Research for this book was conducted over many years and with a number of collaborators. I did not enter into these research projects with the intent of writing a book. Instead, while conducting research on Brooklyn’s drag community, I began thinking about how I could build an analysis of countercultural communities and their relationships to digital technologies that could connect to my previous research. This appendix describes how I gathered data during a multiyear process of doing qualitative work with three separate countercultural communities. My interpretive framework grew out of sustained reengagement with my fieldwork, follow-up interviews, and data collection. In the following paragraphs, I describe the fieldwork that was undertaken for this book, followed by a brief discussion of coding.
BME
Chapter 3 discusses the online body modification community Body Modification Ezine (BME). My research on BME began as part of an internship with the Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research. In particular, I worked with danah boyd, a principal researcher there. I wanted to understand how people circulate information about radical or extreme body modification (EBM), which I defined as “body modification procedures that are unusual, permanent, and typically painful, including split tongues, ear pointing, silicone or magnetic implants, and the voluntary amputation of limbs and organs.” Because these practices operate in a legal gray area, studying EBM can be as much of a project of social capital as a project of information.
Unlike the New Brunswick punk music community and the Brooklyn drag queen community, the body modification community is not tied to a specific geographic location, and I deliberately gathered as diverse a group as possible, eventually conducting interviews in several states in the United States and in Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. Interviews were originally conducted in 2011, primarily in person but occasionally by telephone or text-based chat (see table A.1). Because my definition of the field includes both online and offline contexts, participant observation for IAM included reading participants’ modification-related blogs, hanging out at local piercing shops, and attending an annual campout for people in the modified community. These sites provided opportunities for informal interviews that provided additional context and perspectives.
As I note in chapter 3, I have been a member of this online community for over a decade, after first encountering BME in high school while searching for information on piercings and scarification. Studying one’s own community is always tricky, and involves striking a balance between reflexivity, objectivity, and longstanding familiarity with a community. In writing about BME for this book, I wanted to share a history of community that I both value and hold in suspicion, and I hope that both the values and criticisms of BME and IAM emerge with clarity in this analysis. I document some of the methodological issues in that project elsewhere (Lingel 2012).
Even while conducting interviews about extreme body modification and information poverty, I knew I wanted to offer a broader account of BME as a community. Compared to many of the currently dominant social media platforms, BME has a long online history, and I had seen it struggle to survive the emergence of mainstream sites. I returned to these interviews to develop an account of how BME developed as a community, particularly in terms of managing membership and maintaining a sense of alterity. I felt lucky to have conducted research on IAM in 2011, when the community was still fairly active, and follow-up interviews allowed me to understand how the 2011 redesign radically changed the appearance of IAM and became a kind of scapegoat for its decline. Learning about these struggles was productive for understanding community, but it also meant that IAM was something of a moving target in terms of recruiting or even developing a consistent interview protocol (see Pearce and Artemesia 2009 on the challenges of researching a community with an unstable platform). In 2014 and 2015, I conducted an additional set of interviews, with both former and new participants, including Rachel Larratt, the site’s current owner. In keeping with longstanding conventions in social science research, Rachel is the only participant who (with her consent) was not assigned a pseudonym because it would be impossible to talk about the role that she played in the community without revealing her name.
Follow-up interviews allowed me to talk about the ways that IAM had changed since my first round of interviews in 2011 and also allowed me to solicit feedback as a form of member checks (Creswell and Clark 2007, 217). One thing that I wanted feedback on was whether to cite BME and IAM by name rather than pseudonym. My 2013 article with danah boyd gave the BME site a pseudonym, following standard conventions for occluding research sites. After the article was published, however, several participants and community members expressed disappointment with this decision. They felt that I had disrespected the community by changing the name, and in one case, a participant who was also a friend of nearly a decade explained (not unkindly) that he felt so strongly about identifying BME and IAM by name that he would both end our friendship and publicly condemn any future related research if I continued to use a pseudonym for the sites. This conversation was certainly a turning point in my thinking about how to handle naming and occlusion, but I could not let one person’s beliefs dictate my decision, even if it was a longstanding friend in the community. I reached out to participants I had interviewed to poll their feelings on the issue, and without exception, they supported the decision to use BME’s name, with the understanding that I would continue to use pseudonyms for participants themselves.
I turned to methods literature to think through this issue more thoroughly. Christina Dunbar-Hester’s (2014) ethnographic work on radio activism provided a model, in that she also shifted from a pseudonym to the actual name of the organization she studied as she shifted from a journal article to a monograph. In addition, Annette N. Markham’s work on the ethics of Internet research (Markham 2005; Markham, Buchanan, and AoIR Ethics Working Committee 2012) and Christine Hine’s (2015) research on online ethnography were helpful in thinking through the ethics of this decision. There were other pragmatic factors to consider, too. After conference presentations of this research, people would occasionally ask me, typically with a knowing wink, if I was talking about BME and IAM. Given that BME has been the largest and most popular site for body modification on the Internet, I perhaps should not have been surprised that the site name pseudonym proved to be transparent to many readers. Either for techies who know a lot about online culture and a little bit about body modification or for body modification enthusiasts who know at least a little about the Internet, people who read my work simply assumed that I was talking about BME. Finally, when I interviewed the current site owner, Rachel Larratt, in fall 2015, she gave her approval to having the site called by its actual name in my research, so I felt that I had covered my bases in terms of participants, former site owners, and current site users, supported by literature in ethnography and ethics. With all of these factors in mind, I decided to list the site by name.
New Brunswick
Research on the New Brunswick, New Jersey, punk community began in fall 2009, shortly after I moved to New Jersey to start a PhD program at Rutgers University. Having loved punk and indie music since high school, I was surprised that a college town had very few local venues for live music. When I moved to nearby Highland Park, only one venue in New Brunswick offered shows to the under-twenty-one crowd, unlike other U.S. college towns like Madison, Lawrence, and Bloomington. My friend Aaron Trammel (a fellow grad student, a musician, and a longtime New Jersey resident) explained that New Brunswick music shows were tied to a network of houses that operated as DIY venues, and after much discussion, we realized that this was not just an entertainment problem; it was an information problem. We eventually teamed up with Nathan Graham, Joe Sanchez, and Mor Naaman to study the community as a sociotechnical phenomenon. More than the other two field studies included in this book, research on the New Brunswick punk community grew out of a deeply collaborative effort, and I am particularly grateful to Aaron Trammell for his advice and feedback throughout the first part of this project, which I would not have been able to develop further without his support and encouragement.
Researching the basement community had three basic parts—participant observation, a focus group, and individual interviews. Participant observations included going to shows and hanging out in bars, which we did collectively in 2009 and 2010 and I did on my own in 2014 and 2015. After we attended a show, went to an established alternate social hub (such as a bar), or casually bumped into a member of the scene, we took scratch notes that we later transcribed into more detailed field note accounts. As a team, we compiled field notes from dozens of hours of fieldwork in these various locations. Informal interviews were conducted during field observation, and these helped to shape guidelines for interview guides for both focus groups and individual interviews. To get a sense of the community’s history and evolving practices, we used purposive sampling (Babbie 2010, 193) to conduct interviews with four individuals whose experiences with the community spanned four decades.
After many weeks of attending shows and conducting preliminary, semistructured interviews with individual community members, we recruited participants for a focus group in fall 2009. The focus group was held for two hours with ten participants who had been active in the community for a number of years. Many had been involved with the scene since their teenage years. We saw the focus group as a way of delving into practices that we had observed in the community, such as locating venues by using code names and ask-a-punk. We asked about these practices as well as different communication platforms, including cell phone use, social media, zines, and message boards. The focus group gave us a rich understanding of the community and its relationships to secrecy and technology.
In fall 2010, Aaron Trammel and I conducted a second round of interviews, concentrating on how fans learned about upcoming shows rather than how show organizers sought to distribute information. Initially, we attempted to limit our interview pool solely to fans in the scene rather than band members or show promoters, who constituted focus group participants. Starting with contacts made through field observations, we used snowball sampling to extend our interview pool. As we conducted interviews, we found that limiting interviews solely to fans was challenging, not because it was difficult to locate fans in the scene but because roles of participation in the basement community are extremely fluid. The lines between living in a house where shows are conducted and promoting shows or between organizing events in the past and continuing to attend shows in the present turned out to be both fuzzy and malleable. Table A.2 provides details of our participants’ demographic details and roles in the community.
Aaron, Joe, Mor, and I published a short paper in CSCW 2012 about the use of social media and practices of secrecy (Lingel, Trammell, Sanchez, and Naaman 2012), but there was no way to work through the many sociotechnical tensions within the community in a four-page human-computer interaction paper. In returning to the interview data to write this book, I wanted to provide richer descriptions of the community and develop a more extensive analysis of secrecy, information practices, and sociotechnical tactics.
As was the case with BME, I struggled with whether to name the location of the basement community. In our CSCW 2012 paper, our group listed the location because we agreed that New Brunswick’s geography and its relationship to Rutgers was too essential to explaining the information practices to anonymize. The recent publication of a book about the basement community (New Brunswick, New Jersey, Goodbye) also served as a kind of precedent for our research.
Of the three field studies, the most time lapsed between New Brunswick fieldwork and publication. To some extent, it is impossible to have a comparative book of field studies that does not involve a time lag, in that the length of time required to conduct fieldwork, analyze data, write, and publish makes it inevitable that the analysis of (at least) one of the case studies will involve older data. I wanted members of the community to know that I was writing new analysis about New Brunswick punk, and the best way to circulate that information seemed to be via a zine. Zines have a long history in punk and DIY circles, and although I had not seen a significant number while conducting fieldwork, a zine seemed to be a way of communicating my respect for DIY values. My zine (called Asking the Punks: A Basement Ethnography) explained the research project and how it fit into the book. I listed my contact information in the zine and asked for feedback, questions, and concerns. In December 2014 and April 2015, I attended a number of basement shows in New Brunswick and distributed around a hundred copies of the zine. I was both relieved and disappointed that no one contacted me after seeing the zine. On the one hand, it meant that no one was so upset by my plans that I would have to reevaluate how or whether to include the field study in the book. On the other, it meant that I had not opened a new line of dialogue as far as member checks. Nevertheless, I feel it was a worthwhile approach in signaling to participants that I was still conducting work on their community.
Bushwick
My research into Brooklyn’s drag community began through a collaboration with Adam Golub, who at the time had just earned a master of arts degree in journalism at Columbia University. After Adam completed a documentary film on the community in 2012 as part of his graduate work, he approached me about applying for a grant from the Brown Institute for Media Innovation, which supports research at the convergence of storytelling and technology. The grant allowed us to conduct focus groups with Brooklyn-based drag queens, focusing on the use of social media. Throughout our project, we had the support of administrators and other grantees at the Brown Institute, particularly Mark Hansen and Michael Krisch.
Because we were interested in the sociotechnical dimensions of drag, especially through social media, we felt that focus groups were a particularly useful methodological tool. Between September and December 2013, we conducted four focus groups with a total of fifteen participants. Groups ranged in size from two to five participants. Although the number of participants is small, our focus group populations represent a sizable percentage of Brooklyn’s drag community, which included approximately a hundred active performers. We recruited participants through word-of-mouth and snowball sampling. Most participants knew each other, some intimately and others vaguely or by reputation. Participants had various levels of experience as performers: some were instrumental in creating Brooklyn’s drag community, and others had begun performing only in the previous few months. All participants lived in Brooklyn, and they all were between twenty-four and thirty-five years old. To respect the fluidity of gender and sexuality prevalent in the drag community, we did not ask participants to list their sexuality, gender, or sex as part of our recruitment process. But during our conversations, several participants identified themselves as trans, which supports a narrative we encountered during fieldwork that Brooklyn’s drag community sought to be inclusive and welcoming of trans performers. Focus group questions centered on the role that was played by social media for performers and as a tool of forming community. We also asked about the extent to which these practices had changed over time for performers who had participated in the scene for a number of years.
In addition to focus groups, we took advantage of a three-day salon called Drag Arts (held in Manhattan’s Lower East Side in November 2013) to hold a workshop on the role that was played by social media in Brooklyn’s drag community. The workshop drew approximately forty people, including drag performers (from Brooklyn and Manhattan) and nightlife goers. The workshop was structured as a moderated discussion of the themes that emerged from focus groups, including the role played by social media in promotion, documentation, and communication between performers and fans. We also addressed terminology as it relates to collective identity, working through collective understandings of terms like community, subculture, and counterculture. The workshop both supplemented our data and acted as a form of member checking (Creswell and Clark 2007, 217) because we were able to present some of the high-level themes from our interviews to a larger part of the community and solicit feedback.
Based on this research, Adam and I published an article in the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication (Lingel and Golub 2015) that concentrated on online identity work in the context of drag queens’ everyday online lives. As was the case with the other two field studies in this book, many research avenues (particularly around issues of community) could not be pursued within the limits of the JCMC article. To explore how Brooklyn drag queens were making sense of Facebook’s real-name/authentic-name policy, I conducted a small number of follow-up interviews and interviewed new participants whose accounts were frozen. I also incorporated textual analysis of Facebook activity as a source of data on the role played by social media in everyday life. I concentrated on a two-month period before and after the Bushwig 2015 festival, tracking social interactions and messages among queens I befriended during fieldwork.
An interesting dynamic unfolded in 2015 after I gave a talk presenting initial research from this fieldwork. An audience member introduced herself as a Facebook researcher and offered to be a point of contact for queens in my participant network who encountered problems with their accounts. After I relayed this information to my participants, several of them later reached out to me with requests to help queens whose accounts had been frozen. After putting these performers in touch with my contact at Facebook, I asked if I could interview them about their relationship to Facebook and social media. For most of the queens I encountered this way, the most frustrating part of having their accounts frozen was feeling that they lacked recourse for addressing the alleged policy violation, making it particularly gratifying to provide a meaningful service within the community I had studied.
Data Analysis
In returning to this data with the intent of writing a book, my first step was to survey all the data that I had accumulated from prior fieldwork. I took notes on themes that emerged, concentrating on high-level issues that I knew I wanted to pursue in the book—alterity, community, and relationships to digital media. I then made a plan for additional data sources that would be required to engage these topics thoroughly, including follow-up interviews, textual analysis of social media content, and participant observation. After I conducted additional fieldwork, I recoded all transcripts and media. This meant setting aside the coding structures that I used in journal articles and reevaluating my sources in light of the new project. I used NVIVO software, drawing on an emic/etic approach (Miles, Huberman, and Saldana 2013). This approach to coding involves a simple, hierarchical structure of high-level themes identified by the researcher (etic), with codes nested below corresponding to how participants refer to these concepts (emic). For example, I was interested in the relationships between authenticity and alterity. Under the etic code authenticity, I eventually included subcodes like “sellout” and “scene points.”
Emic/etic analysis provides a dialectical structure that puts concepts into conversation with (or perhaps more precisely, translated through) the terms and perspectives of participants. In addition, I used an open coding method (Corbin and Strauss 2015) to develop a set of codes that do not necessarily fall within the scope of etic themes but were interesting to me. In combination, the coding methods provide both structure and flexibility for developing observations and theoretical claims. After completing this new round of coding, I began developing the three-part framework that anchors the analytical component of my networked field studies method. Perhaps more than anything else, the coding process began to bind three distinct field sites into a cohesive conceptual project.
As a means of evaluating my analytical claims, I decided to conduct member checks, which involves soliciting feedback from participants on drafts or high-level themes. This was easiest for BME because I had the longest ties to this community. In fall 2014, I asked my interviewees and a few longtime IAM friends if they would read a draft of the chapter. I also asked a handful of participants from Brooklyn’s drag community for feedback. Most responded positively, but few sent any substantive comments about my analysis. A better approach, I found, was to send an email or Facebook message to individuals or small groups of friends and include a short list of questions.
For example, in fall 2015, I sent a set of questions to a number of drag queen participants. Part of my interest in Brooklyn drag had to do with space, both in terms of safe spaces and New York City as a locus of queer culture. I had assumed that there would be at least some concerns about moving Bushwig from Brooklyn to Queens in 2015, given how many participants had clearly and forcefully claimed themselves as belonging not just to New York but to Brooklyn. But in asking for feedback on the arguments that I had made on the topic, participants indicated that I was making too much out of what they perceived to be a pragmatic decision to find a bigger, cheaper space that was slightly over the Brooklyn border. It was more difficult to conduct member checks in the New Brunswick punk music basement community, so I relied on feedback in casual conversations among people in my social network who were current or former members of the community.
As a whole, I found that thinking of member checks as a guided discussion about specific questions or doubts worked better than asking for wholesale feedback. The process was valuable for me in trying to ensure that participants had a mechanism for engaging with and critiquing my analysis of their communities.
Note: This table presents details about interviewees from the BME community. With the exception of Rachel Larratt, pseudonyms (chosen by participants) are used to provide confidentiality.
Table A.2 Interviewees from the New Brunswick, New Jersey, punk music community
Note: This table presents details semistructured interviews that were conducted in fall 2010. The column titled “Role” shows the different modes of participating in the community—as band member, fan, member of a house where shows take place, and show promoter. In many cases, these roles overlap, in which case I use the term that dominated (but did not necessarily encompass) the interviewee’s main mode of participating in the community.
