Grass Roots Campaigning as Elective Sociality (or Maffesoli Meets ‘Social Software’): Lessons from the BBC iCan Project

Figure 1 Grass Roots Campaign Process Model (design: Seigfried Herrnreiter)

This research lived up to its expectations; it was received as fascinating and informative by our clients. It had many insights into micro-level local activism. A key one emerging form analyzing the intricacy of the campaigns we modeled was that campaigning is more about late nights in front of a spread sheet or coffee mornings with the neighbors, than manning the barricades. Just as every battle or event has its unsung heroes who are said to tip the balance; the majority of the work of campaigning is accomplished during such ‘unsung moments’ (literally—ever heard a protest song about typing up a petition?).

As researchers we were exhilarated because we seemed to be getting at the ‘reality’ of grass roots campaigning. A reality almost eclipsed beneath the romanticization of protests and ‘direct action’. For their part the BBC design team was expecting detail so they were especially pleased with the ‘campaign process model’. One of their earliest research questions for us was to find out what campaigner’s need at various stages of their campaigns. The model with its 4 main stages and multiple sub-stages, fulfilled this request and we knew the new media team planned to design with it as a cornerstone of their process.

Not long afterwards we saw the ‘system conceptual model’ the design team had prepared. This was one of those crystallizing moments—when the whole ethos behind a project gets revealed at once. A statement in the diagram read: “What is the journey between being an active user and a passive user?” It appears, the early iCan was re-conceived as a kind of machine to turn timid citizens with vague concerns into full-fledged campaigners—via the alchemy of a host of new media tools.²

Figure 2. iCan System conceptual model

In the prototype that eventuated from this model, the iCan concept had morphed from its initial modest goals into a one-stop shop “For all your campaigning needs” (as the slogan ran across the homepage). It was to function as a ‘campaign management hub’ where campaigns were created, staffed and directed online. To signal its intention for action the site had a prominent button labeled ‘start campaigning’ on its homepage

When we tested it with users in a second stage of research there was strong interest in the subject of campaigning but almost unanimous rejection of the way the site portrayed and engaged with the practice. One participant said “This site for me would generate constant R.T.F.M. errors (Read The F..king Manual)”. While another dismissed many of its features as “Self-reflexive bollocks”. Almost all the experienced campaigners said the concept site made campaigning look more difficult than it actually was. ‘Start campaigning’ and the empty form that followed it was met with universal confusion.

How could research artifacts that were to us so accurate lead our client in the wrong direction for its prototyping? There are clearly some lessons for praxis here which we will reflect on later. In short, the BBC team had interpreted the predominance of ‘unsung moments’—the daily organizational grind of campaigning—to mean this was the place they should focus the site for users. So they had added core features like organizing meetings online, sending emails and posting strategy ideas to fellow campaigners through the iCan system.

Building on the research from Lodestar, the designers had implicitly assumed a tight correspondence between the detailed stages of the campaign process model and the design of the website; and in addition to the initial bias toward action, we had helped them unknowingly assume a new bias toward comprehensiveness. Together we had made a powerful theoretical decision, without even knowing we had been theorizing.

The prospective ‘users’ of iCan had also mad e an equally powerful decision: a rejection of the site concept’s tendency to totalize the life of a campaign as a new media experience, and as something to be wholly mediated through iCan. In contrast they desired to employ a website only as a sometime resource – favoring to keep the brunt of their campaigning more firmly anchored in the local world that gave birth to it. They equally wished their campaigns to be fed and filtered through multiple sources and means, not dominated by a single conduit.

Yet the research input was not solely responsible for the site concept becoming too overweening and ambitious. Some of this can be attributed to the usual new media ‘scope creep’, but there was another powerful actor here: Winter 2003 was the rising tide of the ‘social software’ movement and members of the project team had attended seminars at the BBC with Clay Shirky himself. The ideology of this movement would have communicated that campaigning was just the kind of human activity that could be migrated online and the proposed functions and features list would have been influenced by this climate (as the system conceptual model already showed its hallmark goal of building ‘active’ online community members). Therefore this ‘zeitgeist’, should be seen alongside ‘data’ and ‘theory’ as another force directing action and decisions in this context, as in so many others.

Figure 3 Lisa (far right) and the Gatley anti-pone mast campaigners

But the truth is both Lisa in Gatley and Mark in Church Lawford said they had not known their neighbors very well. “Before there was some small talk in the streets, but now we really know each other afterwards”, said Lisa. So grass roots campaigning seems to have contributed more to ‘community’ in than being a result of it. We must look elsewhere for the forces that brought these people together.

The French sociologist, Michel Maffesoli has created an elaborate narrative about the decline of individualism and the return of a culture of tribes Embedded inside this epochal framework are provocative sociological insights from Weberian and phenomenological perspectives.

Society thus understood cannot be summarized by any old rational mechanism; it is experienced and organized, in the strongest sense of the term, through encounters, situations, experiences within various groups to which each individual belongs. (Maffesoli, 1996: 88)

For Maffesoli “the essential problem of social reality is relationism” (Maffesoli, 1996: 86), not how society as a whole is created—but how the innumerable micro-groups that are continually forming and dissolving come together. Just as ‘Time’ and ‘History’ were for Heidegger (1926) abstractions built from the more primordial human experiences of ‘temporality’ and ‘historicality’, so for Maffesoli ‘society’ is a structural abstraction out of our primary experience of ‘being-together’ with others, which he calls “sociality” and believes is the key attraction of motivating contemporary group formations. But unlike the strong ‘social’ obligations in traditional community, group allegiance here is a ultimately a matter of choice, hence it is called ‘elective sociality’. In this it follows the “logic of the network” rather than that of the clan group.

These ideas resonate with the reactions we received to the iCan prototype. They were getting something out of it beyond the drive toward reaching campaign goals. I started to think that the power of “being-together” could be the charismatic core of these kinds of groups – even if they were ostensibly devoted to serious, ‘political’ action. Maffesoli had borrowed the term ‘syntony’ (mutual tuning in relationship) from the phenomenological philosopher Schutz to describe the quality of moments when,

“…individuals in interaction are epiphanized in a vivid presence.” (Maffesoli, 1996: 73)

This description matched with stories of group experiences we had collected within the twelve campaigns; about late nights after work spent brainstorming together; about breakthrough moments where the whole strategy of a campaign shifted because a committee of four people seemed to think as one. Sue and Dionne (who campaigned against a refugee center planned for their town) were ten years apart, had never met before; but became fast friends spending nearly every night together: smoking, answering queries on the phone; mobilizing support and planning their next move. Throughout our interview they spoke as one. We as researchers were someone else to win to the cause (like the reporters before us) and they presented a united front, which seemed to go far beyond a presentation.

If this was the quality of collaboration on even some of these campaign, it goes some way toward explaining why the new media campaign experience we were proposing evoked a visceral rejection especially in the more experienced campaigners.

Although Maffesoli does not himself address the issue of local activism; it is my contention that grassroots campaigns are a species of group generated from sociality; and that this description better accounts for the phenomenon than rival ‘political’ explanations.

The situation in Gatley outside Manchester was that a mobile phone company planned to put a phone mast at the end of a quiet street overlooking a playground. Lisa, our informant noticed the planning application on a lamp post and began to tell other residents of the plans and research the possible effects of living near masts (headaches, sleeplessness) They were especially concerned of any effects on children. She had never been involved in politics or much interested in it. But throughout 15 months of campaigning she acted as defacto leader. There were countless informal meetings at Lisa’s house and larger ones in pubs (with 120 attendees); there were newsletters, a march in the street, petition tables and week-long vigils in the road (as described above). All told a lot of ‘being-together’. Most of the road’s resident’s elected to enact their sociality by supporting the campaign. They were united by a common repulsion against the idea of the phone mast.

The issue at hand was even more unequivocal for the residents of Church Lawford. According to government plans to build a new airport outside Rugby, their village would be under a runway (hence the reference to concrete). Obviously this had a mobilizing effect; most locals were appalled at the idea of the destruction of their village. So most supported the campaign with committee members like Mark playing a larger role as its media spokesman. (He had been totally non-political and in his earlier life and was a police officer who required special permission to participate). On call all day every day for the campaign, if the airport plans are shelved, Mark said “He will hang up his campaign hat and get his life back.”

So we see that campaigning can be a time of collective upheaval but also one of classical” collective effervescence” (Durkheim, [1912] 2001). All the more so for revolving around something more taxing than hobbies, sports or leisure (as Maffesoli’s examples tend to run). For the people exposed to this special form of “experiencing the other” (Maffesoli, 1996: 73) campaigning was truly a means of constructing community. All by way of encounters, situations, and experiences within a group to which they would not normally belong. As Lisa attested, life in the neighborhood was not the same afterward.

Maffesoli has a further concept that illuminates the nature of grass roots activism. He believes sociality brings with it a sense a communalized empathy” (Maffesoli, 1996[2]:136). I realize this kind of empathy was a catalyst running through the campaigns we studied. Empathy that was no longer person to person, but had become generalized across a locality. Empathy for a common fate that a nearby other is enduring alongside you. Empathy for having to move out of your village, for having a mobile phone mast placed in your road, for having traffic routed into your quiet residential street. If this kind of active empathy is achieved within a collective, it solves a host of traditional political problems at a single stroke (without resorting to the usual ‘political’ means): from the communitarian dilemma (Sennett, 1998) of how to motivate civic action (by instilling an ethic) to Rousseau’s ([1762] 1969) panacea of transforming the ‘will of all’ into the ‘general will’ (by suppressing individual self-interest). But such empathy is usually only effective for a very proximate area (within which people can share common experiences) and for one issue (or ‘object’) at a time. Ergo, this mobilized will cannot be relied upon as the basis for an ongoing political project.

Consequently, for many reasons, I want to question if what we observe in grass roots campaigning is best described as politics at all. Where Beck was correct, in the statement I began this paper with, was in identifying business, science, towns, and everyday life as current hot spots. But he was wrong to proclaim that what motivates people toward such ‘sub-politics’—is the desire to get involved in “shaping society from below” or taking part in “the substantive technification and industrialization process” (Beck, 1994:23). This sounds like the objectivist viewpoint of a systems theorist who cannot imagine any motivation outside of the logic of the system. These groups may have encroached on the political sphere because their voices can act as limiting factors on others’ decision-making power. But grass roots campaign groups do not want to run or control business, science, towns, or everyday life. Rather they want to defend and respond, or protect and guide certain outcomes in these areas – when the normal political system seems to have impacted on the way they want to pursue their everyday lives. Thus, grass roots campaigning is not so much an extension of the political; of politics reaching down into a subterranean zone as Beck would have it, but a natural extension of the process of ‘sociality’; of it electing to reach out and safeguard something it values—be it quiet streets, an uncluttered seafront, or an affordable house in the town where one grew up.

Moreover, this reaching out is something well within sociality’s grasp. Neighbors who can plan street parties and raise money for the PTA can likewise organize to prevent a mobile network operator placing a phone mast next to their playground. Viewed this way grass roots campaigning is more like a slight re-focusing of the ‘logic of the network’ (its members now aggregating to play a new role as campaigners) than any kind of bold transformation of the socio-political structure. The energy that gives rise to it has not migrated from elsewhere a la Beck; and certainly does not entail the people becoming like’ little politicians’. Likewise, totally unlike the classic discourse on political activism (Marcuse, 1969), (Huenefeld, 1970); grass roots campaigning does not require its members to be ‘politicized’, get emancipated, and ‘raise their consciousness’ (in a jargon which already sounds quaint); or, in short, become a different sort of person than they already are. (This underlines Maffesoli’s emphasis on ‘roles’ rather than essentialised ‘identities’). In our understanding of grass roots mobilization– based on attraction, repulsion, and empathy—ideology had little part.

Furthermore, this activity fails to satisfy classic definitions of politics—with a focus on gaining and maintaining power, office or control. (Johnson, 1995) Power in itself is not a goal, and almost never referred to here; although campaigners often want to direct some of its “effects” (Foucault, 1980) towards their areas of concern (or more frequently to block or re-direct some its effects). So to sum it up in Maffesoli’s terms,: grass roots campaigning is a phenomenon whereby certain members of the ‘mass’ that he describes as having “in a quasi-intentional sort of way, as its sole project, its perdurability in existence” join with other members to take the actions they see as necessary (temporarily acting in a quite intentional sort of way) to protect the quality of that existence. And then more often than not they return to ‘everyday life’. (As Mark talked about hanging up his hat.) Additionally, through involvement in a campaigns people reap the benefits of connecting to those around them through “shared sentiments; deepening their ties to ‘community’ and their chosen sense of identity within it.

This is a description that I believe accounts for the motivations and dynamics of the twelve campaigns we studied in the iCan project. However, Leo from Cornwall (a hairdresser and 31 year old campaigner for affordable housing) who best expresses the ethos of grass roots campaigning when he says, “I never desired to start a group or be part of a movement…I just see things around where I live that need sorting out, and I try to sort them.” (Lodestar/BBC, 2003:3)

So the major problem with the iCan concept was not merely that it required doing things through the internet; but that its mechanisms and tone were too functionalist (meaning both too individualistic and too directly political – it made the users feel they would be removing this activity from ‘the logic of the network’ (e.g. their network, Maffesolian definition), and its basis in sociality. While tapping into a ‘network effect’ (new media definition) was considered of secondary importance, if helpful at a latter stage (many of the campaigns did have their own websites, used for campaign PR not management).

Social software “can be loosely defined as software which supports, extends, or derives added value from, human social behavior – message-boards, musical taste-sharing, photo-sharing, instant messaging, mailing lists, social networking.” (Coates, 2005). And it main proponent says succinctly “It’s software that supports group interaction.” (Shirky, 2003).

Despite all its talk of ‘the social’, groups, and networks; ‘social software’ as a body of practices still posits the sovereign individual (as alone as one of Leibniz’s monads) ([1712 1965)sitting at the keyboard picking and choosing who to engage with. Social software projects an individualist fantasy of the social, or what one could refer to as ‘the social sublime’ as it places the torrent of social life safely at a distance – on the terms of the ‘user’, subject to his control and escape. While promoting the idea of making connections with others, social software, also functions to protect its users from the social. To be ‘within’ sociality is not to have such distance. It’s to share common sentiments, empathy or even a common fate with those around you. You may choose whether or not to get involved – but once you are ‘in’ a group, involved with it you are. Disengaging from sociality is not like getting rid of someone you chatted with on IM, grew bored with, can delete from your addresses and block from messaging you.

In contrast to the social theory conveyed by the prototype site, I believe it was this more embedded experience of ‘sociality’ (outlined above) that our participant campaigners were embodying when we showed them the ideas for iCan (how you could start a campaign online; or create an ‘e-poll’ to test your support in advance) and their response was simply to mutter – “But it’s not like that…its not like that”. For them starting a campaign online would feel like a making a public speech act with no one listening.

The social/political model also introduces a rationalized culture into grass roots campaigns (which are as unlike the traditional ‘Robert’s Rules of Order’ type of association as any group could be). Yet when imagining it transferred to iCan (which like many web services mediates human action through forms, processes and hierarchical procedures) this is what is conjured up and the charisma of campaigning dissipates under it spell.

We must emphasize that for Maffesoli the two scenarios above are not neutral choices. From society to sociality there is historical directionality—our cultures and collectivities, he believes, are moving away from the era of rational individualism toward person-centered absorption into locality and the mass. There is no doubt the internet and new technologies play a large role here (in connecting and consolidating tribes as well as providing them with ‘objects’ (such as photos or jokes) to coalesce around (Engstrom, 2005) But in the iCan concept we had tapped into the web’s most rationalistic potentialities to envisage a service more reflecting the ersatz politics of ‘society’, than the grass roots ‘sociality’ of the present. And we had done so despite using the ‘latest’ technology and being part of one of the newest web crazes of the time (at least for the serious-minded). This uneven development is not surprising when understanding technology change is simple compared to adapting it to how people change (Norman, 1998).

To put it more bluntly, the technology of social software may be state of the art but its social theory is a bit naïve, even untheoretical. Here I am in accord with Paul Dourish, who in a recent paper opined that this movement employs a “highly positivist interpretation of social phenomenon – a sort of social science, perhaps, uniquely attractive to engineers.” (Dourish, 2005:1). I think this raises the question of how frequently the people who make appeals to the social in the new technology actually draw on social science (as we practice it) at all.³

The most cited new works on social networking in the blogsphere; Linked (Barabasi, 2003 ) and Nexus (Buchanan, 2002) are both by theoretical physicists. These works are significant within our industry context; they fire people up, spawn brainstorm ideas; stimulate new market propositions and later provide a rhetoric of justification for them. This is just part of a long history of technology bypassing our space for the ‘harder’ sciences. So why are we as ethnographers or interpretive social scientist so often left out of these ‘conversations’? Is it simply because our representations of sociality are often too indeterminate, nuanced and troublesome to serve as a rhetoric of justification? Just as on this project Linked might have told you the full-strength iCan was a great idea; ethnographic research plus Maffesoli revealed the irritating old-fashioned preference for embodied contexts and face-to face interaction. (Maybe projects cannot bear too much reality?). Yet if we are gaining a greater share of voice in these conversations we must wait see how influential it can become. (EPIC will help the cause).

As well as partaking in the newly-coined zeitgeist of social software, I believe the iCan concept ultimately rested (for its conception of the social) on one of new media’s hoariest theoretical fundaments – the perennially under analyzed concept of the “community of interest”. For those who have reputedly undergone this ‘shift’ the activity in question would be just another interest group to take part in. But I believe I have shown the natural ground from which grass roots campaigning arises is ‘elective sociality’ which in its characteristics occupies an intermediate space between traditional communities and the ‘community of interest’ (as so described). Therefore a site concept built on the presuppositions of the later would not be expected to complement this practice. In particular such campaigns usually require longer gestation periods; more shared experience, and closer bonds as a threshold compared to many online interest-groups. Again, theory gets done where you least expect it; and while we were seeking to newly define our object, pre-set parameters held sway.

For some e-democracy propositions (such as FaxYourMP.com or Political Compass) the goal of streamlining interaction online with the state political system is the way to go. (This is a classic example of ‘National Politics’ ). But we had extended this same approach to an area of very local campaigning that does not conform to the usual definitions of political action or benefit from the same optimizing logic. Of course there have also been other successful online ‘campaigns’ as well, such as the celebrated case of Charlene Blake and Chrysler.⁵ But this was a patently a campaign that does work via a one-dimensional ‘community of interest’ (Chrysler owners with defective brakes) and being distributed across the country was key to creating the kind of aggregated power that here effected change (an example of a ‘National Campaign’ rather than a grass roots one).

Social software may be the best existing technology for building active online communities. Instant messaging, photo-sharing, and forums bring the pulse of sociality especially when introduced to a static or editorial-based website. And the movement has helped engender a “resurgence” in this area of technology (Boyd, 2005:1). But as we belatedly realized, the early iCan concept was trying to work in the opposite direction—not adding an element of ‘social life’ to an online community but extracting a practice that normally grew in embedded contexts and trying to grow it online instead; or transplant existing campaigns there. For grass roots campaigning, this would represent not an intensification of social activity but a diminishment of it.

Once you realize this, it makes the very idea of iCan as a one-stop campaigning hub seem a kind of category error (or misuse of the technology). The realization also begs us to re-consider the idea of tools to support group interaction. To fully recover the real here we have to ask not only what ‘supports’ an activity; but what supports it most successfully. For grass roots campaigning, we must come to the conclusion that it’s not any software that best supports it; but rather embodied human practices that don’t need to involve it – weekly committee meetings, planning brainstorms, vigils. And they support it best in two senses: practically; in achieving campaign goals – they are the most direct and unmediated ways of deciding on issues and making decisions, and morally; they are the kind of practices which consistently generate ‘group solidarity’.

This is crucial because the main way campaigns fail is by petering out before reaching goals – owing to members losing motivation. So the most important sense in which you can ‘support’ a campaign is by sustaining it. These practices fulfill this: meetings, brainstorms, vigils – being together, thinking together, being resolved together. The power of ‘vivid presence’ and acting in harmony appear the best means to preserve the “communalized empathy” upon which campaigns rest and through which the reciprocal will to continue are reinforced. As much as we love online tools we may have to admit forms of being-together are more ‘optimal’ for this task. As Maffesoli continually argues against his rationalist colleagues, much of social existence can not be explained by instrumental rationality. (1996, 21). Despite engaging in seemingly goal-oriented, purposeful action, the people involved in grass roots campaigning need to rely on other bases to maintain the effort (the kind of bases only an awkward social scientist might point out when faced with an innovative new technology concept).

It is probable that agrass roots campaign may be an intensely local object that can only have limited parts of it mediated remotely. In this, according to Maffesoli it would simply be partaking in “the spirit of the times” whereby “it is the ‘local’, the territorial and proxemic that determines the life of our societies” (Maffesoli, 1996, 57). Viewed this way you could say the industry zeitgeist of social software had fallen prey to a far wider one.

Why is this an issue for praxis? Because zeitgeist gets in its way; becomes an obstacle in the necessary dialectic between theory and data and our attempts to resolve their encounter into an outcome we can apply in practice.

Zeitgeist often has more charisma (in the Weberian sense of authority derived from a non-rational basis) than either theory or data; and therefore has more power to influence. On this project we were all swept along by the social software zeitgeist for a time. We all believed that drawing from it we had invented the ultimate linear, rational, solution “for all your campaigning needs” (whoever you were). The iCan project leader offered a further explanation for the hub concept “We got a bit too fixated on that from a research point of view, and even design point of view, probably because it was the most innovative part of the proposition” (Vogel, 2005). The desire to be innovative within one’s community of practice is a strong motivation whatever your community, and its significant to note how this can lead one away from the perspective of the ‘end user’. This project also reveals how on top of customary habits and ways of doing things every such community is swept by ongoing revolutions in practice that may carry equal weight.

All until the shock of the prototype testing results brought us out of the social software zeitgeist and back into alignment with our users – the local campaigners and would-be campaigners already immersed in their networks of sociality. They did not want iCan to run their campaigns; just contribute to them.

Sometimes research works; it really does restore a sense of the real. You can’t put too much importance on being empirical or theoretical; and for this project you can’t overemphasize the importance of two stages of work. Achieving knowledge on this project was cyclical. But the latter stage of the project devoted to ‘practice’ – using prototype screens almost as a projective technique – proved more fundamental for opening up and developing our ideas about grass roots campaigning than the ethnographic research phase would have on it own. It was also through responding to this crisis and drawing on Maffesoli; that we were able to ‘do theory’ on this grass roots phenomenon rather than simply ‘using’ it.

Therefore, I want to suggest polemically and certainly seemingly self-servingly, that commercial ethnographers can achieve a profound knowledge of social phenomena while pursuing their commissioned work. And furthermore, that in many ways they are in an equally good position to those in academia to do this. Structurally, Bourdieu (1988) has shown how academic career trajectories are advanced through point scoring by critiquing the texts of the previous generation of luminaries. While this endows them with many ‘foreshadowed problems’ (pace Malinowski) it also means that in many ways an academic career is oriented practically toward the past – possibly drawing on present research just enough to complete the critique of the elders.

Now in client work, one of the drawbacks has always been that we are hardly free to pursue our own research agendas (which of course creates difficulties in amassing cumulative knowledge). But it also means we are often guided (more like thrusted) by our clients into hot spots of emerging phenomena – especially as concerns the socio-technical nexus. In blundering into a fresh area where we, or maybe no one has previous expertise; but by being empirically led as well as theoretically informed, we can break new ground (even without research grants). As I believe we did by extending Maffesoli’s theory to grass roots campaigning.

Having a wealth of past references ready-to-hand is not enough alone to guarantee you are in a position to grasp social reality. One can apply in-depth theory at a latter stage when it can still shape the outcome. So I want to suggest that Malinowski’s quote can be read both ways: not only – contra applied or commercial ethnography – that we may not be in the position to take as many theories or ‘foreshadowed problems’ into the field. But also – contra academia – that by having more theories (and being more professionally invested in them) academics may be more likely to hold on to them – and not refine them in light of empirical evidence. Having too few or too many pre-conceived ideas can spoil the account – and thereby omit the unexpected but essential. Sometimes it may be best to observe naively, or at least uncommittedly, as long as you don’t stay naïve for too long. As much of the SST (Sociology of Science and Technology) work has shown, we are not all as heroic as Malinowski – professional thinkers often stick by their ‘pre-conceived ideas’ and don’t much enjoy seeing them falsified. (Latour, 1988).

To combat this I certainly am not advocating naïve empiricism; or letting the ‘facts’ speak for themselves. One could never interpret this paper as downplaying the significance of theory – Maffesoli is after all the deus ex machina of this story. My point is simply that in Malinowski’s formula: ‘moulding theories according to the facts’ vs. ‘seeing facts in their bearing upon theory’, this must be a balanced equation. And on balance I suggest people on projects usually major in the former and minor in the later; while for academics the relationship often runs in reverse. This gives both camps an equal chance at getting at the ‘truth’ of phenomena. But, I believe, gives project people an edge in effecting praxis.

Finally, in interpreting this paper, I want to offer a warning and an encouragement. In this discussion of an early project concept that scaled back on its plans to facilitate grass roots campaigning through a website, I am not trying to re-circulate any simple distinctions about the value of the ‘real’ vs. the ‘online’ world. As devices and systems become more ubiquitous and more usable these worlds are certainly becoming more continuous. Instead my message is that we must always remember the importance of context and that adoption and adaptations only ever occur within contexts; and will do so at variable paces and degrees of success for different human practices – with no inevitability that all practices will get there in the end. We do ourselves (and our clients) a disservice to overestimate the rapidity or desirability of all such change, because real innovation in technology design will only take place by delineating, as a baseline, exactly what people feel does gets lost in the transformation. If anyone can and should do this, it is we ethnographers. There is no other professional group who can both look so deeply into (and out from) a user’s internal (emic) perspective while remaining resistant enough to the lure of technological determinism to say the content of these perspectives still matters. Therefore I see our prime role as double; as defenders of the real and the best chroniclers of context.

I guess my only enemy here is the zeitgeist; because I believe swallowing a zeitgeist leads to hubris and over-extension of the preferred means at hand; while sustained theoretical reflection leads to humility and more appropriate praxis. The warning is serious; there are zeitgeist everywhere (industry and theoretical ones too) that condition and direct human action to such an extent that we often do not know we are making their choices. And there is something like the whole bias in our culture towards two magic words called ‘new technology’ that even we as critical ethnographers don’t always manage to escape.

So while not being naïve either about any transcendental value in theory or data; I think we should everywhere be on guard against the unthought assumptions of the zeitgeist – in whatever guise it may take – including our own professional hubris.

Stokes Jones is Director of Lodestar, a company he founded in 2003 to help businesses identify and adopt to social and cultural changes shaping customers in particular markets. In three years its clients have included; the BBC, Halifax/Bank of Scotland, Procter & Gamble, Nokia, and three mobile network operators.

Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference Proceedings 2005,pp. 31–52. © American Anthropological Association, some rights reserved.