What is a Silo?

Silophication is most actively theorized by a person who straddles anthropology, global finance, and journalism: Dr. Gillian Tett, a Cambridge trained anthropologist and US managing editor of the Financial Times. Below I build theory through  categorizing Tett’s use of the term silophication in her financial journalism critical of how regulator’s and banker’s silophication led to an absence of information sharing and the presence of a global financial crisis.

Tett sees the “modern age” as epitomized by tensions between integration and fragmentation. “[W]hile technology is integrating the world in some senses, it is simultaneously creating fragmentation too. Moreover, as innovation speeds up, it keeps creating complex new activities that are only understood by technical ‘experts’ in a silo.” (Tett 2009). Tett provides reasons why silos exist (complexity and professional specification) and implores regulators and bankers to silo-bust through hiring holistic thinking anthropology-like personnel to cross silos and share information.

Tett refers to two mutually reinforcing silos, an intellectual silo epitomized by monological and non-holistic thinking supported by the second structural silo of employment departmental balkanization. She admits to this duality of silos describing “structural silos (ie: departments that do not talk)” and “mental silos (financiers with tunnel vision)” (Tett 2009).

Structural Silos

Tett states that financial regulators, the British Financial Services Authority (FSA), has “increasingly succumbed to a ‘silo’ mentality” (Tett 2008a). They “spend their time ticking boxes, within their allotted silos, rather than take a holistic view of risk” (Tett 2008a). Within these homogenized specialist silos, without “common sense and talk” (Tett 2008b) within or across specific fields, the chances of arriving at disasterous “solutions” increase exponentially. These structural silos are workers’ castes reinforced through “career silos” (Tett 2012a). Tett writes about “career silos” referring to how bankers or regulators remain in those castes, resulting in an absence of silo-transcending, information sharing, and empathy across silos (Tett 2012a).

Structural silos are results of the hierarchical organization of the firm, the spatial arrangement of offices within the firm, and the lack of collaboration within the firm. As Thomas Malaby, Andrew Ross, and other corporate ethnographers have recognized, companies can modify their office cultures and use social technologies to transcend structural silos. Business organization have been known to reject hierarchy in exchange for the semi-lateral flow of information across the firm that comes with heterarchy is analyzed by David Stark. This is often the case in new media firms. As Google, Facebook, and other Silicon Valley companies with their California ideologies have shown, it is possible to institutionalize through space, culture, and practice ways of addressing structural silos. This is de rigueur in new media firms but not so in the financial and federal sectors.

Intellectual Silos

In 2010 emails revealed the extent of the deception and greed within the culture of Goldman Sachs investment bankers and Standard and Poor’s credit raters. Tett refers to these leaked emails as primary documents in her analysis of the mental silos behind the global financial crisis of 2008. She writes, “Their world was also in a strange, geeky silo, into which few non-bankers ever peered” (Tett 2010a). By “geeky silo,” Tett refers to the mental or intellectual silophication that defends proprietary knowledge against boundary breakers.

In another example, Tett expanded her notion of the silo to apply outside of finance and its regulation to describe America and American media as polarizing and tribal (Tett 2011). Tett says that the internet is not helping Americans bridge their tribal silos: “social media, far from bridging these silos, is spawning a new form of cyber-tribalism of its own” (Tett 2011). She continues, “Now that Americans feel free to create their own identity online, they increasingly assume that information should be ‘customised’; and as media companies rush to offer these bespoke services, it becomes easier to retreat into an intellectual silo” (Tett 2011).

The phenomenon of the intellectual silo has been identified by a range of scholars, activists, and anthropologists. Going by the name the “filter bubble” which fosters the “myth of digital democracy,” intellectual silos appear to be reinforced by personalization algorithms and by the innate safety of sameness in risk prone fields of cultural production.

Why Silos?

Complexity and specialization, the result of growth in the knowledge management fields augmented by specific technological competencies, is the reason for the proliferation of task, department, intellectual, and field fragmentation today. Tett claims, “If you look around the world today, it is clear that almost every institution, from the army to the banks, is becoming increasingly complex. That, in turn, is creating a plethora of silos, where specialists beaver away, performing an activity that few outsiders understand. Yet the irony is that while these silos are springing up, we also live with systems that are increasingly interconnected; events on a trading desk or isolated battlefield can send ripples across the world” (Tett 2011b). As social complexity scales up, the silos proliferate and grow dangerously less communicative. In core intelligence industries of modernity, from the military to science, energy production, and finance, the silo curse impacts much of the world’s Western elites and by extension the rest of the world.

Tett explains the process: “This problem is not unique to finance. On the contrary, similar patterns can be found in numerous other areas of the modern world, ranging from science to medicine to energy and manufacturing. For as innovation speeds up in the 21st century, specialists are engaged in highly complex activities in numerous silos, that almost nobody outside that particular silo understands, or even knows about – even though the activity in that silos often has the ability to affect society as a whole. There is thus a bizarre paradox in the 21st century world: namely while the global system is becoming more interconnected in some senses, the level of mental and structural fragmentation remains very intense” (Tett 2010b: 129).

Craft specialization has long been our species’ reaction to increasing social complexity. For logical efficiency as well as the domination of worker’s biopower, hierarchically controlled professionalization has been one solution to the problem of knowledge containment. Employment casuality is one result of such efficiency logic on the human scale. But on the present global scale, and with the increasing dissociation of resources and publics through digital abstractions and its derivatives, unchallenged silos and the logics that support them, appear to be able to create global catastrophes.

Solving Silos?

Tett works for the Financial Times so she is a knowledge worker for financial elites willing to pay exorbitantly to access her pithy writing behind an expense paywall. She is also a social actor who doesn’t want to see her clients create another global financial crisis. For Tett this is the “silo curse” she wants to solve for her clients and because her client’s work impacts the wealth of millions of people, poor and rich (Tett 2009).

Tett provides some evidence that by 2009 certain sectors of finance and financial regulation were embarking on efforts to cure the “silo curse” impacting numerous sectors of modernity: “The problem that military and financial systems alike are grappling with, then, is how to combat tunnel vision; or, more accurately, how to persuade players to recognise how tempting – but also dangerous – it is to operate with a one-track mind” (Tett 2011b).

She applauds companies like Goldman Sachs who “try to ensure that different business silos have ways of watching what each other does” (Tell 2008b). Some regulators, for instance, are employing “macro-prudential surveillance (essentially, a posh word for active, holistic regulation). … [This stresses] the importance of joining up the dots” (Tett 2009). Meanwhile, “asset managers are trumpeting the importance of lateral thought and trying to understand what is happening in seemingly disconnected silos” (Tett 2009). To trump the silo curse, improve regulation, and reduce the prevalence of risking investment, Tett argues that bankers and regulators should “be forced to talk about their business with a wide pool of colleagues, including their immediate silo” (Tett 2008b).

Tett claims that “one of the essential investment challenges today [is to] understand the micro-details of modern silos, but [also] see how the macro-pieces interconnect, in a world that is both highly interconnected and tribal.” (Tett 2009). She looks back to her PhD training in anthropology for the penultimate solution. She proposes the development of “cultural translators”, who can explain what is happening in those silos to everyone else (Tett 2009). Tett is suggesting that anthropologist-like employees could help regulators and bankers translate insights from one department to another. For example, she champions “silo-busters” like Dr. Jim Yong Kim, also an anthropologist, as the president of the World Bank for showing the “power of breaking down the intellectual silos that mar much of the modern world” (Tett 2012b).

She concludes: “So, for my money, a better way to frame the debate is not to call for business leaders to be ethical, but to launch a fight against tunnel vision; call it, if you like, a focus on silo busting, both in terms of how companies organise themselves and how business people think” (Tett 2011b).

Conclusion

Tett identifies two iterations of silophication, one structural and another mental. Silos exist because of the complexities of today’s socio-technical world require professionalization and specialization. Silos need to be solved because they result in bad decisions that negatively impact millions of people. One way to solve the “silo curse” is to employ “cultural translators” who can inform specialized knowledge workers about the big picture of their work.

In my work with media reform broadcasters I identified silos: Inter-firm silos that are similar to structural silos in which departments fail to communicate; Inter-audience silos that are similar to intellectual silos in which television viewers balkanize into affinity groups; and intra-field silos, not addressed in Tett’s silo categorization, that refer to institutions within a single field of cultural production, a social movement for instance, who want to but fail to collaborate because of their silophication.

Financial journalists and media reform broadcasters are using the same opaque term, silophication, to describe similar processes. What is the significance of this shared emergent discourse? A methodological question remains. Tett is both a financial journalist and an anthropologist who is using a term used by the subjects of my research. Building theory requires a meta-language developed from records of an indigenous discourse. What to do when the ethnographic subjects and anthropological theorists share the same theoretical discourse?

Tett, Gillian
2008a The danger of letting ‘group think’ spin out of control. Financial Times, March 28. http://www.ft.com/intl/cmts/s/0/1925d542-fc6a-11dc-9229-000077b07658.html#axzz1u23EtNca

Tett, Gillian
2008b How talking can help cut the risk of a lemming fall, Financial Times May 16. http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/e040ef72-22df-11dd-93a9-000077b07658.html#axzz1u23EtNca

Tett, Gillian
2009 Waking up to the ‘silo curse’ is far from the end of the problem. Financial Time. October 9. http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/6d1de780-b469-11de-bec8-00144feab49a.html

Tett, Gillian
2010a E-mail howlers bring murky credit business out of shadows, Financial Times. March 25. http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CFwQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcms%2Fs%2F0%2Fa9da1aa4-508b-11df-bc86-00144feab49a.html&ei=l7-yT4–FYTRiALn-4ySBA&usg=AFQjCNEWttbIb-CaTyM61YL6Fn9HMKhLEA&sig2=Nh82w8uZk9l8z5-rc8y5WQ

Tett, Gillian
2010b Silos and silences: Why so few people spotted the problems in complex credit and what that implies for the future. Banque de France • Financial Stability Review • No. 14 – Derivatives – Financial innovation and stability • July 2010 121. http://www.banque-france.fr/fileadmin/user_upload/banque_de_france/publications/Revue_de_la_stabilite_financiere/etude14_rsf_1007.pdf

Tett, Gillian
2011 US Tribes and Tribulations, Financial Times, August 5, http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/9a0ed5ae-be37-11e0-bee9-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1uyNOEaac

Tett, Gillian
2011b The tunnel-vision thing, Financial Times, January 28. http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/32637b44-28eb-11e0-aa18-00144feab49a.html

Tett, Gillian
2011c  ‘Preventing a repeat of the financial crisis isn’t about more business ethics, argues Gillian Tett; it’s about fewer silos’ Financial Management. April 19. http://www.fm-magazine.com/comment/our-guest/preventing-repeat-financial-crisis-isn%E2%80%99t-about-more-business-ethics-argues-gillian

Tett, Gillian
2012a Hildebrand affair a blow for Europe’s public bodies, Financial Times, January 12. http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/9c389df0-3d3b-11e1-8129-00144feabdc0.html

Tett, Gillian
2012b Right time for a World Bank renaissance man, Financial Times, March 30, 2012. http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/9eda0f8e-798c-11e1-8fad-00144feab49a.html

First of all, I’ll admit that I was pretty spoiled during the first few months of fieldwork because I had WIRELESS INTERNET access anytime I wanted.  That’s right, a wireless connection right in my room.  Madness, I know.  This was definitely not the case when I was here in 2009 and 2010 doing prelim work for my dissertation.  I had no problems with my fantastic and luxurious internet situation…until it evaporated like spilled gasoline.

Gone.

For the last month the internet has once again become a rare, fleeting occurrence that is only attainable (it seems) when the wind blows in the right direction.  You can’t always get what you want.  The funny thing is that once something like the internet comes into a place, certain technologically-skilled folks (like the local satellite internet tech) become high demand individuals–and almost impossible to find.  The internet is wonderful, amazing, and very useful…until it breaks and there’s nobody to fix it.  So anyway, my extended vacation from Savage Minds has a little something to do with the sudden loss of signal syndrome (SLSS)…but the truth is that this might not be a bad thing considering the fact that I am in the middle of fieldwork.

Still, having internet for fieldwork can be really beneficial, especially in my case.  Why?  Because many of the residents of this area use the internet to communicate with one another instead of telephones (and sometimes instead of walking over and tapping on a neighbor’s door)*.  So it helps to be connected into this network in order to keep a certain level of communication going.  It also helps to have internet when I need to try to set up meetings in places that are 1-2 hour drives away, since there’ nothing worse than making a long, dusty drive to find out that the official you wanted to talk with is away for two weeks on vacation.

At the same time, internet access in the middle of fieldwork can be a time-sucking curse (I’m sure many of you know what I mean).  In the old days I think a lot of cultural anthropologists used to wile away the hours and fieldwork anxieties by reading massive books.  This is still pretty common.  But what about now?  Are future generations of anthropologists going to deal with culture and fieldwork shock by playing solitaire or Angry Birds?

There are lots of conversations out there about how the internet is going to affect fieldwork.  In my case, it’s both a positive and a very negative thing all at once.  It’s useful to have, just like anywhere, but it’s also not really a good idea to depend upon the internet.  Why?  Because when it isn’t there, and your research methods are counting on it to make connections, then what?  Well, that’s where flexibility comes into the picture.  If there’s one thing that we all need in fieldwork, it’s the ability to adjust what we’re doing to the situation at hand.

I’ll go ahead and admit that I may have been counting a little too much on having internet access to get in touch with certain people in the communities where I am working.  I planned on using it as one of my recruitment tool, mostly after I learned how important it was for many community members down here and how often they use it.  And when the net is on and accessible, it works great for getting in touch with people, setting up meetings, and even arranging times to meet for interviews.  But when it goes out, it’s like getting stuck on top of some massive roller coaster…the whole system got you this far, but now you’re stuck.  Now what?  Well, this isn’t exactly a new problem in anthropology.  Veronica, my wife, who is also a cultural anthropology grad student, always reminds me about the fact that old Bronislaw Malinowski used a pretty simple yet effective anthropological method when he needed to learn what was going on: he went for walks.

He went for lots of walks.

So there you have it.  If your research design counts upon having access to high-speed (or even excruciatingly slow speed) internet, here’s my advice: don’t count on it.  This is not just advice for field sites in places where the internet is a relatively new luxury.  This applies everywhere: haven’t you ever experienced a day or two when the net goes down at your university of office and the whole world seems to freeze and nobody knows what do to?  Ya, it’s the same thing…kinda like when the power goes out and then everyone realizes that maybe having candles, water, and flashlights would be a good idea.  So, the lesson of the story (and I am learning this myself) is to find the fieldwork version of candles and flashlights for when the communicative power known as the internet flickers into nothingness.  Two feet, motivation, and a decent little notebook can still go a long way in the 21st century.**

So, there you have it: keep on walking, people.

Over and out.  I’ll write when I can.

*In fact, where I am working, there are many people who PREFER to be contacted via email, since that’s what they use for all kinds of social planning.  So, another issue here is that we might have to face the fact that our preferred methods of meeting and recruiting interview participants might not always be available, so we have to adjust accordingly.

** Repeat this mantra as necessary if you are an intractable online junkie/fieldworker.

As described in my last post, listening to lots of audio in the target language is a key part of my approach to language learning. For that reason I needed a good field recorder app for my iPhone. I spent a lot of time and (because you can’t demo most apps without buying them) money searching for a workflow which would let me record, edit, and listen to audio within the same application. I wanted it all in one application because I find that I sometimes want to go back and re-edit a file. It is also currently difficult to send files to iTunes without going through the desktop. In the end, I found a wonderful app that did exactly what I wanted: FiRe2 Field Recorder.

FiRe2 has some really great features that I find particularly useful. First of all, it shows a waveform of the audio. When you are trying to edit an audio file, or listen to it for language practice, having a visual representation of the audio is very useful. Secondly, you can easily mark the audio during recording or playback for easy navigation or editing. While I found other waveform editors, none were as easy to use for playback and language practice. In FiRe2 it is very easy to jump back to the previous mark or the beginning of an audio file with the tap of your thumb. Third, it is easy to sync the audio to the desktop in a number of formats via Dropbox. Forth and most importantly, if you turn the phone sideways it gives you an intuitive and easy to use waveform editor which allows me to easily extract the bits of speech I want to listen to for my language practice.

Of course, FiRe isn’t perfect. I wish it was easier to edit and see text labels for the markers. But FiRe is not meant to be used for transcription. In another post I will talk about transcription software – an essential part of my language learning workflow. I also wish it supported the “open in” feature of iOS which allows apps to send and receive files from other apps. (They say they are working on it.) I should also add that while I find the built-in microphone is good enough for my needs, there are a number of external mics you can buy if you need better sound quality.

I am not this guy:

Or this guy:

Then he dived into Russian, Italian, Persian, Swahili, Indonesian, Hindi, Ojibwe, Pashto, Turkish, Hausa, Kurdish, Yiddish, Dutch, Croatian and German, teaching himself mostly from grammar books and flash card applications on his iPhone. This in addition to a more formal study of French, Latin and Mandarin at the Dalton School, where he is a sophomore.

I suspect some people are wired differently, like this RadioLab episode about a ragtime musician who can play four concerts in his head at the same time and keep track of what any instrument in each of the four orchestras is playing at any given time.

This is a post about language learning for the rest of us. But first, a little throat clearing. While I have read a few books summarizing contemporary research on language learning, I don’t claim to be an expert on the subject. That means I make some scientific claims without backing them up. Caveat emptor.

1. If you are having difficulty learning a foreign language, it might not be your fault.

There is significant debate over the concept of “learning styles.” Some researchers argue that different students learn things in different ways, while others argue that this theory is simply an excuse for coddling the lazy and stupid. I personally believe that our education system trains us to learn in certain ways and that after a certain age it is hard to learn in new ways. So, if you are a Taiwanese student you are probably pretty good at memorizing large chunks of information because your schooling has taught you how to do so. But if you are an American, you probably don’t have the same memorization skills.

Being good at memorization (like the folks listed at the top of this post) is useful for learning vocabulary, but it isn’t sufficient, nor is it necessary in the strictest sense. By that I mean that being able to provide the English term for a word is not the same thing as being able to use that word in a conversation. There are lots of words I know and can use in Mandarin conversation which I would not be able to provide upon demand if you asked me how to say the Chinese equivalent of some English word. These are different mental skills. I do believe having a good memory can help, but only in the sense that being a good long distance runner means you probably are in better shape and less likely to get winded when doing sprints. The training for one is very different from the training for the other and they shouldn’t get confused.

I realized this very late in my training. I was doing horribly at my intensive Chinese classes and was beginning to despair of ever having the language skills necessary to do ethnographic fieldwork. Every day we had to memorize nearly a hundred Chinese characters and familiarize ourselves with the new grammar patterns in the book. I just couldn’t do it. Moreover, I was becoming sleep deprived and I now know that sleep deprivation makes it harder to learn a foreign language (or anything else for that matter). Luckily, one of our teachers Ms. Chen, was studying at a program which was teaching new methods in language learning and she asked if I would be a guinea pig in her new class. Despairing of anything else working, I agreed. I will explain why in the next section.

2. Learn a foreign language like you learned your mother tongue.

It is true that children are naturally wired to learn a foreign language. We loose a lot of that when we grow up, so there are good arguments to be made for using a different approach when learning a new language. Above all, we can apply our literacy skills to learning the new language – something we can’t do as infants. Nonetheless, I firmly believe that, like infants, we learn a lot just by sheer exposure to a foreign language. Exposure isn’t enough on its own, but we need a lot more exposure than we realize. Listening to a language for half an hour a day in addition to your classes will make a huge difference. Watch TV, read books, read comic books, listen to the radio, eavesdrop, do whatever it takes to increase your exposure to the target language. Like a baby, I believe you need thousands of hours of exposure to achieve basic competence. But unlike a baby we have to work to get that exposure.

What Ms. Chen did that was so different from my previous teachers was to have us first spend lots of time listening to audio of the new lesson. Doing this before we had studied the vocabulary or the grammar. Just listen. Use our knowledge of the language to try to guess the meaning. Like a baby. Only after we had listened numerous times, tried to write down what we heard, and tried to guess the meaning, did we get to look at the grammar patterns. Then we listened again. Guessed again. Then, and only then, did we get to see the new vocabulary list. This worked for me in a way that my previous classes had not. One of the problems, I believe, is that if you learn the vocabulary first, you “hear” the English word instead of the word in the target language when you study the lesson. This way, you really hear the word in the target language and then when you learn the English it helps you to make sense of that word rather than replacing it with the translation.

3. Become the master of your domain.

One of the hardest things about learning a new language – especially if you don’t have a particularly good memory – is that there is simply so much vocabulary to learn, but you need a minimum amount of vocabulary to learn the language. Without that vocabulary you can’t really learn new words or grammar because you don’t have a framework upon which to hang the new information. The solution is to focus on a few domains that interest you. To this day I am much better at talking about politics and social theory in Chinese than I am at talking about sports. Not surprising as I’m pretty much the same way in English. By playing on your strengths you can quickly reach the minimal threshold necessary to begin learning new words “in the wild” (as opposed to what you see in textbooks).

Similarly, if you want to read fiction in another language, or watch a TV show, pick something with numerous volumes or episodes. It will be hard at first, but soon you will know the characters and the basic vocabulary associated with that world. I read all seven Harry Potter books in the Mandarin translation (see this great website comparing Harry Potter in Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese). Doing so was very hard at first, but by the third volume I was familiar with most of the terms associated with the Harry Potter universe, and I could increasingly guess the meaning of words I didn’t know (or at least the general outline of the plot) without recourse to a dictionary. I have also watched every single episode of Doreamon in Chinese (but not the specials or the films, I prefer the TV show). The musically inclined seem to do very well learning songs in the target language – unfortunately that has never worked well for me.

4. Learn like a linguistic anthropologist.

This is even more true for learning an endangered language that might not be as well documented, but I think it is true of all language learning. Ms. Chen’s teaching method taught me the importance of transcription as a teaching method. Trying to transcribe unfamiliar speech makes one a keen observer of the nuances of a language and turns one into a better listener. I know several linguistic anthropologists who have told me that they only really began to get good at a language when they returned home from the field and began to transcribe the tapes they had collected in the field. In essence, this approach combines elements of all the previous rules I’ve mentioned above.

Conclusion: Application of these rules for learning an endangered language.

These rules are not easy to apply to endangered languages. Native speakers are likely to be old and trained in grammar-translation approaches to language teaching, or they might lack any training whatsoever. You have to teach them how to teach you. It is also going to be hard to get lots of exposure to the language if it isn’t being used much anymore. Nor will you find much in the way of TV shows and books in that language. Where there is a lot of material, it may be in an area outside of your domain (in my case: the Bible). You will have to use #4 to create the materials and texts that you need for study. In a later post I will talk more about specific tools one might use to implement such an approach.

A similar issue has arisen in anthropological research on Muslims in North America. In the conclusion to Katherine Pratt Ewing’s edited volume, Being and Belonging (2008), Andrew Shryock called for greater attention to “the immediate and mediated worlds…articulated in everyday life” (206). So, how should one strike a balance between studying media and the everyday? One could study the everyday dimensions of production practices, or how the reception of media is incorporated into people’s everyday lives, or how and why media producers construct the everyday in certain ways.

This issue is especially relevant to many members of the Muslim community in North America and those who conduct research on/with them. Last year I attended two large conferences: The American Academy of Religion (San Francisco, November 2011) and the Islamic Society of North America (Chicago, July 2011). Religious adherents, spokespersons and academics all converged on the notion that engaging with media (news, entertainment, and social media) was the most vital means to influence public opinion about Muslims. I heard numerous panels where professors, journalists, filmmakers, writers, students, etc. discussed the benefits and pitfalls of media activism. Such a large degree of interest solidified my focus on the anthropology of media and Islam by generating more questions than answers. But what about the everyday?

I share Shryock’s view that ethnographies of the everyday lives of Muslims in North America could add texture to our understanding of post-9/11 Muslim identity formations, while also humanizing the Muslim ‘Other’. Yet, television shows about everyday Muslim lives have reached more Muslim and non-Muslim American homes than any ethnography could dream of. Even though an ethnography of actual lives could provide a much needed point of comparison with televisual representations, it seems just as pressing to ethnographically research the construction and reception of the everyday in tv programs.

An ideal approach would analyze the relationship between the everyday in televisual media and lived realities. But, there is no guarantee that such moments would arise during fieldwork and would probably have to be one dimension of a larger study. For this reason, internet sites could prove useful for analyzing how Muslims discuss such shows and apply them to life situations (more on this in the next post), as well as understanding how non-Muslims make sense of them. Another possibility would be to approach the relationship between the everyday and media in a sideways manner (see my last post). This would entail interpreting one in light of the other without positing an underlying unity.

How do you perceive the relationship between media and the everyday? What are some other fruitful directions to pursue?

Moving on.  While my wife was doing interviews, I ended up playing games and hanging out with a lot of the local kids.  Not a bad gig, eh?  Well, I was also the free research assistant, and I went along on many of the interviews, too.  In addition I did a stint of archaeological survey work for a few weeks–just to let you know that it wasn’t all just homeruns and striking out little kids for me that summer (kidding, of course, I let some of them get hits).  But I did play a lot of baseball with the kids when there was downtime.  We used to play tons of games in the solar (i.e. yard) of the house where we were staying.  These games included about 4-5 kids from the family we were renting from, and a whole slew of kids from around the pueblo.  Pretty fun.  Whenever I got back to the house all the kids wanted to play.  Often, they totally wore me out.   It became a pretty regular thing.  But then, I noticed something.

The kids who came over to play were only from certain households.  Other kids never came by, or were explicitly told to stay away by the kids in the household where we were renting.  I didn’t know this was happening at first…but I slowly started figuring things out.  Certain kids would approach me and ask about baseball when I wasn’t at our house, and I thought it was strange that they never actually came over…until the whole mystery started to make more sense.  I also remember some kids hanging out on the edge of the yard, leaning on the wall watching us play.  I’d ask them if they wanted to play, but they would politely refuse every time.  Why didn’t they every want to actually  play?

Well, it’s because those kids who didn’t come over, or who refused to play, knew more about the surrounding community politics than Veronica and I did at the time.  Sure, in some cases, this was a matter in which some kids just don’t like some other kids.  But in many other cases, there was more to it–some of the histories and politics of the adults in the community were filtering down through the kids, and this was showing up in something seemingly innocuous like these afternoon baseball games.  And these kids knew all about it.  In short, some of the kids in the pueblo were persona non grata at this house because of the bad relationships among all their parents.  Now, this isn’t really a shocking reality, but in the context of doing anthropological fieldwork, it was an important lesson.

Why?  Because we realized that where we were staying had its own small, but definitely important, politics effects.  Some members of the community felt comfortable coming by–and others did not.  This was a pretty important lesson, and both Veronica and I learned a lot from the whole experience.  The first thing we did was move the baseball games from a specific residence to a public place–we started playing in the plaza, next to the old stone church that’s hundreds of years old.  This worked out much better, and managed to help put the lid on some of the simmering kid politics (certain kids were less prone to little power plays once we were in public).  But what we also learned was that we have to pay close attention to the effects of the place where we actually end up living–and find ways to deal with issue that crop up.  Of course, there is probably no way to find a place that is completely apolitical or neutral in ANY community.  But it does help to recognize these kinds of things–whether they show up in kids games or elsewhere–and adjust accordingly.

The fury: When I finally checked the recording later that night, the rain made it almost impossible to hear the conversation.  The voices of mother and son were swept up in an auditory wrecking ball that sounded more like a tornado than raindrops.  The interview was still salvageable, but it was hardly a masterpiece of ethnographic audio.  Frustrating.

The admission: While I have a lot of experience in photography, I do not have a lot of experience making high quality audio recordings.  And if we’re going to record interviews, we should make them as good as possible, right?  Sure, I have used digital recorders that do the trick, but the overall quality of most of my interviews hasn’t been exactly stellar.  They have been decent, but not great.  The above incident (which took place during my MA field research) caused me to upgrade my digital recorder to a Zoom H2, which was certainly a step in the right direction.  Still, while I know how to handle a whole slew of difficult lighting situations in photography, I am willing to admit that I have a lot to learn when it comes to recording audio in tricky situations.  Two situations create consistent problems for me: 1) when there is a decent amount of background noise (traffic, dogs barking, rain, etc); and 2) windy, or even slightly breezy situations (which can ruin audio pretty easily).

The question(s): How do you deal with difficult sound/audio situations?  Do you have any tips or methods that help you in these kinds of tricky situations?  What about controlling/mitigating background noise?  Dealing with wind (e.g. what accessories/tools do you use to cut noise)?

*As a gesture of reciprocity, here is a quick, basic tip for photography in the field.  If you want to photograph someone in the middle of the day (when the sun is blazing overhead)…just look for what’s called “open shade” lighting.  That’s basically shade that is just on the edge of bright sunlight–whether under a porch, just inside a doorway, or any other even shadow (watch out for shade under trees because this can produce patchy light).  Open shade blocks direct sun and keep the lighting nice and even.  Just place the person right inside the shade line, but facing the sunlight–this will provide that even light (and avoid really deep shadows).  Here’s the key: the bright sunlight is reflected off the ground to fill in the shaded subject, which creates excellent light.  Much better than trying to photograph people in blinding sunlight all the time.  As one blogger over at “Pioneer Woman Photography” writes, “Open Shade is Your Best Friend” (this link gives a pretty good rundown, including some tips about white balance).  When it comes to photography, simplicity goes a long way.

**Apologies to those of you photographically hip Savage Minds out there who already know about the wonders of open shade.  I tried.  Maybe next time.

We get backed into a corner, with no place to turn.  Our choices are cut off–we are stuck with the hassles of lines, rules, and forms.  We wait on phones, we try to find official offices with no address.  You know what I’m talking about.  We become not just fools in this process, but blithering fools.  But there is power in the inefficiency of bureaucracies–Weber knew that, as did many others.  You know that too, don’t you?  If you want to know more about this, please click here for more options.

Apologies for that…there must be some sort of glitch in the system.  I will send out a request for someone to post a note about composing an email to resolve this issue at a later date.  Please wait.  In the mean time, if you haven’t read David Graeber’s “Beyond power/knowledge: an exploration of the relation of power, ignorance and stupidity,” well, you should.  Here is your chance.

Let me give you a short example of the hilarity of bureaucracy from some of my recent travel experiences:

Setting: A small taco stand in the middle of a well-known tourism destination in Mexico.  The taco stand is located alongside the street, in a very small space next to a little convenience story that sells things like soda and sabritas. Novelas are on the TV (novelas are, for those of you who don’t know, soap operas).

Cast: Myself, and a few good friends.  The cast also includes the very nice people who own the stand, the unseen phone caller, and the official who shows up to complicate the general plot.  And then there is the big official who is in charge of everything, but that’s not for a bit.

Plot: We are at this taco place because said good friends really, really wanted to go there because this place is the best in town.  Plus, we are hungry and need to get some food before a long drive.

So we arrive, greet the owners who are working hard, and sit down.  We order.  Fish tacos for some, and shrimp tacos for the more daring.  One friend decides to walk down the street and buy two beers to drink with lunch.  He does this because beer is not sold in this small taco stand.

Suddenly, after only a few minutes, an official appears on scene.  He does not look at us, but instead talks grimly with the owner of the taco shop.  Things look serious.  Is this about us?  I see the Spanish word for “alcohol” on the back of his uniform.  Sure enough, it IS about us, and those two beers that we have on the table.  Apparently, it is a BIG PROBLEM to have these two beers here, because the owner of the taco shop does not have authorization to have alcohol on his property.  This is little more than a taco stand, mind you.  A small cart, a shade, and one plastic table with some chairs alongside the street.

There are no signs posted–this is just the law.  This is how things work, even if it doesn’t always work that way for many other shops and businesses all around this taco stand.  Plus, the official tells us, someone called in this complaint so it has to be dealt with.  If he did not deal with it, he could get fired.  The fine?  Two thousand US dollars (which is an exorbitant amount of money all things considered).  Who pays?  The owner of the taco stand, who doesn’t exactly make a ton of money.  The owner categorically refuses to even consider paying any fine.  He looks around the street and tells us that this is about jealousy.

We all feel terrible for this seemingly random–and overly punitive–citation.  People drink beer at taco stands all the time.  Why is this case such a big deal?  The officer responds that this is just the way things are, and there is nothing he can do about it.  Besides, we all should have known better–and there was the caller.  The one who got the bureaucratic machine to awaken.  There’s nothing that can be done.  The process has already been started and now it just has to be seen through.  The process is in charge now.  My friend makes one last attempt: I have been traveling here for 30 years and nothing like this has ever happened!  Tough, says the official.  These are the rules.

He writes up the citation and leaves.  We talk with the owner and agree to go to court with him the following day.

The next day we meet him downtown, where we can talk to the big official who is in charge of all this.  The office is small.  Other people are waiting to pay their fines.  These are not rich people who are here to pay, let me put it that way.  We wait, but not for too long.  We step into the office of the official, which is full of what we assume to be contraband liquor that has been seized.  We state our case, and he listens.  The taco stand owner goes first, but doesn’t make much ground.  Then we give it a try.  First of all, we tell the official that this is not the fault of the taco shop owner–it is our fault.  We should be to blame.  We also argue that this should be a warning, since there were no signs posted, there were no other offenses, and since the law is so ambiguous.

He is done listening and tells us: “Ignorance of the law is no excuse.”  He also asks us this pointed question: “If I was in YOUR country and this happened, tell me, what would happen to me?”  One of my friends, who happens to be an attorney AND a restaurant owner, replies: “Well, depending on the situation, you would probably get a warning, especially if this was a first offense.  Besides, while ignorance of the law is no excuse, we also have to take account of intent, no?”

This last line did not please the big official.  It was a good try, though.   But it may have made things worse.  The official  is visibly upset.  He apologizes and says there is little he can do.  The process is what it is, and the law is the law.  He makes a show of punching up some numbers on a calculator.  He reduces the fine substantially, but that was all he could do.  He tells us that we are indeed responsible, along with the owner.  Rules.  Laws.  Regulations.

The fine had to be paid, regardless of all the ambiguity.  He directs us to the other office down the hall where we needed to go to pay the bill.  After we pay, we were to come back and show proof of paying.  There is a thirty dollar fee for the services and time of the big official.  In effect, this is a small toll that must be paid in order to grease the wheels of business and politics.  We all know it.  What choices did we have?  We pay the fine, feeling somewhat victorious because at least it wasn’t two grand.  It’s not really a victory though.  All of this time and money over two beers.  Rules are rules, except when they’re not.  The process controls all.  We are stuck in its tentacles–all of us.  The officials–everyone.  There is power in the nonsense of it all.  It happens here, and everywhere.

End.

*Hilarious Firefox image comes from here.

I usually get a substantial segment of the class from other disciplines — graduate students who want to do ethnographic work in education, business, sociology, or whatnot and want to see how The Anthros do it. Even though other fields have been doing fieldwork as long or longer than us, we somehow capture the imagination of other disciplines as doing the ‘real’ or ‘most intense’ version of ethnographic work. In fact, often we have a bit of a mystical aura around us since no one can figure out exactly what we do, they just know we do it in some extremely ineffable way. Which, too often, is anthropology’s self-understanding as well.

When we read Marcus-and-Clifford postmodernism in my fieldmethods class, non-anthropology graduate students find their ideas not only uncontroversial, but actually the most scientific of the stuff on the syllabi. While the anthropologists consider postmodern reflexivity to be narcissistic, the non-anthros consider it to be the closest thing our discipline has produced to a ‘methods section’: something in the ethnography that describes what we actually did in the field. While the anthropologists approach collaborative anthropology and the decentering of their epistemological authority with a mixture of erotic longing and dread, the non-anthros consider it to be a sensible attempt to check the validity of research results against the intuitions of research respondents.

I think there’s something deeply ironic — and also very insightful — about this take on anthropology’s now-canonized apostates. But I’m not sure what. That anthropology was so far down the rabbit hole that postmodernism looks like an attempt at answerability? That postmodernism is just common sense about the research process with an -OfTheContemporary suffix attached at the end? Or something else?

Let me know what you figure out.

And you say to yourself: Now what?

Just getting yourself to the field can be a trek in an of itself.  Even if you aren’t working half way around the world from your university (I’m not, since I am working in Mexico, which is relatively close).  These things take time.  You have to think about really basic things like transportation, possible medical issues, insurance, communication…and of course food.  There are a lot of things to be worked out when setting up fieldwork, and a lot of decisions to be made and logistical problems to be solved.

Enough of the preamble: this is a post about books.  Choosing books, to be more succinct.  So, when I got on my flight to head down to Mexico, one of the tough decisions that I had to make was which books I was going to take with me.  I narrowed things down to one box, and then had to narrow that down even more.  There’s only so much room in a 737 after all.  The good news for me, at least, is that I am actually going back to the US and then driving back down to Mexico–which will give me the chance to bring even MORE books.  Not too many, of course.  I promise.  For many people who have to travel really far, this is not an option, so the initial book-choosing is all the more critical.

Now is the part of this post where things get interactive.  If you had to choose a half dozen or so absolutely essential anthropological books to take into the field, what would they be?  Here is my list of essential books that I took with me on this trip:

1. The Professional Stranger by Michael H. Agar (Never read this one before this year, so I bought it.  Agar has a good way of laying out and talking about some of the key issues in ethnography.  I’m re-reading it now).

2. The Art of Fieldwork by Harry Wolcott (I’ve always liked Wolcott’s take on ethnography).

3. Research Methods in Cultural Anthropology by H. Russell Bernard (This is an older text, but still full of good stuff.  Sure, I have read through more recent editions of Bernard’s methods books, but this one is still good…and it’s a nice small paperback too).

4. Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes by Emerson et al (Definitely time to browse through this one again, that’s why it made the list).

5. Global Transformations by Michel Rolf Trouillot (I have read parts of this book, but not the whole thing.  I took this along almost entirely because Jason Antrosio mentions it so often and that makes me want to read it all the more).

6. Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value by David Graeber (This book is the one that I have been scouring quite a lot for the last year or so.  If Graeber’s book on debt wasn’t so big that would have come too.  That’ll come down in the Jeep in January, for sure).

7. The Human Economy by Keith Hart et al (I have been reading a lot more of Hart’s work the last year as well.  Great stuff.  This new edited volume is packed with all kinds of good chapters.  Definitely a good choice for any economically minded anthros out there, since it covers a wide territory).

8. Coffee and Community by Sarah Lyon (Dr Lyon is my adviser…definitely gonna read this one inside and out).

Ok, so that’s eight books instead of a half dozen.  It happens.  One interesting thing is that I felt pretty compelled to bring a lot of methods books.  Did you do this as well–or I am the only one?  I’m interested to hear what books you brought to the field, and, more importantly, why.  If you are planning on heading out to do fieldwork, what books do you have in mind?  Are you bringing the classics?  Only the latest methods texts and ethnographies?  Or, on the flip side of all this, are you some techie hipster who has gone entirely digital, thereby completely eliminating this whole issue?

*The top important book that I MEANT to bring but somehow forgot?  Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History.  Ouch.  Gotta bring that one for sure.

What attention it has gotten has largely been positive, such as this glowing review in CounterPunch, or this blog post by Louis Proyect. A review in VAR was slightly more critical, but not by much. Still, the following comment from Stephen Broomer’s review gets to the heart of the matter:

Padilha’s contribution to this debate is confined within the limits of documentary form. Secrets of the Tribe is a narrative-driven documentary, and as such it privileges dramatic contrast over the reinforcement of facts or proof.

Indeed, I would go much further. The film struck me as little more than tabloid journalism, reveling in salacious scandals, academic cat fights, and conspiracy theories in the name of discussing research ethics and scientific methodology. It reminded me of one of those local news stories where a reporter exclaims how shocked he is to discover that there is prostitution in his city while the camera indulges in digitally blurred closeups of exposed female flesh.

In comparing this film to tabloid journalism I don’t mean to impute Padilha’s motives. Padilha is clearly someone who cares deeply about Brazil’s indigenous population. He also deserves credit for actually interviewing Yanomami for the film. But Padilha is not an anthropologist. As one review put it: “A student of math and physics, Padilha turned to filmmaking after a brief, unsatisfying career in banking.” (He is most famous for “Bus 174″ about a hijacked bus in Rio.) For this reason he seems unable to meaningfully engage with contemporary debates about fieldwork practices or the nature of anthropological research.

I don’t really know which bothered me more: the lumping together of pedophilia accusations against Jacques Lizot and Kenneth Good with Patrick Tierney’s accusations against James Neel and Napoleon Chagnon, the fact that the film completely ignored Tim Asch even as it relies extensively on his footage, or the way it presented anthropological epistemology as a simplistic choice between the hard-science of sociobiology on the one hand and mushy-headed cultural relativism on the other.

What really upsets me is that these are serious issues, which warrant serious discussion. By simplifying the scientific debates and lumping them together with pedophilia accusations, the film missed a unique opportunity to make an important contribution to the popular understanding of anthropology. Too bad.

Eco-chic, like many other socio-cultural manifestations of neoliberalism is rife with contradiction. The fundamental contradiction being that it is a social justice movement within consumer capitalism. The producers of eco-chic goods and experiences are structured by capitalism’s profit motive. Likewise consumers of eco-chic goods and experiences are motivated by ideals that try to transcend or correct the ecological or deleterious human impacts of capitalism. Thus both producer and consumer of eco-chic are caught in a contradiction between their social justice drives and their suspension in the logic of neoliberalism. Eco chic events such as Burning Man and television networks such as Al Gore’s Current TV also express the fundamental contradiction between the social and the entrepreneurial in social entrepreneurialism. How do the contradictions within eco-chic represent themselves in American West Coast’s cultural expressions such as Burning Man and Current TV?

I don’t study eco-chic but it is a reoccurring motif. The specific location for my ethnographic encounter with eco-chic is the annual Burning Man festival that I have been attending since 2001. Combining countercultural ideals and Web 2.0 notions of sharing with ecological mindfulness and new primalism, Burning Man is the quintessential event in North America for the eco-chic radical. Following Fred Turner—and I’ve stated this before–that Burning Man is a ‘sociotechnical commons’—the cultural infrastructure for the digital media industries of California. Burning Man is expensive, catering to the Silicon Valley intelligencia who are eco-chic and have the finances to explore themselves along with 50,000 people at Black Rock City, a temporary metropole we construct for a delirious week of personal expression and community celebration on the barren alkaline plains of a Nevada desert a half-days drive from San Francisco. Thus, like most iterations of cultural and community identity in neoliberalism, Burning Man is rich with contradictions. The economic costs and carbon footprint required to freely express oneself and live briefly in alliance with nature and community and supposedly outside of capitalism, being only the most obvious contradiction.

Ethnographic research requires specificity so I have focused on one manifestation of the eco-chic culture of San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and Burning Man. Since 2006 I have been producing television documentaries and conducting participant observation with the global television network Current TV who has been exclusively covering Burning Man since 2005. Current TV, founded by famed eco-chic Vice President Al Gore, is based on the mission to democratize television production through broadcasting citizen journalism on television screens around the world. Current TV employees, of whom I have interviewed many, express eco-chic values of sustainable coolness as well as a technoutopian idealism about how new media is going to improve democracy and heal cultural and ecological fractions. Thus, like Burning Man, Current TV is full of contradictions, namely the attempt to instigate democratic processes within the most capitalized and hierarchical cultural industry–global television.

How are the contradictions of neoliberalism mediated by an eco-chic culture of media producers, digital designers, and artists spatio-temporally situated between the radically expressive neo-primitive festival Burning Man and Al Gore’s media democratizing global television network Current TV? Both of these sites of cultural production reflect the contradictions that befall the high tech cultural industrial centers of Silicon Valley in the shadow of the countercultural epicenters of San Francisco and the Bay Area. These contradictions can be summed up in the contradiction between doing good and doing well, being ecologically sensitive while being hedonistic, being trendy while being independent, and being a creative producer while also being a conscious consumer. These contradictions don’t fly. As an anthropologist I seek to critically assess these contradictions while exploring the social, historical, economic, and technological affordances that rationalize and valorize eco-chic as a valid cultural identity as well as an impacting consumer movement.

Whether eco-chic, Burning Man, and Current TV are developments of social justice within corporate culture or merely new incarnations of neoliberalism’s sophisticated production of surplus from the social justice energies of people is not an empirical question. Capitalism is fraught with contradictions, the primary one being the drive to enhance life for many while retaining a surplus for the few. The point of this research is to document how these contradictions are mediated at specific times and spaces, namely, early 21st century Silicon Valley and its proxy locations like Hollywood and Burning Man, in accordance with the institutional value sets and technological assemblages of these specific spaces.

On a more meta-level what does it mean for a larger anthropological project when it recognizes these trends in values? Chris Kelty recently talked about how “transhumanism”–that utopian value for immortality through science and technology–continues to appear throughout his research with computer scientists, hackers, and other geeks. He isn’t doing research on “transhumanists” but their values crop up consistently in the course of doing his other work. Eco-chic is like this I assume for many scholars investigating Western liberal elites. It isn’t the focus but the wider socio-cultural context for the research. When I recognize these larger patterns that appear to unify subjects across a field of seemingly disparate scenes I get that rush that I’ve finally found “culture.” Is it, or merely a typification?

Free Speech TV at the National Conference on Media Reform

From its inception in 1995, Free Speech TV’s goal has been to infiltrate and subvert the vapid, shrill and corporately controlled American television newscape with challenging and unheard voices. Fast forward to 2011, and in the age of viral videos, social media and ubiquitous computing, the same issues persist.

An excellent young pro-freedom-of-speech organization, Free Press, called all media activists to Boston for the National Conference on Media Reform (NCMR), April 8-10, to celebrate independent media and incubate strategies to fight the tide of corporate personhood, monopolization in communication industries, and the denial of access to the public airwaves.

These are issues FSTV has long fought, first with VHS tapes of radical documentaries shipped to community access stations throughout the nation, then through satellite carriage in 30 million homes, and now via live internet video and direct dialogues with the audience through social media.

FSTV was at NCMR in full force, covering live panels on everything from the role of social media in North African revolutions to media’s sexualization of women; developing strategic relationships with print, radio, internet and television collaborators; interviewing luminaries like FCC Commissioner Copps; and inspiring the delegates by opening up the otherwise closed and corporatized satellite television world to the voices of media activists fighting for access and diversity during a frankly terrifying period in American media freedom.

One question haunted the many stages, daises and dialogues at the NCMR: Is the open, decentralized, accessible and diverse internet – by which media production, citizen journalism and community collaboration have been recently democratized – becoming closed, centralized and homogenous as it begins to look and feel more like the elite-controlled cable television system?

For example, while we were in the conference, the House voted to block the FCC from protecting our right to access an open Internet. The mergers of Comcast and NBC-Universal and AT&T/T-Mobile loomed behind every passionate oration. And yet FSTV was there to document when FCC Commissioner Copps took the stage stating he would resist the denial of network neutrality and such monopolizing mergers.

Internationally, examples of the power and problems of the internet exist. The Egypt-based Facebook group “We are all Khaled Said” had 80,000 members, many who amassed at Tahrir Square on January 26, instigating a wave of democratization that began in Tunisia – also fueled by social media – and hopefully continuing to Libya. Two days later, however, the Mubarak regime was able effectively to hit a “kill switch” on the internet and target activists using Facebook for arrest, an activity that worked against the desires of the repressive regime. At the NCMR, Democracy Now! reporter Sharif Abdel Kouddous said,  “Facebook was down … so they hit the streets. It had the reverse desire and effect that the government wanted to happen.”

In 2010, Reporters Without Borders compiled a list of 13 internet enemies – countries that suppress free speech online. The U.S. wasn’t on the list, but U.S. companies Amazon, Paypal, Mastercard, Visa and Apple were pressured to cut digital and financial support for whistleblowing WikiLeaks. The point is obvious: A vigilant press aided by an open, uncensored and unprivatized internet are necessary yet threatened and are the focus of FSTV’s coverage at NCMR.

FSTV embodies that ancient movement of ordinary people taking back power from entrenched elites. Today, every issue, from class inequality to ecological justice – is a media issue. However, our media sources, from journalists to internet and television delivery systems, are being co-opted by monopolizing corporations and lobbyists. As an independent, open and interactive television network, FSTV is an antidote to the problems facing free speech and democracy as more media power is centralized in fewer hands. Thankfully, as we found out in Boston, FSTV is not alone in this dangerous and difficult operation of media liberation.

—
Jenkins hyperbolically describes “critical pessimists” as people who “opt out of media altogether and live in the woods, eating acorns and lizards and reading only books published on recycled paper by small alternative presses”. This is a false exaggeration of a movement that is providing a necessary check on corporate power and mindfully working for greater civic, community, and citizen involvement in media production.

The last morning of a national conference on progressive media one of my friendly informants invited me to a power breakfast at 8 AM at a 4 star hotel. An HD camera rested on a high tripod above two semi-private tables overlooking the harbor via tall glass windows that shed morning light on flutes of parfait and silver pitchers of coffee. Having a rather late night at the cash bar at the local whiskey establishment we hungrily consumed our breakfast, caffeine, and juice as we awaited our invitation to introduce ourselves. Magazine editors, television producers, community media activists, major funders, radio DJs, progressive television personalities, and one out-of-place anthropologist quickly gave their name in an audible wave around the tables.

The editor emeritus of a major progressive magazine presented two timely issues that were cause for celebration and alarm. He wanted to celebrate a success that needed repeating. For that we needed to generate an institutional history of the practices that worked. A small committee was formed through a show of hands. As the house social scientist it sounded like that fit my skill set so I volunteered. I was encouraged to visit the archive of programmatic and pragmatic emails that went quickly and passionately between the groups and individuals hustling to organize leading up to the days of the successful operation. Next, there was not as much agreement, as can be expected, about what to do about the alarming new situation but engaged debated ensued about fundraising, the upcoming 2012 election, and ever increasing media consolidation around corporate mergers. We agreed to collaborate. But what did collaboration mean?

Thinking through this question and about Part.Public.Part.Lab‘s work in the article Birds, I began to typologize social interaction into three types: participation, collaboration, and mergers. First is participation, which was the focus of Birds, and can originate from an organized public or be provoked by a formal social organization. When participation emerges, it can come from three different categories descending in the amount of time and resource commitment, as media scholar Mirko Tobias Schäfer explains in his excellent 2011 book, Bastard Culture! How Participation Transforms Cultural Production. The first, according to Schäfer is modification—the hacking of physical devices such as Xboxs or software. The second is a form of explicit participation, where subject exert agency and act on an ambition for professional or personal growth. Examples of explicit participation include the now classic forms of user-generated content production: making YouTube videos, Facebook profiles, and Tweets. And, thirdly, is implicit participation, the subjectively lackadaisical or algorithmically automated forms of participation such as “liking” this or that, or simply conducting Google searches that implicitly participate with Google’s capacity to fine tune and target its search and advertising machinery. Each of these three forms of participation—modification, and explicit and implicit participation, are vertically organized between an organized public and a formal enterprise. For example, my co-diners this morning—magazine editors, television audience experts, social justice social media gurus—each incorporate the network and economic effects of at least two of these forms of participation into their annual planning and budgeting. The vertical power relation of this participation distinguishes it from what I define as collaboration—which is horizontally ordered. Modifiers and hackers take professional objects and manipulate them for more idiosyncratic and local uses; explicit UGC contributors upload content to billionaire companies; and implicit participants do the same, but often out of ignorance or lack of concern.

Second in my typology is collaboration, which my little story above demonstrates, and is usually the tool for the under-funded and those organized to work for social justice. Collaboration is a middle-range theory, between unincorporated or uninterested participation, and fully incorporated and economically motivated mergers. Collaboration is a powerful tactic to resist hegemonic power, and thus codes an antagonistic relationship to vertically arranged power structures–while at the same time resisting the temporal transformation into hierarchy–but it is structurally a horizontally ordered strategy for internal practical formation. The lateral pooling of resources—sometimes with potential competitors as I saw at the power breakfast–proves that, in the social justice realm, the efficacy of the mission trumps the funding operation (sometimes to the point of compromising the efficacy). Despite the fact that many of these organizations compete for a decreasing share of philanthropic dollars, what was agreed upon was a commitment to collaborate, pool resources, and attack the problem vigorously from the skills sets dispersed throughout the group. New media firms also exhibit collaborative strategies as anthropologist Thomas Malaby showed in his study of collective problem solving and virtual world coding in Second Life. But while the visionaries of Second Life devise such pro-corporate tools such as the Love Machine, which enables collaboration and appreciate to flow laterally peer-to-peer across the company, collaboration is not dependent upon digital technology and is a tactic innovated by the dependencies of social justice activism.

The lateral collaboration I viewed at the power breakfast was not an example of what we wrote about in Birds. This was not internet enabled participation, but rather collaboration between people over eggs and hearty dialogue. Email is the most sophisticated ‘new’ media system. These collaborators are all technically literate and use very sophisticated technologies in their broadcast and start-up professional lives. But they are not dependent upon digital peer-to-peer networks for the sharing of Perl code, complex video uploading systems, or sophisticated medical record aggregation databases for their collaboration. Rather, embodied meetings and simple text-based communications suffice. They set ad hoc goals and tasks and produce tools, data, and methods that are generative as opposed to being tethered to protocols within the collaborative community.

The third type of social interaction I have only remotely observed but it permeates the community. While embedded in a hardware, software, and enterprise television and internet research and development laboratory, I witnessed the excitement of employees as their company purchased a world leading internet video database. That is another story, but even without this experience I and several others at this breakfast were literally holding in our hands a physical and symbolic technology at the center of this third type of social interaction (our smart phones): the corporate merger. Throughout the media reform conference, whose final day we were beginning with a working brunch, loomed the historical reality and threat of media consolidation, vertical integration, and mass media industrial mergers of US internet, cable, and wifi industries. The mergers of T-Mobile and AT&T and NBC-Universal and Comcast were the reasons for the alarms of the magazine editor who initiated the debate of our key problem.

I begin to wonder: what is the cultural industrial logic of the corporate merger? Larger firms consume smaller ones to be able to fold their resources into the mission of the behemoth. Complementary firms consolidate their resources to achieve a larger market control. Distinct firms merge to expand their sway over new social, geographical, or technological horizons. Though stated in official press releases as benevolently balanced to those firms merging, the generous laterality I observed in the collaborating social justice media organizations, is unlikely the reality in the case of the corporate merger.

This expansive community in progressive media culture engages with all three of these forms of social interaction–participation, collaboration, and mergers. Modification, implicit, and explicit participation within organized publics, while never without aspirations or connections to formal social enterprises, is essentially on the level of the person. Social media, with ever user-interface simplicity—as well as algorithmic capitalization–is the technological kit for participation. Collaboration, on the other hand, is a tactic for under-resourced and mission driven organizations to share capacities horizontally across their field. In-person meetings, phone calls, and emails are enough of the socio-technical modalities necessary for these collaborations. Finally, is the merger, the hostile or peaceful economic takeover of complementary, heterogeneous, or homogenous firms. Financial and journalistic manipulations fill out the technological app-base for this type of social interaction.

Personally, I find I do better work when my research subjects are people who have a kind of critical consciousness which allows them to function as real collaborators in the investigation process. This isn’t a question of education or class. I’ve worked with people from poor communities who, as a result of years of activism, were much more articulate and critical of their own situation than fairly middle-class school teachers with master’s degrees. Nor is it a question of having similar politics to my research subjects, although I find that can help. Much more important is that sense that my subjects are themselves invested in the research process.

Good research requires spending a tremendous amount of time with your subjects and making significant demands on their time as well. There are all kinds of claims people make for the superiority of one research methodology over another, but I think it often comes down to who we feel comfortable working with – and what kinds of people feel comfortable working with us. Of course, there are often cases where we must do research with unsympathetic subjects, and that’s an important skill to have, but I think there are very few ethnographers who can do good work without the benefit of some kind of bond with their informants. You don’t have to like them, but you do have to be able to work with them – and working with them means much more than just having them tolerate your presence.