Annette N. Markham

Go Ugly Early: Fragmented Narrative and Bricolage as Interpretive Method

This article presents findings from an ethnographic research project as well as a study of method that explores the meaning of the popular phrase “Go Ugly Early” as it is claimed and lived out by a group of males in a popular bar. Acknowledging that similar methods can accomplish some of the same results and effects, this piece is an example of writing as inquiry, layered account, impressionist/mixed genre tale, or hypertext. Through form and content, the author illustrates the political value of fragmented narrative as it disrupts the linear flow of argument, reveals disparate and disjunctive influences on the researcher’s process of sense making through the course of a study, and opens more spaces for multiplicity. Through fragmented segments of scholarly, fictional, research journal, and participant narratives, the article explores how these sources of information play and interweave in the interpretive sense-making process and the construction of a research report.

Internet Research: Ethical Concerns

Across the globe, societies are experiencing significant flux and transformation in the way digital information and networked technologies are woven into and influence everyday life, workplace practices, social norms, and institutional structures. Likewise, all academic disciplines are challenged to make sense of these transformations in light of ethical research practice. Actively confronting these challenges means not only being aware of them, but thoughtfully considering how we might better address these challenges. This article discusses various ethical challenges in applied research involving digital media or Internet-related contexts.

Disciplining the Future: A Critical Organizational Analysis of Internet Studies

This article provides a critical, cautionary stance toward the future structure of “Internet studies” as a field. A social constructionist reading of the process of organizing reveals the ways in which apparently obdurate structures are constructed and negotiated through everyday discursive practices. Subsequent structures and practices function ideologically to control organizational members in a concertive fashion by shaping and directing the conceptual frameworks for inquiry and action in a seemingly natural way. Definitions and metaphors construct conceptual boundaries of meaning for the field of inquiry, delimiting and protecting over time what counts as Internet and Internet studies. Over time, origins of knowledge are hidden within the structure of the organizations and a culture of unobtrusive control emerges. Unless radical measures are taken to reflexively interrogate everyday routines and habitual ways of talking in academic environments, the future field of Internet studies will not transcend the traditions of the academy but will be entrenched in and reproduce traditional structures and a traditional scholarly enterprise.

I'm an Addict and Other Sensemaking Devices: A Discourse Analysis of Self-Reflections on Lived Experience of Social Media

How do young people make sense of their social media experiences, which rhetoric do they use, which grand narratives of technology and social media do they rely on? Based on discourse analysis of approximately 500 pages of written data and 390 minutes of video (generated by 50 college students aged 18-30 between 2014-2016) this article explores how young people negotiate their own experience and existing discourses about social media. Our analysis shows that young people rely heavily on canonic binaries from utopian and dystopian interpretations of networked technologies to apply labels to themselves, others, and social media in general. As they are prompted to reflect on their experience, their rhetoric about social media use and its implications becomes more nuanced yet remains inherently contradictory. This reflects a dialectical struggle to make sense of their lived experiences and feelings. Our unique methodology for generating deeply self-reflexive, auto-ethnographic narrative accounts suggests a way for scholars to be able to understand the ongoing struggles for meaning that occur within the granularity of everyday reflections about our own social media use.

The rhetoric of self‐directive management and the operation of organizational power

This essay presents a critical‐interpretive case study of an organization that illustrates the communicative accomplishment of organizational power. It details how the managing ownership espoused a rhetoric of self‐directive management which obscured conflicting political interests and relations of power. The case study demonstrates the difficulties organizational members face in recognizing and dealing with conflicting political interests, and how communication practices can serve to conceal and reinforce the dominant organizational power structure.

Ethics as Methods: Doing Ethics in the Era of Big Data Research—Introduction:

This is an introduction to the special issue of “Ethics as Methods: Doing Ethics in the Era of Big Data Research.” Building on a variety of theoretical paradigms (i.e., critical theory, [new] materialism, feminist ethics, theory of cultural techniques) and frameworks (i.e., contextual integrity, deflationary perspective, ethics of care), the Special Issue contributes specific cases and fine-grained conceptual distinctions to ongoing discussions about the ethics in data-driven research. In the second decade of the 21st century, a grand narrative is emerging that posits knowledge derived from data analytics as true, because of the objective qualities of data, their means of collection and analysis, and the sheer size of the data set. The by-product of this grand narrative is that the qualitative aspects of behavior and experience that form the data are diminished, and the human is removed from the process of analysis. This situates data science as a process of analysis performed by the tool, which obscures human decisions in the process. The scholars involved in this Special Issue problematize the assumptions and trends in big data research and point out the crisis in accountability that emerges from using such data to make societal interventions. Our collaborators offer a range of answers to the question of how to configure ethics through a methodological framework in the context of the prevalence of big data, neural networks, and automated, algorithmic governance of much of human socia(bi)lity

Afterword: Ethics as Impact—Moving From Error-Avoidance and Concept-Driven Models to a Future-Oriented Approach:

Beginning with the premise that most regulatory guidelines for research ethics are deeply flawed, this article walks the reader through three models that can help social researchers, technologists, and designers identify and reflect on how they’re approaching ethics, or “doing the right thing” in their own work. The first, an error-avoidance model, has traditionally focused on creating frameworks to help researchers avoid repeating historical ethical violations. The second concept-driven model focuses on refining the concepts that undergird core ethical frameworks. Both are dominant in human-focused research and tend to be highly proceduralized, implemented a priori or from the top down as part of largescale regulatory structures. In both of these models, the agency of the researcher is removed or dismissed as less relevant than the agency of the system. The article draws on recent controversies around data collection and corporate experimentation on social media users as well as two academic research cases to illustrate how these two models fail repeatedly because they do not retain enough flexibility to allow for recontextualizing ethics as needed on a case-by-case basis. The third, an impact-model of ethics, offers an alternative whereby researchers, technologists, and designers can take a more active role in decisions about the contexts they study, by exploring the possible positive and negative impact of their work. This article invites us to work toward building a different balance in agential distribution in our models around responsible conduct of research, so that the conceptual and regulatory systems that guide and impede our actions are more balanced with our own agency as decision makers, with accountability and responsibility for doing the ‘right thing’.