"Incest is not a problem" · Thursday November 16, 2006
Well, that’s a misleading header, to be sure.
Angie responds to my Urban Honking idea:
“Ok. What is UH a case of?
“This is a pretty hard queston, actually.
“You need to figure out how UH relates to mass media and political power. So can you find some particular ways that it deals with media coverage of X? Or places it serves as a forum for particularly important discussions? Are there perhaps two issues or events different UH bloggers cover that you could compare over time in terms of how they deal with them, the politics of the discussions, the popularity of the discussions, or the way UH competes with mainstream media as a forum where issues are defined or debated?
“Moreover, where is the “power” or “hegemony” in all this? How does UH conceptualize, challenge, reinforce, etc, whatever it is you claim is “hegemonic”? Do they see mass media as dominant? Do they see their blogging as an alternative? This might be a place where you would want to sample on the dependent variable, as it were, by scouring UH for places where bloggers are actually making an effort to subvert something hegemonic, such as mass media capacities to define certain political problems and lay out their possible solutions. I think it’s important to consider in this scenario the possibility that UH isn’t revolutionary or subversive at all. You should specify what it would take for you to find this to be the case. Also specify if you think it’s possible for UH itself to become hegemonic in some sense. Isn’t that your main question? What would that mean and what would it look like?
“Other notes.
“If the community is homogenous, that’s interesting. Yes, studying your own demographic creates important limitations and, in particular, may reproduce problematic biases. You’ll want to think about that. At the same time, in a field with fewer interactional/socioeconomic barriers to entry, it’s interesting that UH has still constituted itself as a bunch of kids from the same social location. Why is that? (This isn’t your research question, which has to with political power and teh mass media. It’s a sociological question about race and class and their roles in group-formation online. But it’s still one to keep in mind, I think, based on how you describe things.)
“If you’re going to use their stats, that’s great. The main question to bring to those numbers is, compared to what? Numbers are pretty meaningless without a comparative axis. Later you might want to bring in a comparison case. Or you can slice things up over time and compare the periods you impose on these data. Or whatever.
“Incest is not a problem. Other researchers have theorized and formalized a practice of participant observation, upon which you can draw for both legitimation and guidance. As you go forward, too, being a participant observer can give you a chance to think deeply about your own subjectivity and how it interacts with objecivity of your knowledge and truth claims. Makes things interesting.”
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