Erik OBrien

Week 11
Class:
As I flip through this weeks notes I seem to have underlined a few notes
about desire, though from the lecture itself I remember these as being
inconsequential and not critical to the main point of the lecture but at the time I
obviously found some significance in it. Specifically my notes say The postmodern
self is incomplete and always in desire for the other and We always DESIRE more.
Think Rene Girard. Recently I have been making my way through Rene Girards
book I see Satan Fall Like Lightning. When I first thought about the postmodern
self always being in a state of desire for the other, I was not convinced. I suppose I
thought of myself as above the wants of man, but in reality I think I was just ignoring
it. Though it was not in the lecture Girard would argue that the desire is mimetic, it
is the desire to imitate in hopes of achieving something that I am still unclear about
(I am only 30 pages in). Girard says that according to the bible, desire is the ultimate
failing of man and the root of all evil. Though he argues that the bible makes this
case I would disagree if that statement was made about reality. I can agree that the
postmodern self is in a state of constant desire and while it might not be the best
thing ever it is certainly a far cry from the ultimate sin. We talked about our
identities and who we are in class and how it is always changing based on the
culture or some kind of expectation. I wonder if this concept of desire that I am so

fixated on is one of the main reasons we change these things about ourselves, a
desire to fit in, stand out, or whatever it is in the context of the culture.
Since we have been talking about ethnography so much I keep looking back
at my past experiences and wishing that I had taken notes. I selfishly wish I had
taken notes so that I could better track my own performance of identity. In my
personal experiences from what I can remember I remember going into certain
situations purposely trying to mess with my own identity. For example, when I went
to Germany my Sophomore year of college in many ways I felt as though I was
locked into an identity and way of acting here in Utah because of the people I
surrounded myself with that made me unhappy. But because I was so steeped in
these social expectations I felt I could never branch out. When I left for Germany not
knowing anyone, I purposefully went into the situation saying you can be whoever
you want to be. Before I left on the trip I was rather introvert and by the time I had
returned after adopting a be anyone attitude I was rather sociable. Germany did
not bring this out of, the absence of Salt Lake and my friend group did. While there
are just as many social pressures while traveling, the one I got to leave behind was
my history, which was very beneficial. I would expect a long-term ethnographic
project to have a similar effect. Yes you are studying the other but at the end of the
day I am sure the ethnographer learns more about themselves and their own
identity than anything else.
Atkinson and Hammersley:

The second half of the book was very practical but only mildly interesting till
the ethics section. However, while not the most interesting it was certainly useful
especially in directing some action for my research project. Though I would not
qualify my research quite as ethnography chapter 6 was pretty useful in spurring
me to collect some documents. After reading the chapter I started spooling through
all of KUTEs hard drives and looking for emails about our DAD software. This
included stuff like manuals but more importantly I was looking for formal and
informal policy documentation. I did not find as much as I would have liked but it is
enough where I think I can implement it into my final project. I also took pictures of
the written instructions we have in the studio. These are provisional policies, that
speak to the short-term status of the organization.
Under informant consent in the last chapter of the book the authors put some
of my concerns I brought up last week at ease. I asked last week if the ethnographer
was always being deceptive?. No one really wanted to bite at the question, there
were a few small responses but nothing with respect to what I was expecting.
Ethnographers rarely tell all the people they are studying everything about the
research An ethnographer often does not know what will be involved, certainly
not in any detail; even less, what the consequences are likely to be. (p.210). I
suppose this is why we try to minimize harm rather and eliminate it. What I
wanted to get at with my question to the class was to whether it was ok or not that
ethnography and all research is never fully honest. It would be great if everything
was clear and simple but the world does not work that way and I am not super
concerned about it.

Saldana and Tracy both had something saying to the effect despite what you
might think, coding and transcription can be fun. Unlike Saldana and Tracy this
book makes ethnography sound like a blast. I almost want to take it up as a hobby
not connected to academia, it just seems like a lot of fun. This then begs the
question, Is it still ethnography if Im not going to write a book about it? Maybe, but
either way the process of gaining access to new groups and learning new things can
never be bad.

Outside Reading:

This week I encountered an article that pulled a grounded theory type

approach but with sampling. A grounded sampling of sorts. The study started by just
looking for the identity process that goes on in sexual harassment cases for men.
They ended up conducting 40 interviews each an hour in length. However once they
had interviewed everyone in their sample they realized that a more interesting sub
sample emerged. Out of all the 40+ hours of interviews they ended up looking only
at 4 interviews from male professors who had been accused of sexual harassment.
On the one had they put in a lot of work in to just not use the rest of that data but it
does shed a light on a population I do not really think of often when it comes to
sexual harassment. I am assuming that perhaps later they will come back to the data
and write a different paper on a more broad sub sample.

This makes me wonder if there are some opportunities to do something

similar in my study once I have collected all the data. One of my committee members
even said that this thesis would make a great pilot project before an actual
ethnography done during a PhD. At this point I feel that with the data I have been
gathering an alternative study would be to look less at the technology and more at
how policy is shaped by the various people at the station. Yes it is technically made
by the station manager but usually there are other forces a be such as the Student
Media Council and other staff members that influence new policy.

Rhetoric Video:
We will talk about this in class so this will mostly be a small little section of
some notes I am thinking of right now before we talk about it in class. First off, while
I do not like the video I am very impressed that someone on the faculty can sing that
well, I am not sure who it was but I was pretty impressed. Anyway, the first thing I
would code for is simply presence, who shows up where and so forth. Code all the
names at the end and see who is in the piece and who is simply listed. This could be
intpreted that either the rest of the rhetoricians were busy or they were not
interested in being a part of the actual video. I would also code for all Utah branding,
so the Imagine U, the Block U (ugliest thing I have seen on campus), and even the
pac 12 logo they threw on after the credits.