How to interview an Instagram account
I’ve been sending out a lot of direct messages on Instagram in the past few days: “Hi, my name is James Gallagher, and I’m a college student at UMBC. I’m doing a research project on the digital life of diecast toy collectors. Would you be willing to have a brief phone interview? Thank you for your time!”
But for all the times I’ve sent this message, I’ve gotten “yes” once, “no” a few times, and “Seen at 10:53 p.m.” all over the place. This slow start has gotten me thinking about interviews in virtual ethnography.
So, in light of our discussions of the interview process and my mixed results, I decided to write up a brief skill summary of the interview process. Specifically, I will focus on the challenges of conducting interviews in a digital landscape.
First, why do I need to do interviews at all? I have plenty of data about toy car collectors. I have blog posts, photos, follower counts, public captions and comments. Could I write an ethnography as an observer, as a “lurker,” without speaking one-on-one with my subjects? Yes, probably. But would it be as effective? To answer this question, I looked to the ethnographic work we’ve read so far.
Interviews are vitally important to Matthew Engelke’s work. Without much detail in the government archive and without an official written history, everything Engelke reports about the history of the Friday apostolics comes directly from interviews with elders. Likewise, he isn’t allowed to record or take notes at church services, so he supplements his experiences of the services by interviewing attendees. Simply put, his ethnography would not have been possible without the hours of interviews he completed over a span of years.
The same is true of David Boyer. He has plenty of observation and data on his side, but his key evidence comes from his interviews with the slotters, the online journalists, and the radio producers. Interviews allow Boyer to explain or to challenge what he sees on the surface.
So, again, do I need to do interviews? We were probably all expecting the same answer: yes. I don’t think it’s a futile question, though. Depending on my goals, I could easily write up an analysis of the collectors’ community without speaking to any of them. I could glean plenty of detail from what’s already available online, as most students do these days. It would probably be a pretty decent profile of a little-known fan group.
What I would lack, though, without interviews, is any sense of internal motivations or emotions. I’d have plenty of data and “hard” information, but nothing “soft.” As I’m learning more and more from our readings, ethnography lives in the sphere of the “soft.” What motivates these collectors? How does collecting make them feel? I might be able to find an answer in an Instagram caption, but it’s probably not entirely complete or authentic.
Virtual ethnography, then, presents an interesting paradox. My interview subjects are simultaneously easier to access and harder to reach. By this, I mean that it’s incredibly easy to find subjects in the first place. I can go on Instagram, and in 5 minutes, have a dozen people I’d like to interview. But it’s harder for me to have a real, high-quality interview. At best, we will probably talk over the phone or through Skype, which is better than email, but not as desirable as a face-to-face meeting. Thanks to the digital sphere in which I’m researching, I have a wider base of subjects who are actually harder to interview.
For virtual ethnography to function, then, interviews are still necessary. The best solution I can come up with is the Skype or phone interview I mentioned above. I imagine we’ll have a good talk, but I doubt it’ll be anything like Engelke’s conversation in the house the apostolics built for Jesus, or Boyer’s conversations with an editor after their daily meeting. As more and more ethnographic research happens through digital media, it will be interesting to see how researchers adapt to this shift in information quality.
But first, I have to get someone to talk to me.
