Conducting an ethnographic research project inevitably involves fixations that are not unlike some of the fixations that this book has been examining. As conventionally understood, ethnographic fieldwork typically involves researchers locating themselves alongside and within sociocultural processes at particular sites for lengthy periods of time. By doing so, the ethnographers attempt to position themselves alongside and within the historical processes through which other humans and nonhumans make their existence together in conditions that they can only partially control. It involves attempting to develop a better understanding of how differently positioned actors make sense of, participate in, and hence help sustain and change the webs of relations within which they are entangled.
In this sense, and in a more canonically ethnographic vein, much of the empirical work that I conducted for this study occurred by way of my going to a particular place for a lengthy period of time. I moved to New York City from Berkeley, California, in the summer of 2009 and began gathering and producing ethnographic documentation that August. I moved out of New York City in August of 2012 to start my current job in San Diego, California. During my three years in New York, I wrote more than 400,000 words of field notes, most of which describe my experiences as a participant observer in and around the Downtown School, in people’s homes, and in online settings. I also generated thousands of pages of interview transcripts and collected myriad digital artifacts. I gathered and assembled this documentation throughout my time in New York, with the majority of this activity taking place during 2009 and 2010, a period when I was funded to conduct fieldwork fulltime.
This close attention to “the local” can be a powerful corrective to the ethnocentrism and positivism that still dominates much of the social sciences, and it can allow for a more nuanced analysis of how social-historical processes work, unfold, and produce unanticipated effects in different places and at different historical moments. But this close attention to local field sites can also entail some of the problematic fixations that this book has been addressing, particularly when ethnographers render the local as a circumscribed space with a particular culture. Such enframing practices, which occur through processes of problematization and rendering technical, imaginatively construct a fixed and comparative geography of other cultures. It is in part because of this fixation that many anthropologists have called upon their fellow ethnographers to reexamine their spatial-cultural assumptions (Gupta and Ferguson 1992, 1997).
While these and similar calls for anthropological self-reflexivity are welcome, the problems of fixation that this book has been examining are more diffuse than the particular fixations that characterize the history of anthropology as a discipline. Among professional academics, fixations are entwined with the intellectual division of labor and its corresponding tendency to develop differentiated realms of expertise, including the expertise of ethnographers who work outside of the discipline of anthropology. In my case, the disciplinary pressures of training in an Information School led me to initially fixate on not just on a particular place and people, but also on the presumed importance of digital media in the lives of those people, a framing that proved quite limiting once I was in the field.
As mentioned in the preface, I began this project with an interest in how school-based peer cultures mediated processes of social reproduction for children growing up in the so-called digital age. To scope my project, I centered my study on the school’s first class of seventy-five eleven-and twelve-year-olds. I began fieldwork by trying to place myself, as best I could, alongside these students. While obviously recognized as an adult, I tried to distance myself from educators and other adults in the school: I wore casual clothing, and, with educators’ permission, I avoided participating in the canonical practices of school adults, especially practices such as teaching, disciplining, and correcting students. I also initially tried to limit my spatial positioning and movements to those that were available to the students. I sat with the students in class and at lunch, I lined up with them as they moved between classes, and I tried as much as possible to follow the same directives that students routinely received from school adults. Aligning myself next to the students was awkward at first, but after several months many of the students began to treat me as a friend. As our friendships developed, many students also started incorporating me into not just their lives at school, but also their lives online.1
One thing that slowly became clear during this stage of fieldwork was that digital media was not nearly as important for the students as I, and the school’s designers, had assumed that it would be, neither in nor out of school. Digital media was inextricably part of students’ everyday lives, but very few of the students approximated popular stereotypes about a generation that was engrossed with digital media, and most students had concerns and interests that primarily lay elsewhere. What is more, and despite the school’s public reputation, much of what happened on a daily basis at the school did not involve students using digital media or playing games. Moreover, when students did use digital media and play games at school, the process was often highly scripted by adults, which did not correspond with the more hopeful idealizations of games and new media as tools that amplify the agency and power of young people.
A similar pattern emerged as I got to know the reformers, educators, and many of the parents and family members of the students. After hanging around the school for about six months, I started to invite students, parents and guardians, and educators to participate in a semistructured interview. I also conducted a series of show-and-tell-style “media tour” interviews with fourteen students who were particularly involved in producing media technology.2 I used these interviews to learn about phenomena that I could not observe directly, including out-of-school routines and personal histories. These interviews tended to further reinforce my sense that many people were primarily concerned with matters that did not have all that much to do with digital media and games, and, what is more, digital media and games were often of little help as they tried to get a grip on these matters of concern. Even families who were supportive of the Downtown School’s focus on games and new media seemed to be primarily attracted to the school for other reasons, and reformers that specialized in game design and new media often seemed preoccupied dealing with issues for which their technical expertise was of little help. None of this was good news for my initial fixations.
As I began to decenter my focus on the role of digital media in the students’ lives, I also began to pay increased attention to the rhetorical salience that terms like games, design, and digital media seemed to have among the school’s designers, its institutional backers, the press, parents, and academics such as myself. I began to ask questions about how the polysemous character of terms like games, design, and the digital had shaped how the school had been imagined and designed in the manner that it had, how NGOs, philanthropic organizations, and researchers like me were caught up with these processes, how journalists and media technology corporations took an especially keen interest in digital disruption, and how political processes were being obscured and worked on by these various fixations.
As I traced the people and organizations that seemed to take an idealized interest in the school’s supposed focus on digital media, games, and design, I also realized that I needed to develop a more institutional and historical account of what I was observing within and around this particular project. To develop a better understanding of the historical character of these dynamics, I relied on research by academic historians, newspaper articles, government documents, summaries of legislation, and congressional reports. As I familiarized myself with these works, I increasingly came to see how researchers such as myself, who were often supported by philanthropic foundations like the one that was supporting my work, regularly played a constitutive role in maintaining and shaping what I have been referring to as disruptive fixation. Put differently, I came to see how much of my work since starting graduate school—working on research projects about young people and technology, attending conferences on digital media and learning, meeting with funders and other researchers supported by these funders—as well as much of the work that I have been doing since I became a professor—teaching, writing, giving talks—were and remain part of my field site. In this sense, I came to see that I had already been in “the field” long before I moved to New York City, and I feel that I am still in the field now, albeit in a different location. I suspect the same is true for any ethnographic undertaking, as well as for any scholarly project.
A Note on the Use of Pseudonyms
In constructing this book I have wrestled with how to protect the anonymity of my research participants in an era when so much material about a field site can be discovered online. In my case, I had the additional challenge of trying to protect anonymity for people who were involved in a project that was especially unique and to some degree famous. As I worked on the project, I came to realize that it would be impossible for me to fully camouflage the identity of the school without also erasing what made the project theoretically and politically important. While I have kept with ethnographic convention and given the school a pseudonym, I am also aware that an enterprising reader could make a strong guess about the school’s identity.
Given this possibility, I have put additional effort into trying to protect the anonymity of the persons represented and quoted in the book. My goal has been to construct ambiguity about who did or said what at any given point in the book. The most conventional way that I have attempted to do so is by using pseudonyms for the people involved. But given the school’s relative fame, I have also tried to deploy several additional tactics. For one, I purposely use somewhat abstract labels—such as “a creative professional parent” or “one of the school leaders”—in cases where I felt a more concrete designator could lead to unmasking. Similarly, since there were multiple teachers and aids in the school, I have tended to refer to them uniformly as “educators”. In terms of the school’s designers, principal, and leadership team, I often say “one of the school’s designers” or “one of the school’s leaders,” which, in reality, consisted of about ten people. In some cases I have also switched the gender of pronouns in the hope that doing so will make it more difficult for readers to link a specific quote or description to a specific person. While these abstractions and transformations sacrifice some nuance and rhetorical power, I hope they provide the people represented in this book with a plausible basis for denying that they are the persons represented at a given point in the book.
As for students, all names have been changed and, again, I used descriptions that were fairly generic on many occasions. While I imagine that people who were involved with the school during its first several years will be able to recognize some of the students, I hope my representations of students are sufficiently opaque to mask their identities from readers who know the school only from afar. As for students being unmasked to people who were directly involved with the school, I do not believe I am reporting anything incriminating that is not already known to these insiders. Furthermore, all the students represented in the book will have left or graduated from the Downtown School by the time this book is published. Finally, I have tried to take a cautious approach in how I represent the digital artifacts that people posted online. In particular, I avoid quoting verbatim any materials that students posted online. I do quote several snippets of e-mails by educators and parents, but I attribute them to more generic actors, such as “one of the creative professional parents,” and as far as I know these e-mails are not publically searchable.
None of these strategies can guarantee anonymity for the various people that partook in this study, but I do hope they make it difficult for people who were not present for the events described to attribute specific quotes or descriptions of actions to any particular person.
Unraveling Fixations
Directing intense attention and curiosity toward the local, the digital, peer cultures, or anything else is not in itself a bad thing, nor are yearnings to help fix or improve worlds that seem broken. While I was nearing completion of a draft of this book, I saw the British artist Tacita Dean give a presentation on her artistic process, and I took special note when Dean repeatedly invoked the term fixation to characterize the ways that she had delved into several projects. Dean told, for example, how she had fixated on a photo of Jean Jeinnie, a young girl who stowed away on a ship from Australia to England in 1928, and, on another occasion, how she had fixated on the story of an amateur British sailor, Donald Crowhurst, who entered a contest to circumnavigate the globe in 1968, likely tried to fake circumnavigation, but died, probably by suicide, in the process. What struck me about Dean’s self-described fixations was how they led her down such markedly different routes than the fixations that this book has examined. Dean’s fixations were intensely attuned to the minutia of the local worlds she encountered, but the focus of her attention and concern constantly moved backward and forward across space and time as various pathways of intersection revealed themselves to her, often in surprising ways. To me, Dean’s fixations seemed to unravel, not in a chaotic sense or in the sense of bringing closure to the puzzle that had sparked her initial interest. Rather, they unraveled in the sense of observantly following and documenting interwoven and interlayered processes and themes as they crossed her attentive explorations. Dean’s fixations, and hence Dean herself and her works, became more complex, more expansive, more historical, and yet still partial and concrete as she attentively explored the unexpected pathways and relations that unraveled in front of her.
Dean works as an artist and not as a reflexive ethnographer or an activist, and yet the ways in which her fixations unraveled perhaps provide clues for how a critical scholarly or activist practice can be undertaken without resorting to the narrowness of view that so often thwarts such well-intentioned endeavors. Dean’s descriptions of her process reminded me that fixations can help produce nonreductive modes of understanding and situated possibilities for political action. By contrast, this book has explored how well-intentioned people became fixated on that which they could foreseeably handle and fix with new technological remedies. In part because of these fixations, many people maintained the best of intentions as they helped tighten the scripts that they aimed to relax and as they helped remake many of the divisions that they hoped to mend.