Ethnography Matters

Note from the Editor, Tricia Wang: The fourth contributor to the Co-designing with machines edition is Molly Templeton (@mollymeme), digital and social media expert, Director of Social Media at Everybody at Once, and one of the internet’s first breakaway YouTube stars. Her piece urges brands’ social media strategy to look beyond the numbers when working in the digital entertainment and marketing industry. Molly gives specific examples where algorithms don’t know how to parse tweets by humans that are coded with multiple layers of emotional and cultural meaning. She offers the industry a new way to balance the emotional labor in audience management with data analysis. Her articles draws on her work at Everybody at Once, a consultancy that specializes in audience development and social strategy for media, entertainment, and sports.

@Tacobell spent an hour sending this same gif out to dozens of people. The account is probably run by humans (most social media presences today are). And they were following best practice by “replicating community behavior,” that is, talking the way normal people talk to each other (a human taco bell fan would definitely send a gif). But when @tacobell only sends the same gifs out over and over again, it’s uncanny. It’s pulling the right answers from the playbook, but at the wrong frequency.  

Why do brands lose their chill?

I think that brands lose their chill when they don’t let their social media managers exercise empathy. The best brands on social media balance the benefit of interaction with the risk of human error – managers are constantly concerned with pissing off the organization, or the audience, and ultimately trying to please both sets of real people. Hitting campaign goals and maximizing efficiency are important, but social media managers need to bring humanity to their work. They have to understand the audience’s moods and where they’re coming from, and they have to exercise empathy at every level: customer service, information and content sharing, community management, call-to-actions, participation campaigns, crisis and abuse management. That is a lot of emotional labor.   

With the recent chatter about chat bots on Facebook’s messenger platform, a lot of people are thinking about how bots can take over communications roles from humans. I’ve been thinking a lot about the opposite: how can machines help people manage the emotional labor of working with audiences? Can bots ever help with the difficult, and very human task of managing with empathy?  

Social media is a business of empathy  

Emotional connections drive social media. When people gather around the things they feel passionate about, they create energy. It’s because of limbic resonance — the deep, neurological response humans have to other people’s emotions. As my colleague Kenyatta Cheese says, it’s that energy that makes participating as a fan on social media feel as electric as it does when you’re part of a physical crowd.  Read More… Why do brands lose their chill? How bots, algorithms, and humans can work together on social media

Translation

English中文(简体)FrançaisEspañol

by

You can help improve the automatic translation by checking off “Edit Translation” after you select a language. Thanks!

Stuart Geiger

Editors’ note: The next post for our Ethnographies of Objects edition is by one of the people who inspired it when he talked about an ‘ethnography of robots’ for EM last year. Stuart Geiger (@staeiou) is a PhD student at UC Berkeley’s School of Information and long time Wikipedia editor who has been studying Wikipedia bots for many years and who has brought us really great insights: not only into how Wikipedia works but also on new ways of thinking about how to do ethnography of largely-online communities. In this thoughtful post, Stuart talks about how his ideas about bots have changed over the years, and about which of the images below is the “real” bot.     

A few weeks ago, Heather Ford wrote to me and told me about this special edition of Ethnography Matters, focusing on the ethnography of objects.  She asked me if there was something I’d like to write about bots, which I’ve been struggling to ethnographically study for some time.  As I said in an interview I did with EM last year, I want to figure out how to ethnographically study these automated software agents themselves, not just the people who build them or have to deal with them.  Among all the topics that are involved in the ethnography of objects, Heather briefly mentioned that she was asking all the authors to provide a picture of their given object, whatever weird form that may take for bots.

At first, I started to think about the more standard epistemological questions I’d been wrestling with:  What is the relationship between the ethnographer and the ethnographic subject when that subject isn’t a human, but an autonomous software program?  What does it mean to relate an emic account of a such a being, and what does ethnographic fieldwork look like in such an endeavor?  How do classic concepts like agency, materiality, and the fieldsite play out when investigating what is often seen as more of an object than a subject?  What do we even mean when we say ‘object’, and what are we using this term to exclude?  I could take any one of these topics and write far too much about them, I thought.

As always, after jotting down some notes, my mind started to wander as I entered procrastination mode. I shelved the more ‘theoretical’ questions and moved to what I thought was the easier part of Heather’s request: to provide a photo of a bot.  I thought that finding an image would be a fun diversion, and I had so many great cases to choose from.  There were humorous bots, horrifying bots, and hidden bots.  There were bots who performed controversial tasks, and bots whose work was more mundane.  There were bots I loved and bots I hated, bots that were new and bots that were old.  There were bots I knew backwards and forwards, and bots who were still a mystery to me.  I just had to find an image that I felt best encapsulated what it meant to be a bot, and then write about it.  However, I didn’t realize that this simple task would prove to be far more difficult than I anticipated — and working out how to use imagery rather than text to talk about bots has helped me come to articulate many of the more complicated issues at work in my ethnography, particularly those around materiality, multiplicity, and memory.

Read More… About a bot: Materiality, multiplicity, and memory in the study of software agents

Translation

English中文(简体)FrançaisEspañol

by

You can help improve the automatic translation by checking off “Edit Translation” after you select a language. Thanks!

This month’s edition is co-edited by CW Anderson (@chanders), Juliette De Maeyer (@juliettedm) and Heather Ford (@hfordsa). The three of us met in June for the ICA preconference entitled ‘Objects of Journalism’ organised by Chris and Juliette. Over the course of the day, we heard fascinating stories of insights garnered through a focus on the objects, tools and spaces surrounding and interspersed with the business and practice of newsmaking: about faked photographs through the ages, about the ways in which news app designers think about news when designing apps for mobile devices and tablets, and about the evolution of the ways in which news room spaces were designed. We also heard rumblings – rarely fully articulated – that a focus on objects is controversial in the social sciences. In this August edition of Ethnography Matters, we offer a selection of objects from the conference as well as from an open call to contribute and hope that it sparks a conversation started by a single question: what can we gain from an ethnography of objects – especially in the fields of technology, media and journalism research?

Hardware. Image by Cover.69 on Flickr CC BY

Why an *ethnography* of objects?

As well as the important studies of body snatching, identity tourism, and transglobal knowledge networks, let us also attend ethnographically to the plugs, settings, sizes, and other profoundly mundane aspects of cyberspace, in some of the same ways we might parse a telephone book. Susan Leigh Star, 1999

Susan Leigh Star, in ‘The ethnography of infrastructure‘ noted that we need to go beyond studies of identity in cyberspace and networks to (also) look at the often invisible infrastructure that surfaces important issues around group formation, justice and change. Ethnography is a useful way of studying infrastructure, she writes, because of its strengths of ‘surfacing silenced voices, juggling disparate meanings, and understanding the gap between words and deeds’.

In her work studying archives of meetings of the World Health Organization and old newspapers and law books concerning cases of racial recategorization under apartheid in South Africa, Star ‘brought an ethnographic sensibility to data collection and analysis: an idea that people make meanings based on their circumstances, and that these meanings would be inscribed into their judgements about the built information environment’.Read More… August 2013: Ethnographies of Objects

Translation

English中文(简体)FrançaisEspañol

by

You can help improve the automatic translation by checking off “Edit Translation” after you select a language. Thanks!