MEDIA ‘ETHNOGRAPHY’
A recent development, designed in part to reemphasize the status of media
use as a form of social action, has taken place under the heading of ‘ethnography,’
particularly since the mid1980s. Most generally, the widespread invocation of
ethnography may be understood as one way of coming to terms with the
convergence between social-scientific and humanistic inspirations – a
development that has been especially noticeable in audience studies. It may be
necessary to carve out a specific research position, or niche, which would
recognize that media use is simultaneously a discursive and a performative
phenomenon. It may also be necessary still to oppose this position, as a camp, to
the dominant paradigm (Webster and Phalen 1997). In fact, an earlier edition of
Lowery and DeFleur (1995) had credited the coming of a ‘meaning paradigm,’
which, curiously, was remarginalized in the third edition of the ‘milestones’ (for
discussion see Jensen 2000b).
Radway (1988: 363), early on, pinpointed the underlying problem, and
suggested a cure for both textual reification and the decontextualized study of
audiences:
Audiences . . . are set in relation to a single set of isolated texts which
qualify already as categorically distinct objects. No matter how extensive the
effort to dissolve the boundaries of the textual object or the audience, most
recent studies of reception, including my own, continue to begin with the
‘factual’ existence of a particular kind of text which is understood to be
received by some set of individuals. Such studies perpetuate, then, the notion
of a circuit neatly bounded and therefore identifiable, locatable, and open to
observation.
Her less reifying alternative was classic ethnographic fieldwork about all the
cultural as well as other social practices of an entire community, covering work
and leisure:
a collaborative project that would begin within the already defined
boundaries of a politically constituted municipality and attempt to map there
the complex, collective production of ‘popular culture’ across the terrain of
everyday life . . . a project that would take as its object of study the range of
practices engaged in by individuals within a single heterogeneous community
as they elaborate their own form of popular culture through the realms of
leisure and then articulate those practices to others engaged in during their
working lives.
(Radway 1988: 368)
Ang went several steps further in assuming that an ethnographic
methodology represents a radically different epistemology from both qualitative
reception studies and quantitative forms of audience research. Indeed, she
discredited both positions, since, to Ang, the scientific act of categorization is, in
itself, an act of violence committed against the public and the everyday:
From this [ethnographic] perspective, ‘television audience’ is a
nonsensical category, for there is only the dispersed, indefinitely proliferating
chain of situations in which television audiencehood is practised and
experienced – together making up the diffuse and fragmentary social world of
actual audiences.
(Ang 1991: 164)
It seems difficult to specify how then, concretely, empirical studies should
proceed. Nevertheless, as a theoretical point, this line of argument became
influential. Also Radway’s (1988) less radical position implied a considerable
complication of the task at hand – of the relevant objects of analysis, of the
collaborative research activity, and of the eventual interpretation of ‘findings,’ if
that term is appropriate.
The record suggests that media studies have rarely delivered the sort of
projects outlined by Radway (1988). Instead, there has been a tendency, in some
publications, to describe assorted qualitative methodologies, including
interviewing, as the equivalent of ‘ethnography.’ This, in turn, has provoked severe
criticism, particularly of the standards of data collection, analysis, and reporting,
summed up in the conclusion that ‘“ethnography” has become an abused buzz-
word in our field’ (Lull 1988a: 242).
In response, some researchers (e.g., Drotner 1994, 1996) have attempted to
reclaim the ‘ethnographic’ terminology, not only by acknowledging the technical
requirements of the approach (e.g., Schensul and LeCompte 1999), but by
suggesting that it has its own methodological, and perhaps epistemological,
specificity. Accordingly, ‘ethnography’ might imply a focus, not on media, but on
the social practices and gendered identities which media help to constitute
across contexts. Still, it remains unclear how this approach would differ from the
qualitative methodologies and constructivist epistemologies of most other
reception studies. More seriously, perhaps, ‘media ethnography’ appears to be a
contradiction in terms – it assumes that an inclusive and holistic study of a social
group or context could, nevertheless, legitimately predefine media use as its
empirical focus. If, in addition, ‘media ethnography’ would propose to cover all
moments of the communicative process, not just audiences, it would become a
misnomer for a whole variety of multimethod approaches to the practice of
mediated communication as such, already in the literature (e.g., Aron 1998; Gay
et al. 1997).
