TEBlog

OK, so for many of you it's a case of "been there, done that, tagged the photo". But even if it is yesterday's news, I'm still busy researching Facebook. Scroll down for my research questions and methodology... But let me get right to the point. I want to survey UCT students about their FB usage, but I need some help with access to large lecture groups. All it would involve is about 10 minutes - to explain the research and to distribute the questionnaire - perhaps at the end of a lecture. If you're willing to offer your students as guinea pigs, please email me tanja.bosch@uct.ac.za so that I can get my lab coat ready for a visit to your classroom.

I'm hoping that, if nothing else, we can find out more about students' use of online social networking networks and the potential for building online learning communities...and of course, if we (UCT) are to follow the route of blocking access (like many employers have done), then we do so from an informed perspective...Hope you can help me! 

Research Questions
•    How are UCT students using Facebook?
•    How do UCT students’ networks on Facebook relate to their networks in the classroom?
•    How do UCT student FB profiles reflect the “digital divide” (with reference to language, class and race; Internet user demographics in South Africa)?
•    How are tutors and lecturers attempting to engage with students using Facebook?
•    What potential does FB hold for building learning communities?

Methodology
•    Unstructured qualitative interviews with UCT students who use Facebook
•    Quantitative survey of UCT students who use Facebook
•    Online ethnography and qualitative content analysis of UCT student profiles
•    Collective case studies of UCT faculty using Facebook for academic purposes
•    Conversation analysis of student moves on Facebook (e.g. on the wall)
 

Given that I’ve spent the large majority of this weekend working, I allow myself the luxury of a frivolous post. Is this what it’s come to? This is what I do for fun these days? Well, last night’s fun involved converting wma files to mp3 on a mac (more fun than you’d imagine), so I guess this is an improvement. Anyway, as if the start of term, convening 3 courses and teaching 4 (in the 1st semester alone) isn’t enough, I’m also in the midst of buying a house – yes, we’re finally selling out, but rest assured there’s no metaphorical white picket fence in sight. So I’m on the phone with the attorneys and they’re asking for our names and personal information. “So you’re both unmarried”. “No”, I respond. “We’re married” (it’s a long story, involving ceteris paribus and apricot brandy in rural Southeastern Ohio). “To EACH OTHER??” “Yes, to each other”, I answer wearily.

What’s so odd about the fact that I kept my maiden name? After all, it didn’t stop my mother-in-law from giving me a cow (literally). Yes, I suppose I am a feminist (just by virtue of being a [black] woman), but it was all purely practical. They’d already printed my PhD (and various other meaningless certificates), I was too lazy to queue at Home Affairs for a new passport and ID, and given that I’m also an environmentalist of sorts (I recycle), the thought of all the extra space a double-barrelled surname would take, just seemed like a terrible waste of paper…though I suppose South Africans have mastered the use of the hyphen – much better than our appalling apostrophe usage.  My husband, the progressive modern man, doesn’t seem to mind. He must have read, “Don’t sweat the small stuff”, and then figured that we could rather argue about how many of the Super 14 fixtures he’ll be chained to the bar for.

I’d never really thought about it before, but after all the questions this week (from other women), I started to think that perhaps surnames are one of the most powerful tools used by patriarchal systems to deny women personal identity, much like prison inmates or soldier recruits are given a number. Our son takes his father’s surname, and I honestly couldn’t give a toss if a few small-minded individuals think he was born “out of wedlock.” Our dog, on the other hand, takes the hyphenated combination last surname (given the unlikelihood of her mating with another hyphenated surnamed dog). There are, of course, many exceptions to this norm: Iceland, Spain, some parts of Africa, Iran, Yemen, Jordan, among others. But I would have had a difficult time explaining this to the bank who just said unashamedly, “That’s umm... nice. Well you had better bring your marriage certificate along with you then.”

It actually makes having suffered through a PhD worthwhile. I can use my academic title and my maiden surname and suffer through the Woolworths cashier asking me, “Are you a real doctor?” - instead of having Mrs incorrectly tacked on to my maiden name (that just seems wrong). And when Dr Jekyll owes money, Mrs Hyde can answer the phone and say that she’s not in. I suppose, in the end, like much of today’s “shallow, satisfying, lipstick feminism”, one can have it both ways.

When I moved back to Cape Town from the United States, I was surprised to find that much of my student late night viewing, mostly of reality television shows, was to be found on local channels in South Africa. The intellectual part of my character instinctively snubs reality TV as ‘low culture’ (ala Raymond Williams), somewhere on par with soap operas, but I must confess to my own secret fascination with mediated spectacle.

South Africa was slow to jump on the bandwagon, but M-Net doubled its viewership in 2001 after the local version of Big Brother, following up that success with it’s own version of the U.K’s Pop Idol (De Jager, 2002). There have been other uniquely local offerings, e.g. the (very irritating) Going Nowhere Slowly, described by the producers as Reality TV platteland style.

Much of what’s available on our screens (which academic can afford DSTV? [money and time]) seems to be local versions of American shows e.g. The Apprentice, Big Brother, Survivor, Idols, The Weakest Link, and most tasteless of all, The Biggest Loser, among others. Purchasing a format and making a local version of an already successful programme is obviously cheaper, and it is the ordinary aspects in such local versions that are most likely to be adapted (Bonner, 2003). The careful choice of ordinary participants (and in South Africa, a racially diverse group) is probably the most important and well-orchestrated component of the spectacle. There are many arguments about the production of television to constitute and represent the nation, and certainly, our reality TV shows have been instrumental in telling us how South Africans act in public, what they aspire to, what they fear, and how they react under unusual conditions. And perhaps it also says a lot about us, the ‘imagined community’ of viewers, glued to our screens to see ourselves being (mis) represented. In fact, one might argue that the voyeurism of (reality) television shows us how to manage our lives to reflect the identity we would like to present (much along the lines of Facebook), often through the consumption of commodities. The most typical of these kinds of shows are those that offer a 'makeover', sometimes as extreme as to include surgery (such as a recent programme on M-Net).

With some of these makeover/style shows (read: let us change your wardrobe and hair and make you look more like Barbie’s cousin), there seem to be an endless supply of gullible women available as subjects. Though, as a colleague pointed out to me this week, there is a British reality style show, which targets gullible men too. In the US there’s (my favourite) Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, which, while highly watchable, seems to imply that a man has to be gay to moisturize, and to know that pink is the new black.

But our reading of the spectacle of reality TV might also be constrained by cultural factors, and ambivalence over what should and should not be seen. The editing of fragmented shots into continuous sequences, and the omission of certain visuals e.g. in their supposed ‘total coverage’, US networks edited out the images and sounds of falling bodies from the World Trade Centre because they deemed it too brutal (King, 2005); in South Africa, the long running controversy over the alleged sexual assault on Big Brother Africa.

But the term “Reality TV”, as used since the late 1990s, is actually something of a misnomer, since the very nature of the medium implies a particular presentation of reality. These programmes don’t claim to actually show some kind of minimally mediated ‘real’ (as in shows like Cops or World’s Worst Drivers), involve placing ‘real’ people in contrived situations, observing what happens and most often reducing the number until only one remain (Bonner, 2003). In most cases, the programme settings are so contrived and fictional, that there’s nothing ‘real’ about the staged events of reality TV.

In 2004, South Africa was on the verge of purchasing a porn reality TV show (Private Stars), but it never made it to our screens (or did it?). And thankfully we have no local versions of the silly matchmaking shows like The Bachelor/ Bachelorette or Temptation Island (no, I neither support nor celebrate Valentine’s Day). But either way, the creation of local versions of international (mostly American) reality shows says more about the McDonaldization of society and glocalization, than the SABC’s budget. But hey, at least it’s local stuff. And that’s way better than the rubbish like Ricki Lake and Days of Our Lives etc that so many South Africans appear to be hooked on.

I found a whole shelf of books on reality TV in the library today, and once again found myself saying, “This is fascinating, I want to write a paper on this.” I’m a radio (and new media) person, but hey, maybe it’s time to diversify a little. And maybe I will, when someone can tell me where and when I’ll have time to claim a so-called “Research Day”…

References:

BBC News. (2001). SouthAfrica’s reality TV race test. BBC news, 26 July 2001. Available online at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/tv_and_radio/1458386.stm. Accessed 13-Feb-08.

Bonner, Francis. (2003). Ordinarytelevision. Sage Publications: NewYork.

De Jager, Christelle.(2002). Rivals reach for stars. Variety. Available online at http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb1437/is_200202/ai_n5932452. Accessed 13-Feb-08.