But when speech is presented in writing, perhaps “like” and “’cause” aren’t always evaluated according to the norms of speech. I went back and changed “’cause” to “because”, and took out a whole bunch of “like”s.

Although transcription is sometimes regarded as trivial, it can be a kind of analysis, and can carry many of the risks and uncertainties of translation between different languages. For researchers working with communication via relatively new text-based media, questions of orthography can become both simpler and more complicated. Maybe a text message could be thought of as a kind of self-transcription? People composing text online choose how they will be represented orthographically, but taken out of its intended setting, a text may read differently, and need some recontextualization and translation.

Wikipedia conversations are asynchronous (sometimes with whole weeks or months between replies among editors) and it has proven extremely complicated to work out who said what when, let alone contact and to have live conversations with the editors. I’m beginning to realise how much physical presence is a part of the trust building exercise. If I want to connect with a particular Wikipedia editor, I can only email them or write a message on their talk page, and I often don’t have a lot to go on when I’m doing these things. I often don’t know where they’re from or where they live or who they really are beyond the clues they give me on their profile pages.

So far the picture of the field of residential affairs I have painted is one of the Giddensian routinisation and recursivity -the predictable cycles of modern agents as they go about coordinating their activities and (re) producing their practices in real clock-and-calendar time (Postill 2002). But to complete the picture we also need to consider the irregular, often unpredictable patterns of social action that disrupt the regular schedules of a field of practice. (…) Borrowing form Turner, I define a “field arena” as ” a bounded spatial unit in which precise, visible antagonists, individual or corporate, contend with one another for prizes and/or honour (1974: 132-33). Field arenas are “explicit frames” in which leading practitioners take major decisions in public view and “nothing is left merely implied” (1974: 134). Arenas are often stations that have temporarily morphed from being convivial settings to sites of conflict in which individual leaders must state clearly where they stand in an unresolved dispute. It is common for these disputes to centre on a leader’s perceived breach of the field’s existing moral order, a type of political turmoil knohwn as a “sociall drama” that will only be solved after appropiate “redressive action” has been taken by the offending party (Turner 1974, Eyermen 2008). Private doubts about a leader’s ability or commitment to a residential cause may surface onto the public realm in these increasingly digitally mediated arenas, e.g., through SMS texts to the leader demanding that they declare their unambbiguous, public support for a given cause via a campaign blog (see Chapter 6 and Arnold et al. 2008).

Although there is a bourgeoning academic and journalist literature on these ‘Second World’ developments (Khanna 2008), the part that digital media may be playing in social change in emerging economies remains poorly understood. Recent events in Tunisia, Egypt, Israel, Spain, Britain, the United States and other countries have drawn public attention to the potential uses of social media for protest and political mobilisation. Important as these developments are, they distract from less visible forms of media-related change that can have as much long-term significance as the more spectacular ‘media events’, for instance, micro-processes of digital media appropriation into domestic, educational, work and leisure settings.

Academics frequently criticize corporate ethnography simply as “too short.” But this is just as shallow an insight as is the idea that culture=consumerism. Academics, of all people, should know that culture drives practice. The rapid pace of contemporary corporate life clearly and reasonably demands shorter time horizons for any research project. It is more than obvious that time differs in academia. Time is what Kluckhohn (1953) calls a fundamental “value orientation,” or a universal feature of all cultures. A culture can be past oriented, meaning it reveres the past through symbolic gestures and everyday behaviours. A culture can be present oriented, by focusing on what is immediately temporally present.

Academia is a past-oriented society, with its obsession with paying homage to past greats of the literature and constant “reviews” of what others have previously found. The private sector, by contrast, worships the present (though it may portray itself as future-oriented, this is often stymied by a relentless focus on the near future). Both “cultures” mark time differently, making it completely natural to do rapid research in the private sector, and perfectly ethnocentric for academics to criticize such research based on normative assumptions of “appropriate” time frames. Symbols of time in academia are typically longer, not “better.”

When instructors follow the banking concept of education, they continue to exercise power over students by depositing information (Freire, 1970). Shor elaborates:
“There is a reassuring simplicity in the old ways of teaching. They may not work very well, but they are a solid tradition to fall back on—the hour-long lesson, the documented lecture, the Socratic discussion, the course outline and sturdy reading list, the separate canon for each academic discipline, the term paper and final exam. It is well organized and very busy. The irony of this order is not simply the static knowledge it produces, but also the alienation it provokes. (1980, p. 122)”
Instructors who follow such an approach prevent students from learning from their own lived experiences. In contrast, critically-minded instructors make themselves vulnerable, both by engaging in reflexive writing about their own pedagogical practice, and by sharing their feelings and insecurities with their students. The experience also creates vulnerabilities for students, who are asked to share their own thoughts about hegemony in the classroom. Such an experience is uncomfortable for both parties, because it differs greatly from the hegemonic, yet familiar, “banking concept of education” (Freire, 1970, p. 72). However, only through the discomfort of making oneself vulnerable can an instructor and his or her students transform the classroom and realize the potential of critical communication pedagogy.
If instructors take critical communication pedagogy seriously, desiring to work toward positive change in their classrooms, reflexivity about classroom oppression becomes worth the effort. Shor echoes this idea:
“When we think critically about our action, then we can act critically on our thinking. Teaching is the most important social practice of intellectuals, so reflection on pedagogy can do a lot in extraordinarily redesigning the ordinary work of a teacher. (1980, p. 123)”
Thus, instructors who desire to create a classroom environment that examines power can follow the two steps advocated in this article: naming and critically reflecting on sociocultural problems (autoethnography), and acting to create change (critical communication pedagogy). This process affords opportunities for instructors to become better facilitators of learning, first by empowering their students, and then by creating change in their classrooms (the micro level), and in the educational agencies of society (the macro level). In sum, this work demonstrates that autoethnographic writing about pedagogical practice can be pragmatic scholarship that bridges the gap from critical communication pedagogy as ideology to critical communication pedagogy as praxis.

Ethnography mid-way and ethnography all the way have their own set of constraints. But both processes have to grapple with the invisibility of their work. One way to overcome this is that ethnographers have to find ways to visualize their work. Visuals make recommendations tangible and demonstrate the ethnographer’s value. This is one of the reasons I value and love learning from designers because they are experts at visualizing their process.