wickedqueen.net

This past week for my collaborative learning course, we read three articles on activity theory, a theoretical perspective concerned with how actors work towards goals/objects from particular motives/passions, using certain tools to do so–based on the little triangular diagram that seems much beloved of activity theory, I would include “rules” within “tools,” which is of course very ethnomethodological of me.

That is to say, ethnomethodologists often argue that rules are never sufficient to account for people’s actions, no matter how frequently people claim that they did things “because of” rules. Rules are simply resources, another possible tool in the toolkit when people are accounting for action–and in fact, one often sees cases in which people justify a seeming violation of a rule by demonstrating how it was in fact following the “spirit” of the rule or something similar. I like to think of roles in a similar way, actually, although I would freely admit that some roles are harder to get out of or into than others, and of course accounts can fail in the sense that other participants do not accept them. But anyway. Activity theory.

One of the articles, Wolff-Michael Roth’s* “Activity Theory and Education: An Introduction” (2004), discusses the early absence of activity theory from the discipline of education (the course I’m taking is in educational psychology, if you’ll recall). He attributes its rise in visibility in part to articles published in English by Engestrom and notes that you can trace this ascent by looking at the increasing attendance at activity theory-related sessions as the American Educational Research Association national meetings.

As pretty much all academics know, there are trends within academia. Certain topics or theoretical perspectives get hot and everyone wants to get in on the action. Sometimes these trends are Madonna; sometimes they are Britney Spears. In the case of activity theory, the main barrier to its having been promoted earlier seems to have been a lack of English publications; this is certainly a problem for non-English-speaking researchers in engaging in dialogue with a larger audience, but one that I think is often not considered much. I’m guilty myself of crossing off potential references without a second thought if they’re not in English–I’m a graduate student; I have papers to write and articles to submit and classes to teach; I just don’t have time to learn German. This is, however, a good example of how what we know, or think is important, is often shaped by forces that are mostly invisible to us. Even if we know they’re there, we mostly don’t think about them.

Language barriers are an obvious example, but in fact academics’ perspectives are typically a lot narrower than that. We get trained in certain disciplines, with bodies of literature behind them–some of them are older and more entrenched than others, but graduate education is pretty focused anyway. Interdisciplinary research seems to be getting more and more buzz, and it seems obvious that it’s a good approach when you have a particular topic established. I remember a couple of years ago talking to a guy at a party who was interested in autism diagnoses. He wasn’t a sociologist, and had no idea about the work within conversation analysis (narrower and narrower) that had been done on the topic. He was really interested in it when I told him about it. I suspect he probably never read it, or maybe read it and got frustrated and decided to stick with more sensible perspectives.

By which I mean, more sensible to him. Academic training is all about learning a paradigm and working in it. Interdisciplinary research and perspectives seem like a great idea, kind of like ending world hunger, but then they turn out to be really complicated and confusing and people keep referencing pet theorists and very few people actually want to quit being a sociologist or a psychologist or whatever, and there’s a tendency, I think, to get frustrated with people for not having had the same training as you. It’s probably worse when you’re all sort of in the same division, like social science–physicists are clearly alien; you don’t expect them to know anything about Marx. But when people know about Marx, and then turn out not to know what YOU know about Marx, it’s confusing–especially when you start out thinking you know the same things, because duh, why wouldn’t you?**

For example, one of the other articles, a piece on online community, includes a bit on sociability:

The important design point here is that designers shift their focus from simply supporting usability to supporting what Preece (2000) described as ’sociability.’ Barab, MaKinster, Moore, Cunningham, and The ILF Design Team (2001) described sociability as ‘those social policies and technical structures that support the community’s shared purpose and social interactions among group members’ (p. 83)” (Barab et al. 2004)

I realize that what is being termed “sociability” here actually diverges rather sharply from Simmel’s definition of sociability as non-instrumental, but it comes as quite a shock, to a sociologist, to see the word “sociability” and not even a breath of him. This may just be an exaggeration of a problem common to a lot of social scientific terms, which is that we tend to use words like “self” and “motive” that already have vernacular connotations that may not actually mean what we want them to mean.***

I don’t mean, actually, to be negative about interdisciplinary research–I think it’s a good idea, just like a bunch of other people do. I do think that when attempting it, participants needs to really think about their own differences in perspective, and try not to ever assume that two people using the same word mean the same thing. There are language barriers amongst English speakers.

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*It is not often that I encounter another academic with an apparently English name as non-normative as mine.

***I was told once that Japanese academics, as part of their academic training, have to learn new sets of kanji (Chinese characters) for the technical terminology of their discipline. I wonder if their social sciences follow this convention as well, or if they, too, use words pinched from laypeople.

This semester I will be blogging weekly for my course on collaborative learning, because it is a requirement; I will be doing it here rather than on the course site because a) I have enough blogs to maintain already and b) there’s a precedent, if you’ll recall my many prelim-studying entries and those times I geeked out over the stuff we saw in Alice’s digital media literacy class; besides c) my audience is hella nerdy anyway.

I was surprised to find that the first week’s readings actually referenced conversation analysis (CA) quite a bit. Back when I was studying for my prelim on the subject, I read several chapters from an anthology on CA and cognition, so it’s not that I don’t think it’s appropriate for the subject under study, but it’s always interesting to see what people who were not actually trained in CA make of it. Usually something that would make the hardcore CA people cry, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. At any rate, given the focus of the course and thus the readings on CMC (computer-mediated communication) in the service of collaborative learning, and particularly text-based quasi-synchronous CMC (e.g. chat), the data seem well-fitted to CA. If your concern as an analyst is that you have access to all resources that were available to participants at the time of interaction, chat logs are pretty comprehensive, especially if they’re time-stamped.

In some cases, though, lack of unique adequacy raised issues for me; “‘[u]nique adequacy’ is defined here as the researcher’s ability to analyse the encountered social world from practitioner research rather than from ‘classical social theorising’ (Cuff et al., 1992) perspectives” (Wakefield 2000). Stahl (2006) seems to suggest more difficulty with tracking parallel topics in chat than I believe most participants actually have, especially if they’ve been using chat for their own personal purposes for any length of time. The book was published in 2006, but I’m not entirely sure when the research he references using CMC for group work on math problems was conducted–certainly a major issue in research on the internet in any context is that today’s internet is a dramatically different place from the internet of even five years ago, and the average participant gets more and more savvy with the passing of time.

On the other hand, technologies and applications also change very quickly. As I’ve mentioned before, pretty much the only people MUDding now are the same people who were MUDding in 1992 when it was an exciting topic for academic research. MMOGs are certainly the virtual descendants of MUDs, but they’re not quite the same and they are occupied by mostly different people. Email lists, while not dead, definitely seem to me to be on the way out, although perhaps not in academia as in the general population–my main exposure to email lists outside of academia was in activism and fandom. I wanted to talk about sexuality and read Star Trek pornography, and for some time, those needs were mainly met by Usenet and listservs.

Now, however, there are websites, particularly hive communities like LiveJournal, and communities on Facebook. Almost all the undergraduates who I interviewed last semester about Facebook use remarked at some point or another that email was “formal” and not something they used for socialization or personal communication. This is probably not going to stop academics, because we are the kind of people who like spreadsheets and monographs and Being Important, but for everyone else, email seems to have become sort of stuffy and boring, like actual mail or something.

Even chat, which is to me so familiar that I tend not to distinguish in vernacular reports whether I was talking to someone face-to-face or virtually, may be on its way to obsolescence even as I type. Text messaging on mobile devices seems a bit different in character than chat, and now that everyone has a cell phone and everyone is also online, I think there are fewer extended interactions happening in chat, even if people do leave their AIM up as a kind of answering service, competing to have the deepest or wittiest away message in the dorm. Or, you know, I’ve always been weird; maybe it was always more random solicitations for cybersex than anything else. It’s not like my college chats were deep, but they were properly punctuated.

Really, I just wonder how long it will be before computer voice chat largely supplants text chat. Gamers already prefer it; they use third party applications to supplement the game interfaces that supply only text chat because it’s so clunky, especially when you’re trying to coordinate raids. I use Skype when I play City of Heroes, and I’ve also started using it to call my parents because my cell phone service is so shitty in my new place. As everyone’s systems catch up, I can easily see more and more people using voice chat in place of the phone, but also in place of “impersonal” text. Voice may kill the chat star. Maybe. On the other hand, there are advantages to not being totally present for the people to whom you’re talking, and sometimes I don’t want to devote that much attention.

Once again, I have to say simply that all I know about the internet in five years is that I probably can’t imagine it. Sure, I want that headjack as much as ever, but even if I get it, there’s no telling what comes with it. It makes it hard to keep your research current.

ETA: NOTE TO POTENTIAL EMPLOYERS AND MY PARENTS: No, I was not participating! Read the footnotes, geeze. It just HAPPENED TO BE amateur night.

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I have mentioned before that African American women love my hair. Just yesterday I was walking down the Infinite Corridor and was informed by a young black woman (she looked about junior high age): “Man, that makes you HOT.” Something along those lines, anyway. I remember thinking that I don’t understand how the kids talk these days, although it seemed generally positive.

At any rate, I have identified another group with a special appreciation for my hair: exotic dancers.*

Proportionally, exotic dancers seem to love my hair even more than African American women. I see a lot of the latter in any given day and only a small number of them say anything about my hair. Of course, I recognize that dancers are working for tips. They also got to see my hair under a black light, a condition in which it is particularly striking.** Unfortunately, I suspect I will never be able to conduct a truly controlled study to determine, for good and all, who likes my hair BEST. But I will say, over half the professional dancers I encountered last week were very enthusiastic about it.

The amateurs, not so much. An interesting difference between professional dancers and the women who participate in amateur night is that the former see a group of women and make a beeline for them, whereas the latter LITERALLY cannot be paid to come close.

Another thing that dancers like (in addition to my hair, the nominal topic of this post in case you lost track) is $2 bills. Another member of my party knew this and came prepared. I realize that $2 bills are worth twice as much as $1 bills, so they’ve got that going for them, but dancers seem to love them far out of proportion to their doubled economic value. One woman told us that they are lucky, which I of course found subculturally fascinating.*** Another woman told us that she gives them to her daughter, a fact that I suspect she would never have disclosed to a group of men–that’s not what they’re buying.

At one point, I was in the bathroom and heard two women discussing how “there’s nothing like a strip club to make you feel bad about your body, god, I need to do some crunches!”

Huh, I thought. You’d think amateur night would be more of a consolation than that.

I mean, no, I do not think I am as hot as the PROFESSIONAL dancers,**** especially not the one who was double-jointed and could cross her ankles behind her head. But this is kind of like acknowledging that I could not take an Army Ranger in a fight. They’re PROFESSIONALS and they’ve dedicated way more time to their pursuit of choice (being smoking hot, killing people with spoons) than I am willing to put in, so it’s not like there’s any SHAME in it.

Anyway, I have my hair. Even the dancers are impressed.

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*My information from a friend of mine who worked for several years in the profession, as well as what I gleaned from that Lerum 2001 article I read for the social psych prelim, suggests that dancers do not like being referred to as “strippers.” I have to agree that the term eclipses a truly impressive degree of athletic skill, not to mention various other professional competencies that most people probably don’t think of when they hear “stripper.”

****But I am totally as hot as the amateurs. The main difference between us, I would venture, is that I recognize the fact that I lack the necessary social skills for success in exotic dancing. Nudity? No problem. Making nice to strangers? Not so much. Also, I saw one of the amateurs almost fall off the pole while hanging upside down. I try to avoid any job that entails the risk of cracking my skull open, naked or clothed.

I redyed my hair a couple of days ago; for possibly the first time ever, I actually redyed it the same color that it had previously been. And I didn’t even redye it because the color had faded badly; it was just that I hadn’t bleached before my last dye job and consequently had, like, inch-long roots.

The color is Special Effects Cherry Bomb, which comes out a bright deep neon red, and fades to hot pink. The hot pink was still plenty vibrant two months after dying, but like I said, I had roots.

When you have brightly colored anime character hair, the world is a different place. It provides a warrant for total strangers to talk to you; some of them might be the kind of people who talk to strangers anyway (”Do you have the time,” “Do you have any spare change,” etc.), but as my friend Keely remarked to me once at a gas station after a woman had shrieked in delight over my hair from across the parking lot, I get a lot of attention.

What’s interesting is the way in which people seem to take the warrant for granted. Last week at the gym, before I redyed, I was leaving the cardio room behind a very attractive girl wearing short-shorts with “BEACH BUM” emblazoned across the ass. I was thinking, I have to admit, uncharitable thoughts about her, even a little bit after she held the door for me, but then as I was pausing to stretch my calves against the wall, she turned and said: “I love your hair, by the way.”

I said thank you and felt bad about thinking uncharitable things about the kind of person who wears BEACH BUM short shorts. Probably you shouldn’t judge people by what they wear to the gym, although my personal work-out attire is pretty indicative of my overall self-presentation and did in fact lead to me last week in the weight room hanging upside down on one of the benches to do sit-ups and and suddenly hearing from behind/above me, “CHRIST, woman, do you own ANYTHING that isn’t garish?” It was one of the guys from my program, who ought to know the answer to that question by now.

Anyway, back to the BEACH BUM girl: the interesting bit here is the “by the way,” which may have struck you as somehow unusual or weird in the context of the stranger’s compliment, delivered as it was apropos of nothing other than a subvocalized “thank you” from me after she held the door.

Phrases like “by the way” are typically employed to mark a topic or utterance as unconnected to sequentially antecedent talk (Heritage 1984), of which we hadn’t had any–talking about my hair, on the surface, hardly seems like an “abrupt shift” in topic when we weren’t talking about anything else to begin with. Strangers in public places frequently compliment my hair. In fact, I can refer to two cases right now that both occurred today, following the redying (it is pretty dramatic, I’ll post a photo when I get home):

1. In the locker room, I returned to my locker from the showers and there was another woman in my row, middle-aged, putting on her work-out clothes. As I stood there unlocking my locker, completely naked,* she asked in an enthusiastic tone, “How often do you have to dye your hair to keep it that red?”

   I allowed as how it was recently redyed, but that it would fade to a still vibrant pink, and we proceeded to have a conversation about hair dying as I dressed–she wanted her stylist to put in purple streaks, but the stylist refused on the grounds that it wouldn’t hold, and I confirmed that purple and blue are really the hardest colors to dye and you never know how they’re going to fade.

2. On my walk home from the gym, I was on the phone with my friend Crystal, reporting excitedly on recent weight loss. As I was walking and talking, a young woman walking in the other direction stopped, exclaimed over my hair, and directly asked me where I got the dye and what kind. Crystal was laughing over the whole exchange on her end, but it was interesting that the woman oriented towards the topic of my hair and the dye (for her potential use, as she presented it) as urgent enough that the phone conversation in progress could be interrupted for it (assuming she saw I was on the phone and didn’t just assume I was one of those sidewalk crazies).

In neither of these cases did the speakers produce any suggestion that the topic of talk was somehow accountable, i.e. in need of explanation, despite the fact that they both spoke to me at times when ANY initiation of talk might be accountable, i.e. a) when recipient is naked and b) when recipient is already engaged in conversation.

There WAS a case on the day that I redyed, when I was walking up State after buying some vitamin repair serum (the bleach really did a number on my hair), when a middle-aged woman walking with one or two people who seemed to be “in her party” called to me, “I love your hair!” and when I thanked her, responded with, “I really do!”

This sincerity upgrade struck me as sort of odd given that I had already produced an appreciation token accepting her compliment (cf. Pomerantz 1978), which seems to implicitly accept the underlying proposal that it was sincere, unless I unwittingly delivered my reply with some kind of sarcastic intonation.** However, again, the introduction of the topic itself was not treated as an accountable action. In general, one assumes, there is a presumption that a person with Cherry Bomb hair has put herself out, and her hair in particular, to be talked about. The act of having Cherry Bomb hair is itself an inherent mentionable.

Imagine, I suppose, if you had “normal” hair, and a stranger on the street called out to you, “I love your hair!” It would seem odd. You might wonder what they loved about it. Conversely, although I have a pretty kicky little style going on right now, I never consider this to be the referent of the compliment when people say, “I love your hair!” And if they say, “What a great color!” I don’t think they’re talking about my shirt. So in a way, they’re right; the topic is immediately clear to me when introduced by strangers. My hair IS a mentionable.

Obviously, if I really minded, I wouldn’t have dyed it Cherry Bomb (or Party Time Pink, or Atomic Turquoise, or Ultra Violet, or Electric Blue, or Hot Rod Red, etc.). The BEACH BUM’s vaguely apologetic/explanatory “by the way” struck me as odd precisely because no one else ever seems to address the topicality of my hair as accountable, and I myself don’t think of it as particularly accountable when people compliment it.***

Maybe she was just an exceptionally polite person. Definitely an outlier in the set of “strangers complimenting my hair,” but as you can see, members do not make sense of their worlds by statistical calculation (Heritage 1984); we work at it until we have an account, like exceptional politeness. Works for me, anyway.

An additional note: the politeness account only works because the utterance accounted for through “by the way” is itself complimentary. One assumes that many people do not like my hair, but they rarely say so, and if they do it is indirect (see footnote ***). I don’t know if people often remarked on my hair when I was a small child and it was noticeably weird (I have mutant hair), but I bet that if they did, there was a lot more accounting going on.

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*This should not be taken as a criticism of people who talk to naked people in places where it is perfectly reasonable that people should be naked, like locker rooms. In fact, I wish more people would act comfortable about nudity in those settings; it makes ME uncomfortable when everyone around me seems to be performing complex gyrations under their towels lest god forbid someone see their breasts, while I would be perfectly happy to prance around without bothering to wrap my towel around me or anything. I feel like I am violating norms.

***I do, on the other hand, consider bald formulations of the state of my hair, i.e. “Your hair is pink,” to be accountable. Since I and any other competent member know damn well that my hair is pink, I have to assume that something is being done that is not an informing, because obviously I already know, and is not a compliment, because if it were they’d just come out and say so, and thus my instinct is to attribute hostile motives to the speaker.

The thing about studying for prelims (which is where I’ve been) is that there’s no ceiling. Anything I’m not reading is something that I potentially could be reading; any time that I am not reading is time that I potentially could be reading something. Of course my advisor has given me some articles and suggested that I read them, and obviously I read them (and should reread them soon), and there are the syllabi from the classes I took in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, which I have also been rereading, but still: there’s plenty of other stuff that might be good to read. And I could always be reading more than I am.

Of course, you don’t know whether you have read enough until you take the prelim, and it’s a simple test: if you read enough, you pass. This is not terribly helpful in any prescriptive sense, however.

This will probably come out of left field, but what I was actually leading up to here is that I’m planning to make a t-shirt.

I’m currently reading Scientific practice and ordinary action: Ethnomethodology and studies of science by Michael Lynch. The first chapter lays out some critiques of ethnomethodology, the least serious of which seems to basically boil down to “Goddamn hippies!” The others are more cogent and thus more important to my prelim studying, but they are of no import for my t-shirt.

As a representative of the “Goddamn hippies!” camp, Lynch quotes Ernst Gellner, “a veteran anthropologist and philosopher of social science, who informed his readers that the ‘ethnos’ are affected by a peculiarly Californian form of irrationality and that among other things they perform like rock stars in front of admiring audiences of ‘ethno-chicks’”:

…it was noticeable, and I think significant that the quality and quantity of ethno-chicks [at an ethnomethodology conference that Gellner attended] surpassed by far those of chicks in any other movement which I have ever observed–even Far Out Left Chicks, not to mention ordinary anthropo-chicks, socio-chicks or (dreadful thought) philosophy chicks (435).

(Ernst Gellner, “Ethnomethodology: the re-enchantment industry or the California way of subjectivity,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 5(1975):431-50, quoted in Lynch 2003.)

I know some philosophy chicks who would probably like a few words with Ernst Gellner, but that is also irrelevant. The important thing here is: ethno chicks are totally Hawt. We’re #1! Naturally, I immediately thought of making a t-shirt. The design (reduced for easy browsing):

(front)

(back)

If there’s any interest from anyone else, I might look into doing a Cafe Press thing (they have women’s tees in some nice styles). Otherwise, it’s the cheap and easy homemade transfer method for me.

I want to conduct an ethnomethodological investigation of participant orientation towards women’s pants sizes.

We act like it’s a rule-governed thing even when we know it isn’t. I have four pairs of pants that actually fit me right now and they cover a range of seven numerical sizes. Admittedly, one of them is a ridiculous outlier that I suspect was mistagged on the assembly line or something, but still: no two of these pairs are the same size.

Women know this. Women buy items of clothing that lean in the self-esteem direction just so they can have a pair of pants marked “4.”* Women tell themselves that is NOT THEIR FAULT if some size that is supposed to be “their size” doesn’t fit, because it’s different with every brand and style. Which is true, but…

…But dude, ask a woman what size she is, and she will HAVE AN ANSWER, although she may a) lie, b) produce some kind of vague range, or c) refuse to admit to a number she has in mind because it is too big. But the thing is, she HAS A NUMBER IN MIND. It’s ridiculous. It is totally irrational. Is it because numbers are supposed to mean something? Or just that we’ve all be brainwashed by the fashion culture? Or what? I mean, all you have to do is look at men’s pants, which have numbers on them that correspond to an ACTUAL UNIT OF MEASUREMENT, and you know that this is not separate but equal.

The thrift store where I get all my pants even makes an effort, with the more expensive pants, to put inch measurements on the tags for women’s pants, demonstrating a clear institutional recognition of the inadequacy of women’s pants sizes. And yet they persist.

And we still think it means something. I had a denim skirt when I was in college that was marked “size 4.” I would never have CLAIMED TO BE a “size 4,” although this skirt fit me and I wore it frequently. It would have been ludicrous. Anyone could see that I was not a “size 4,” whatever the hell that means. Just wearing any article of clothing that happens to be marked “size 4″ does not make YOU a “size 4,” missy.

…I might have claimed to be a size 7. That seems reasonable. It does! It seems “reasonable!” I had stuff that was marked “size 7,” too. And other sizes. But “size 7.” That seems “reasonable.”

Can’t you see what a great paper this would make? They’d probably want me to cut down on the all caps, though.

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*You could do experiments on this, although that wouldn’t be very ethnomethodological. But if you had identical pants selling places with one set of pants sized two integers larger than the other, i.e. A7 = B9, then any fool can tell you that the A pants are going to sell better.