Connective Media Ethnology

London.
The second speaker in this double-barrelled keynote session at Transforming Audiences is Christine Hine. Her interest is in digital media practice in daily life, which she has approached in the past through virtual ethnography. More recently, she has used such approaches also to investigate the use of information and communication technologies by a group of biologists.

More broadly, then, media ethnography brings and attention to cultural difference, a commitment to close observation and recording, a focus on dense descriptive detail which reveals contexts that give meaning to actions for a community - which implies that that context is not known a priori.

Media ethnography is well established, and increasingly multi-sited; it pursues media objects through an articulation with different social contexts. It need not be a series of visits to self-evidently connected sites; such connections between apparently unconnected spaces can also be uncovered in the course of the research. As ethnography can never cover all possible sites, it requires an exploration and justification of the choices enacted in the research. This kind of connective ethnography offers up an alternative and a challenge to more conventional ethnographic work in media studies.

Christine now takes us through an example for such work, focussed around the Antiques Roadshow television programme. It attracts a particular audience segment, and is part of a wider genre of factual television as well as a piece of 'ordinary' TV. The show reinforces the economic and representational values of objects rather than their usefulness, and acts as a cultural event which is reproduced by skilled and knowing participants; it also leads to a contest over (expert / enthusiast / amateur) status.

In addition to the roadshow event itself, one site for ethnography is the living room in which the show is watched by its audience, of course; so is the site of production and distribution within the BBC organisation, and the context of other shows in the same genre. Then there are media reports around the show (about local roadshow events), various independent Websites surrounding the show, and individual participants' experiences in trying to get themselves and their antique objects on the TV show itself.

It is difficult to see this media text independent of its mediating technologies; media are ontologically multiple, they are different things in different spaces and constantly in feedback. This requires us to work with and against the visibility of different practices. The Internet is both a resource and a constraint for connective media ethnography. We cannot discern the meaning of an online forum for its diverse users without actually pursuing that issue beyond the readily visible online interaction.

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