Rob Responds · Thursday November 16, 2006
From Rob S. Jansen:
“Good to hear from you. I’m gonna comment on the blog idea, cause I think it’s as do-able as any of the others, and also that any problems you’re having with the blogging question you’ll also have with any other the others. So it seems best to stick with what you seem most interested in at this point. (Although, yes, “Creative Communities and Cooperative Commodities” sounds really cool.)
“First off, a tension that I see between your various proposals (including the non-blog proposals) and the comments from your advisor are between interpretive and empirical (and/or causal) questions. Pretty much all of your questions are interpretive: e.g., Does this thing REPRESENT this other thing?, Can this be seen AS A that? What does it MEAN that this happened?, etc. I get your advisor as wanting you to ask “how” or “why” questions instead of (or maybe in addition to) “meaning” questions. (By “how” question I mean, descriptively, by what processes or to what extent did this thing happen? By “why” question I mean, causally, what is the explanation for the fact that this thing happened?) Now, I don’t want to take this too far, cause there are disciplinary differences as well—my discipline doesn’t have much space for interpretive analysis, and other disciplines (such as anthropology, history, cultural studies) do much more so. It’s maybe a social sciences vs. humanities thing… Anyway, part of the “too broad” problem may be that you want to write an “essay” that interprets the cultural and political significance of a new cultural phenomenon (blogging, open source, etc.), whereas your advisor wants you to write a “research paper” that uses data to answer a specific empirical or causal question (albeit maybe one with broader, interpretive import that can be addressed in the intro and conclusion).
“On the question of whether blogging is a played out topic, you might be right in terms of the interpretive questions. That is, yes, people have talked a lot about blogs. But, as academia lags tragically behind popular critical discourse, I would wager good money that there has been virtually no actual systematic, nitty-gritty “research” on blogging.
“So, one way to think about your blogging topic would be to come up with a question on which you can get more traction, empirically. After all, the question “CAN blogs challenge hegemony” is a hypothetical question about blogging’s POTENTIAL – a pretty hard thing to measure. Now, this might still be your “motivating question” – the question that drives you and your research – and you might speculate on it with theory in the conclusion, for example. But think about more researchable ways of getting at the same thing. For example, even changing one word- the “can” to a “has”-would make what you’re going to do much more clear. It’s much clearer the sort of data you might collect to answer the question “HAS blogging challenged hegemony” than for the question of CAN it do so.
“And here I think I’m in line with your prof. To answer the “has” question, you need to (1) decide what it would mean to challenge hegemony, and then (2) go out and study a case where you think it has happened to explore how and why it worked. Once you narrow the question asking in this way, the narrowing of the data gathering makes much more sense. If you pick a particular event or issue in which blogging has been important (maybe a scandal, election, policy vote, popular response to an anti-war protest, etc.), then there are a limited number of blogs that were relevant to that issue, and a limited time frame for which they would have been relevant. Then you could come up with a way of narrowing that to something you could study in a year and write about in 12,000 words. One way would be to take one example of different “types” of blogs. If you could break down blogs into different “types” (I don’t know blogs well enough to do this), then take one of each, and PRESTO, you’ve sampled 5 blogs for, say 3 months when a story mattered. Then maybe you compare blog content to mass media content, and if you’re lucky interview some bloggers and mass media reporters (even news consumers) to boot.
“Anyway. I’m not saying that you have to pick this specific “has blogging challenged hegemony” question. I’m just trying to point out the process you might go through to narrow things down in a way that can seem slightly less absurd and arbitrary. To sum up: (1) by changing from interpretive to empirical/causal questions, the burden is no longer on you to discuss the entirety of the cultural phenomenon under some enormous rubric like “globalization”; (2) a well-worded question (i.e., concrete and not hypothetical) will essentially dictate what sort of data needs to be collected in order to answer it.
“Hope this helps at least a little.”
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