Television on the Borderlands

Dear all, I am very, very happy to announce that my first book has been published :) I had a great stage-fright when it came out in December but now I got used to its presence in bookshops. It is the end of a very long journey. I am particularly enthusiastic about the cover, which looks like this: .

. The funny TV set on the cover is the artwork by Erno Bartha The Triptych from the TV Mania series. I am happy that Erno allowed me to use his work. Firstly because I believe his work, the TV set opening itself is the metaphorical representation of the main argument I make: television by the act of letting in the Other and his own representation (even though within the narrow niche) into the broadcasted main stream communicates interculturally and opens itself and its viewers to the other point of view. Secondly I really enjoyed the TV Mania exhibition that I visited when in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. I found it extremely funny on one hand and theoretically interesting on the other. It is a game with the object that is no longer used and lost its initial function. Now being an empty shell may be filled in with different content, different uses and roles. I have already written about this exhibition earlier on this blog. If you want to see more Bartha’s works visit his site. . The book itself is the shortened version of my Ph.D thesis defended in 2010. It is based on analysis and research conducted in 2008 and 2009 so as TV texts are rather ephemeral ones it is in fact it is rather historical book now. I treat it as a representation and critical analysis of a television scape in a given historical moment. . The main aim of the book is presenting various strategies the Others are presenting themselves in the main stream of television broadcasting. I was not interested in the images of the otherness created by the representatives of main stream television programmes (as travel series) but the selfportraits the representatives of the nondominant societies and groups are allowed to present – even though these representations can be found mostly in niches. In spite of that one can still perceive cracks on the monolith surface of the mainstream media. . The book consists of four chapters. The first one is a methodological one, where multimodal text analysis, content analysis and ethnographical methods are presented and justified. The latter three chapters are case studies of abovementioned cracks in the mainstream media ordered by the geographical scale. . The second chapter regards television texts moving in global scale above administrative borders of states and mental borders of nations: the country promotion spots. They are only one way of national branding but, as I see it, the most global and influential as transmitted by the worldwide news channels as CNN or BBC. I analyse them as Arjun Appadurai’s mediascape elements that has the power of setting in motion the human masses (tourists and investors) due to the stir of collective imagination. . The third chapter regards the phenomenon that I call the trasnborder television. These are the television programmes that are realized in co-productions by the neighbor states. All analysis in this chapter is based on programmes produced by Polish television in cooperation with German, Ukrainian, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian and Byelorussian broadcasters. Some of them are stable and are still on air, some survived only two or three episodes (Ukrainian ones), some did not survive the political tensions (the case of Byelorussian series). . The last chapter is the longest and represents all the methodological equipment I have suggested in the first chapter. It is a monograph of the local scale otherness self-representation in television and regards the national and ethnic minority series in the local subsidiary of Polish Public Television in northern part of Poland Podlasie. It is the most culturally diverse part of the country with Poles, Byelorussians, Ukrainians, Russians, Lithuanians, Roma people and Polish Tatars live together, where three religions – catholic, orthodox and Islam – meet. The research I conducted covers the content analysis, ethnography of the Byelorussian viewers and the journalists creating the minority programmes. . Even though I am now so far away from these issues, into totally different groups and media really love this book :)

Netnography. Doing Ethnographic Research Online by Robert V. Kozinets

Netnography. Doing Ethnographic Research Online by Robert V. Kozinets (Sage 2010) was my first choice to dip into the method. And it was not only due to the really great cover (which fully matches my aesthetical needs). Kozinets handbook is a very coherently and clearly written introduction to the whole process of netnographic inquiry from the very begging: selecting the topic and the online community to be investigated, the pre-research reflection on how to enter the community, of how to present yourself, through the problem of keeping field notes during all the research stages and finally how to collect and analyse various kinds of data the netnographical paradigm provides. Last but not least, author covers two procedures of research that are not always taken into consideration in Polish context: how to conduct ethical research (with crucial for netnography: copyrights and data protection) and evaluation (that is generally weak chain of the qualitative, soft disciplines).

Many examples of author’s own work, analyses and mistakes makes an impression of going through the workshop designed by Kozinets for a reader. Exercises to which author strongly encourages and appendix with a ready for use form for conducting online research - it all makes this book very helpful.

The new thing for me, as far as academic discourse is concerned, was using feminine forms when mentioning hypothetical researcher. That is something completely unusual for Polish academic writing. It simply speaks to me.

As an ethnographer I never believed in observant participation – the most “ethnographical” method originally invented and developed by Alfred Radcliffe-Brown and Bronisław Malinowski almost century ago. The observer’s paradox – especially in the small communities – seemed an unavoidable and unacceptable element of inquiry to me. That is why in my research on mediated intercultural communication I have chosen open interviews with communities’ opinion leaders. The intereview-based method has its drawbacks, especially when it concerns media (television) decoding. In this case researcher is not investigating the media decoding itself, but the only data to which he/she has access is the autho-biographical metanarration on how respondent decodes herself media decoding. Not to mention that the process of interview analysis and report writing is another process of decoding (of interview transcription)*. Netnography seems to be the golden solution here. I believe it enables the observant participation much more than traditional ethnography, although (as Kozinets suggests) netnographer should always reveal his/her identity and research intentions to the investigated community.

A bit uneasy part of the research process Kozinsts suggests, is the member check. At first I was distrustful of this procedure. In traditional ethnographic inquiry the researcher is the last agenda to draw conclusions and to make the final interpretations. On the one hand member check is more equal procedure that makes a community member researcher’s partner and in some way co-producer of the final report. Still it is the member who knows his or her community the best. But on the other hand I would be afraid of some form of pressure that community might put on researcher to influence their own representation in the report/book or to somehow use the research for their own purposes**.

I strongly recommend Netnography. Doing Ethnographic Research Online as a basis and introduction to ethnography online, with some historical introduction, a kind of archeology of netnography and a discussion over phenomenons such as the distinction between online communities and communities online or the links and crossroads of ethno- and netnography. It is a very useful training as well as set of problems, issues researcher needs to bear before takien up the study.

Here are my notes - partly in Polish :)






*More on this: Researching Audiences, (2003), red. K. Schroeder, K. Drotner, S. Kline, C. Murray, Arnold Publication, London, p.18.

**No, I am not the conspiracy theory enthusiast, even though I am The X Files fan :)