interesting ways. A way it all hadn’t before. So easily and seamlessly. Radically so and radically fast. Radically messy and radically organic. Or not. It all happened in a very short period of our lifetime, like human race lifetime.

And along came the cluetrain, web2.0, the restoration of the goddess, google, wikipedia, the database of intentions, tagging (no, not the Banksy type, but while we’re at it, why the hell not), and folksonomies (user-generated taxonomies) that all walked in and broke bread with ethnographies and fieldwork, stayed for some wine, the analog kind, and never left. So, will the world be a better place because of this internetsupertrain we ride?

Who knows? It may be an ugly mess or a beautiful mess. A good mess or a bad mess. But a mess, nonetheless it will be. Here’s to those who’ll work to make some sense of that mess.

-saúl martínez

[teachingbytes-mls]

5370 School Librarianship - School Library Leaders Presentation - Neil Postman - Mass Media Critic and Educator