On an Attitude of Openness.

This course has helped reveal my research interests not just in terms of what kinds of research I might want to do, but also in terms of the methods I find most interesting. My blog posts often talk about interviews and narratives, and I especially enjoy the readings related to ethnography. This week, the chapter by Christine Hine on defining the boundaries of an internet research project, was no exception. My experience with ethnography so far has been limited to studying the "real" world (as opposed to the internet world? I know it's not really that clear a division), and understanding the use of ethnography for studying the internet was really interesting. Hine's appreciation for ethnography as a method was similar to mine. I like the fact that ethnography (especially in relation to information science) doesn't really limit what is considered "information" - the holistic nature of ethnography means that as a researcher, an attitude of openness is important, and it seems like, to the ethnographer, everything matters. Which makes defining the boundaries of your project important (and tricky!). Hine's comment about being "pre-disposed not to accept taken-for-granted ideas about what technologies can do and how they come about" (5) highlighted, for me, the importance of ethnography for understanding technologies, and for understanding the social realms online, especially when she discussed the bush pump, and the idea of technologies having an identity. She writes that "the identity of the technology, and thus where to stop and start studying it, cannot be decided in advance" (4), and although this makes the process of defining the boundaries of any study a challenge, it also highlights the importance of an attitude of openness when approaching research, no matter your chosen field. It makes me think of the issue I had with the Yin reading last week, which is kind of the same thing - this openness, whether in writing (in the case of the Yin article) or not, is a laborious thing, but seems to me the only way to develop a robust understanding of a case, or a technology, or whatever it is you're interested in researching.