4

The Abbreviated Field Experience in Audience Ethnography

Patrick D. Murphy

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I began my chapter with this tale from my family visit to Kidzania in order to help frame a methodological question: Can such site visits be constituted as fieldwork within a broader ethnography of media audiences? When my family was considering, for the first time, spending the day at Kidzania, I certainly didn't present the trip as a great opportunity to do field research (“Hey everybody, want to do a mediascape site visit today!”). Nevertheless, I have to confess that, as a media researcher, I was already taking headnotes when I went through the American Airlines gate of Kidzania. And I know I am not alone in making such generative transitions. Indeed, regardless of the original intent, media researchers are often inspired by embodied experiences of rich, performative media spaces, and in fact they are often the catalysts through which research projects are launched and elaborated. Yet at issue for me here is this: Can quick and dirty field visits – whether unplanned ones, such as what I have described above, or more deliberate and focused endeavors – provide audience researchers with the sort of data-rendering experiences that are ethnographically thick enough to stand in for more immersive and sustained field practices? Indeed, given the limited possibilities for participant observation on the part of the audiences actually consuming media, site visits have the potential to compensate for investigative gaps in ethnographic media research that is often driven wholly by prearranged interviews, as opposed to utterances delivered in the flow of everyday practices. But when do such field experiences become “ethnographic,” and how might the possibilities and limitations of such abbreviated excursions be negotiated to help animate richer audience ethnographies?

Fieldwork in Media Studies

I ask these questions within a history of ethnography in media studies that has been uneven and often methodologically oblique. These questions also come with the understanding that, as the signature method of anthropology, ethnography has long been grounded in physical fieldsites, and in fact accounts of fieldwork have traditionally presented and thus constituted ethnographic evidence. As a product, the ethnographic text is understood to be generated by the process of doing ethnography, which was established through long-term participant observation. Though it may be presented in a variety of expository or narrative forms of “thick description” (Geertz, 1973), the product is an articulation of the ethnographic process (Murphy, 2008). Historically, however, media ethnographers have not established the kind of bounded, long-term fieldwork of anthropology, so the body of ethnographic scholarship in media studies has been less defined by a particular kind of orthodoxy (e.g., participant observation). Moreover, unlike what happens in anthropology, where an ongoing reformulation of what can legitimately claim to be fieldwork is taking place directly in relation to “the aesthetics and the regulative ideals of the Malinowskian paradigm of research” (Marcus, 2006, p. 2), media scholars have often been content to nibble at the edges of this anxious reconsideration of the limits and partialities of traditional fieldwork. These tendencies have unfolded and influenced the character of ethnography in media studies for a number of interrelated reasons.

First, although the roots here are perhaps not deep, they are wide, as over the years media ethnographers have maintained a fairly flexible, at times even ambiguous, notion of ethnographic practice. In the formative years of the field, from the late 1970 through to 1980s, most media studies did not present a normative model of fieldwork that necessitated immersion, rapport, observation, and the most recognizable product of this kind of work – fieldnotes. Many followed instead the less prescriptive but nevertheless identifiable path of applying methods associated with ethnography (in-depth interviews, conversational interviews, group interviews, time-use diaries, letters, family albums, and other personal documents) in the vein of Morley, Ang, Radway, Schrøder, and others who were interested in establishing an empirical commitment to the study of popular culture production and consumption. By the late 1980s the quasi-ethnographic marbling of media studies was colored further by a greater focus on political and epistemological issues tied to representation. The debate surrounding the representation of the “Other” constituted a disciplinary “crisis” in anthropology, and its force hit ethnography squarely, as a practice discursively wedded to colonialism and the objectification of non-Western subjects. But, whereas anthropologists wrestled to come to terms with the translative process between fieldwork and ethnographic text, for a long time media studies seemed content to discuss the limits of reflexivity as the object of inquiry, as opposed to an epistemological dilemma tied to “voice” and to “being there” and “writing here,” and this state of things prompted some to question media studies' ethnographic commitment (Bird, 1992; Drotner, 1994; Murdoch, 1997; Murphy, 1999; Nightingale, 1993). And, although more recent ethnographic work produced by media scholars has signaled an attempt to deal directly with issues of representation, field experience, and reflexivity (Boylorn, 2008; Kim, 2005, 2006; LaPastina, 2005; Mayer, 2005; Murphy & Kraidy, 2003; Parameswaran, 2001; Podber, 2007), most of this scholarship has been generated by researchers of media and globalization.

Second, a growing corpus of media ethnography is moving away from the notion that ethnography is constituted through sustained encounters in stable, situated fieldsites. The emerging ethnographic vision can be found in the descriptive tropes now used by media ethnographers, “cultural interlocutors,” “complicity,” “lurking,” “mobility,” and “embodied subjectivities” serving in place of classic anthropological terms like “informants,” “entrée,” “rapport,” and “immersion.” This language reveals an understanding of fieldwork that is configured by a world where cultural exchange takes place, routinely now, in something called cyberspace and where social ties are shaped through things like chatting, surfing, and tweeting. But these adjustments are also more than just about penetrating virtual fields of communication and exchange, as the fieldwork itself is being increasingly defined as a dynamic, even ephemeral experience, conducted in what could be characterized as a context of fluid situatedness. Bird (2003), for instance, has called for an “opportunistic ethnography” (p. 5), developed through “researcher-absent” methods (p. 17). She argues that media researchers should be less concerned with “insignificant” issues such as time in the field (p. 8), and they should commit themselves instead to the “ethnographic way of seeing” (p. 12). Rather than privilege immersion in specific sites, Bird places an emphasis on communication with participants and on asking the right questions, which would be designed to create situations where “the participant is invited to define the terms of the encounter” (p. 12).

Additionally, there is Hills' (2002) reconceptualization of fieldwork as something conducted through an “ethnography of the self” (p. 81). Hills is primarily interested in fan culture, and his autoethnographic privileging of the self casts the personal–locational at the interpretative core of the ethnographic process. This move serves as a means of overcoming the limitations of low-tech, face-to-face ethnography when the subject of the research involves making sense of the multiple theaters of media reception. Also, rather than celebrating the “native's point of view,” which he believes leads to inherently weak interpretations of fan culture because it is reliant on the “auto-legitimation within fan culture” (p. 66), Hills advocates self-reflexivity as the ethnographic path through which to question the currency of the fan's own interpretations of media texts. Given these parameters, “the field” is an internal place for the ethnographer-fan, and self-interrogation is the tool that must constantly be deployed in order to interpret one's own identities and affiliations within the fan communities of media cultures under study.

Somewhat complementary to Hills and Bird's reconceptualizations of fieldwork is Couldry's (2003) more existentially grounded, yet no less fluid argument that media researchers need to develop “passing ethnographies” capable of yielding “knowledge under certain conditions” (p. 44). At the core of Couldry's vision of ethnography is the perception that, since people live increasingly “mediated lives,” meaning and understanding are always partial and situated. Therefore, in order to reveal patterns of thinking in media audiences, ethnography needs to be less focused on the total life contexts and more sensitive to context as something rhetorical, negotiated, and situational. In other words, instead of an encamped “being there” vision of ethnography, in line with the anthropological tradition (e.g., in the village), Couldry advocates for an ethnography that is in the moment as much as it is in the field. “Listening closely and effectively to people's talk need not require a full ethnographic contextualization for that talk” (p. 52). Instead it can be spontaneous and conducted across a range of multi-sited contexts, which are built on mutual exchange (“complicity”) rather than on rapport, in order to capture patterns of cultural thought and action related to media discourses.

Taken together, the ethnographic visions sketched out by media scholars like Hills, Bird, and Couldry are less rigid and considerably more open than classic ethnography to experimentation and to an adjustment based on the communicative elements of social networks and media events. While the change in the ethnographic mise-en-scène may very well suggest a less rigorous connection to the concrete fieldsite and to the immersive process of participant observation, these authors nevertheless present ideas for a new imagining – both of how ethnography can tackle more phantom-like practices of cultural exchange and information sharing by shifting emphasis to fleeting moments of ethnographic opportunity, and of how those moments are negotiated to bear ethnographic fruit.

Third, it is important to understand that, in media studies as elsewhere, the recent move to ethnographic field studies without a traditional sense of fieldwork is tied to institutional realities. At its height, anthropological fieldwork was a methodological beneficiary of university systems, at least in the US, where it was receiving huge sums of money. Today we might admit that our ethnographic cocooning is just as much a product of institutional budget cuts, which are felt by researchers most often in the form of restrictive travel funds, reductions in sabbaticals, and the elimination of internal summer grants, all of which translate into less opportunities for field studies built on “being there.” Not surprisingly, many media studies research projects consist now of “traveling” to more accessible virtual worlds, in order to study community media convergence audiences and virtual communities.

These last two factors – that many media scholars are working to establish a new sense of what constitutes ethnography and that institutional pressures shape the practice of media ethnography – underscore the observation that the ethnographic method is at a time of transition and profound change. Or, as anthropologists James D. Faubion and George E. Marcus (2009) put it, one can simply say that “fieldwork is not what it used to be.” Of course Faubion and Marcus are writing about anthropology, and so perhaps a better take on the idea that new kind of fieldwork needs to be formed is to say that, at least within media studies, “fieldwork is what we decide it will be.” In stating this I am of course poking a bit of fun (with a Geertzian wink) at the fact that media studies is in the somewhat interesting position that, since it never really had an established “rites of passage” approach to fieldwork vis-à-vis anthropology, it is, to an extent, freer to explore a new vision of ethnography. Or at least this is how it seems to be playing out. Indeed, it is quite ironic that, in many ways, the absence of a grounded notion of fieldwork in media studies has made the transition to today's global mediascape of convergence, networked communities, and the inescapable echo chamber of corporate media messages somewhat more open to an ethnographic adjustment for the study of audiences. That is, if the politics of the rites and rituals of the field encounter was not something particularly hobbling to the enterprise of audience ethnography before, why would media ethnographers suddenly be overly concerned by their limitations in an age of emerging virtual tribes and of exponential growth in social media communities?

Observation and the Field

In mapping out some of the forces that have formed ethnography's profile in audience studies, I want to underscore that I am not advocating a move away from long-term media ethnographies grounded in the study of physical sites of reception and production. Rather, as I acknowledge the pressures and limitations that affect ethnographies built on extended fieldwork and I build on some of the past work that calls for an opportunistic ethnography and emphasizes the situatedness of experience and self reflexivity, I want to suggest how and why audience ethnographers might reconsider short-term field visits conducted in physical sites as a way to deepen the ethnographic commitment to the study of networked communities of media production and consumption. Indeed, as Livingstone (2010, p. 569) asserts, audience ethnography still represents one of the best ways to study ecologies of power when it remains focused on analyzing consumption's relation to production (as mapped, for instance, by Johnson's, “circuit of culture,” by Hall's “encoding and decoding,” and by Habermas' “life world,” in concert with the “system world”). In my view, this involves investing in an understanding of media ethnography that draws on the embodied experience in the field, even if that experience is less immersive than that of anthropology's established tradition.

Consider for instance, as an extension of the audience research tradition, how the situated and sensual experiences of fieldsite visits might be employed to research the elaboration of increasingly complex and integrated “mediascapes” (Appadurai, 2003). Defined by anthropologist Arjun Appadurai as image-centered, narrative-based “strips of reality” comprised by a “complicated and interconnected repertoire of print, celluloid, electronic screens, and billboards” (p. 43), mediascapes are inflected by political and historical contexts and shape the flow of cultural capital that audiences experience. As part of an interlaced series of scapes through which social actors navigate, mediascapes serve as the building blocks of “imagined worlds” (p. 43).

My introductory tale from Kidzania hints at how a site visit can tap into the performative, participatory, and “passing” nature of some of these mediascapes, not to mention how global and locally integrated they have become over the last few years. It also illustrates how such existential experiences might serve as a point of departure for elaborating audience research – first informed by observation and then built on to move steadily toward a more identifiable audience. But digesting these experiences to initiate such an ethnographic process is no simple task, as such sites can be quite dense and fluid, and thus researching them can be more than a little challenging: although they vary in terms of size, complexity, and coherence, these are – primarily, even if not exclusively – strategic spaces of cross media marketing that are constantly being adjusted.

Nevertheless, it is because of the potential of fieldsite visits to reveal entry points into research that there is good reason to argue for an experiential, observational path to the study of audiences. Clearly, now more than ever, we live in a world where spectacle and multiplatform messaging form commercial mediascapes designed to engage individuals through their subjectivity. Often these corporate creations represent efforts to shape and sell a particular brand image, making it not just an image, idea, or slogan, but an experience calculated to inscribe a discursive frame of reference for its audiences. And, as commercial interests continue to respond to technological innovation and seek out ways to harness its potential, such performative spaces are not just the terrain of Kidzania-type malls or amusement parks venues. In fact, in an effort to craft a better, more socially responsible brand image, many companies have taken to establishing entire media divisions dedicated to elaborating interactive mediascapes that dovetail together to shape public perception. More and more this is preformed through brand management that relies on the sophisticated interlacing of public relations, social responsibility efforts, social media (e.g., issue blogs and responsive twittering), self-publishing, employee buy-in, and strategic framing. Interestingly, these efforts have lead to some of the most diverse sites of cross-cultural interaction, production, and reception, as their audiences are comprised not only of those sanctioned as the consumers (say, ticket holders, shoppers, travelers, site visitors, investors, journalists), but also of those involved in the production of these sites (account managers, tour guides, vendors, sales clerks, security, maintenance workers) – and sometimes even of those more peripherally or oppositionally connected (street vendors and artists, culture jammers, activists, and the like).

To get a better sense of how and why these kinds of efforts have been designed to engage audiences, I arranged to conduct a site visit at the headquarters of a company that has invested heavily in the elaboration of its own mediascape of brand management.

Notes from a Visit to Monsanto

In the spring of 2009 I was invited to visit the Public Affairs unit of the US-based multinational agricultural biotechnology giant Monsanto and to tour their corporate headquarters. As part of a larger project I was working on, which focused on the media in the contexts of environment and globalization, I was interested in learning about Monsanto's media operations in relation to their corporate image, and particularly to the key issue of sustainability. After I undertook some preliminary research on Monsanto's product lines, following the debate about Monsanto's business practices, I reached out to the head of the public affairs office and was immediately contacted and invited to visit the company's headquarters for a tour and to sit down meeting with some members of its team – an invitation that was surprising at first, as I had been warned by colleagues how notoriously unresponsive Monsanto was to research requests.

As I was driving down the winding entrance of Monsanto Drive, it quickly became apparent that this was truly the model of a Midwest corporate campus: it was a big, almost bucolic place, located in the western suburbs of St. Louis, Missouri. Monsanto Drive is tree-lined and it twists and turns past a host of office buildings and parking lots ranging from A to X, divided into north and south designations. Various signs direct visitors to these buildings, as well as to the Monsanto Child Development Center and to the Security Office. In view of the company's rather controversial status around the globe, as I drove in I was struck by the lack of a heavy security presence, at least one that I could see. Instead of being stopped and directed, I parked on my own in lot N-1 and wandered around several buildings, asking staff for assistance until I found the correct entrance to Building A. Once I was there, a receptionist took my name, and within minutes I was greeted by Tom, my tour guide for the day. As if to punctuate Monsanto's global reach, Tom informs me that we will be joined by the governor of the Sarangani Province in the Philippines, but he assures me that the tour will just consist of the three of us.

Tom escorts me to the R visitor's center, and on the way there we chat. I find him personable and quite knowledgeable about Monsanto's history and product lines. Indeed, he entertains all of my questions in an easy and friendly way, fielding even my most provocative questions with grace and patience (for instance when I ask about Agent Orange – a topic that Monsanto dubs a “legacy issue” – one among others). Through my conversations with Tom I learn that he is a graduate of the University of Missouri's prestigious journalism program, and was a long time journalist at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He indicates that he left the newspaper after things there became too contentious, and he stressed that he finds Monsanto a much more pleasant place to work because of its transparency among staff and administrators and because of the generally positive attitude about what the new employer stands for – something he shares with me when he confesses that, ironically, he never felt like a journalist (“In journalism, everyone had such cynical views of the world that I came home depressed and exhausted everyday”: Monsanto employee, personal communication, April 20, 2009).

To begin things, I am to take a tour before meeting with the Public Affairs team. The governor from the Philippines is already in the waiting room, and Tom directs both of us to a small theater, to watch a 12-minute video. The video is instructive; we learn that Monsanto has over 15,000 people a year participate in the tour and that the campus was established in 1964, on 500 acres. The company's showcase product has long been the herbicide Roundup, but we are informed that Monsanto now invests over $900 million per year in research and development, 95% of which is spent on seed development and only 5% on chemicals. We are also introduced to the “Monsanto Pledge,'” which is “Dialogue, Transparency, Respect, Sharing and Benefits” (available in six languages) –the central strategy through which, as I learn throughout the day, Monsanto is very deliberately rebranding itself as a food company rather than a chemical company.

When the informational video ends, Tom points to a map and explains where we will go. He escorts the governor and me down a series of stairwells and long hallways, many of which have small emergency showers outside of old chemical labs. Tom assures us that most are relics from the past and that all the old chemical laboratories have now been renovated into seed labs. As we move down the corridors, there are touch screens with short videos at each stop in the tour that orient and introduce us to the topics we are being educated about. These videos range from lessons about the oil content of corn and advice on cultivating low transfat soy to presentations about increasing the cotton crop yield and instruction in the science of “seed chipping” corn and soy. Tom tells me that each “station” on the tour is designed to have three “take-home points,” and in fact I learn quite a lot about the scientific process behind bioengineering.

Thematically the tour is organized around the master code of “sustainability,” which in turn dovetails with Monsanto's branding agenda of being seen as a seed company as opposed to a chemical one. This message does not just reside at the thematic center of the tour but, as I will learn later, during my round table session with the Public Affairs team, sustainability is clearly the battleground where Monsanto sees its discursive struggle with the “activists” (a term used to describe many of its critics, but particularly those involved in the organic food movement) being played out.

After the tour is completed, the Philippine governor is picked up by another Monsanto representative and led away, while Tom takes me to a meeting room for my session with the Public Affairs team. I am a bit early and the lunch buffet is still being set up as I arrive. The meal consists of grilled salmon accompanied by, as if to punctuate the morning's learning points, a beautiful garden salad of red lettuce, red ripe tomatoes, purple onion, and other greens. Within a few minutes the members of the Public Affairs team start to make their way into the room. All are very friendly and introduce themselves. As they state their names and positions within the company, I have to admit that, even with my academic credentials, I feel quite surprised by the degree of access I am being given for this working lunch. I am introduced not only to the director of Public Affairs (the person who initially invited me to Monsanto), but also to her superior, the director of Issues and Employee/Electronic Communication. Others who join us for the lunch include the assistant director of Public Affairs, the director of Internal News and Communications, the social media specialist, the communications project manager, the research and development (R&D) pipeline director, and the manager of tour coordinators. I am given an hour and a half to interview them in round table style while we munch on the fresh garden salads and salmon.

The conversation that unfolds is not unlike one fostered in a focus group session, providing details both on topics introduced through my questions and probes (e.g., how Monsanto has used the media to address its history of highly controversial products – such as Agent Orange in Vietnam, Roundup Ultra in Plan Colombia, and recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH) in milk production) and on issues that emerged as the interlocutors interacted and engaged with each other (information versus spin, or outreach and science versus uninformed criticism and myth). The group genuinely seemed to enjoy the opportunity to talk to me, as well as to each other. I am also struck by how young most of the team members are, half of them being in their early thirties. All present themselves as being committed to Monsanto's mission and troubled by the fact that that mission is largely misunderstood and unappreciated.

Emerging from my interview with the group is the assertion, which was expressed many times, that “we are a seed company.” This was thematically consistent with the morning tour, and indeed I am reminded that legacy issues such as Agent Orange and rBGH are part of Monsanto's past. I am told that, unlike competitors such as Dow Chemical, Monsanto today has very little invested in agri-chemical research and development. One participant adds:

It was for this reason, I am explained, that the media team was assembled. Interestingly, they see this shift – away from the old “legacy” and toward the notion that Monsanto is a seed company – and the path leading to it primarily as a matter of changing the topic of conversation, from “how” things are done to “why.”

As I learn quickly, this is a highly sophisticated process, based on the interdepartmental communication synergy model of “Promote, Respond and Implement.” In this model the focus is not, say, on the science of developing corn with higher oil yields, but rather on the reasons why producing higher yields is important. Through this shift in emphasis Monsanto is attempting to drive public perception away from what it makes and toward why what it does has social value.

One of the main instruments through which this institutionally coordinated effort is being elaborated is the use of an employee blog. I was told that this terrain within the Monsanto mediascape is designed as an effort to “make employees ambassadors” by encouraging them to be involved in conversations about Monsanto.

The blog, which was started in February 2009, was created to facilitate an employee conversation about the company, and it permitted even “extraordinarily critical” comments. In the place of photos of each employee, participants used customized South Park avatars to interact through the blog. Conversations that surfaced in the first months of the blog included serious discussions about “chronic issues” (for instance Indian farmer suicides, especially among cotton growers) as well as tackling external critiques (such as Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma) or issues presented by groups most critical of Monsanto (Center for Food Safety, or GM Watch).

In addition to the blog, Twitter is used as a social media tool, in order for people to interact both with employees and with audiences external to Monsanto. According to one communications project manager, “we were given the freedom to try new directions” (ibid.). The result is that Twitter has become the communicative mode of information exchange that Monsanto has placed at the center of its social media efforts – since the account, which was started in September 2008, quickly grew to about 900 users. Several social media specialists are assigned to answer questions on Twitter and to direct people to the company's main website for more information. Moreover, this is a way to get employees to respond to “activists,” community members, and others. Significantly, the social media specialists also see it as a “really good way to get different voices in the conversation, be those ‘activists’ who post their own preferred websites or Monsanto's own ‘Field advisors’ (biologists who work with farmers testing Monsanto seeds) who bring their experiences in the field to the conversation” (ibid.).

The blog and Twitter are both used to direct audiences to “For the Record” – an “issues management site” presented on Monsanto's main corporate website – so that they can access more in-depth information on a given subject. This site provides planting and harvesting updates; it also links to an informational website about specific products or issues and can be set up to email information directly to investors. “For the Record” was described to me as being “much more conversational than [a] typical information site, but not as much as a blog” (ibid.).

In addition to websites, blogs, and Twitter, Monsanto employs video and television to help shape its message. One of the most direct examples is its farm show coverage from Iowa and Illinois. The aim here is to bring the shows, via the Monsanto website, to audiences unable to attend the shows themselves. The coverage of a show is designed to “go beyond press releases” through the use of video, bloggers, and webcam coverage of events (ibid.). In addition, Monsanto has its own internal television news show, created to be a “one stop shop for information” for its employees. During my interviews, Monsanto's Internal News and Communications director (also executive producer of the show) informed me that his aim was to create news programming that was about Monsanto and for Monsanto employees, but without it sounding like corporate propaganda; and he shared with me: “I despise spin and corporate speak” (ibid.).

Finally, there is also Monsanto Today, the company's online news magazine, which is responsible for chronicling topical issues of interest for Monsanto's investors, employees, and others, who are just generally interested in agricultural issues. In many ways this is the company's flagship media product, and it is dedicated to establishing an official record of Monsanto's activities and accomplishments. As one of the writers of Monsanto Today explained to me: “We take true journalistic principles and apply them to Monsanto issues” (ibid.).

After my lunch session with the Public Affairs team I was led to a large office area divided into some twenty smaller modular partitions. There I was given access to a number to division heads working along with the Public Affairs team to “Promote, Influence and Respond.” It was within my conversations with these division representatives that I was able to get a better sense of how “sustainability” is understood and articulated at Monsanto. During my talks with several of the social media account managers I was told that they are committed to sharing with readers how Monsanto's investment in sustainability is really about feeding the world. To do this, they are constantly surveying other blogs, websites, and mainstream media (St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorials, Huffington Post, The Ethicurean), in order to gauge “what's being said and where the conversation is going.” In this way they anticipate critique and are able to address issues raised by the “local food activists,” whom Monsanto sees as its chief rivals in the domain of sustainability. In fact, from Monsanto's point of view, adopting social media was just a way to level the playing field and to add its own voice to the conversations. As one Monsanto social media blogger put it to me: “Sustainability was becoming the domain of the organic farmers, but we need to produce more food so where does the technology come in? This is our way to help people understand what we are doing” (ibid.).

I am taught that there are also crop-related challenges that Monsanto focuses on. The three main seeds that Monsanto's engineers have worked on are for row crops: corn, soy, and cotton. The company sees these as something less intimate or personal than fruits and vegetables, and so the problems related to them are, in its eyes, distinct. Veggies, I am told, are both more global and more local than grains are. “People put tomatoes on their tables. There's an aesthetic to them and people have an everyday connection to them. It's hard to say that about soybean or cotton” (ibid.).

This distinction between row crops and vegetables is addressed directly when I meet with the communications director of Seminis, a company acquired by Monsanto in 2005. Seminis has a footprint primarily in Africa, Eastern Europe, South America, and Asia, and it has worked to increase the yield of “open field” crops like tomatoes. The company's operations are smaller, since its 4,000 employees are working in 51 research stations around the world, in an attempt to keep the company's image tied to local and regional producers. This, I am explained, means that the researchers work closely with different local growers, and the focus is more on breeding than on biotechnology. To make sure that the operations don't “carry the baggage of the grains,” Monsanto has elected to keep the name “Seminis,” which originally belonged to a European company.

The sense that people have a relationship with vegetables and that these are much more visible than soy or cotton was something that became quite salient in my interviews. One Seminis account administrator said: “People have a pastoral vision of food. Organic has done a good job of controlling this image, but there are large farms that are also family farms which grow the food we eat” (ibid.). Another added:

The media strategies described to me and listed above are how Monsanto is attending to these image concerns, and they are of course elaborated in concert with more traditional public relations operations and sponsored events around the globe, which are designed to help craft Monsanto's image. The emphasis during my interviews was largely placed on employee response to these media, and in fact I was told that, on the basis of their own research, over 75% of all US Monsanto employees and 55% of all Monsanto international employees use the website. “Employees can be very interactive,” I was informed, “adding their own video, articles and blogs.” For example, one social media specialist shared with me the case of the blog “What is Corn,” which was generated when a single issue took hold, and within a few hours over “110 comments appeared,” being followed by people posting articles, video, and even international debates (ibid.).

But, as mentioned earlier, beyond targeting employees to help make them corporate ambassadors, Monsanto develops its information sites as resources for external audiences. A member of the Public Affairs team said: “we want to be positioned so that people can come to us for credible information.” This sense of positioning is vital, I think, and it is reflected quite directly in the Public Affairs team's mission: “Promote, Influence and Respond.” The mediascape that emerges from these distinct efforts underscores how, through cross-media, multiplatform strategies, and brand management, a corporation is attempting to shape and guide the contours of what is being talked about, all the while presenting the flow of ideas and information as flexible, open to debate, exploration, and argumentation, and customizable. But what becomes apparent throughout a site visit like the one I describe above is that the measures taken to create and maintain the terms of a discourse, though ostensibly under constant negotiation and open to being reviewed by audiences, are highly coordinated and driven by both corporate agendas and personal motivation – qualities not necessarily self-evident to those who might consume the company's message and interact with its mediascape.

Conclusions

The last few pages, which I presented as a mixture of narrative description, quotes from conversations and interviews, and field notes, suggest a few observations about the ethnographic quality of my site visit and, by extension, about whether a short field visit can generate ethnographically thick material for research. So, by way of conclusion, I wish to consider some of the “take home” points – to borrow the Monsanto terminology – that the site visit of a mediascape (both in the sense that the tour is a mediascape and in the sense that the company itself is creating and maintaining one for a host of audiences) can provide for the elaboration of an ethnography of Monsanto audiences.

First and foremost, there is a sense that even a short-term version of “being there” is important for establishing a fuller sense of how, both as producers and audiences, the communities of networks involved in the delivery and consumption of the mediascape are shaped and elaborated. Nightingale (2008) reminds us that fieldwork “is based on the premise that communication is a material process in the sense that it is something that can be observed, recorded, documented, analyzed and written about,” and hence it “involves finding ways to transform the fleeting character of communication and social relations into durable analyzable forms” (p. 1). To be in the field is to observe, to experience, and to document those observations and experiences. Though my day of meetings, interviews, and tour falls well short of a field stay in classic ethnographic terms, it does offer something more than what Couldry describes as a “passing ethnography,” and indeed in many ways it does continue the Malinowskian tradition of “getting away from the table on the verandah and hanging around the village instead, chatting, questioning, listening in, looking on – writing it all up later” (Clifford, 1990, pp. 51).

More specifically, the case of the Monsanto site visit shows how even a limited field experience can provide opportunities for engagement and observation that are ethnographically evocative. Such situated, existential experiences are immensely helpful for revealing linkages and connections to social networks and for teasing out a deeper, fuller sense of how “corporate culture” is translated into “media culture” (e.g., why “sustainability” matters to Monsanto, how social media account managers see “activism,” how the image of vegetables is distinguished from that of grains by corporate divisions). In short, though partial and highly limited as a site visit, the opportunity to move about in the context of people's professional environment allowed for a more complete, observable, and experiential understanding of the cultural communication and generative processes and roles within the Monsanto team of media professionals, their imagined community of readers, and their sense of creative purpose.

But, while data-rich, the Monsanto example still leaves somewhat open and unanswered the question: When does fieldwork become ethnographic? One day in the field, even one as productive as my Monsanto visit, does not make for a media ethnography. What it provides instead is an ethnographic path for getting the voices and images from the field into our audience ethnographies, in ways that chatroom or telephone interviews, time-use diaries or fan letters cannot. So, for audience ethnographers, the potential quality of elaborating fieldsite visits in relation to more audience-centered data gathering efforts has a number of implications. First, to achieve ethnographic validity, such abbreviated field experiences of observation and exchange in corporate sites where media products are generated can serve to complement and extend, not sit in for, the range and variety of ethnographic choices (interpretive communities studied, for example) and relationships (access and entrée to communities, friendships, key informants, and so on) that ultimately define an ethnographic product in audience studies. Second, the grounding of audience ethnography in some sort of existential place and experience provides a means through which to move closer to the investigative chore of linking and following events and activities that shape and frame the imagined worlds of media users and producers. Indeed, as Livingstone (2010) recently noted, within media studies there is still a “distaste for the risky negotiations with ‘real people’ on their home ground” (p. 569). To move off of the proverbial veranda and hang out in the village allows audience ethnographers to ask better questions and to engage more fully the webs of meaning elaborated between mediascapes and their audiences. Even abbreviated field experiences can be a vital tool for audience ethnography, because, with a fieldsite visit and conversations that emerge within them in tow, any subsequent analysis of audience responses to blogs, chatroom exchanges, television viewing, or other media in which an audience is immersed can be interpreted in relation to the partial knowledge gained through a range of abbreviated field experiences.

NOTE

¹ According to its Dubai website (http://www.kidzania.com/dubai/), Kidzania is “an entertainment and education center for kids – the first to offer kid activities based upon the oldest game of all: role playing. This center combines real environments with activities that allow kids to play to be grown ups. It is a city scaled down to kid size where the most common establishments you would find in any city are recreated. In this city, kids learn real life skills, reinforce educational concepts from school and values the importance of each role and profession that exist in a city. All of this is possible through the concept of ‘edutainment.’”

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