Field Methods: How I'll find out more

With what I have already tapped into in this project, I've been able to form a great foundation for what I hope to be a great finished product. To tie all of this together, these are the bits from previous posts that are especially significant to my "big questions".

Initial purpose:
"In an online world where anonymity has produced hate, discourse, and things like Anonymous, it will be necessary to keep within our sight something that seems to have transcended the anomie, disconnection, and insignificance that threaten our increasingly technological existence."

Connecting to other pieces of the project:
"So maybe the historical parts of this project will tell how we got to be so disconnected, which will definitely show some mind-blowing stuff. I'm liking how PostSecret turns that around and will show how we're reconnecting with what we have now. The need to reconnect is a key point though."

"Considering this, can we still treat PS as a bright-sided contrast to /b/ over the span of our presentation? Definitely. In the broader context of anonymity and identity, it pulls us away from the emerging mad/smart/bot mobs and back to the "Great American Poets" part where ideas, expression, art, and truth are widely distributed with no biases toward their inceptors. And for the inceptors and those affected by them, a "sense of place" is recreated."

Assumptions/observations to explore:
"In a way, it is reinjecting raw humanity into these otherwise post-human interactions. Yet at the same time, it is still more of a mirror than a window. It connects with disconnection; anonymity still plays a huge role. In doing so, it more deeply connects people with themselves or parts of themselves that were previously unknown."

"That may be why many people experience emotional distress in recognizing such a thing on PostSecret: that recognition is a violence to the part of the self that does not want that secret to be true, or has been living as if it is not true."

"Here is the connection: as Thompson has outlined the effects of ambient intimacy to conclude that we are more self-aware, I believe I have found an answer to one of my initial questions.

Q: What are people willing to reveal about themselves behind a cloak of anonymity?
A: All of the things they have discovered about themselves that would have negative consequences within their social network."

"So maybe through this continual shock [of self-awareness] that Wesch has noticed, PS functions as a place to pause and deposit the more difficult things."

"It really isn't strangers that PS, Found, and Mortified users are connecting with; it's content. They are connecting to the idea of a person through a picture, a postcard, a story. This might put a double-mediated spin on these communications."

The big questions:

What are people willing to reveal about themselves behind a cloak of anonymity?

How, then, might we determine the authenticity of interactions if there are things we might not know about ourselves?

Are we so drowned in self-presentation that we consider our overall reputation more valuable that honesty with a friend?

How I'll go about it:
Having compiled these pieces of my research thus far, it is clear that the answers I'm looking for are largely subjective. I will need to look at personal reactions and experiences, which will have to be done through interviews in any way possible. Hopefully, one of these interviews will be with Frank Warren or the people behind Found Magazine and Mortified. Much can also be gathered through checking these sites regularly.

As for more formal research, there is a lot to find in the area of social psychology and the effects of new media. I will continue traditional research in these areas to enhance my interviews and observations with relevant interpretation. The literature review (seen below) is only the start of what must be applicable my findings.

Within the interviews, ethical issues of privacy, disclosure, and copyright will have to be carefully considered. As many of the secrets on PostSecret are submitted anonymously for very obvious reasons, if I want to interview any of the postcard-senders, it may have to be done in a way that is sensitive to how those people wish to protect their identities.

In describing my so-called field methods, it's difficult to not connect to certain other pieces of this overall project. I see how it ties into history, microcelebrity, a crisis of significance, memes, and identity. That's what makes this an ideal case study: elements of nearly all of our subcatagories are evident here. I'm hoping to effectively communicate this in video/text/voice form as clearly as I can imagine it.

And I'm always up for suggestions.
-Katie