Fabrication as ethical performance

Traditional journalistic and sociological practice considers a person’s words to be freely available–if uttered publicly or with permission–to analyze and quote, as long as we anonymize the source. Prior to the internet, researchers took for granted the ability to safely store fieldnotes, interview transcripts, demographic data, and other information that might reveal the location of the study or the participants’ identities.  These methods of data protection may no longer suffice in situations where social researchers need to design studies, manage data, and build research reports in increasing public, archivable, searchable, and traceable spaces.  In such research environments, there are few means of adequately disguising details...

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Posted by on Mar 5, 2011 in Ethics, internet research methods, methodology | 0 comments

Kenneth Gergen, on the way from Goffman to Method as Ethic.

…or, similar song, different decade. Today, in thinking about research methods, I am thinking about symbolic interactionist practices, Goffman and the performance of everyday life, and reading Kenneth Gergen’s Relational Being (Oxford Press, 2009). It seems to me that to grapple with the complexity of everyday life, from a symbolic interaction perspective, if one is using Goffman as the baseline, it is necessary to either read more carefully Goffman’s work on the performance of everyday life, read his other works, or to remix Goffman, using a heavy dose of postmodern concepts of how self, other, relationship, and structure is negotiated. Enter Kenneth Gergen, talking early 1990s about multiphrenia and the saturated self and later about...

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Posted by on Mar 3, 2011 in ethnography, methodology | 1 comment