‘Making Visible the Invisible, STS Field in Spain

During the last few days of May, the newly formed STS network in Spain (Red de Estudios Sociales de la Ciencia y la Tecnología, eSCTS) celebrated its first meeting in Madrid, in the premises of the Cultural Association Medialab Prado. The STS network is an informal, horizontal network of around ninety STS researchers from all over Spain, which includes university professors as well as PhD students who are currently working on a variety of social issues of science and technology.

The network was formed in November 2010, after a series of meetings among Spanish STS researchers that took place within different STS events, like the SDN meeting in London in June 2010, the 4S conference in Tokyo in August 2010 and the EASST conference in Trento in September 2010. The main goal was to promote a permanent, yet flexible, system of connection and cooperation, which could encourage a more effective exchange of ideas, collaboration in research projects and co-authorship of academic work, and also constitute a platform to reflect upon the state of the art of STS in Spain, academically, institutionally and also thematically speaking.

STS studies in Spain are very fragmented, and this area of studies is neither considered a discipline nor a well established research area, for it often overlaps with history of science, anthropology and philosophy of science, which have a much longer tradition of institutional consolidation in the Spanish academic context. Moreover, STS, somewhat following the traditional organization of research groups in Spain, is dispersed in several medium to small research groups scattered across the country with little interaction with each other. Finally, with very few exceptions like the Master in Science, Technology and Society organized by the University of Salamanca and Oviedo University and the Master of History of Science organized by the UAB, there is also little specific training in STS provided by academic institutions in Spain. As a result, there are quite few Spanish STS participants at international conferences such as 4S and EASST compared to other countries of similar size and traditions, although STS studies do in fact exist and they are even growing in Spain.

Indeed, the STS network was an attempt to address these problems and to initially provide a new online space to help STS researchers to overcome these institutional and cultural shortcomings through the meeting opportunities offered by the Internet. On the one hand, the creation of the STS network had an academic purpose because it was expected to facilitate the exchange of data, ideas, articles and proposals to promote studies of science, technology in Spain. On the other hand, the network also serves the consolidation of STS in Spain because a well-organized network can be an important reference for all STS researchers who want to work on science and technology in Spain and seek cooperation in creating partnerships and collaborations.

As membership grew and ideas began to flow into the e-network and in the blog (redescts.wordpress.com/), the network also opted for a traditional face-to-face event, and the first STS meeting held in Madrid was the outcome of this effort. The meeting was entitled “Making visible the invisible” and it was inspired by the same spirit sustaining the network, aiming at bringing to light the variety of STS studies and research efforts currently on-going in Spain, mapping institutions, ideas, projects and already existing networks, in order to facilitate formal and informal interactions, and the creation of platforms for debate and elaboration of new projects. The meeting was also organized with the idea of giving an opportunity to all participants to have a chance of discussing and envisioning the future of the network, and to elaborate a road map for the next two or three years. More than fifty researchers from all over Spain gathered in the center Medialab-Prado in Madrid to discuss their research, which was an excellent start both concerning the number of participants, which is very good for a first encounter, and also for the variety of topics, from lines of research, institutions, and junior and senior researchers involved.

This first meeting aimed, first and foremost, at making visible current issues and challenges, especially in relation to existing trends of STS studies in Europe and worldwide. Secondly, it also exposed, in a shared and horizontal space, a large part of the institutions, opportunities, groups and agencies dedicated to STS, giving them space and time to meet, recognize, interact, discuss, look beyond and think about the future of STS in Spain. Finally, the meeting also had an epistemological goal: to bring to the fore what STS studies make visible, but also what they hide, the invisible, what they obscure and marginalize.

In the space generously offered by MedialabPrado, during three days, young researchers as well as senior scholars already established in the field had the opportunity to openly discuss their common interests and their research questions, results and prospects in various formats. Along with traditional plenary sessions, a keynote from Brian Wynne, and panel sessions, the meeting experimented with two formats that are not so common in these encounters: a workshop for doctoral students and a space for presentation of research lines.

The meeting took off with a round table in which some senior and junior Spanish STS scholars dealt with the issues of STS, visibility and invisibility, bringing in different perspectives from not only sociology of science but also history of science, anthropology and philosophy of science. Three main themes emerged, which are likely to become main issues in epistemic debates in and around the STS research field. The first refers to the eSCTS disciplinary tensions, which were discussed at length in the opening session of the meeting. Miquel Domenech (Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, UAB) expressed these tensions as a clash with his own master discipline, psychology, describing STS studies in psychology “as an octopus in a garage.” Yet, he argued, STS represents a unique opportunity to rethink key aspects of psychology. The historian Agustí Nieto, from the UAB too, pointed out the potential of a stronger collaboration between science historians and scholars from STS. In fact, this possibility was embodied in one of the discussants, the historian Antonio Lafuente (CCHS – CSIC), a historian who travels through the history of science with the interpretative gaze that STS studies provide. The discussion concluded that a dialogue and collaboration between history of science and STS seems possible, but not without difficulties.

In fact, Lafuente addressed a second theme: The recurring confrontations and tensions within the field of STS in Spain, which partially explain the absence of a common space for dialogue and the lack of consolidation of earlier initiatives. The STS meeting in Madrid was , in fact, not the first of its kind: just five years earlier, in 2006, a similar meeting was held in Barcelona, which also hosted a large number of researchers in Spain. The initiative, however, was not followed up by any other event of this kind, although the Madrid meeting may have harvested some of the fruits of that earlier encounter.

If the disciplinary matters generally refer to what happens inside STS and among STS and related disciplines, Marta Gonzalez (the Institute of Philosophy, CCHS-CSIC) addressed a third main theme, which refers to the crucial issue of relating STS studies to their social context, which she defined as “the dilemma of political commitment.” In other words, Marta pointed at the dilemma faced by STS after the rise and consolidation of social constructivism, especially in relation to the feminist studies of science and technology. Looking at a similar issue but from a different angle, Ana Delgado (University of Bergen, Norway) remarked the importance of political science and political theory within STS, which only recently seems to have been widely recognized, receiving a strong impulse.

The second day was opened by a keynote delivered by Brian Wynne, who focused on the different roles that STS studies have in the production of political orders. Wynne described in his presentation the subtle process of translation between the scientific and legislative domains and the progressive oversights that are thereby produced, which is of extraordinary relevance all along the bureaucratic trajectory that is followed by legislative proposals in the European Union.

The meeting was an opportunity to acknowledge that STS Studies recently have been moving well beyond the borders of science and technology, addressing the social domain in its entirety. Miquel Domenech, for instance, showed how the analyses carried out by STS quickly overflow the boundaries of science and technology (or extend indefinitely), suggesting that “the problem of knowledge is always a problem of social order.” Interest in science and technology is perhaps the first step in extending agency to others and pluralizing ontologies, as hinted at by Marta Gonzalez. Even more forcefully, Antonio Lafuente made it clear that we have reached a point in which STS scholars have moved their investigative gaze well beyond what happens in laboratories, focusing, as he does, on the situation and transformation of the commons. STS studies, therefore, have overflowed the laboratory and are now interested in topics and social dynamics that are only indirectly connected with technological or scientific issues. The presentations offered through the meeting indeed covered a broad spectrum of themes and issue, ranging from the ontology of oncology to Alzheimer’s and memory as an object of study, from the social role and impact of pleasure to the key role of invention in the field of architecture, and the thrill of communication 2.0. Yet, more traditional (and by no means less important) issues and topics were also present, ranging from free software or scientific collaboration to nanotechnology.

The meeting was also an opportunity to address the problematic issue of teaching STS in Spain in order to explore the existing and, perhaps, future possibilities in the context of higher education and academic studies. That few academic institutions and programs currently offer STS studies or STS courses in their curriculum is one of the reasons preventing STS from further expansion and consolidation in the country. Yet, this shall not give the wrong impression that the aim of the meeting solely was to get “more STS.” Rather, and perhaps most importantly, the aim was to foster educational innovation, to discuss how to establish dialogue among multiple knowledge areas and disciplines and how to explore the fundamental issue of the increasingly porous border between laymen and experts. Education in general is a domain that STS studies in Spain should actually address more, and more in depth, in the years to come.

As a result of the meeting, participants agreed on the importance of ensuring continuity to the actions of the network and on the need to strengthen the structure of the network. Recognizing the importance of creating a common epistemic ground, several participants argued that the Spanish STS network might act as a catalyst to establish this dialogue. The network is in its infancy, but future initiatives, now in the making, give hope that it may consolidate over the next few years. Among these future actions, it is important to mention the organization of a second annual meeting in 2012 in Gijón. At the end of the meeting, it was also decided to strengthen the Network mainly through two initiatives: thematic groups and STS correspondents. Nine working groups have been established, which aim at giving an opportunity to scholars working on similar issues to have an institutional yet open common space to foster future collaboration. Current working groups address biomedicine and health; strategies for integration of history and contemporary studies of science and technology; environment; digital cultures; public participation and collective action; scientific culture; bodies, eating habits and practices of socialization; care and technology; and, subjectivity and affect – but more thematic groups on different areas may start and operate in the future. On the other hand, the network of STS correspondents throughout Spain aims at identifying and sharing areas of interest for the Network, and serves as the STS points of reference in the geographical areas in which correspondents operate. In both cases, the specific articulation of these strategies remain open and up to further development by the respective participants.

Emerged initially as a mailing list, the network remains open to contributions, ideas and initiatives from all its members and those wishing to join, because there is still much to do. So far, there has emerged a widespread desire to experiment: experimenting, for instance, with the types of form, structure and organization that a community of scholars like this can take in order to serve equally the interests of those who belong to it and its social context. There also emerged the desire to experiment with the ways in which we share knowledge, we gather, learn, teach, communicate our findings and results, and why not, our doubts and weaknesses. The next destination of the Spanish STS Network, therefore, is the second annual meeting to be held in 2012 in Asturias, which will be a wide-open opportunity for further experimenting with both issues.

We hope, in short, the Madrid meeting to be a first step in developing an important initiative, based on digital communication and face-to-face encounters and on openness and horizontality, which provides ideas, proposals and visions, but also shares questions, concerns, and training. We also hope that it might be a first step of a process of innovation and consolidation that gives the Spanish community of STS scholars a new space, and new tools to foster the studies of science, technology and society within Spain and to further a closer connection between STS studies in Spain and the wider STS community in Europe and across the Atlantic.

An important feature of e-research is the increased mediation of research practices, which changes not only the objects and tools of research, but also the relation between researcher and object, between researchers, and between researchers and their constituencies and stakeholders. This article focuses on the ethical aspects of e-research by analysing the implications of these changing relationships in the case of ethnography in mediated settings. It makes a specific contribution to the discussions about research ethics that are currently pursued and that tend to be catalysed by institutional review boards. The authors aim to link ethical discussions with the actual practices and conditions of qualitative social research. To do so, they review how researchers have used principles and ethical guides of traditional disciplines in ethnography, and show that several of concepts and categories on which these guidelines rely (personhood, privacy, harm, alienation, power) are otherwise enacted in mediated settings. The authors also analyze the ethical issues that have arisen in our own research. On the basis of these discussions, they specify two of the underlying dynamics of research in mediated settings, contiguity and traceability, in order to understand why traditional research ethics are challenged by these settings. The article specifies how mediated contexts can shape ethical issues; it provides a concise yet illustrative elaboration of a number of these issues; and proposes a vocabulary to further discuss this aspect of ethnographic work. Together, these elements amount to a contribution for the elaboration of new ethical research practices for social research in mediated settings.

Over the past two months thousands of people have gathered in plazas and public spaces across local neighbourhoods in Spain. They have come together to constitute themselves into so-called ‘popular assemblies’. Theirs is a call to tomar la plaza: to take over the plazas and recuperate the barrio (neighbourhood) as a space of self-made political action – a making visible of the circuitry of do-it-yourself associative work that animates neighbourhood life.

In this sense, the assemblies are very much experiments in grassroots democratic self-organisation. Participants are not allowed to speak on behalf of political parties or partisan organisations. People attend on their own capacity, to speak in their own voice. Indeed, the assemblies have developed a democratic sign-language of their own. In the name of ‘respect’, participants are called to index their approbation or disapprobation of proposals by waving and gesturing their hands in an established etiquette. Proposals thus agreed turn into working groups staffed by volunteers. Different barrios are thus incarnating in different groups and projects their neighbourhood capacities. We will come back to the assemblies at the end.

The popular assemblies are a direct offspring of the #spanishrevolution (Twitter hashtag): the street protests that took over the urban landscape across the country in the days prior to the municipal and regional elections on May 22, and which originally drew some comparisons with the events at Tahrir Square in Egypt earlier this year. Although the historiography of the events is of course still very much in the making, a brief chronology of how things turned out is helpful.

On May 15 (15M) the online forum ‘Democracia Real Ya!’ (Real Democracy Now!, DRY) called for street protests at various public squares in Spain. The demonstrations were orchestrated by a coordinated platform of social movements which included the distributed collective Anonymous, Juventud en Acción (Youth in Action) or No Les Votes (Do not vote them). The platform’s first public call to action was announced on March 2, although it built on a culture of public spectacle that some groups had been developing over the previous months.

Indeed one of the most interesting aspects about the recent demonstrations has been the recuperation of public spaces for political engagement. The plaza has played a crucial role here. As early as January 15 Juventud en Acción first made a call on its website for organising a ‘flash mob’ in a ‘public and central space in Madrid’. This was eventually called at Madrid’s central square, Puerta del Sol, on January 23, under the slogan, ‘Sacrificed by the markets!’ The website announcement defined a flash mob demonstration as ‘an organised action where a group of people makes a sudden and improvised performance at a public space, only to disband quickly thereafter.’

On January 24, a day after the ‘Sacrificed by the markets!’ intervention, a much larger situated performance was announced for February 13, on occasion of the celebration of the National Film Awards ceremony. Three days later ‘No les votes’ was registered as a web domain, and Twitter registered its first stream of messages around the film awards flash mob. A central element in the exchanges here was the call to protest against the ‘Ley Sinde’, the bill against Internet piracy through torrent and webpage downloads, which was to be voted (and approved) in parliament on February 15.

The intervention itself on February 13 was arguably a success, with hundreds of people showing-up wearing Anonymous masks and demonstrating in front of the red carpet at the Plaza de Oriente (Oriental Square). The awards ceremony offered a most suitable showcase for exposing the differences between the film industry’s culture of extravagance and the emerging sociability of Internet mediated peer-to-peer production. If only because of the awards’ coverage by mainstream media, the flash mob performance received substantial attention.

Over the ensuing two months, DRY gathered momentum through an intensive use of social media and a couple of (rather inspiring) YouTube videos [1].  The 15M demonstration was called in protest for the corruption of the political classes, the rise in unemployment and precarious employment (including 45% unemployment among under 25yrs old [2]), the state’s trimming of social and welfare benefits, and the general transfer of wealth to the rich. A manifesto produced for the occasion ended with the phrase, ‘We are not merchandise in the hands of politicians and bankers!’ [3] An additional item of protest was the reference to the ‘Ley Sinde’, which had spawned its own social movement, ‘No les votes’, through the coordinated action of otherwise unlikely bedfellows such as hackers, intellectual property lawyers, digital libertarians and a variety of copyleft movements.

In Madrid the 15M crowd gathered at Puerta del Sol. The demonstration filled up the plaza and ended in a rough encounter with the police and some detentions. Once the police left a number of people lingered around and toyed with the idea of spending the night at the square. A tweet went out marking the decision: “We have just encamped at Sol in Madrid. We are not leaving until we reach an agreement #acampadasol”. Some 30-40 people thus spent the night in open air.

Next morning the campers got together and called their first assembly, to which some one thousand people attended. Within twenty four hours the Internet domain, spanishrevolution.net, had been acquired. That second night the number of campers went up to some two hundred people and a second domain, tomalaplaza.net, was also purchased. Campers began to get together in different groups, including a ‘communications’ group which drafted the minutes of the first assembly. They even convened and ran a ‘course for spokepersons’ aimed at helping campers address the press. At around 5am the police arrived at Sol and evicted the campers. The campers had in fact anticipated the possibility of the eviction and discussed a number of actions. Puerta del Sol is for example a passageway of a Royal Pastoral Way, used by herders to shift their herds from the Castilian highlands to the lowlands. An ancient custom allows herders to spend up to three nights sleeping in open air at that spot, an argument which campers considered holding up to the police to justify their stay. They also stressed the importance of producing as many video recordings as possible of the eviction itself, and indeed following the police intervention some campers managed to upload video content directly from their smartphones to YouTube. A remarkable point is the campers’ efforts during the eviction at keeping the main tent in place. This was eventually removed by the police, but it signals the symbolic importance attached to the makeshift structure of the camp as an icon of political self-sufficiency. From the very start, then, campers showed an acute consciousness of the various dimensions of their public action. Thus, not surprisingly, early next morning the encampment had been set up again [4].

The occupation of public spaces was quickly replicated across the country, even among Spanish communities abroad. David Bravo and Javier de la Cueva, two well-known digital and intellectual property lawyers, drafted and made available on the Internet the legal proviso for rightful public demonstrations on May 18 (and thereafter), which campers were encouraged to submit to their respective local government delegations. The document highlighted the demonstrators’ call to exercise ‘a responsible vote’ at the forthcoming municipal elections.

On May 18 Madrid’s Municipal Electoral Board dictated, however, the illegal nature of the demonstrators’ occupation of Sol and thus called for its dismantling. The decision caused outrage and served only to expand the crowd’s numbers. Indignados (outraged) became indeed the identity-label that the media would start to ascribe the movement, echoing the title of Stephan Hessel’s reactionary manifesto [5]. The crowd paid little attention to the Board’s decision and the encampment stayed put. Moreover, the campers started to get together in ‘interest groups’ – social, legal, work, economy, environment – which would soon began working as permanent ‘commissions’.

Spanish electoral law establishes a ‘day for reflection’ on the day prior to a polling day. Judging the encampments contrary to the spirit of such a norm, on May 19 the Central Electoral Board ruled the dismantling and eviction of all encampments countrywide. Again the decision only served to mobilise and draw ever more people to the squares and social media. Thus May 20 recorded for instance the largest volume of tweets with subject matters (Twitter #hashtags) related to the general movement. If Twitter traffic from May 15 to May 22 reached 967,231 tweets by 156,544 unique users, the number of tweets on May 20 alone peaked at 200,198 [6]. Indeed the crowds gathered at Sol in Madrid or Plaça de Catalunya in Barcelona turned into a multitude on May 21, with tens of thousands of people coming together for public manifestations of ‘reflection’.

On the day following the elections the various camps across the country assembled to decide on their own future as social and political installations. The consensus countrywide was to remain encamped. On June 7 Sol’s general assembly finally agreed by consensus to dismantle the camp on Sunday, June 12.

#acampadasol
The occupation of the plazas amounted to much more than simple demonstrations. The word ‘acampada’ (encampment) captures well the sophisticated gesture of political innovation that over the past two months has transformed the urban and social fabric of Spanish cities.

The acampada harks back of course to an old tradition of okupaciones (squatter occupations), and indeed in the case of Madrid, for example, Sol is only a walking distance from some of the city’s most famous ‘squatter labs’ and ‘urban hack spaces’, such as el Patio Maravillas and La Tabacalera. The spatial innovation of #acampadasol lied perhaps in the boldness with which it brought out the invisible periphery of squatter action into the centre-stage of the country’s most conspicuous and famed public space. Hence the symbolic importance attached to the tent on the day of the eviction. The structural frailty of the camp brought about a radical inside-out to the notion of democratic organisation: it exposed the entrails of democracy as a circuitry of do-it-yourself actions and a patchwork of craft and handiwork politics. It made the infrastructural stuff of politics radically visible.

Early on in #acampadasol campers referred to the encampment as a ‘city’: the fragility of the tents and cardboard installations notwithstanding, the campers quickly organised to deploy an urban infrastructure in miniature. Within days the camp had a library and a ‘reading room’, a kitchen, a nursery, a reception desk for gifts of food and drinks, a legal desk, a cleaning squad, and a medical emergencies space. The nursery provoked many-a-one candid reactions: local residents often drawing a biting comparison with the lack of public nurseries in the neighbourhood.

The constitution of the encampment as a space of infrastructural politics was sanctioned by the campers themselves when stressing what the encampment was not. Thus in demonstration posters, slogans and online media there was explicit reference to the gathering not being a ‘botellón’, an open air drinking party. On the other hand, much investment went likewise into thinking the encampment itself, that is, into problematising the type of event or movement that brought us here.

Our own ethnographic encounter with #acampadasol intersects at this point. For almost two years now we have been working with digital and new media artists, intellectuals, hackers and activists of various provenances at Medialab-Prado (MLP), a digital art and culture centre part of Madrid’s City Council. MLP has become an important hub for discussions on the future of the digital and creative commons in the Spanish context. For over four years MLP has been convening for example a Commons’ Laboratory, to which some of the leading voices in the copyleft movement, including intellectual property lawyers (such as Javier de la Cueva) and members of La Tabacalera or Patio Maravillas, have contributed projects at one time or another. Many of these people have taken an active role helping endow #acampadasol with organisational, philosophical and infrastructural equipment. The rise of the encampment as a figure for our contemporary, then, offers an intriguing image with which to the think the intertwining of urban hacktivism, digital commons and relationships, and artistic and academic practices in new forms of political wireframing.

Prototyping political action
On May 24, just over a week into the establishment of #acampadasol, some MLP friends and informants who had been following and participating in the encampment met together for lunch at a restaurant nearby Sol. An Argentinean collective of ‘militant researchers’, whose production of grassroots indigenous theory is well-known in the Latin American context, were visiting Madrid as ‘thinkers-in-residence’ at a contemporary art centre, and MLP was interested in recruiting their help to conceptualise the encampment. Over lunch we talked about the encampment as a prototype of / for political action.

There was not much consensus on what sort of prototype the encampment might be a figure for. But the image of the prototype did enable nevertheless a focus on certain practices of infrastructural politics: it helped zoom into focus a particular form of political action, one centred on circuits of exchange (food, materials, wires, cardboard, digital objects); on certain do-it-yourself and artisanal qualities of collaboration; and on the provisional, open-ended and ultimately hopeful temporality of engaged action. One could argue that the frail silhouette of the original camping tent stood as a prototype for new forms of residence in the contemporary polis.

On May 28 the encampments essayed a first attempt at decentralisation and went local. Popular assemblies were called at barrios all over Spain. Thousands of people assembled open air and ‘helped made the barrios visible once again’, as Alberto overheard some attendants at his local assembly say. The assemblies have replicated the structural organisation of the encampments, with a variety of commissions being created in accordance with the residents’ needs and capacities. As we write this, the assemblies in Madrid are meeting every 1-2 weeks, and report back to Sol’s General Assembly. It is too early to say what will the 15M movement accomplish or where it will head to. Thus far, collective and associative life within barrios has indeed been reinvigorated. The Internet, the flash mobs and encampments, and the assemblies seem to be converging in the reinvention of a municipalist tradition: a tradition of open (street) associative politics. We send this paper in on June 19, when thousands of people have taken the streets again all over Spain using the barrio as the launching platform of their associative mobilisation. Perhaps it makes some sense after all to speak of the advent of new forms of prototyping political action.

Alberto Corsín Jiménez & Adolfo Estalella, Spanish National Research Council, CSIC, Madrid

Acknowledgements
Our thanks to Javier de la Cueva, Francisco Ferrándiz and Antonio Lafuente for comments and feedback on prior versions of the article. Thanks, too, to Medialab-Prado for hosting our research, and in particular to Marcos García and Laura Fernández for their conversations and hospitality.

[1] «YouTube – ¡El 15 de mayo la calle es nuestra! Manifiesto común protesta 15/05/2011», http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAq273qwnZw&feature=player_embedded.

[2] «El 90% de los que pierden empleo, menor de 35 años», http://www.elpais.com/articulo/economia/90/pierden/empleo/menor/35/anos/elpepieco/20110430elpepieco_6/Tes
[3] «15 de mayo», s.f., http://www.democraciarealya.es/?tag=15-de-mayo.

[4] One cannot help but think of Peter Sloterdijk and Gesa Mueller von der Haegen’s ‘pneumatic parliament’ in this context: a self-built, quickly-to-install piece of democratic equipment. Peter Sloterdijk and Gesa Mueller von der Haegen, «Instant democracy: the pneumatic parliament», in Making things public: atmospheres of democracy, ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Boston, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2005), 952-955.

[5] Stephane Hessel, Time for Outrage!, Pmplt. (Quartet Books Ltd, 2011).

[6] «Del 15-M a la acampada de Sol», s.f., http://www.barriblog.com/index.php/2011/05/19/del-15-m-a-la-acampada-de-sol/.

I attended my first EASA conference, it was great! many friend and new interesting people I met. This is the abstract of my presentation at the Digital Anthropology workshop: Based on 18 months of fieldwork focused on the study of intensive bloggers in Spain this paper discusses how expectations are enacted in the everyday material practices of a group of individuals that expect to transform society (mass media, science and politics) through their blogging practice. Drawing on the concept of inscription (Latour, 1999) I describe how blogs and bloggers interactions are materially inscribed (in the form of statistics of visitors, for instance) in a massive way by blog technological infrastructures. I highlight how present facts are materialized in graphics of visitors and lists of incoming links and expectations of the future are materially enacted when exceptional facts take place (an unusual wave of visitors, v.g.). I then argue that the inscription of the present is the condition of possibility for the performance of future expectations through an infrastructure that take part in the everyday enacting of hope among bloggers. (photo by Édgar Gómez)

We presented a discussion trying to reflect on the implications that mediation has for fieldworkers. This allow us to draw parallelism between (you know, I don’t really liked the term) virtual ethnography and visual ethnography. The ‘virtual ethnography’ is in this case only a ‘literary’ resource. By it we mean fieldwork mediated by Internet technologies.

Internet and visual methods
Researching the Internet using visual methods & Using the Internet for visual methods research

The Internet is becoming increasingly visual. Videos, photos and all kind of graphic animations with very different qualities (porn, scientific images, everyday snapshots, videos) circulate and are consumed in different contexts. This phenomenon is especially intense for the Web and strongly related to the proliferation of digital photography. We want to focus the discussion of this panel specifically on visual content and related practices on the Web.

This proliferation of visual content is accompanied by a whole set of new visual practices mediated by web technologies of diverse kinds: large specialized databases, multimedia services, personal and institutional sites (web pages, blogs), etc. The close relationships between Web technologies and digital photography transform the practices of both consumption and production of visual content. With the extension of digital photography, any context is now a potential situation for taking photos that are later or immediately uploaded to the Internet. As a consequence, the very nature of digital objects is transformed: images that were usually private (or shared through face-to-face-material encounters) become public and widely available on the Internet. Furthermore, images become increasingly and structurally layered with meta-data that further shapes their circulation. Contemporary visual culture is therefore marked by complex interactions between digital technologies and networked infrastructures.

Internet and digital photographic technologies are reshaping all the domains of visual research practice: the consumption and the production of visual objects, the subject (and content) of photographic practices,  and the nature of the visual object itself open up a new field of study for visual researchers and raises methodological challenges. This panel aims to discuss some of the possibilities and challenges that the Internet invites for visual researchers.

First, the Internet is in itself a meaningful object of study for visual anthropologists that poses particular methodological challenges for visual researchers: how to contextualize the images? How representative are they? What is the value of the experience of the researcher in gathering this data? How might we articulate the ethical issues when gathering data that is publicly accessible? And, what are the implications of these new issues and practices in relation to the new emphasis on multisensoriality that is becoming increasingly important in visual anthropology?. These are some of the issues that are posed. But the Internet can be considered not only as a object of study but as a research tool for visual researchers. Thus the Internet can be used for gathering visual data that was very difficult to access previously, for instance.

Although some visual researchers have started to make of the Internet their object of study in the last years, there is still a limited dialogue between them and the field of Internet research, in spite of the fertile exchange of techniques, methodological strategies and theoretical approaches that could enrich both fields. We want to open a discussion with this panel between both fields.

I will be doing a research stay in Amsterdam in the Virtual Knowledge Studio where I will work with Anne Beaulieu in different topics related to mediating ethnographies, a non-problematic way to refer to the Internet ethnography. Anne is working on the interaction between new technologies and scientific research practices. She recently started a blog link to the VKS, and she is doing really well. Her last initiative seems promising: Scholars’ Bags: An exploration of epistemic material culture.

The workshop was a wonderfull opportunity to discuss my research and listen to what other social scientists are doing in Europe in the sociocultural study of digital technologies. The paper was elaborated in colaboration with my Ph D director Elisenda Ardévol and my colleague and friend Edgar Gómez entitled. The workshop was co-organized by Caroline Basset, Kate O’Riordan and Maren Hartmann. The picture was taken by Panagiota Alevizou from the London School of Economics.

Citing: Estalella, A., & Ardèvol, E. (2007). Field Ethics: Towards Situated Ethics for Ethnographic Research on the Internet. Forum Qualitative Social Research, 8(3).

You can fiend a brief bibliography of etics in the qualitative research and the abstract in Spanish and in German (Feldethik: Zu einer situierten Ethik für die ethnografische Internetforschung).

Abstract
This article reflects openly on the decisions that researchers have to deal with when undertaking qualitative research, especially ethnography, on the Internet. Our argument takes as starting point the ethical guidelines already developed for human subject research, and the way Internet researchers have tried to adapt these guidelines to their field. We argue that many of these ethical recommendations for researching the Internet have been designed according to specific applications (a chat, a mailing list, a blog, etc.), conferring specific properties to technology and making inferences about the kind of interaction that is taking place through such devices (public or private, for instance). We question these approaches and consider that the attribution of properties to technology restricts the scope of the ethical decisions that the researcher can make. We advocate a dialogical and situated ethical practice that takes into account every particular context when making any ethical decision during research. In line with this proposal, we report some ethical dilemmas that we have had to face in our own fieldwork on blogging practices among Spanish bloggers. We also draw on our experience of creating a “field blog” as part of our research. We describe three axes that have helped us to guide our ethical decisions in the field: the scope of individual data collected for participants in the course of research, the explicit and open presence of the researchers, and the search for symmetry and mutuality with our respondents in the field.