What is Information Ethnography ?

A year ago I changed my LinkedIn title description to “Information Ethnographer”. Since then, a few people have ask me what information ethnography is about; it seems like the use of an empirical method with an abstract concept does not match. It turns out the reason for this name came by goggling this term. My professional expertise is to make cultural structure into educational content, and vice versa. From an anthropological point of view, the direction of one or another is a question of perspective, or observation… as the social dimensions of any cultural product are beyond it individuals. So I found the Social Informatics Program at The University of Indiana website. There, around 2012, professor David Hakken, from the Social Informatics (SI) Group in the School of Informatics and Computing (SoIC) was teaching a course titled “Ethnography of Information“.

I accepted as a fact that at least one relevant search result, from one respectable person was enough to maintain the name as my LinkedIn title. At least one well recognized professional in the world was actually doing something I though was feasible. It is possible to research how rituals practices of knowledge production operate symbolic technologies. How the (re)production of concepts like “raw data” or “mathematical” are embedded with cultural beliefs, lexicons and discourses that shape notions like document, content or information.

There are many theoretical approaches to the fact that symbolic thought has byproducts that are simultaneously imaginary and material, like alphabets, numerical notations or tools for measurement and imagery visualization. In order to make possible to say that mental and physical aspects of information are expressed by linguistic practices, a discursive analysis of the symbolic technologies of though it is necessary. In other words, an ethnography of information.

For instance, among different approaches for the ethnography of  language, one is the ethnography of communication and, accordingly with it proponent, Dell Hymes, it analyses the flow of information. Since each society has a different perspective on the distribution of knowledge, each one will manage it allocation according to it patterns. 

Still, Information can be many things but abstract. Studies like the ones conducted by professor Kalpana Shankar, with ethnography and Big Data are on the track to encounter the merge of language, number an social sciences.

From my approach, in order to see concepts like data, content, document, or information as cultural productions, it helps to apply the linguistic distinction between massive and countable entities. If I say “there is water all over the street“, it means that is impossible to see how much like, for example,”there´s beans all over the street“.  The difficult part is not much to count the beans, as is not feasible to pick one by one, but “to separate” water. So information is taken like beans, but behaves like water…For that reason, concepts like “data lake” are taking the stage in dealing with information.

The very nature of something existing as “meaningful” implies human interpretation and, therefore, distinction… Although abstract, information can be produced, collected, managed, analyzed, synthesized, multiplied, missed… So like any other cultural materialization, information is a “material” consequence of cultural practices.

But, nevertheless,  there is a piece of sense on asking “what” (which information) is ethnographed. After all, fancy words like ethnography.

At some point the Information Science people begun to incorporate cultural aspects to their practice. Although Marshal McLuhan had noted:

When IBM discovered that it was not in the business of making office equipment or business machines, but that it was in the business of processing information, then it began to navigate with dear vision. The General Electric Company makes a considerable portion of its profits from electric light bulbs and lighting systems. It has not yet discovered that, quite as much as A.T.& T., it is in the business of moving information.
The electric light escapes attention as a communication medium just because it has no “content.”

More recently, the field of Information Science itself has begun to pay attention to the cultural settings they deal with.  As we can see, there is a tradition to recognize the cultural aspects of information. The more people ask about what information ethnography is about, more I think that what I do, is nothing more than follow what I have been doing in the last 17 years: research, production and documentation of digital content.

Interface design is the new discourse analysis

The notion that” the medium is the message“, as McLuhan said, has never been more present than in our use of interfaces . In order to make possible to have digital conversations, from the dark patterns design to the accessibility needs, today technologies have all in common manipulation of signs, symbols, icons. As we us more technology to communicate with others, we became ourselves instruments of communication.

Icons, the images that organize elements in different surfaces like physical objects, like a remote control, or the flat screens of monitors and cellphones seems to appear have primacy over word of text. Symbols like triangles, circles and squares today go far beyond specialized use like video game controllers.

How much of a web page is text, and how much is about images, I found this encouraging blog post, arguing that 95% of the total web content is about text, or typography. The post goes further linking to another blog where is made the following distinction:design still about word ( or language).

Besides the fact that sound overcomes image when it is used as a description, the kuleshov effect , text, image and sound are semiotic elements that are interchangeable to some extent. The limit is precisely the syntax scope one can spread over the medium. Take sound and it possible manipulations reduced to human language specificity beyond vocalization: words. Take image without words. And take text as image itself, or text as interface.

All these factor come into comparison when analyzing digital content. Still, a problem is that each channel as been taken as separate and only now some research shows that auditory perception is influenced by image.

Around 70 thousand years ago, say archaeologists, systems of  pattern recording  were produced intending  to engrave lines beyond the mere accident of contact friction.

So with this gap of 40, 50 thousand years,one of the two scenarios maybe happened: the first is one where a proto-language emerged from these images, one that had lexical properties such the formation of words. The second is carried out by some linguists of the Noam Chomsky tradition, that argues the language is a feature that emerged as a whole, without a proto-language.

In recent years, there is a hype about how technology is showing images from thoughts:

Meaning, the holy grail of language, is one thing that images, sound and word cannot bear it alone, or separated by channels of significance. The emergence of graphical interfaces is so pervasive that text today is resembling the interface itself. More we dive into images, more we find words, names, moods, variations of shape and content: the syntax behind it