“Embracing Discontent: Teaching Television Effects through an Ethnographic Experiment”
Charles Lewis, Ph.D.
Mankato State University
Given: visual electronic media have a powerful presence in modern life, but too often go unexamined because they are perceived as part of the “unnoticed domestic environment.” It’s quite dangerous to have something so powerful and so biased creating an unexamined immersion environment.
Remove tv-watching from your life!! Then study your behavior and the behavior of those around you as you begin gradually to add TV back into your life. Focus of article is pedagogical to determine how this method can be a rich component in certain types of communication courses.
Goals:
• to help students better undersand the effects of TV and motion pictures in their lives
• to teach students how to do ethnographic research
Assignment model contains1. Self-experiment – you remove TV from your own world
2. Participant observation – examine how you respond to this absence and how you react to those around you
3. reflexive focus: reflect on the insights you gain from observing yourself and others
Ethnographic methods and the basics of qualitative research:
Taking solid, detailed notes
What to stress in descriptions of events like interactions or things like physical contexts
Drawing analytical points from field notes
Two views of communication:
“transmission view”: communication is sees as the imparting, sending, transmitting or giving information to others. Tossing media messages like bricks to a passive recipient.
“ritual view”: communication is seen as a social process—meanings are generated and the context in which these meanings are constructed must be taken into account, evaluated, and analyzed.
Necessary components for this assignment to be successful:
• Students must be motivated
• Students must have time to move through the stages
• Students need rudimentary training in ethnographic methods before beginning
Source: Journal of Visual Literacy, Volume 19, Number 1, Spring 1999
