Sam Hind

lecturer in digital media and culture at the University of Manchester, UK.

sam.hind@manchester.ac.uk

  • Interview dynamics and fieldtrip mobilities

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    I’ve just returned from a week-long fieldtrip to the island of Gozo, hence the lack of posts on here. I’ve also started to read a lot of articles on mobilities and methodologies recently, and this really wasn’t a coincidence. Fieldtrips provide the opportunity to think about empirical opportunities away from the usual inhabited spaces of reading and writing (i.e. the office desk, the commute etc.) Also, with the weather in the UK typical for the time of year there was nothing better than flying out for some winter sun (23 degrees anyone?), island exploration and discussion. I’ll talk of two parts to the fieldtrip that were worthwhile for myself.

    Interviews

    In the first instance there were two group interviews (of 11/12 people) with 3 individuals (local mayor, holiday business owner x2) focused around a variety of island-based questions on immigration, asylum, cultural identity, tourism, local food & drink, environmental/energy issues, war and empire, EU funding, economic stability, crime and travel connections.  Although the questions were for the benefit of the students (although asked by all), the dynamics of each of the two interviews were critical for understanding appropriate interview techniques. The benefits of a large interview panel were multifarious, despite a number of potential pitfalls. We were able to cover a wide range of topics without jumping arbitrarily between subjects due to the entangled nature of the themes discussed (EU funding > bridges > crime etc.). Although this did require some initiative and timing, making the right judgements on when to move topic and when to continue the current line of questioning. It also gave the students enough time to compose questions and allowed a more varied interview path. No one person was responsible for asking all the questions. Also, in interview 1 we arranged ourselves in a ’roundtable’ fashion that arguably levelled out the power relations between interviewee and interviewer. It took place in the local council building in a clean, air-conditioned event room. The interview arrangement was in contrast to the classic confrontational dynamic of the one-to-one interview that can be daunting for those involved due to the bodily proximity and exposure to the interviewee. The large table (complete with water, coffee and biscuits) gave  interviewers enough space and bodily distance to feel comfortable and confident enough to ask questions. Interview 2 was a ‘poolside’ interview at the apartments we stayed in. Both interviewees were joint owners of the holiday complex and seemed happy and relaxed at being interviewed on sunloungers by the resort pool (much like the rest of us…)! Questions didn’t flow as easily as the initial interview but did take on an informal structure. Both interviews were interspersed with a few jokes, communal laughs and general at-ease gestures. Both contained a number of challenging and straightforward questions for interviewees and the size of contributors helped in mediating some difficult topics. Talking to Mediterranean islanders about North African immigration and asylum policy is a prickly subject. The range of interviewers helped to disperse the conflict between subjects, allowing some ‘softer’ questions to bookend the difficult ones. With some students having a more confrontational technique (helping to open some thematic doors), and others a more laidback approach we were able to put our subjects in a non-threatening position, getting an array of rich answers in the process.

    Travel

    The second part of the fieldtrip that was particularly worthwhile involved different modes of transport. In the week away I travelled:

    On foot (short distances to the local village, around supermarkets, up steps, hillsides and pilgrimage routes, around monuments and along coastlines)

    By car and people carrier (middle and long-distances of between 1/2 hour and 3 hours from village to town, island to island and from holiday complex to ferry port; with 3 people and with 6 people, as navigator and passenger, on shopping trips and on day trips)

    By taxi, minibus and airport shuttle (in the UK to the airport at 5am, across an unfamiliar landscape from airport to hotel complex, by an Asian Mancunian and a Maltese driver, from complex to airport back across a now-familiar route, from aeroplane to terminal, with hand-luggage)

    By public bus (from town to village, from town centre to tourist attraction, on a newly privatized service, on air-conditioned vehicles, by the rhythms and luck of a local service, with locals and fellow tourists alike, with conversations with bus drivers, for considerably less money than in the UK!)

    By ferry (from an uninspiring Maltese port to a far more picturesque Gozitan marina [see above], from Cirkewwa to Mgarr, by Gozo Channel Company Ltd, as a foreign tourist, as a car passenger, as a day-tripper rather than commuter)

    By aeroplane (from Manchester to Malta, from gloomy English rain to balmy Mediterranean sunshine, by low-cost airline, alongside lecturers, students and other travellers, enjoyed with conversation and reading literature, by the window and aisle)

    On my return to the UK I also subsequently travelled by bicycle (home – centre of Manchester), local bus service (airport – home, Coventry – Warwick), and lastly, train (Manchester – Birmingham – Coventry and back again).

    By all accounts that’s a fair bit of travelling. 11 different modes of transport. Multiple journeys and many miles! My only recommendation is never to drive out of Valletta during rush-hour. An astonishing 310, 409 cars are registered in Malta, seemingly most of which were trying to get out its capital at the same time as we were.

    Here’s an article, book, video and a novel I’ve all read and watched recently that have shaped these personal experiences:

    Ingold, T (2004) Culture on the ground: The world perceived through feet. Journal of Material Culture. (subscribers only – although look for any of Ingold’s work at his staff page here)

    Pink, S (2012) Situating Everyday Life. (available on amazon for £18~) and her What is Sensory Ethnography video on the SAGE methodspace website (http://www.methodspace.com/video/what-is-sensory-ethnography-by)

    Poe, E.A. (1999 [1838]) The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (a novel by Penguin Classics, around £6/7)

     

  • What are the differences between the savage geography and the civilized one?

    La Pérouse travels through the Pacific for Louis XVI with the explicit mission of bringing back a better map. One day, landing on what he calls Sakhalin he meets with [the] Chinese and tries to learn from them whether Sakhalin is an island or a peninsula. To his great surprise the Chinese understand geography quite well. An older man stands up and draws a map of his island on the sand with the scale and the details needed by La Pérouse. Another, who is younger, sees that the rising tide will soon erase the map and picks up one of La Pérouse’s notebooks to draw the map again with a pencil . . .Latour (1986: 5)

    From ‘Visualization and Cognition: Drawing Things Together’. Available here.

  • Techno-fundamentalism?

    Another episode of the Digital Human aired on Monday. ‘Do we know what all our technology is for or more intriguingly what it wants?’ asks Aleks Krotoski this week. In the opening few seconds you hear Douglas Rushkoff, who I saw defend his PhD in the summer. He talks of technology’s ‘bias’, and provides the example of the gun as having a ‘tendency’ towards killing people. I immediately thought of Latour’s (1994) Common Knowledge article ‘On Technical Mediation’ (available here) where he provides the same example of the gun and the operator. He outlines two symmetrical positions:

    The myth of the Neutral Tool under complete human control and the myth of the Autonomous Destiny that no human can master…

    Or in other words, that gun is responsible for the killing (‘Autonomous Destiny’) OR the human operator is (‘Neutral Tool’). Latour, of course, proposes a third way. A new path that corresponds to neither of the above:

    …[A] third possibility… more commonly realized: the creation of a new goal that corresponds to neither agent’s program of action. (You had wanted only to hurt but, with a gun now in hand, you want to kill.)
    I call this uncertainty about goals translation.

    Who then is responsible? ‘Someone else (a citizen-gun, a gun-citizen)’ (1994: 32). I’ll quote this next passage in full, because it really is a fundamental constituent of Latour’s argument, and I really think it’s a classic:

    If l define you by what you have (the gun), and by the series of associations that you enter into when you use what you have (when you fire the gun), then you are modified by the gun-more so or less so, depending on the weight of the other associations that you carry. This translation is wholly symmetrical. You are different with a gun in hand; the gun is different with you holding it. You are another subject because you hold the gun; the gun is another object because it has entered into a relationship with you. The gun is no longer the gun-in-the-armory or the gun-in-the-drawer or the gun-in-the-pocket, but the gun-in- your-hand, aimed at someone who is screaming. What is true of the subject, of the gunman, is as true of the object, of the gun that is held. A good citizen becomes a criminal, a bad guy becomes a worse guy; a silent gun becomes a fired gun, a new gun becomes a used gun, a sporting gun becomes a weapon. The twin mistake of the materialists and the sociologists is to start with essences, those of subjects or those of
    objects. That starting point renders impossible our measurement of the mediating role of techniques. Neither subject or object (nor their goals) is fixed. (1994: 33)

  • The Mechanical Turk

    Saturday saw the TUC ‘A Future That Works‘ march in London, and estimates suggest 150,000 people took to the streets (see here). Ed Miliband and others spoke at the Hyde Park rally which was hosted by James Smith (or, Glenn Cullen from The Thick of It!)

    Protest marches are invariably tiring affairs. My calves are still aching from walking round London all day, and my head hurts from trying to extract data from Twitter, which I can assure you is not an easy process. The ‘anti-kettling’ mobile web app, Sukey (version 3.0) was running during the day, providing a reliable and informative account of proceedings. I’m trying my best to collate hashtagged tweets (‘#sukey’ ‘#oct20’ etc.) and updates from key accounts (@sukeyio, @OccupyLondon etc.) to help with tracking the action. I’ve also saved all the re-tweeted and verified images of incidents during the demonstrations across London and hope to make use of them somehow. Sukey should be launching a corresponding desktop web app in the next few days. The overall aim is to connect those inside demonstrations with those outside, by crowdsourcing ‘micro-tasks’ (like Amazon Mechanical Turk, they say) and enrolling others in small but crucial jobs (tagging photos, linking tweets etc.).

  • Telegraph and Modern War

    Derek Gregory has a fantastic post on the role of the telegraph in modern war over at his Geographical Imaginations blog. In a post called ‘Bodies on the wire’, he points to a bunch of new ideas he wants to follow up on. They revolve around the historical role of war media and, specifically the place of the telegraph in the communication of the Crimean War. He also notes Jan Mieszkowski‘s argument that…

     one of the crucial dilemmas of modern war is the disconnect between the participant’s sensory disorientation (‘To be under fire is to experience the loss of control of one’s own signifying practices’) and the abstraction (or ‘perspective’) of distant observers.

    When I relate this to the use of digital (mapping) technologies during protest, I’m interested to see whether we can apply the same sort of thinking. It seems to me that this dis/orientation is a notable continuum; and that often, an intimacy with modern technology (in the way of touch-gestures on a mobile device) leads to a difficulty in maintaining a kind of abstraction or perspective of the distant observer. A tactile primacy, I guess. But of course, the kinds of moves made on a mobile device are in some way creating these abstractions too – straight from the heart of the action.