Natural problems of naturalistic video data

Routinely when we tell other social scientists that we have been filming what people do while they are in cafés, we are asked this question (or variations on it): Doesn’t filming change how people behave? This question appears to raise trouble for the aim of ethnographic filming in cafés to record naturally occurring activities, the suspicion being that customers must react to the presence of a camcorder, thereby spoiling the ‘nautral’ record. The camcorder in the café, like the elephant in the kitchen, is unavoidably and very noticeably there. Food made in the kitchen should surely be abandoned wholesale since the elephant’s presence contaminates all the cooking done there; and some might therefore conclude that our efforts at videoing should also be abandoned. Certainly an unexpected thing in a familiar place raises questions about its presence there that day, and about how much it will disrupt the workings of that place. The camcorder, though an unusual thing, has a further special status, it is a recording device; it is expectedly making a record