Minor Ethnographic Research

This weekend I went out of town and was in the car for quite some time (7 hours up and back) with a group of people. Being an enthusiastic linguistic anthropologist, I naturally mentioned the topic of CMC during the ride (since my victims couldn’t escape :D ) I decided to do some informal ethnographic research. I asked everyone about their views of cell phone usage. Here is the results:

Nearly everyone in the car admitted to using their phones to call someone who was in the same house that they were in. When questioned why, they either said that it was easier or that they thought that shouting all around the house was rude. I asked them why they did not just walk into the next room or floor. The general consensus was that they were busy multitasking and that they didn’t have to disrupt their work to call someone else.

I told them about the debate over whether texting, IM, and blogging is destroying language. I asked them if they thought technology was making people stupider. Everyone said yes. This surprised me. However, no one indicated that they thought that they were becoming less intelligent. They said that in their experience, people do not want to read books that are written at a high reading level. (One of the girls was reading a romance novel which, as we discussed earlier, is usually written at a 6th grade reading level. However, she still complained that it was a shame that people did not have higher reading skills.)

I thought it was interesting that no one thought technology was making them stupider, just other people. Perhaps we judge the level of other people’s language against our own. This may be the reason why educators are so concerned: they presumably have a very high reading level, considering their education, and judge any difference from their speech and writing to be wrong or at least alarming. Maybe this is why texters and IMers who use a lot of abbreviations do not see anything wrong with their language.

One final question I asked was whether people preferred electronic or printed books. Baron said that one of the questions in the future was whether or not paper will play as an important role in an electronic world. The only boy who responded said that he preferred electronic texts because he could easily add his own notes to them. Personally, I like bound books because I can hold them and feel them. To me, they seem more real.

I seems as though this cross-section of the population is generally in agreement about calling people in the same house and the deterioration of language. Then again, this data wasn’t exactly collected in the most precise, scientific manner. However, I am always very interested in people’s opinions on what we talk about in class, especially if they haven’t academically studied the subjects in question.