What do we actually DO when we engage in qualitative inquiry?

I’ve been writing about this in other blog posts.  In the first of this 4-part series, I talk about why I got interested in the metaphor of remix; in the second post, I give a (glossed) perspective on some key complications of social (research) contexts in the 21st Century.  In the third post, I sketch out a definition of remix as it might be applied to research methods. Here, I finish up by talking about what I consider the key processes in remix methods:  Play, Borrow, Interrogate, Generate, and Move.

For the past three years, I’ve been giving interdisciplinary workshops (mostly PhD students, and mostly in the EU or Nordic regions) to help participants explore how they might be more innovative and creative in their methods, without losing disciplinary integrity.  To get workshop participants to think less about labels and more about practice, I started using the concept of remix.  Then, I started using less heavy (in terms of baggage) terms to get under the surface of methods like ‘data collection,’ ‘data analysis,’ ‘findings,’ and so forth.

We Play.

We Borrow.

We Generate.

We Move.

We Interrogate.

These terms have proven very successful in cross-disciplinary workshops exploring innovative or creative approaches, as they help disconnect the practice of inquiry from methodological or epistemological baggage.  A significant percentage of scholars who study digital culture, internet-mediated contexts, or social media are new to qualitative inquiry. This is an important consideration when it comes to imagining the common models informing the definitional parameters for how qualitative inquiry gets done. Even when defined as a non-positivist process, procedures still retain linear and compartmentalized foundations. One begins with a phenomenon that informs one’s research questions, which in turn inform particular strategies for data collection, analysis, and interpretation. Various stages are described as separate moments, and findings are written up at the end.  Although the process can be displayed as iterative, the fundamental working metaphors are not nearly as innovative as those of us with extensive background or experience with innovative qualitative inquiry might imagine.

Play, borrow, move, interrogate, and generate. These terms describe the practices of remix. They also describe the practice of social research.  Of course, each of these terms will be conceptualized and operationalized in different ways for any researcher, depending on his or her perspective, discipline, project, and so forth.  Likewise, the terms will take on different meaning at different stages of the project.  Thus, the following brief descriptions of each term serve as only a starting point, illustrating how I might situate these terms in my own world of research.

Generate: 

When I think of this term, I immediately visualize the physical stacks of material that would collect on my desk over the course of a study.  It was easier to understand what the term meant when the ‘stuff’ of our research was more physically noticeable.  The changing dimensions–in width and height– of the stack over time would indicate a state of progress.  The more I investigated, the more stuff was generated: draft documents, field notes, concept maps, sketchbooks full of doodles, photos, and drawings, notes on literature I was reading, printed copies of theory and concept articles, untouched transcripts from interviews, the same transcripts coded the first time, the same transcripts coded a second time or in a different way, and on and on.  I considered this teetering pile a treasure trove, full of data. Picking up random objects might trigger certain connections among ideas. Flipping open a research journal might spark a memory and open a floodgate of new information to consider. This wonderful chaos of inquiry is less visible when we work digitally. Much of this generative quality of inquiry is forgotten, never experienced, or lost.

We might think about the process of generating as one whereby we transform data according to different thematic classification schemes. Every iteration of this presents a new (in that it is different) data set, which represents the phenomenon in a new way. The act of transformation is one of interpretation and remix.  Likewise, we generate a ‘new’ participant every time we transform their raw activities into a different form, such as a written text, an edited version of their talk, a grammatically corrected version of their discourse, or a summary of themes emerging from their activities and interactions. Reflecting on these and other practices, we can see that inquiry is not only about simplifying and narrowing, but generating layers upon layers of informational units that influence our interpretations. Focusing only on the first layer of data (the original stuff we collected) doesn’t allow us to fully appreciate what is actually at play when we engage in the long, involved, inductive, and explorative art and science of ‘writing culture.’

When this inherent generative process is understood, it can enable fuller analysis of multiple layers of meaning. Simply put, more ‘stuff’ is laid out on the table to be considered as ‘data.’

Play: 

Play is sometimes a guided or rule driven activity, as when we play games.  At other times, play is an open-ended leisure activity, as when we play with or play around.  It’s easy to see remix as a product of both types of play.  As a process of inquiry, remix relies on experimenting with various combinations of elements, to produce something meaningful. Successful remixes are inventive and often yield outcomes that seem quite new, despite the fact that the elements that are being combined are borrowed from other sources.  So remix is a highly open ended process.  And like most artistic endeavors, passion and innovation work in tandem with the skillful, if not expert performance of one’s art/craft.  At the same time, most remix occurs in a larger community of remix, where certain goals and guidelines apply.

In academic contexts, we have been far less willing to characterize research as play, or playful. Particularly if one’s practices are closely directed or controlled by outside forces such as supervisors or funders, play may seem a disrespectful, lazy, or non-rigorous form of activity. In qualitative inquiry, this is a mistake, since what we do in the best moments of the interpretive process is just that.  As any athlete or musician will say, getting in the zone of play or engaging in improvisation requires at least some element of skillful application of certain techniques and also functions as an important tool for honing one’s skills. Curiosity and exploration mark a significant type of play. Experimentation without any particular purpose allows the researcher to move beyond what is already known to a point of learning, making new connections.  Imaginative play allows one to let go of what ought to be done or thought and work in the realm of possibilities. As Marantz Henig (2008) notes, “[f]or all its variety … there is something common to play in all its protean forms: variety itself. The essence of play is that the sequence of actions is fluid and scattered.” Bekoff describes play as “training for the unexpected. . . .  Behavioral flexibility and variability is adaptive; in animals it’s really important to be able to change your behavior in a changing environment” (in Marantz Henig, 2008).

In terms of exploring complex social media contexts, play can actually become a critical turning point for research design that resonates better with contexts of flow, analysis that moves with or into these flows rather than abstracting and isolating objects arbitrarily and artificially, finding forms of representation that have contextual integrity, and finding, rather than simply applying, conceptual models that help make sense of these phenomena.

Borrow: 

In the context of copyright, Lessig (2008) reminds us that a basic foundation of writing is quoting from other works. Referring to the writing of a particular individual, he says, “were it music, we’d call it sampling. Were it painting, it would be called collage. Were it digital, we’d call it remix” (p. 51). In academic research, borrowing is essential, in this and other ways.  To make sense of any phenomenon, we borrow all the time, whether or not we recognize it. We borrow ideas about sampling strategies, genres of writing, tools for analyzing data, and so forth.

As I take short-term engagements at various universities, I often end up sitting for days, weeks, or months in other scholars’ offices.  While I think or write, I wander around the offices of computer scientists, feminist technoscientists, linguists, post-phenomenological theorists, or actor network theorists, gazing at the titles on their bookshelves. Flipping through books, gazing at art on walls, and reading articles left sitting on desktops, it’s no surprise I find a lot of useful concepts, theories, and phrases that I would never otherwise encounter. Through serendipity, I make new connections and find alternate perspectives.  All of this broadens my perspectives, no matter the topic.

Of course, it’s messy when I leave the comfort of my home discipline to struggle with new concepts.  But it makes good sense when I consider the target of my inquiry. Most aspects of internet-related phenomena occur across multiple platforms, media, devices.  Interactions that seem cohesive or complete are just partial traces of interactions, abstracted from lived experience, displaced in time and space. When we consider the way in which people use and relate to technologies for communication, the variation is endless.  Borrowing approaches, perspectives, and techniques from not only outside one’s discipline but from outside the academy seems not only natural but essential to figuring out creative ways to grapple with these contexts.

Move: 

Everything discussed previously, whether applied to the activities of remix or the activities of qualitative inquiry, is about moving, or as my colleague Jenny Sunden reminded me, of “being moved.” Inquiry is always situated, but never motionless. This is an important thing to remember particularly in globally entangled networks of cultural flow that comprise ever-shifting terrains of meaning.  George Marcus (1998) uses the term ‘follow’ to describe creative ways to engage in multi-sited ethnography: follow the story, follow the people, follow the metaphors. We can add to this many other ways of thinking about following: shifting one’s perspective, changing the questions, moving in and out of the flows of information, following the silences, gaps, and absences.

In many ways, what’s most important is not how one moves but that one acknowledges that movement is inevitable, natural, and productive.  It is also not necessarily forward, in that many movements will take us back to the beginning, or will force us to see the entire project in different ways, forcing us to mark our current point as a new beginning to move from.

Interrogate:  Successful remix interrogates pieces of culture, torquing and integrating them into something unique so the audience can see each piece or the whole in a different way.  This has happened throughout time, in literature, painting, architecture, design, film, music, and so forth. Now, we see it in fan fiction, mashup videos, street art, internet memes…everywhere we see the production of culture, we know we are witnessing the outcome of a process of reflexive interrogation.

Perhaps ‘interrogate’ seems too forceful to describe the act of reflexively questioning everything we’re doing, seeing, feeling, or everything about the project and the phenomenon itself.  I use this term to highlight that any close reading, detailed analysis, or inductive interpretation requires a stead stream of questioning.  Sometimes we direct this interrogation at the object, to see how it is situated, to focus on what surrounds, embraces, encompasses, or encloses it, to wonder how it might look or be ‘otherwise,’ to think about its existence in time and space. At other times, we direct this interrogation inward, to consider why we’re interested in this and not another phenomenon, to ask how we are situated in relation to this ‘stuff’ of our curiosity, to consider how we might think otherwise, by focusing critically on what surrounds, embraces, encompasses, or encloses us.  This constant questioning may not be directly acknowledged as part of one’s method, but it comprises a powerful everyday practice of all inquiry.  Noticing it allows us to get better at doing it well, with purpose, and to incorporate the processes and products of our interrogations more clearly, or rigorously.

Searching for resonance

These five elements of remix–generate, play, borrow, move, and interrogate, usefully resist disciplining and can prompt more freedom to innovate when exploring contexts that defy easy encapsulation. As with bricolage or layered accounts (Rambo Ronai, 1995), remix presumes that the resulting pastiche will never constitute a complete or whole picture. Rather, each outcome is an iterative rendering. Each is a work in progress. All are possibilities. Each builds on the others, informs the others, and influences the overall perspective one ends up with at the end. This is an unending process, one that invites conversation, collaboration, and further remixing. Remixes might show connections among elements or present a beautifully cohesive piece, as we see in Eric Whitacre’s virtual choirs.  Or, remixes can illustrate juxtaposition, disjuncture, or discontinuity. Rather than trying to resolve complexity in the research project, a remix might illustrate very clearly the irresolvable complexity of the phenomenon.

Of course, questions of quality and credibility arise. There are many ways to think about criteria for quality (see, e.g., various writers in Denzin & Lincoln’s Handbook of Qualitative Research (all editions, published by Sage). Questions of criteria for quality are considered paramount and comprise a consistent theme throughout these volumes.), but here, I just mention one: The most successful remixes are those that have longevity and can be seen by many to hold a mark of quality. Whether this quality is closely analyzed by experts or simply felt by cultural members, and whether this quality is in the way something is made or in the story it tells, it likely has something to do with how much the product resonates.  Successful remix reaches beyond the merely sufficient to the monumental. Ethical, context sensitive, creative research does the same, if in the end, it captures the attention of the reader, moves the reader to think differently, or causes the reader to want to engage, contribute further to the conversation, and continue the playful process of remix.

Definitions of remix continue to shift as technologies for production and dissemination of cultural materials evolve. Remix is often used to refer to the widespread practice of mashup, most evident in YouTube videos, or the phenomenon of internet memes, which are typically composed of small units of cultural information (a phrase, an image, a short audio or video clip) that get mixed in different ways, generally for comedic effect. A meme is characterized by its evolution — in effect, it doesn’t exist unless it morphs through reproduction and dissemination.

We could say Remix is everywhere, or “everything is a remix” (Ferguson, n.d.), as both a practice and outcome in all forms of cultural production. Navas (2006) notes that “cut/copy and paste, the fragmentation of material, is today part of everyday activities both at work and at home thanks to the computer,” (paragraph 13), whereby easy-to-use software applications allow people to develop sophisticated mashups. Lessig, Ferguson,  Navas, and other scholars offer extensive discussions of remix, offering many historical as well as contemporary artists and contexts to argue that it’s the content of an idea, not the originator, that matters, and that borrowing, sampling, and creatively remixing ideas is an inherent aspect of any culture. Conceptualized broadly, remix is not something we do in addition to our everyday lives, it is the way we make sense of our world, by transforming the bombardment of stimuli into a seamless experience. If we take seriously the idea that everything we take to be ‘real’ is a constant negotiation of relationships between people and things, and that culture is ‘habit writ large’, remix as a form of sensemaking embraces this framework.

For purposes of talking about qualitative inquiry and the study of digital experience, I find two aspects of remix to be critical:

First, remix relies on sampling, borrowing, and creatively re-assembling units of cultural information in order to create something that is used to move or persuade others. The key to the power of remix is that it doesn’t matter where the elements are drawn from, as long as the resulting product has resonance for the audience. Remix is about working in the liminal space to create a particular way of connecting the familiar with the unfamiliar, or the original elements and the remixed.

Second, remix always occurs as part of a larger community of remix. It is a process of creating temporary assemblages that change almost immediately after initial production.  The very power of remix relies on the participation of others as produsers or collaborative remixers. Producers of any remix understand that once their product leaves their hands and is distributed, others will potentially remix it, again and again.  The form of the remix will change over time.  It might grow in quality and cohesion over time through various iterations. Or, it might morph into something completely unrecognizable with very few elements to trace it back to the origin points (or it might wither and die from neglect).  A meme might appear to have a life of its own as it morphs and changes. But it is negotiated, interactive. It is transformed and it transforms its users and creators.

Remix is an inherent part of digital culture. As we surf, we create momentary meaning structures, mini-remixes that get remixed again and again, every time we surf similarly, with different outcomes.  Our own actions yield these remixes at one level, yet these remixes are influenced by many other factors.

Indeed, remix undergirds the infrastructures of everything we understand to be part of the Internet.  As Navas points out (2010), Google is an excellent example of a very different sort of remix, one that selectively presents us with results based on a complex (and often hidden) set of algorithms.  Amazon.com recommendations, YouTube’s ‘related content’, and Facebook feeds are likewise remixed for us, based on proprietary algorithms that function beneath the surface of activity. Remix may not be the only lens for thinking about this (e.g., I also like Tarlton Gillespie’s work on the power of algorithms), but it highlights the ways that meaning, contexts, and structures can be seen as temporary outcomes of interaction, emerging and fading, morphing into something slightly new every time we engage.

Thinking about digital culture through the lens of remix offers powerful means of resisting the focus on individuals and objects in order to get closer to the flows and connection points between various elements of the media ecology system, where meaning and assemblages and imaginaries are negotiated in relation and (inter)action.  At the meta level, thinking about qualitative research practice through the framework of remix offers a means of reconfiguring some of the practices associated with qualitative research. It allows us to embrace and grapple with complexity (rather than trying to simplify) by focusing less on methods (as templates to either apply to experiences and organize these experiences into particular categories and structures) and more on meaning as derived from a creative process of inquiry.

My application of remix as a concept embraces the essence of bricolage, as described by Kincheloe (2001, 2005). Extending the concept of bricolage, remix focuses on everyday practices of enacting method, as well as the way inquiry is—or can be—situated within a web 2.0, social media-saturated, remix culture.  Remix focuses our attention on the way temporally situated arguments are assembled and reassembled as they traverse various audiences. Each of these renderings has meaning and will be assessed by the reader/viewer/listener, but the quality and credibility of each is not predetermined by the way the data (cultural material) is collected, or the tools used to manage, sort, and categorize this data into something that can then be reorganized and edited by the remixer. Rather, quality is embedded in the extent to which the production (whether we call it argument, story, or finding) demonstrates resonance with the context, and also has resonance with the intended audience.

Rather than marginalizing the concepts of copy/cut & paste, collage, pastiche, and mashup, these practices become resonant and thus appropriate lenses for thinking about of cultural formations as well as adaptive modes of inquiry.  By letting go of the idea that our academic projects should provide answers, remix provides the researcher with a greater freedom to build creative and compelling arguments that enter larger conversations, both inside and outside the Academy.  Although not within a metaphor of remix, this sort of premise for engaging in academic scholarship has long been the project of Yvonna Lincoln & Norm Denzin (e.g., 1994, 2003), Art Bochner & Carolyn Ellis (e.g., 2003), Laurel Richardson (e.g., 1994), and many others who comprise the late 20^th century interpretive movement in the United States.

This approach also tackles the difficulty of accomplishing the practices that Latour (2005) and others advocate through actor network theory. As Latour notes:

Any given interaction seems to overflow with elements which are already in the situation coming from some other time, some other place, and generated by some other agency. This powerful intuition is as old as the social sciences. As I have said earlier, action is always dislocated, articulated, delegated, translated. Thus, if any observer is faithful to the direction suggested by this overflow, she will be led away from any given interaction to some other places, other times, and other agencies that appear to have molded them into shape.  (2005, p. 166).

Remix is a way of following this overflow, being willing to flatten the social by considering all elements to be equal, without trying to identify individuals or contexts or distinguish the local from the global. The outcome of one’s activities–if considered an act of making an argument–influences one’s process, in that it matters less where one begins or ends, because patterns and possibilities always emerge. It also shifts one from matters of fact to matters of concern.

So what might a remix approach involve, from a methods point of view?  I talk about it in this post:

The past three decades mark tremendous growth in digital social interaction, from early experiments in virtual reality, text-based communities, and role playing games to today’s saturation in social media, where we are always on, tethered to mobile devices, enacting what Nielson in 2012 labeled “Generation C” (for connected).

At the turn of the century, technologies for communication became much more pervasive through mobility and convergence.  The collaborative and distributive features of the web were more fully realized at this time with the rise of blogging.  The capacity to easily connect–via commenting, tagging, and sharing—facilitated a huge growth in complex networks among people both locally and globally, across any media form imaginable.  In both the blogosphere and commercial spheres, a system developed whereby value was linked to reputation and connectivity in these networks. This reputation and sharing economy has shifted our traditional understandings of authorship, blurred the boundaries between producer and consumer.

Throughout this time, frameworks for understanding and defining identity and social constructs have continued to shift away from the individual and more toward networks and information flows. The performance of everyday life is seen as increasingly inseparable from the technologically-mediated and mediatized confluences in which our information flows, with or without our attention or intention. Materiality in this mobile epoch is better understood as connection, process, and relationship.

In the 1991 book Saturated Self, Ken Gergen discusses this as an inevitable but slow-in-coming recognition of the relational self. In her book Alone Together, Turkle describes it more in terms of fragmentation, or a cycling through of various virtual personae, each with sets of attributes to suit particular situations.  Scholars like Bruno Latour (2005, 2012) go further to emphasize that in contemporary culture, we need to move beyond the notion and privileging of the individual, to better understand the multiple agencies influencing any social situation. Characteristic of actor network theorists, the actor is not just embedded in networks but is “defined by its network…entirely defined by the open-ended lists in the databases” (Latour, Jensen, Venturini, Grauwin, and Boullier, p. 3).  From this perspective, anything we might call an individual is simply a temporary constitution of attributes.

For social researchers, this means that many taken for granted techniques for identifying discrete situational boundaries, individuals, or other objects or for analysis are far less useful than they may have once seemed. As I have noted elsewhere, at least four complications emerge when we consider the entanglements of the social contexts involving humans, web 2.0 technologies, and smart, mobile devices.

1. Boundaries between self and other are often unclear, particularly when information develops a social life of its own, beyond one’s immediate circumstances.

2. Boundaries of situations and identification of contexts are often unclear as dramas play out in settings and times far removed from the origin of interaction.

3. Agency is not the sole property of individual entities, but a temporal performative element that emerges in the dynamic interplay of people and their technologies for communication.

4. Performativity can be linked not only to individuals but actions of the devices, interfaces, and networks of information through which dramas occur and meaning is negotiated.

To deal with the challenges of conducting qualitative research in mobile, global, and fragmented mediatized and mediated environments, do we cling to tradition, hoping for steady grounding? Or do we continually experiment?  These questions are complicated by other axiological questions. Part of the difficulty of being innovative links closely to the persistence of positivist models and procedures.  Whether discussed within the larger backlash against interpretivism or postmodernism, or within the economy-driven shifts toward evidence-based research models, it still feels like academia is battening down the hatches. This occurs in the midst of a cultural explosion, outside the walls of the academy, of collaborative, open source, reputation knowledge production.

This becomes an ethical concern on many levels, not the least of which relates to how and whether we are interrogating our methods adequately to protect people (our participants, their communities, and ourselves) from harm.  With the automated scraping of data occurring on massive levels across all media platforms and by various agencies, individuals, and privatized interests, how can we ensure data privacy? How can we be sure our techniques for anonymizing sources will work? The simple answer to this question is we can’t, unless we adjust our methods of representation. Or take the issue of privacy and informed consent. There are no easy answers, as we emphasize in the latest ethics guidelines of the Association of Internet Researchers. People engage in activities that would traditionally be considered highly sensitive, even understanding that their actions are public and the potential audience is vast. It’s not just that we have blurred the boundaries of what constitutes public and private spheres; it’s that the concept itself is changing (see, e.g., boyd & Marwick, 2012; Markham, 2012; Nissenbaum, 2011).

To add to this dilemma, technological advances teach us that we cannot predict how our information will be used in the future. Now more than ever, we have the obligation to try to proactively protect participants, or to consider ways of doing inquiry that minimize the risk of future harms. My effort to invoke innovative metaphors for thinking about inquiry is embedded, then, in a larger argument that interpretive studies of digital experience would be not only stronger but probably more ethically grounded if we more radically disrupted–or revisited previous disruptions of– still taken-for-granted parameters for qualitative inquiry.

…continue reading the next post, where I sketch out a research-oriented notion of remix…

Not only did I experience homophily, but very soon, I found myself saturated in situations that I would not otherwise experience.  I saw certain tragedies very close up and personal, like the Queensland floods and the New Zealand earthquakes (two of my colleagues lived in Brisbane, one in Christchurch). I learned a lot about the music scene in Britain (I followed a musician who tweeted a lot and lived only one time zone away from me).  I watched a lot of Rachel Maddow and Jon Stewart (as most of my friends in both Facebook and Twitter would forward these clips). I read scholarly articles that were posted when I was awake (and since I was in Denmark, this meant my stream was primarily European).

As Deuze, Banks, & Speers write, “the whole of the world and our lived experience in it can and perhaps should be seen as framed by, mitigated through, and made immediate by pervasive and ubiquitous media” (2011, para 3). This became clearer to me on January 25, as the Egyptian Revolution started to flood my Twitter streams. The speed at which tweets flowed on hashtags like #jan25 limited me to quick flashes of statements before they disappeared.  Clicking on links became a fairly random act, but led to some amazing pathways of meaning. On January 27, 2011, my mom watched this clip from MSNBC News on her TV, listening to the anchor talk about growing concerns about rioters getting ready for a “day of rage,” while a video clip over the anchor’s shoulder showed crowds of rioters shouting with fires visible in the distance.  She learned that rioters had injured 87 police, and one was killed. Meanwhile, halfway around the world, I cried as I watched a remix created by Tamar Shaaban that clipped footage from various news agencies as well as on-the-ground local video clips. Over a stirring soundtrack, I heard the passionate and committed voices of the Egyptian people, bloodied on the streets of Cairo.

In this century, we are witnessing a startling transformation in the way cultural knowledge is produced and how meaning is negotiated. The digital era does not mark the beginning of this sort of activity, by any means, yet it has facilitated a remarkable acceleration toward de-privileging expert knowledge, decentralizing culture production, and unhooking cultural units of information from their origins. One way to think about this is through the lens of remix. Although remix has been long associated with hip hop music forms, it is now a general term referring to the processes and products of taking bits of cultural material and, through the process of copy/paste and collage, producing new meaning to share with others. As I experience social reality that have been remixed by my interactions with my social media networks, I gain a particular understanding of the world, remix it again, and distribute this to others.

Inspired by my experiment of saturating myself in the way our understanding of the world is remixed by our engagement with social media (and somewhat inspired by the work of Lashua and Fox (2007) using remix as a method of action research), I have been thinking about the ways in which remix is a powerful tool for thinking about qualitative, interpretive research practice. The form and cultural practice of remix offers a lens through which we may be able to better grapple with the complexity of social contexts characterized by ubiquitous internet, always-connected mobile devices, dense global communication networks, fragments of information flow, and temporal and ad hoc community formations.

Rather than inventing new methods, a remix approach offers a different way of thinking about what we do when we engage with particular methods to make sense of phenomena. Taking a remix approach begins with the premises of a bricolage approach (Kincheloe, 2001, 2005) and then shifts to a level we might call ‘below method,’ where we engage in everyday practices of sensemaking. The concept of remix highlights activities that are not often discussed as a part of method and may not be noticed, such as using serendipity, playing with different perspectives, generating partial renderings, moving through multiple variations, borrowing from disparate and perhaps disjunctive concepts, and so forth. Although methods texts offer extensive descriptions of how one might design research questions, collect data, manage and sort data, and apply analytical tools to this data, much of the actual process from data to conclusion remains a black box. Most often, especially in disciplines where interpretive reflexive inquiry is not taken for granted, these processes are not included in anything the audience might read. Instead, we see the tidied-up version of a long, messy, creative process of sensemaking.

Adaptation and creative innovation is sorely needed to study the complexity of digital life. Internet research has been plagued by a constant reinvention of the wheel and a significant degree of trying to force fit methods that were invented for and function best in local face-to-face settings. I argue that by engaging in a greater level of attention to our everyday processes of sensemaking within research projects, we can identify and then submit these practices to greater scrutiny.  Remix is a metaphor that can help us get to this sort of reflexive attention to practice, product, and purpose, and also is a fruitful mindset for engaging in highly responsive, ethically grounded, and context sensitive cultural interpretations.

To delve deeper into this topic, it’s important to consider the complications associated with studying internet-mediated contexts.

It’s also useful to think more about a research-centered definition of “remix” might look like, which I sketch out in this post.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve used the metaphor of remix to help scholars consider how we might disrupt traditional frames for conducting qualitative research in digital contexts (it works very well as a teaching tool!).  In another post, I sketch out some specific terms that I think capture the essence of what we actually do while we’re doing social inquiry and help jar us loose from some of the baggage that typically gets associated with qualitative research practice.  Rather than thinking about the process of inquiry as a linear progression (oh, sure with some iterative loops thrown in in there) of data collection, data analysis, interpretation, and writeup, I think we get more out of thinking about action-oriented verbs like:  Generate, Play, Borrow, Move, and Interrogate.

As a brief caveat, Remix is a generative tool for thinking creatively about methods, not a new method, or even a framework. It resides alongside other metaphors that seek to challenge how we envision research, such as dance (Janesick, 1994/2010), jazz (Oldfather & West, 1994), crystallization (Richardson, 1994/2000/2005), bricolage (Kincheloe, 2001, 2005), or facets (Mason, 2011). These sorts of metaphors remind us that the process of research is, among other things, exploratory and creative, a mix of passion and curiosity.  And that the products of our inquiry, “whether an article, a graph, a poem, a story, a play, a dance, or a painting, is not something to be received, but something to be used; not a conclusion but a turn in a conversation; not a closed statement but an open question; not a way of declaring ‘this is how it is’ but a means of inviting others to consider what it (or they) could become” (Bochner & Ellis, 2003, p. 507).

We are bodies in motion, constantly sorting out our experiences through our senses.  In online contexts, this can become more evident through the absence of certain perceptual filters. I’ve written about this in regards to interviewing and participant observation elsewhere.

Sensory analysis doesn’t get a lot of play in the social sciences, but I’m seeing more and more empirical and conceptual work emerging in a range of disciplines.  Martyna Sliwa and Kathleen Riach (2010) note this as well in a recent study that discusses how the senses can be useful as a tool for exploring the experience of change in post-socialist contexts:

Whilst there has always been an awareness that place, space and culture are both understood and mediated through the body and material experience, the explicit role of particular senses is only now emerging as a concern to social scientists. Although a range of ‘sensual’ empirical studies have mainly forefronted the importance of the visual (for example, Pink, 2007; Frers and Meier, 2007), there is a scattering of excellent commentaries on the relationship between other senses and the social (see Howes, 2005). However, as Rodaway asserts, traditional social research often induces an implicit separation of the physical, cultural and aesthetic. In developing a more central and integrated exploration of the senses in social studies, he emphasises the senses both as a relationship to the world, and the senses as in themselves a kind of structuring of space and defining of space (Rodaway, 1994, p. 4)

These issues have become more apparent to me in the past couple of years as I talk with scholars struggling to find tools that will help them grasp the elusive character of mobile, multi-modal, mediatized everyday experience. While technological mediation emphasizes the disembodied elements of expression, connection, and context, the ubiquitous features of mobile devices bring bodies (back) into full play. This shift is not simply metaphoric, but looking at the metaphors can help identify those characteristics that are highlighted and hidden.

In the early-mid 1990s, most users would consider the internet as a tool–a prosthesis that extended their bodies or a conduit for information flow.  Others talked about the internet as a place they could go, which focused attention on the architectural elements of the virtual spaces for interaction.  A smaller set of users would not talk about the technologies at all. The internet was already ubiquitous, absorbed as a framework for experience, or quite simply, a way of being (for more on this framework, see my book Life Online)

Now, in the second decade of the new century, while people still consider digital devices and the internet to be tools or sometimes places, most simply use these to carry out aspects of their everyday life.  The novelty has worn off and we’ve stepped into the frame, so we no longer see the frame, we see through it, as R.D. Laing might say.

Research methods have not caught up to the first swing of the pendulum, much less the second. This is partly because of the challenges of adjusting traditional methods to fit different contexts and partly because innovations remain one-off efforts, so we see a lot of reinventing the wheel.  More to the point Radaway is making above, many scholars are simply dissuaded from innovating beyond certain traditional boundaries. There is strong resistance to disruption.  The motivation behind this resistance is less important than the outcome, which is a severe disconnect between contemporary modes of experience and methods used for collecting, analyzing and representing this experience.

More visual and sensory methods are certainly one way to explore further. The question for me remains: How do we reconcile sensory methods– which are inevitably subjective, personal sensemaking practices– with epistemologies that privilege or demand that the researcher gather and identify discrete units of information that can be analyzed as objects? And if we’re able to embrace innovative sensemaking practices at the level of epistemology, how can we implement these in a way that would satisfy the persistent (and irritating) demand in the social sciences for ‘evidence-based’ research methods?

I don’t have the answers, but it’s something I think about a lot, and I think interventions in this arena are critical to the development of robust qualitative inquiry of digital contexts.

I’d like to debunk, or maybe deconstruct the term.  My desire to do this emerges from another quest; to help qualitative researchers embrace innovation and invention without constantly reinventing the wheel or embracing the “anything goes” approach to social inquiry, both of which are unsatisfactory options.

Once we ask, for example, why ethnographers do interviews in the first place, we can begin to rethink how we might get at this same sort of information in other ways, which expands our operationalization of what ‘interview’ might mean.  Likewise, why do anthropologists often find it necessary to have an informant? Why was this useful and what sort of information did it yield?  Looking underneath the method to unpack it at the level of everyday decision making, we actually start to see some common themes, common practices, and even some systematicity.  So what might seem really messy actually has patterns.  It’s enacted differently, and adapted creatively in specific situations all the time. But there are key reasons for doing certain things. We don’t necessarily see these reasons at the level of method, but at the level below method.

In a way, this is a project of scrutinizing these ‘messy’ practices of qualitative inquiry more closely, so these everyday practices of sensemaking become part of our methodological schema, which can help build stronger approaches.   Many scholars understand this naturally, but digital media give us the opportunity to really raise the issue again, in a slightly different way. Rather than just saying: “it’s messy and we should embrace this,” we can get further (and build credibility in stronger ways) by talking about what we’re doing, every day, during this mess.  Only then can we begin to scrutinize it as part of a method, and perhaps even systematize it in ways that are more visible to others.

This is a key question in thinking about the dramaturgy of digital experience, which is also the title of a chapter I’m working on for the revised Handbook of Dramaturgy, edited by Charles Edgley.  I’m not a dramaturgical scholar by training, but I have a lot of background in symbolic interactionism, which is a strong foundation of the dramaturgical approach.  I also happen to have studied Kenneth Burke in grad school, who, with Erving Goffman, are credited as key founders of Dramaturgy.

Big question, but here, I focus on the starting point: certain persistent characteristics of Internet for communication[1] and fundamental technical requirements for interacting with others via any digital interface that links to the Internet. These features and requirements impact how we experience space, place and time, how we think about and enact the self, how we interact with others, and how we make sense of both local and global situations.

Presence and sociality is distinct from physicality

The Internet enables instantaneous transmission of information between people, regardless of geo-location. The Internet extends our senses in McLuhanesque fashion, allowing us to see, listen, and reach well beyond our local sensory limits. The telegraph, radio, television, and phone did the same, but the digital and networked qualities of information, as well as the multiple modalities for interacting with it, yields significant differences in experience. One can experientially connect to situations far removed from one’s physical location, or be engaged in multiple, distinctive situations simultaneously.

Having a sense of presence without actually being there is a hallmark of Internet-mediated communication. Presence becomes a more complicated concept because it is determined by participation more than proximity, a point made early on by Meyrowitz (1986), who discussed the distinction of social from physical presence. This liminality, as Dennis Waskul discusses, means “places are transmitted from one locality to any and all users’ varied geographic ‘space’ (2005, p. 55). In this way, physicality is separated from sociality. As Waskul continues, “the dislocating and disembodying characteristics of the medium necessarily force a reconstitution of self and society. To state it bluntly, places, bodies, and selves are unavoidably translated into the conventions of the medium—they are not ‘there’ otherwise; in these environments, they must be made to exist” (2005, p. 55).

This can play out in more or less remarkable ways. In the early 1990s, novel and shocking examples fueled academic as well as public interest. In one instance, a key member of an online community who was known and beloved as a disabled older female turned out to be a middle-aged male psychologist (Van Gelder, 1985). The discovery of this long-time deception resulted in the demise of a formerly stable and longstanding community. It demonstrated not only the ability of a person to construct and sustain an alternate identity very unlike his physical attributes, but the extent to which this deception impacted the lives of other community members. A few years later in another community, a member named “Mr. Bungle” took over the characters of two other people in a public online living room and performed a violent rape scene between them. Unable to control their own identities, these two victims could only shut down their computers. Even so, their online counterparts continued to be violated, as the rape scene kept going.  This case, which has come to be known as “the rape in cyberspace” (Dibble, 1992), highlighted the potential selfhood of an avatar and illustrated how visceral, embodied presence could be separated from physical bodies.  Text-based violation of one’s online identity caused intensely physical emotional responses for both the online and offline persons involved.

The 1990s Internet facilitated a marked shift in the way people understand, on an everyday level, where and how meaning derives in interactions. In particular, it shifts attention to the content and form of interaction, which has a richness that belies the instinctive notion that text-only exchanges could never be as meaningful as face-to-face. The Internet also shifts attention toward the way the enactment of self can be edited and altered; for many users (see interviews by Turkle, 1995; Markham, 1998), computer-mediated communication promotes a strong sense of control, or freedom to choose how to fill in missing information for others. This sense of control is aided by the fact that one’s choices are made within a non-simultaneous context, in which time is more flexible.

Time is a malleable variable

As well as collapsing distance or making it irrelevant, Internet technologies can disrupt time, shifting it from an unchanging or universal flow to a pliable variable in everyday interactions. Although this was also once a novelty, we now take for granted the ability to stop and start time in the midst of a conversation to consider and adjust our interactive choices. Most of us don’t notice that we are, in effect, manipulating time to suit our purposes.

Time is also shifted in ways we cannot control and may not notice, by the interface we’re using, the quality of our network connection, and other factors. For example, technologies make it easy to keep the past present.  Archived and searchable, I can review my personal email communication back to 1996, bringing details into the present that might have previously been lost and more importantly forgotten in old manila work folders, notebooks, or a diary.  Facebook promotes searching for long lost friends and acquaintances, encouraging us to pick up where we left off back in high school or college. This potential creates a unique situation in that now, we not only have to manage various presentations of self (a taken for granted dramaturgical premise) but also the presentations of selves from the past that collide with selves of the present.  While not unique to the digital environment, the ease with which people can search and find each other, made possible by the persistence of our digital content over time and the strength and finesse of search engine algorithms, is astonishing. Anyone who has reconnected with someone they never thought they’d see again because of Facebook (such as a former boyfriend), or who has received a status update from someone who is dead confronts this unique dynamic and must reconcile the way the Internet changes one’s experience of time.

These characteristics of the Internet — the reconfiguration of proximity and distance and the manipulation of time — significantly influenced the development of platforms and interfaces we now take for granted. We can develop relationships regardless of our individual physical abilities, appearances, and locations. People can and do build communities based on common interests, bridging typical barriers of geography and regional or national politics.[2] Robust virtual worlds and game environments facilitate our capacity to build innovative places and interact with others in avatar forms we have partially or totally invented. Notably, although contemporary tools and modes of interaction are far more ubiquitous and mobile, the characteristics above have remained salient.

Delving deeper into the pragmatic and technical aspects of how we actually interact with others when we’re using a computer interface, we start to parse out what has been called ‘ekstasis’ (Berger, 1963; Waskul, 2005): how everyday activities in digital media contexts require conscious deliberation, technical skills, and more reflexivity about activities or rules that are in constant play in the construction of self and society.

Presentation of self is a deliberate, technical achievement

Participation in digital contexts, while perhaps engaging or exhausting for the entire body, requires–at the most fundamental level– focused activity of only certain body parts, primarily the eyes and hands.  The user must pay attention to the physical details of particular devices and attain a basic level of skill with the mode of interaction, which can be as simple as clicking a button on the screen in order to open a chat window and typing on a keyboard, or as complex as learning a series of keystroke combinations and other programming procedures to make one’s avatar body speak or maneuver in a particular direction.[3] Anything that would be hoisted or hosted by one’s voice, movements, and senses is a technical achievement. In early stages of learning a new mode of interaction, one’s self consciousness about this process is intensified. This is because one must make active choices within platforms that have fairly stringent constraints on one’s movements and actions.

Even after learning the technical rules, or understanding the constraining features of the technology or software, the process of selfhood is deliberative; in online environments, we must write ourselves into being.[4] Then, to recognize our own existence in any meaningful way, we must be responded to (MacKinnon, 1995; Markham, 2005). Although this basic mode of interaction can be enhanced beyond the text by uploading audio, images, and video, and is certainly moderated by a range of software programs and devices, the baseline exchange that creates the potential for selfhood and social presence is still, at least at this point in time, highly textual (or at least keyboard based).  If I want to express emotion in a text-based messaging system, such as SMS, IM, or email, I must choose from a range of possible emoticons or I can build emotion into the content or form of the message. Either way, it’s more an active choice than a spontaneous reaction. In visually-oriented systems like personal websites or Facebook, this deliberation takes different forms, when we select particular background images, profile pictures, or in video conferencing, tilt the camera in particular ways to fulfill specific purposes.[5] These activities may feel awkward at first, but as newness fades, they become more routine, natural, and automatic, incorporated into what Merleau-Ponty (1945) calls the ‘body schema.’[6]

In spite of the seeming incompatibility of network analysis and a symbolic interaction approach, we have both been drawn to some of the possibilities offered by a network sensibility. When the tools are separated from the disciplinary parameters for which they were developed (primarily Social Network Analysis, or SNA), a network sensibility offers a beguiling method for extending certain approaches, such as grounded theory, symbolic interactionism, or ethnography, and specifying other approaches, such as actor network theory or practice theory.
In this essay, we make a case for embracing and critically developing network sensibilities as a way to grapple with the complexity of contemporary social media interactions. Our discussion, mostly focused at the level of method, is intended to contribute to ongoing conversations stressing the need to build conceptual and methodological frameworks that resonate more closely with the complexity of networked, technologically-mediated social contexts.

To begin, we clarify the distinction between network analysis and network sensibility. We then discuss three key strengths of using network sensibilities to study the nuances of social media: (1) network practices can generate data and add complexity by producing multiple renderings of potential meaning emerging through social media; (2) the practice of creating and then juxtaposing different visualizations and potential explanations of the situation can help shift focus from objects to relations or flow; and (3) through the practice of constantly rebuilding and shifting visual mappings so different elements are centered, network analysis can become a catalyst for reflexive and ethical practice.

I recently encountered this issue for an article I was writing.  I wanted to use some images I found in various places on the web to illustrate network analysis techniques. I considered these images to be necessary to make my argument. I reasoned that as academics, we need to be able to use whatever evidence is necessary to support our points. We have long accepted the idea that written materials can be quoted, as long as we cite the source and follow some other guidelines. In theory, we should be able to use images in similar ways, but this has remained a challenge.

Depending on the laws of the country in which one is publishing, the use of images/photos in academic works might fall under the principle “Fair Dealings” or “Fair Use.” in very basic terms (and referring to the specific U.S. concept), this means that if my purpose is to comment on, parody, or critique copyrighted material, and the use would be limited and transformative, I do not need to seek permission from the copyright owner. Fair use is a defense against claims of copyright infringement. (There are good overviews of the concept online–I use Stanford University and Columbia University copyright sites)

The International Communication Association recently published a code of best practices for fair use in scholarly research in communication. This best practice document is not a legal safeguard, but outlines some excellent considerations. It is the most comprehensive document available (to my knowledge) on the use of media in scholarly work.

Here are the key points from that document I found helpful in determining that I was using the images fairly. They go further than any other specifications for fair use, but again, they’re based on the U.S. principle of fair use, so these points may not apply in other countries.

1) Previously, it has been assumed that even if use is fair in the classroom, that doesn’t mean it’s fair for scholarly publications. The ICA guidelines contest this idea, noting that fair use is not medium specific. In communication scholarship, fair use principles extend to published works, not just education in the classroom.

“If a use is fair in the course of scholarship, then it is fair in the publication and distribution of that scholarship by any means, including publishing and media distribution, and in the archiving of that scholarship.”

2) Fair use applies to the use of images as much as the use of text, despite common misunderstandings to the contrary. This is an important adjustment to the pre-digital era assumption that multimedia communication forms should be treated differently than textual forms of quoting.

Fair use is in wide and vigorous use today in many professional communities. For example, historians regularly quote both other historians’ writings and primary textual sources; filmmakers and visual artists use, reinterpret, and critique copyrighted material; scholars illustrate cultural commentary with textual, visual, and musical examples. Equally important is the example of commercial news media. Fair use is healthy and vigorous in daily broadcast television news, where references to popular films, classic TV programs, archival images, and popular songs are both prevalent and routinely unlicensed.

These are distinctive and important specifications, helpful in the continuing struggle to extend our interpretation of fair use. We have to begin making similar claims in other venues. Eventually, perhaps, it will become sensible to use the same logic for quoting audio/visual material or quoting written words.

Based on these arguments from the ICA committee on fair use, and my further study of Fair Use principles, I am confident that if I were publishing in a U.S. outlet, I could make a solid argument for using the images without seeking permission. My use was clearly illustrative, which could be considered transformative, as articulated by the ICA guidelines:

Generally speaking, [quoting copyrighted material for illustration] transform[s] the material reproduced by putting it in an entirely new context; thus, a music video clip used to illustrate trends in editing technique or attitudes about race and gender is being employed for a purpose entirely distinct from that of the original, and is typically directed to an entirely distinct audience from that for which it originally was intended.  This is true even in situations where the media object in question is not subjected to specific analysis, criticism, or commentary.

Even so, the area is gray and likely to remain so for many years. As I said, some publishers regularly reproduce graphics under the principle of fair use, while others refuse any use of graphics without copyright license.

At the end of the day, because I was publishing in Denmark, my research and reasoning didn’t apply. Turns out Danish law does not recognize fair use, so copyright permission must be approved in writing for any image I might want to use. This rule applies regardless of where the images come from. So I cut all the images from the article.

Excerpts from: ICA (2010). Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Scholarly Research in Communication. Available at: http://centerforsocialmedia.org/fair-use/related-materials/codes/code-best-practices-fair-use-scholarly-research-communication.

I’m working on a chapter on Dramaturgy and Digital Experience and I’m working out how to structure the frame for the piece.  I thought it might be useful to brainstorm here, as well as talk about the key question for me, which is: What makes digital experience different from everyday life in the 21st Century?

Frankly, this would have been an easier chapter to write twenty years ago, when performative aspects of digital experience were more novel, more on the screen, and involved more virtuality. Now, of course, the digital is interwoven into everyday life through a range of devices and interfaces.  As Turkle aptly noted back in 1995, what might have been called “life on the screen” has been thoroughly transformed into “life in the screen” (p. 21).   This sentiment is echoed by Deuze, Blank, and Speers (2012), who say in a recent (great) article that we understand and use media in a way that more accurately would be described as ‘in media’ rather than ‘with media.’

Given that everyday life is mediatized and technologically-mediated, the obvious question for this sort of chapter is “what makes digital contexts different?”

One possible way to frame the discussion would be to discuss those things about digital experience that have persisted in a sticky way over the past 20 years.  This would include such things as distributed presence, textual performance (textuality, intertextuality), and the fact that one’s identity and existence is a matter of deliberate choices.

Another way to frame it would be to talk about specific dramaturgical concepts and link these to different digital contexts. The only problem with this approach is that it relies on the use of categories that may or may not fit well any more. Take Goffman as the baseline here. His elaborately detailed discussions of various aspects of performance of self have long served as a solid foundation for a dramaturgical approach.  Does the analogy fit digital contexts? Surely, we could find in any digital context examples of front stage and backstage behaviors, impression management, realigning actions, expressions given versus given off, and so forth.

But “individuals” and “social establishments” are less easily demarcated in networked cultures.  There are many “players” influencing the performance beyond the actual human individuals.  The “stage” may not only be distant from the body of the performer, but may continue the performance without the actor’s presence or knowledge.  Goffman’s specific examples and categories for sensemaking were appropriate for a much different time period in our history. I’m not suggesting they are no longer relevant in mediated settings. However, I think his overall approach is more applicable than his specific terms and categories.  When we think of his larger body of work, embedded in symbolic interactionism and social psychology, certain premises become fundamental to his dramaturgical approach:

1. What we think of as “Self” and “Other” are ongoing negotiations among individuals in specific contexts, which could be examined through the lens of theatre;
2. What might seem a stable entity is a state that is continually achieved through adjustment and realignment of performance;
3. Rules and structures govern these performances;
4. Over time and through various processes of enculturation, actions become habitual, serving as invisible frames governing behaviors, sensemaking, responses, and meaning.

These four premises serve as a fallback when the theatre metaphors seem to break down in considerations of digital experience. In other words, if we can no longer distinguish front stage from backstage in certain mediated contexts, we can use the premises and then modify the specific terms/categories.  Take for example the late 1990s phenomenon of webcam girls, who would display every moment of their days and nights through multiple cameras and microphones (a topic that the brilliant Terri Senft has spent years thinking and talking about).  We could use the terms “front stage” and “backstage” offered by Goffman, perhaps concluding that this example represents a breakdown of front stage/backstage or a ‘backstage solidarity.’ We could speculate, as Goffman did in passing, that a chronic “lowering of barriers” might be “part of an anti-dramaturgical social movement, a cult of confession.” Or we might conclude that the dramaturgical framework doesn’t apply at all.

While all three options are certainly viable paths, it may be more amenable to the data as well as the underlying premises of the approach to conceptualize the situation as a type of performance with a specific set of rules, just not understood or encapsulated in the terminology of front stage or backstage. Approaching the example thus, we can discover context-specific performative rules in play, rather than use pre-determined concepts that don’t apply.

While I think the discussion of traditional dramaturgy terms is useful, it ties the hand of the scholar who needs to think beyond these categories. It also keeps us locked in an ambivalent relationship with Goffman, wondering whether or not the principles outlined in “Presentation of self in everyday life” apply.

A third frame for such a chapter would focus more specifically on issues of identity, as this seems an important undergirding concept in any dramaturgical approach, although this may be just a limited understanding of a dramaturgical approach.  Still, when I consider what makes digital experience so very different from other contexts, I return time and again to the fact that digital contexts provide the means for controlling the presentation of self, enacting embodiment and presence, managing identity-for-others, and playing with different performances in ways not possible (or much less possible) than in physical bodies and contexts.  As a sideline, I also think that these performances are not nearly as controlled or controllable as we like to think and in this way, we are beguiled by the technologies for being.  We are relational beings, achieving what we call the ‘self’ through a constant process of interaction. Despite our “impression management” efforts to control the means by which others ‘see’ us, which presumably gives them information in order to have a certain understanding of us, we can never truly control this process.  We give off (in Goffman’s sense) information that we don’t know about, like misspelling words, breaking the rules or norms because we don’t understand them, or having an unintentional tone or attitude that influences others in ways we’re unaware.  We are essentially relational beings.  Unending strings of interactions influence how we see ourselves, how we think others see us, and how we respond to others’ responses (or lack of responses) to us. Maybe a little R.D. Laing is in order here.  Or a mention of the looking glass theory of self (Charles Cooley).

But more apt, probably, would be Kenneth Gergen, whose book “Saturated Self” remains a strong influence on my comprehension of self and identity in mediated contexts.

The fourth frame might be to follow a timeline of how we’ve shifted our thinking about performance and identity, in relation to certain shifts in technologies and capacities.  Of course, it would be a fairly idiosyncratic timeline (to say the least), since it would be based on trends and shifts that interest me, specifically. Still, it would be interesting to consider a dramaturgical approach within larger historical shifts, such as these:  From virtual reality to mobile and ubiquitous environments.  From text-only contexts to multi-media contexts. From the desire to be something ‘other’ to concerns with creating the best ‘brand’ of ourselves possible.

As with most of my essays, I have no tidy ending. Mostly, I just run out of time and either push ‘publish’ or ‘draft.’  Most likely, because I am in the mode of trying to control my identity as a scholar of merit, I click ‘draft,’ because i still don’t like to offer unfinished product to the world at large.  Ah, the possibilities for a dramaturgical analysis are endless.

…to be continued…..