ANTHMETHGRP4-2425-IZZIE-WILLIS

[Last modified: December, 11 2024 05:46 PM]

Topic: Aesthetics of Genocide: Reposting Images of Gaza

Questions:

1. How do young people in London engage aesthetically with genocide through the “reposting” tool?
2. How does this relate to self-presentation online?
3. How is it engaged with by different people?

Methods:

• Participant observation: Deep hanging out with other young people in London – my peers; chatting with organisers and groups formed from the online space; interviews with creators of specifically political spaces online, etc;.
• Engaging with the virtual space: Take on new forms of virtual ethnography, reach out to people through the digital sites themselves and engage with construction of online persona as a whole participant, not just offline self. This could include anonymous accounts who exist – for purposes of this research – only online.
• The body and auto-ethnography: Engaging with my own embodiment when reposting images: how I move, what physical space I am in when I do it, how long I spend with the images themselves. Engage critically with my own positionality and usage of social media, as well as the epistemic bubbles I may find myself in.

Potential findings:

• People engage with imagery online in a detached way.
• People feel incensed with the democratisation of platforms to speak politically, or take part in offline protest, whilst some people may feel alienated.
• Different age groups use different platforms but both with the intention of constructing online performance of identity. Older groups – as a generalisation –  may engage more with Facebook, whilst the younger adults and kids may be largely on TikTok.
• Reposting is a digestible form of engaging with atrocity. People can do it from anywhere, quickly, and without the permanence of a “hard post”.

I have learnt a lot about ethics during this process. I no longer think I would engage in screenshotting people’s story reposts without full and informed consent from those involved. This is particularly due to the transient intention of stories. 

[Last modified: November, 29 2024 02:23 PM]

I’m thinking about the second case study given:

A student wants to investigate how improving computer literacy and learning to use online tools affects the social lives of elderly people (those over 65 years old) in London. The research will involve volunteering at computer literacy courses in a community centre. Methods will include participant-observation, structured interviews, social diagrams and asking participants to keep a diary

We discussed how there would be multiple things to specifically address with this particular case. Firstly, depending on how old they are, there may be cases of impaired ability to give informed consent. There are plenty of savvy elderly people, but as you begin to move into the 80+ range, it may be useful to assess through avenues such as the Assessing Mental Capacity page on the NHS: https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/social-care-and-support-guide/making-decisions-for-someone-else/mental-capacity-act/ – In cases where there may be participants suffering from dementia, for example, this would boost the risk-profile considerably and there would be a whole new set of ethical concerns.

Secondly, since these are courses held at a community centre, it may have its own institutional standards to go by. It is possible that one would have to obtain approval and permission not only from the supervisor/facilitator of the course, but also more structurally from the community centre itself.

As with all of these examples, there are specifics one needs to consider in regards to how you obtain consent: in making sure that your participants fully understand the process you’re going through and the project, and especially in this case given you’re dealing with elderly people with low computer literacy, that they understand how you’re securely using and storing their data. In this case, this would be securely on university servers such as OneNote. With aspects such as diary-keeping and interviews, there needs to be an ongoing consent-giving – as you build and maintain relationships with participants you need to make sure the information they’re sharing they’re still happy for you to use. It is important here to also use your own judgement.

However, given you’re limiting your research to participants who are able to consent in an informed manner, and you have full oversight and approval from the institution and the program facilitators, then this would probably remain a low-medium risk project.

[Last modified: November, 27 2024 09:56 PM]

My group and I went to sit in the cold, in a square. It seemed an obvious choice for picking up on the senses: the weather on our skin, or the bundles of materials on our necks, the sharpness of the air in the throat, the smells, noises and sounds of the outside. Yet, funnily enough, we all found we experienced it quite differently as we discussed.

I felt each of the senses separately when I focused my mind on it. I ate an orange, so the sour tang of it concentrated in my mouth whilst my ungloved fingers fought for attention with the cold. We all listened to the sounds of the city around. We listened to each other’s voices, and saw how clear everyone’s faces looked in the blue-skied crisp brightness. All it took was letting my mind land on another part of what I was feeling, however, two other members of my group stressed that they found it tricky to unpick or focus on different senses in isolation. The senses didn’t exist in a vacuum, but rather in tandem.

What we all noticed, however, was that cold has a way of cutting through everyone else. It’s almost like its intensity blocked our ears, noses and mouths. Nothing could be experienced with out the simultaneity of cold. It even looked cold: everything had the impression of glass – or a twig ready to be snapped – in high-definition. We discussed how something like this could be captured multi-modally: how do you show the cold? How do people express it? The visuals we all agreed on eventually led us to the idea that a film would be an effective way to capture it. The bodies together, each of the close, quick-cuts of people’s hands rubbing together, the pink of the ears, the cracked-blue of the mouths. The bodies would be indistinguishable from one another, and the sounds would overlap of voices and noises, in order to express the disorienting effect of the cold. The quick-cut would lend to the snapping nature of the weather.

It was an interesting thing to talk to with one another, and I liked the sense of a group observation, both inwardly and outwardly. We necessarily added to each other’s experience, and noticed how nothing could conceivably exist in isolation, and without a knock-on effect. It would be interesting to try this again in a totally different environment.

[Last modified: November, 20 2024 11:06 AM]

8am on the overground from Peckham Rye: everyone’s going to work. The weather was cold outside so I’m overdressed for the heat of the bodies around me, sweating under my clothes whilst stretching my arms out unnaturally over the man on the iPad next to me so I can hold onto the bar. My arm is taut and my grip tight. It feels uncomfortable to stand so close to him, yet my arm can’t stretch further, and even though my feet are firmly planted hips’ width apart for balance, I still don’t trust my body not to fall on the baby in front of me when the train jolts. I’m standing directly in front of the door to the first class carriage, and people push the door into my back to alert me of their getting off, indicating that it’s my moment to curl my body inwards towards a woman on my other side, bringing my morning breath a little too close to hers. The baby begins to grab onto my leg from her buggy with an untrained hand, and whilst her parents laugh, I try to somehow curve my thighs backwards.

I realise with embarrassment after about fifteen minutes that if I move my feet slightly to the side, I can lean on the carriage wall by the door to first class. I move my arm from the man’s face, and try to relax backwards out of my self-imposed strained discomfort. I get off at Farringdon – along with the baby and the man – and feel the comfort of moving through the platform quickly and with ease. I check the time and realise I need to run for the next train.

The beeping of the doors spur on my sense of urgency as I take a leap onto the tube going towards Euston Square. The carriage is much emptier than the previous one, although there are still no seats. I grab the closest pole next to a woman also holding it, and then realise that there’s more space down the carriage. I’m uncomfortable in a different way this time. Do I face outwards, towards the other people on the train, or toward the door, towards my reflection in the dark? I twist my body round, trying the two. Once facing the doors, I look over my shoulder and realise everyone else is facing inwards. I turn back around.

[Last modified: November, 6 2024 09:45 AM]

I think my pilot research project is quite overtly political: or, at least, it’s a way people have of expressing their political positions in a somewhat safe public forum. It is a way of publicly positioning oneself in what people choose to repost. When there are elections, people will repost support for their own parties, or worrying statistics from the other side. This is slightly different however, as people are reposting images of an active conflict to express that they are vehemently against it.

I can’t ignore my own position, which is that my sympathies lie unambiguously with the Palestinian people. I also think most of the people I engage with online share knowing that a majority of people that see their posts agree with them. I think there is bigger absence and silence from those that may be in support of Israel, which I think must also be addressed and explored. I am Jewish, and have older family members in Israel, and a majority of my Jewish family have a completely opposing view to me and my peers. Some, as holocaust survivors, feel this is a particularly difficult thing to talk about.

I also recognise that I am safe in my positionality, as are many of my participants, whereas this is dealing with a very real event in which people’s lives are under threat every single day. I need to treat this subject with the sensitivity it deserves, and not be flip. Since it is such a difficult topic, people’s positions and identities must be protected. I can’t engage in lurking, and instead should only actively engage with and write about the reposting of people who have agreed to participate. It may be that since the popular public opinion takes precedence within an online community, that there are more people who are silently occupying contrasting positions.

Finally, I think I can adapt my methods by not asserting my political position on any participants, and I have to recognise the difference between an “ethnographic scroll” and a lurk. I need to allow people to safely express how they feel, and not push them on subjects that are potentially distressing. It’s impossible to remove my own position, but people who express different viewpoints from me must not be met with any disparagement. I also think it would be interesting to see where the online and the offline line up, and immerse myself in those events led by people who are both posting and organising.

[Last modified: October, 30 2024 07:42 AM]

“Due to today’s inclement weather, please take extra care whilst in the station. Surfaces may be slippery…”

In my mind people usually stand in hordes in stations, necks craned up towards the departures board, but that’s not the case in King’s Cross today. People create shapes on the floor below as they mill around in their raincoats. I’m in a place I haven’t been before, perched up on the top level, sitting on a silver railing, looking down at the buzz of people going from one place to another.

I’ve never noticed before that there are screens on either side of the departures board, playing trailers or adverts. Under the white net ceiling that wraps you in, the whole scene is a cacophony of noise and movement.

People queue for the chance to go to Platform 9 3/4. People walk in pairs, or in threes, or in whole families, towards their platform. Kids are held by the hand while they flip flop behind their hurried parents.

A bearded boy walks past me with urgency: “Harry!” His friend calls out, running after him. The boy stops and turns around. “Where are you going?” His friend laughs.

Harry looks confused and answers that he’s looking for the others. “They’re just there,” his friend points back to where Harry had just marched on by. They walk back together to sit on a metal railing like my own and eat their Greggs sausage rolls.

A woman next to me is applying Vaseline and also looking out towards the people at the station, and I wonder what, or who, she is here for. She’s not on a phone or anything, just looking. She’s the only person I can see who appears to just be waiting whilst doing nothing else.

The disembodied Radio 4 voice shepherds the ant-like people toward their intended destinations. Warnings: “passengers are reminded to mind the gap…” I’m struck suddenly that I – the passenger – take comfort in her voice. She’s been present through my life.

A man in a blue puffer holding his young daughter by the hand checks his watch, and his daughter follows in an exaggerated gesture, revealing a bare wrist.

Day-drinking is the norm in British stations. It’s only 1 in the afternoon and I can count at least four separate people sitting on the curved benches drinking some form of train-drink; canned G&T, a small beer…

Noise and movement never stops.

Reflection:

I enjoyed this task. I used to do a lot of creative writing and one of my best teachers made us write at least an A4 page every day for four months of what we observed in the outside world. It went from demanding and difficult to find different things to observe, to totally enriching. I’m a bit out of practice, but I remembered what this kind of looking entailed. It also made me realise how unused I am to looking around me in somewhere like a station. There’s a tunnel vision which comes with habitual travel in London, It was interesting taking myself out of that and viewing it from the outside.

[Last modified: October, 21 2024 11:58 AM]

Where do I fit into the picture?

In considering positionality, I really tried to break down the constitutive elements of why I was seeing what I was seeing; where these points of access came from, and what they reflected about my own tendencies. I already touched on it in last week’s blog post, but I’m receiving the Israel-Palestine conflict through a very specific lens. I must acknowledge that I am operating at a remove from the trauma being experienced: however, so are many of my participants. Nevertheless, the content I’ve received thus far has been as a result of my own curation, to some extent. For now, I focused on people I already followed.

On that point, I’m kind of only looking directly at my peers: I’m looking at how middle-class, university-educated, English young people like myself are recapitulating images of something horrific for one another, as a means of producing some form of normativity – perhaps – or in a form of activism. My own similarities to those posting create a specific point of access for me which perhaps means there’s a blind-spot, but also perhaps means I have a clearer viewpoint. When partaking in an ‘ethnographic scroll’ [1], do I also have to consider that I’m taking advantage of this privileged access, or are people’s public personas fair use? And then again, people are touched by this conflict to differing degrees. People agonise over family in the affected places, or over their own feelings of marginalisation.

I also can’t ignore how my own personal views have to some extent determined what images I see over and over: I follow like-minded people who will reassure me of my own correctness.  When it comes to interviewing people, I have to veer away from this sense of mutual-mindedness. Despite this, however, I am also Jewish, have family members who not only vehemently disagree with the viewpoint generally being taken by my peers, but also family members who live in the affected areas. This is a part of my identity which makes my offline world slightly different to my online world, and certainly in conversations with older members of my family they would not be able to comprehend the sort of image-message circulation that I experience through my social media. I hope this provides a bit more of a roundedness to my perspective.

[1] https://sites.gold.ac.uk/anthways/archive/pandemic-issue-2021/intimate-snapshots-tiktok-algorithm-and-the-recreation-of-identity/

[Last modified: October, 14 2024 07:38 PM]

Doomscroll

It felt a bit of a shame to sit on a bench in a beautiful square whilst the sun was shining to simply turn my full attention to the stories people were posting on Instagram, yet that’s what I did. I entered the dislocated world of my phone, and the images I saw were quite different to what was around me.

I initially planned to focus on the general idea of the infographic, and specifically how people engaged with politics and activism visually online. However, as I sat there and scrolled I realised at this specific point in time, only one thing was recurring; dizzying in its sheer relentlessness amongst the wide range of people I followed. My general idea was necessarily pulled into focus: how are people engaging with the Israel-Palestine conflict through the medium of reposting online? What does it look like, condensed into a square that must make its point fast? How do the visuals of trauma translate?

I pulled up image after image, without having to look for it really at all. It was – of course – punctured by images of people’s lives, of art, or food, or lovers. Some of it was violent and graphic. Some of it was merely words; the ones felt important enough to convey the urgency of the message or news. The c
olours of black, orange, and red, and green occurred time and time again.

I mainly follow people I know – or sort of know – on Instagram. A lot of people I follow are from London: that’s where I grew up, after all. However, I studied in Dublin, so follow a large portion of people there. I also worked in Rome for a bit, so I also have them. As well as this, many people I studied with are from all over, or people I grew up with have ended up on the other side of the world. It was stark, however, that the message I was getting from these images were consistent. Perhaps it is the age-range – all being people from early-20s to mid-30s – or perhaps it was the type of people I’ve ended up around as a university-educated person from South London. However, as I’ll show with some of the images I encountered, images of conflict contained within that environment  – a quick-tapping image platform that censors certain images and usually delights in the mundane and everyday – have become fused with the everyday.

[Last modified: October, 6 2024 08:47 PM]

Draft Research Proposal

Topic: Reposting and aesthetics as a form of political activism in London

Questions:

1. What do forms of shorthand digital activism e.g. infographics do?
2. How does this relate to self-presentation online?
3. How is it engaged with by different people?
4. What is the balance in engagement with this form of news/education and the mainstream media?
5. What’s the difference between an epistemic bubble and and echo chamber?
6. What’s the variation of use depending on the platform used? Who’s using what?
7. How do politicians now use social networks?
8. To what degree do we engage with aesthetics as much as content?

Methods:

• Participant observation: Interview varying participants, particularly their engagement with activism online but also into offline spaces; hanging out with organisers and groups formed from the online space; interviews with creators of specifically political spaces online, etc;. Finding people who may be creators for more official political accounts.
• Engaging with the virtual space: Take on new forms of virtual ethnography, reach out to people through the digital sites themselves and engage with construction of online persona as a whole participant, not just offline self. This could include anonymous accounts who exist – for purposes of this research – only online.
• Multi-sited ethnography: This takes place amongst the dispersed and varying site of London on different digital platforms. How do older people use Facebook to repost political memes they see? How do people use Instagram stories as a way of displaying political allegiance? How do both content creators and casual viewers on TikTok create and receive information regarding politics? Is a retweet on X endorsement? What are the implications that we can no longer see what people ‘like’?

Potential findings:

• Digital spaces can be both democratising platforms in both education and voice, but can also be a homogenising and reductive source of information.
• People may feel variously positive and negative about the political moving to largely online spaces: this may particularly be a subject of interest to older activists.
• Different age groups use different platforms but both with the intention of constructing online performance of identity. Older groups – as a generalisation –  may engage more with Facebook, whilst the younger adults and kids may be largely on TikTok.
•  Reposting/retweeting, etc. and its lack of time consumption may make some feel they fall short on deeper analysis. Some may feel that it disperses a large amount of information for all audiences where they might otherwise not know where to find it.

 

[Last modified: October, 1 2024 06:28 PM]

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