After approximately three weeks of uploading original photos, my curatorial activity declined considerably due to a lack of original artworks by the artist Ian Reddie.
It became clear that my engagement with the apps and especially the reciprocated actions by other users also declined and this resulted in far less observable ethnographic data. Planning and extending the activity over a much longer period could have been carried out, but this was unattainable in view of the tight dissertation schedule.
[1] The dilemma of lurkers in online ethnography has also been described by Christine Hine (2000)
It became clear that my engagement with the apps and especially the reciprocated actions by other users also declined and this resulted in far less observable ethnographic data. Planning and extending the activity over a much longer period could have been carried out, but this was unattainable in view of the tight dissertation schedule.
Interestingly, it was not possible to capture the data of social media art viewers who were just viewing the artworks, only those that had an active engagement, i.e. either by making comments or through liking. Similarly, as an ethnographer I also needed to engage with the artworks, having decided that an active role would offer better expertise of the social media sites.[1]
Having
less data than anticipated meant that my original intention of conducting a
virtual ethnography involving a certain amount of categorising and coding in
effect became an empirical challenge. It was therefore decided to re-align the project
with a visual analysis and the collating of screen dumps of the
same social media sites.
Kozinets (2011) separates social media users into various categories of strength of engagement and centrality of consumption activity, from being newbie/lurker, to devotee/interactor, insider/maker and mingler/networker. My own curating would position me as having experienced all those features (which may or may not be ethnographically observable). My experience as a curator differs from my role as a researcher, in line with the ethnographic expertise I developed.
With hindsight I can now conclude there was an unrealistic expectation with regards to the number of social media users that would be engaging with my curatorial activity[2]. In order for a user to be active, frequent uploads and collating of many artworks in lists and personal collections is required. This is a prolonged activity which was not feasible within this project.
[1] The dilemma of lurkers in online ethnography has also been described by Christine Hine (2000)
[2] To illustrate this point made: my Trover engagement activities involved 10 people, the majority would express a ‘like’ for all my uploads, and although some comments were made, the information exchanged was minimal. For instance, CA wrote ‘Awe, this makes me sad.’ And MT wrote ‘who paint these walls? and what's their purpose. however, they are amazing.’ Another comment made by C. mentions just ‘Yay!!!’
On ArtStack, there were no comments received, only 18 followers resulted from the 11 artworks uploaded. For Pictify the ‘Ian Reddie portfolio’ received 29 likes but no comments.
