Media Ideologies: An Introduction

When I interview people about their uses of new media, I am always surprised. I have been interviewing people at my home institution, Indiana University, for a few years now about how they use new media to end relationships. In every other bout of fieldwork, I started to become a little bored after 30 or 40 interviews. People’s stories about marriage or government bureaucracy would begin to become predictable, I could anticipate how events would unfold in a narrative and often how people would interpret these events. Not so with my new media interviews. A moment typical only in its unexpectedness: Nicole told me that while she had started flirting with several men after her divorce, none of the flirtations had become serious—they weren’t yet at the stage of texting each other. They were sending e-mails to each other, and, with one man, she was now chatting on the phone. But texting for her would mark a whole new stage of intimacy, and she wasn’t there yet with anyone. Once again, I was taken aback. No one else I interviewed had considered phone calls less intimate than text messages. Nicole’s assumptions about media determined how casual, familiar, and acceptable she would find any medium when used for a specific communicative task, in this case flirting. In my interviews, her hierarchy of media intimacy was not widely shared. People’s range of beliefs about media kept surprising me, the sheer quantity of new technological options seems to encourage people to be complexly aware of the channels they could use. I found myself returning over and over again to linguistic anthropologists’ work on language ideologies to understand how multiple, partial, strategic, and locatable the ideologies about media I kept encountering were. I also started to label these beliefs “media ideologies” as I used Atlas.ti to code my transcripts. And I wondered if other ethnographers studying media were finding the work of linguistic anthropologists as helpful as I have been.jola_1070 283..293

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