Online exploration: Be interested in everything
In this blog series I unpack an approach to digital methodologies using How to be an Explorer of the World by Keri Smith as my map.
When you are an online explorer your mission is to document and observe the online world as if you have never seen it before. Collecting things you have found on your travels around the network is a good place to start.
Look for things you usually would not pay attention to. Document them. As your collection grows, look for patterns in your objects and between them. Remember that the things which might initially appear meaningless might house clues to a whole new world. Pick something and look only for it.
You will be surprised what you find.
This activity offline might look like a walk in the forest. Now forests are not likely to have pictures in them so deliberately deciding to look for pictures might be a challenge. But challenges are what this method is about.
Today I decided to take a walk and look for pictures in the forest. To my surprise I found this:
From this small amount of data many questions emerge about social practices in my local forest. Why are they there? Is there a local campaign I am unaware of? Is this one family participating in an act of kindness while social distancing during the pandemic? A single artist? How has public art developed during social distancing?
Now lets take this little bit of research online. I searched for similar artworks on Instagram and found there are 26,314 posts under #paintedstonesofinstagram. Many Instagram posts explain their purpose in text and by reading that text I can begin to ascertain what’s going on in that hashtag and see if there are any answers to my questions.
By searching the location I found the stones, I happened across a picture from 22 hours ago of a young girl holding a basket of stones ready to hide around the forest. The purpose of them is a scavenger hunt for children walking in the forest for a preschool activity.
Now I am beginning to have questions about the presence of children online and how easily I found an image of a local girl when I was looking for something else. If it was a kindergarten activity, is it ok for the kindergarten to put images of children online where a stranger like myself can find it? Does that matter? Is the digital world just like going for a walk in the forest where I might also stumble across children?
One small activity has given me a whole bunch of digital questions I can spend some time online answering or throwing up larger questions. This research does not need to be for work, it can be for pleasure (or remote schooling during a pandemic!).
You could do a similar study 100% online. Maybe you could collect things which look weird, circular things, 100 gifs in your timeline, words in your Facebook timeline, advertisements on YouTube. Maybe while you are looking for something else, clues to your BIG QUESTIONS might pop up.
While this type of research might not solve the problems of the online world, it definitely celebrates the fun things and I will now file this tiny study away (we all know what happens to files) and one day it might elucidate something completely different.
The point is to approach digital research as an explorer or adventurer. Consider everything to be interesting.
What explorations have you done online?
