Practices

In ethnography, practice theories can be used to understand the ways that people interact with digital media and technology. It all started as a result of a focus on ‘how human actions and habits shaped and maintained over time and the ways in which these impact the world”. This approach entails a concern with the understanding of the relationship between between “human actions and the rules, structures, and processes that underpin what people say and do”.  A focus on practices can allow us to manage how technologies can become key in social relations”. Furthermore, these theories tend to focus on routine over actions, flow and sequence over discrete acts dispositions over decisions, and practical consciousness over deliberation. They emphasize ‘doing over thinking, the material over the symbolic, and embodied, practical competence over expressive virtuosity’.

The example, “Approaching Fan Fiction Practices through Ethnography” involves a more holistic approach to practice. It looks at the practices of fan fiction writers and their relationship with digital media technologies, in this case, of a sixteen year-old who was part of a larger study of digital media. This sixteen year-old writer used a fake name for the study. The takeaway of the study, which also serves as an answer to the question of why this study is ethnographic, is that members of this subculture are now not only consuming professionally produced media, but they are also produce their own media products. According to the text, they are “continuing to disrupt the culturally dominant distinctions between practices of production and consumption”. Related work has shown how once ‘alternative’ fan practices have become more and more mainstream with the integration of ‘traditional’ and digital media forms’. What makes this study ethnographic is not only what was researched but also the way in which it was conducted. The way it was conducted allowed the researcher to come up with methods that could explore more deeply the practices that young people were reporting in their interviews. Since the fan fiction writing is almost exclusively done in private and at home, the ethnographic approach to the study revealed a closer and more detailed look that other methods may not have provided.