We Talked, And Then We Talked Some More - Lab 5 and Discussion Forum 2 Post-Op

That first discussion session went well I think, we deviated from the plan that I brought to the group slightly (“my idea was that for the first 20 or mins we get a discussion going on what exactly we mean by these terms [of ethnographic research], second 20mins on our individual media ecology research, and the final 20mins on how we can use this in our discipline?” (Chatroom, Me, 2005) but that was cool. Banks was on hand to discuss the issues with us, which was great, and I can only assume that we had his attention most of the time due to the fact that we were discussing ethnographic research in its entirety, something that, well, he’s obviously joined at the hip with. Initially we got into discussing exactly what media ecology is, (e.g. the study of media environments), which led to us discussing for a while what exactly a media environment means. Although I’m not enthralled by the prospect of discussing My Restaurant Rules, Big Brother, Australian Idol or the OC, we did find them as useful discussion points in the whole media ecology…umm…discussion.

Cutting a long story short, I brought in an interesting aspect along the lines of talking about a remediated form of television in the act of watching episodes of shows downloaded from the internet. Now, I can’t do this anymore, they’ve gone and taken away the ability to do that, even for shows (See The Daily Show with Jon Stuart) that we can’t get here. But it was an interesting concept to bring up, since all the media environments we had been discussing beforehand were based around a traditional TV watching section, compared to mine which are Internet/PC based.

So yeah, overall it was an interesting chat, hopefully the next one will be slightly more organised….probably not :) We decided we would talk about a few things next time, 1) how you would set up a research project to do ethnographic research in an online community based ecology, and 2) discuss the Trinidad reading in relation to media environments and ecology. Shall be interesting.