On intermediaries, mediators, (im)mobilities, and proximities #RaisingDissertation
It's not easy to see things in the middle, rather than looking down on them from above or up at them from below, or from left to right or right to left: try it, you'll see that everything changes. It's not easy to see the grass in things and in words" (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987).
Before you dive in, some key terms and concepts:
(Im)mobilities - as in effects, outcomes, events. Could be understood in terms of both resources and boundaries, as having the ability to move and as being forced to stay; as effects, outcomes, events that have political significance and relevance. (See also Pellegrino, 2011).
Proximity - as in relations. Could be understood in terms of nearness, farness, togetherness, and closeness to other actors; as physical, virtual, imaginative, and communicative travel of information. (See also Bissell, 2012).
Other key concepts: near-dwellers (Bissell, 2012); near-carriers (my term, 2015); ontology of belonging; institutional and peer surveillance (Jackson, 2012).
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Somewhere in my literature review section might read this rumination on the everyday lives of young people, mostly Black and brown, living below the poverty line, and in-transition...
Intermediaries and Mediators
In Reassembling the Social (2005), Latour talks about the relationship between mediators and intermediaries as both human and non-human objects. Actor-Network Theory (ANT), describes an intermediary as a black box, or an object that can be viewed in terms of inputs and outputs without any knowledge of its internal workings. An intermediary, Latour writes, “transports meaning or force without transformation” (pg. 39). Mediators, unlike intermediaries, “transform, translate, distort, and modify the meaning or the elements they are supposed to carry” (pg. 39). In other words, objects that describe mediators transform meaning whereas objects that describe intermediaries do not transform.
But how do we decipher between mediators and intermediaries? For Latour, this is the first uncertainty in Actor-Network Theory; that is, whether or not objects behave as intermediaries or mediators, and it is also the source of all other uncertainties that follow.
Intermediaries and mediators lead researchers of associations into different territories. Intermediaries account for predictable outcomes, like for example, a large complex bureaucracy where objects perform repetitive and predictable tasks. Latour offers another example of an intermediary’s predictable behavior:
[A] highly sophisticated panel during an academic conference [that] may become a perfectly predictable and uneventful intermediary in rubber stamping a decision made elsewhere (pg. 39).
Mediators, unlike intermediaries are unpredictable. For example, a mediator may become complex and blow out in multiple directions like a banal conversation “where passions, opinions, and attitudes bifurcate at every turn” (pg. 39). Similar to Delueze’s rhizomatic concept, mediators point to the proliferations of objects and locates where these objects might connect to and expand toward. Mediators challenge us to follow flows rather than define containers.
ANT asks researchers of associations to treat all objects as mediators, as unpredictable and complex no matter how seemingly banal they may appear at first. This does not mean, however, that intermediaries cannot be studied nor recognized. In fact, as Latour suggests, intermediaries can become mediators and vice versa overtime. Rather than defining in advance what constitutes or makes up the social and cultural worlds we study, one approach to studying intermediaries and mediators, and their oscillating ways, is through description.
Enter: ethnography
I return now to an earlier discussion about intermediaries behaving in predictable ways. To further elaborate on the application of intermediaries in this research, I sought out other works aside from ANT and social theory where the concept of intermediaries was applied.
Yannakakis’ ethnohistorical study The Art of Being In-between (2008) explores indigenous resistance and colonial intermediaries of Sierra Norte of Oaxaca, a region of colonial Mexico. In Yannakakis work, we learn about native intermediaries, or those who “by virtue of their legitimacy among native peoples [helped to] administer colonial society” (pg. 2). Yannakakis’ study follows the trajectory of social rebellions and the rise of colonial intermediaries that became martyrs and some who were eventually declared saints centuries after their deaths. This ethnohistory provides another perspective about the ways intermediaries, in this case human actors, transport meaning from one group (natives) to another group (political elites). When citing Daniel Richter’s work on network theory and cultural brokers in the seventeenth-century (a concept synonymous with Yannakakis’ application of intermediaries), Yannakakis writes:
[Cultural brokers’] position in multiple networks and coalitions meant that they were both varyingly situated and not situated at all; they occupied an ‘intermediate position, one step removed from final responsibility in decision making [...] Participating in social networks from an intermediate position required not only considerable communicative skills but also a ‘tactical’1 sensibility (pg. 10).
Yannakakis applies the concept of intermediaries somewhat differently than Latour does in Reassembling. Throughout In-between, Yannakakis refers to intermediaries as bridges and brokers or those that “played a considerable role in connecting the colonial state to localities” (pg. 33). Yannakakis implies a bidirectional transfer of meaning (what goes through comes back) whereas Latour’s illustration of intermediaries depicts a unidirectional model of transfer (what goes in come out). However, where Yannakakis and Latour’s concept of intermediaries intersect is in how the transfer of meaning moves; that is, in predictable ways.
It is at this intersecting point in Latour and Yannakakis’ analyses that I enter into a discussion about the proximities (or relations) between human actors (near-dwellers) and non-human actors (near-carriers) as mediators and intermediaries, and how these proximities might constitute young peoples’ (im)mobilities.
Enter: a study of (im)mobilities and proximities in the lives of ‘disconnected’ youth
Through a mapping of (im)mobilities and proximities, I construct a visual representation of relations and events between research participants, technologies, institutions, as well as locate assemblages, entanglements, ruptures, flows, and discontinuities therein. Stripped of the abstract, this work essentially constitutes a story of everyday life for teens and young adults grappling with where and how to belong; when to stay, how to leave, when to log on, how to search, when to watch, and how to recognize when one is being surveilled. It is also a story about the politics of nearness and distance and how power relations are constantly reshaped between young people, key adults in their lives, unanticipated neighbors, police officers, technologies, and institutions.
My argument in this work goes without saying: Disconnected youth are far from disconnected. In fact, they dwell near, within, and among people, places, and things in foreseen and unexpected ways. For young people in transition from adolescence to adulthood, where they exist “in-between” jobs and schooling, their experiences also constitute paradoxical encounters. Where belonging on the block meets suspicion in the neighborhood, where animosity in the projects meets ambivalence in the city, where support at the cafe meets uncertainty at school, where curiosity online meets disinterest offline, where loss at home meets hope for the future. When blown a part these encounters reveal an apparatus of always-becoming, of always-in between.
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Currently reading:
Bissell, D. (2012). Pointless mobilities: Rethinking proximity through the loops of neighbourhood. Mobilities, 8 (3), 349-367.
Fassin, D. (2015). Enforcing order: An ethnography of urban policing. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press.
Goffman, A. (2014). On the run: Fugitive life in an American city. New York, NY: Picador.
Lewis-McCoy, R.L. (2014). Inequality in the promised land: Race, resources, and suburban schooling. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Pellegrino, G. (2011). Studying (im)mobility through a politics of proximity. In G. Pellegrino, ed. The politics of proximity, 1-14. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Further reading:
Sheller, M. & Urry, J. (2012). Mobile technologies of the city. Routledge.
Urry, J. (2007). Mobilities. Polity Press.
Urry, J. (2002). Mobility and proximity. Sociology, 36 (2), 255-274.
Urry, J. (2000). Sociology beyond societies: Mobilities for the twenty-first century. Routledge.
Never stopped reading:
Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
1 I apply Yannakakis’ definition here: “‘Tactics’ are the subtle, everyday actions undertaken by individuals to navigate, resist, and subvert authority” (pg. 33).
Fieldnotes 2: "In New York City, you have to make your own space"
The following are excerpts from my fieldnotes describing a recent site visit. The names have been changed to protect privacy.
Excerpt 1
Roughly 45-minutes into the three hour visit, I noticed something interesting happening. This wasn’t anything I hadn't seen or read about before. It was certainly an instance that I’ve witness emerge inside and outside of classroom spaces, at public events, and around the dinner table. As Chad, a frequent customer at the cafe, talked to me, I noticed behind the counter that Ethan, Ben, and another young man who worked there were all hunched over their cell phones. iPhones, to be exact.
“Yo, you didn’t tag me, son!” Ethan said to Ben. There weren’t any customers in the cafe at this point. Ethan and Ben, while sitting behind the counter, were looking at their phones toggling through Instagram photos.
“Yo, she is ugly, son!” Ethan said to Ben, laughing. Chad looked up from our conversation and asked who they were looking at.
“That’s wifey.” Ethan responded looking at the iPhone screen.
“His wifey is ugly? How’s that?” Chad asked.
“No, no,” Ethan replied, “We looking at another picture now.”
If the cafe was a gendered space, it couldn’t be anymore masculinist than it was at this particular moment. This is what being in a barbershop must feel like, I thought to myself. I was the only woman in the space but that didn’t stop Ethan, Ben, and Chad from exchanging banter about pics of girls and women they gawked at on Instagram. These were light moments between Ethan, Ben, and Chad. I didn’t interject.
Later in the conversation, I asked Ethan and Ben if they were on Twitter.
“Nah,” replied Ethan.
They preferred Instagram along with a new Instagram-like application called Shots.
“Twitter is for females.” Chad interjected. “It’s gossipy, you know?”
“And Instagram isn’t?” I responded. (I had to.)
“Instagram is messy, but not gossipy like Twitter.” Chad replied.
We spent the next fifteen minutes talking about Twitter, Instagram, and then Facebook--which everyone, even me, seemed to agree was wack.
“People break up over Facebook, yo!” Ethan announced.
He told me about the time his girlfriend saw that he liked another girl’s picture on Instagram.
“I was liking this girl's pic to get more followers. It’s like promotion.” He said.
When Ethan's girlfriend found out that he was liking other girl's pictures on Instagram, she ended the relationship.
“I didn’t even do nothing!” He said.
Ben, who at this point I’ve dubbed the quiet one (relative to Ethan), asked if I was on Instagram. I told him I was, but that my account is private. I told him that I’m more active on Twitter. It’s where I get my news.
“Twitter used to be hot back in the day when it first came out, but not anymore.” Ethan said.
In many ways, I agreed with him. Twitter is a much more difficult space to navigate these days than in previous years. But perhaps so is social media in general.
Ethan showed me a picture of him on Instagram when he was 15-years-old. Ben posted the photo but forgot to tag Ethan. If Ethan wasn’t sitting directly next to Ben while they were scrolling through pictures, he probably wouldn't have noticed that Ben didn’t tag him.
“Can I take a picture of you guys while you're looking at your phones?” I asked.
Ethan eyes lit up. “Yes! You gonna put it on Instagram?”
I told Ethan and Ben that I would never post their pictures on Instagram. I also told them that the photos I was taking throughout the day were only going to be used for research.
But Ethan persisted. “You can put [the pic] on Instagram if you want.”
I didn't. Instead, I texted the photos to Ethan's cell phone.
These young men, although labeled disconnected at one point in their lives, were anything but. They moved about in the physical space of the cafe. They also moved about in the virtual spaces of social media. Their bodies, identities, and constructs moved fluidly across time and space. Sociality manifested as mobilities within and among physical, virtual, online, and offline spaces (or places?). These movements, constructs, activities, or whatever you call it were indicative of two very connected and co-present people.
Ethan and Ben's iPhones played significant roles in how connection was established and maintained. These objects, in other words, sustained connection. They also remained in Ethan and Ben's pockets the entire time while they served customers coffee and food.
Yet, Ethan and Ben clearly chose when and where to connect. While they sat in the physical space of the cafe--a constant, sustaining, and perhaps even safe place--the virtual spaces they participated in via their iPhones were not on equal footing. To Ethan and Ben, the spaces that constitute social media held different meanings about their interactions with other people.
Excerpt 2
Later on that day, Patrick, a white guy and regular customer arrived. He playfully argued with Ethan saying that Samsung makes better phones and electronics than does Apple. Ethan wasn’t hearing it though. He, and I too, pointed out how the Apple brand is much more sophisticated than Samsung.
"But, then again," I interjected, “neither Apple nor Samsung are paying my bills so for me it’s not that serious.” I said this while pulling out my iPad Air to check my email.
The banter continued. It was a lovely indication and reminder that there was community here, and it was alive, emerging, and always-becoming.
The topic of conversation shifted. I found out that Patrick was once a middle school teacher. He lived in the neighborhood. Patrick talked about once working in rural North Carolina. He loved the students but hated the parents. He chose to quit teaching once he realized he wasn’t being supported.
Patrick then talked about how it was too expensive to live in Bed-Stuy.
“You can’t find a studio in this neighborhood for less than $1100,” he said.
“Shit, if that!” Chad interjected.
Patrick continued, “The Hassidics are buying up the blocks around here. Then, you know what they do? They rent out rooms. Not apartments. Rooms! You end up living in a shoebox for thousands of dollars.”
“Yeah, that’s pretty crazy” I replied.
“In New York City, you have to make your own space,” Patrick said.
Space, an enigmatic concept, seems to facilitate and impede connection all at once, doesn't it? How then do we make spaces when, in our own lives, space is so obviously scarce, devalued, contested, and always-becoming?
My Dissertation Bibliography
My dissertation work constitutes a mixed-method study that explores the networked lives of teens and young adults who are characterized as disconnected, vulnerable, or in-transition. I unpack the concept of disconnection, in particular, and explore with young people what it means for them to be connected, mobile, and supported, and how they communicate the experience of connection, mobility, and support through various physical and virtual constructs of place.
The following bibliography is alive and constantly expanding:
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Fieldnotes 1: First Site Visit
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The following are excerpts from my field notes describing a recent site visit. The names have been changed to protect privacy.
Excerpt 1
I approached the counter where I saw two young Black men standing behind the food preparation station making fruit drinks and coffee. As I waited for one of the young men to take my order, I looked around the Cafe and saw pinned to the wall several Polaroid photos. In all of the photos appeared Father Tim posing with who I assumed were famous people that visited the Cafe conveniently located in the Brooklyn neighborhood made famous by its native son, Shawn “Jay Z” Carter. Just a few blocks north of the Cafe stood Marcy Projects, the once home of the now uber famous Brooklyn rapper.
As I stood there gazing at the photos, Juan, who accompanied me to the site visit, tapped me on the shoulder and pointed to a giant framed photo of Jay Z sitting with his hands folded and looking off into the distance somewhere. I thought maybe the photographer caught Jay Z thinking about how far he’d come since Marcy. On the upper left hand side of the photo was Jay Z’s autograph scribbled in blue. The photo was a prominent fixture in the Cafe. It hung directly across from the young Black man preparing my coffee.
(Source)
Excerpt 2
After our chat, Father Tim and I walked out of the Cafe to meet back up with Juan who was standing outside waiting for us. We talked outside for another hour. We chatted about the neighborhood and the serious social issues facing young Black and brown men. We laughed too.
“Is Harlem turning white like Brooklyn?” Father Tim asked.
He was aware not only of the economic issues facing his neighborhood but also of the racial demographics affecting the entire New York City metropolitan area. Here, I thought, was this Irish priest lamenting about white gentrification, and mincing no words.
He got it.
Three-thirty approached, and if I was ever going to make it back to Harlem by 5 o’clock, I had to prepare for my trek back uptown. We said our goodbyes and Juan and I headed for the G train.
I left the Cafe feeling like I made a new friend, and reassured that a community would have me.
Prologue to the Research #RaisingDissertation
#RaisingDissertation is a way to keep me sane and connected to the outside world while working, at times in isolation, on my dissertation research. From time to time, and depending on my mood, I will post draft excerpts from my dissertation research to this public blog. I welcome dialogue from subscribers, readers, and lurkers. I acknowledge that ideas belong to the universe. That said, however, if you wish to write about my research elsewhere, you must cite my work here. For those in the press reporting about the media and technology uses among 'disconnected' youth, and youths involved in foster care and juvenile justice systems, feel free to contact me directly. I'd love to share my research with you; this should not to be confused with doing your research for you. For others researching in this area, I also welcome your insights here. As always, I'm happy to connect.
The following is an excerpt from an ever-growing dissertation involving the mediated lives of vulnerable or 'disconnected' youth in New York City.
Prologue to the Research
While I was completing a master’s degree in Women’s Studies I spent long hours in my room reading and writing about people dislocated from their communities as a result of natural disaster and social conflict. Also during this time I was taking care of my father whose health was deteriorating. Throughout graduate school and while living with my father in rural North Texas, I became isolated and somewhat disconnected from the local community. Because of these social and familial circumstances, I retreated into reclusively, and likely as a result, I found affinity with a Macbook computer and online social networks.
Media were tools that I used to not only document research but they also provided a means of escaping, albeit temporarily, from the grind of graduate school and the solitude of caring for a dying parent. In 2006 I posted my first YouTube video online. There was something about performing in front of a digital camera and then uploading a four-minute video to a social media site (SNS) for strangers to comment on and ridicule that provided me with a sense of community and place. While locked in my room researching one day, my father, who was checking-in on me asked, "What are you writing on your computer?" His question, imbued with both care and wonder, has stayed with me years after his death.
My father was born in 1930; one year after the U.S. stock market crashed that subsequently gave rise to The Great Depression. He never used a computer, and it was only during his late sixties and throughout his seventies that he used a cell phone. He would have never described his relationship with a cell phone through affinity, but rather perceived the mobile artifact as an inconvenient sign of the times. As I reflect back to that moment when he asked me about what I was writing on the computer, I think about his orientation to technology. At the time, I would not have described what I was doing on my computer as writing. However, my father’s way of knowing how a computer functioned was intuitive, and in fact true. I do write on my computer, as in mark, produce, and compose—just not with a led pencil or ink pen.
Thinking too about my father, who was a writer and oil painter, and his relationship to the pen and paintbrush, these were technologies through which he found catharsis, just as the button and mouse are instruments through which I can connect digitally with others and express myself. As a child of the Great Depression, and a nomad of this digital world, my father and I, respectively, used the technologies and media of our generations to write our ways into knowing, participate in culture, and to find a sense of place in the world.
When I first began to work with young people who were involved in foster care and juvenile justice systems, I noticed that they too were finding ways to connect with others using social, digital, and mobile media. They were composing on and connecting to publicly mediated networks, engaging in what Alice Marwick, Ph.D. calls ethnography of display[1]. Some of these young people had lost parents at an early age, transitioned in and out of school, and had difficulty finding work. Despite lacking supportive ties to family, school, and work, these young people still managed to find ways to digitally participate in the circulation of culture and knowledge, even with limited access to computers, cell phones, and the Internet. I spent time working closely with young people who, when given access to borrowed computers and Internet WiFi (wireless technology that enables connection to the Internet) would log on to Facebook or WordPress (a popular blogging web platform), connect with friends and share media artifacts like digital pictures and videos. These young people were not simply consuming media, but also participating—despite their circumstances, in the meaning making processes through relatively public and mediated social networks.
As I approach this research, I am again drawn back in time to the question my seventy-year-old father asked me nearly ten years ago. A question that at its core wants to know: What do we do with media and networked technology, and why do we do it, particularly during episodes in our lives when we seem dislodged from support networks that are meant to ground us? MIT specialist, Sherry Turkle writes in her book Alone Together (2011) that “[t]he network is seductive [and] if we are always on, we may deny ourselves the rewards of solitude” (pg. 3). While it may be true that relentless connection to networked technology can impose new communication challenges for people and our relationships, one might consider how networked technology can mediate information-seeking practices and connection, particularly for those who, during moments of difficult transition, find solitude a nuisance, whose offline supportive ties are scarce commodities, and for those whose privacy is complicated by federal legislation and institutional regulations.
This subtle consideration about our relationship to/with each other and networked technology, along with the question that asks what is it that we do with media guides this research. I am compelled to know more about how young people who are characterized as disconnected and vulnerable might find a sense of community and place, if at all, through media and technology. Furthermore, I think about what these findings might reveal about the organization and space of their social ties and networks. My inquiry here is motivated by care for and wonder about the lives of young people I have had the privilege of working with for nearly two years. This exploratory research is also an ode to my father’s loving question years before. And as Cris Beam writes in her book about youth in foster care, To The End of June (2013), this research is a way for me to look.
[1] On February 20, 2014 during a presentation at Teachers College, Columbia University, Alice Marwick, Assistant professor of Communications and Media at Fordham University described the writing and producing that we do via web media as “ethnography of display”. Marwick noted that during the earlier days of blogging and online journaling, text was the primary mode of displaying information. The current web landscape complicates what it means to write our ways into knowing and being because of visual media like images and video. The term “ethnography of display” encapsulates both how people produce publicly online and how these practices overtime tell a story about self-presentation.