From time to time, I like to share technology-related observations about things that  happen in my classes.  This weekend, as I was grading papers, I was fascinated by a new trend that I’ve observed: interview participants using digital media in various ways while being interviewed.

I am currently teaching my “Cross-Cultural Issues in ESL” course, which is one of the required courses for our Master’s degree in Applied Linguistics.  I teach it every Spring semester.  For one of the course requirements, I’ve developed a multi-phase experiential project that introduces students to different aspects of the ethnographic process.  Each student selects a “New Cultural Experience” (NCE) that they attend as a participant-observer, and then write about the cultural practices they observed.  This is followed by an interview with a member of that particular community.  These interviews enable students to triangulate their outsider (etic) observations with an insider (emic) perspective, in order to better understand some of the tacit cultural meanings.  I ask my students to transcribe those interviews and submit their transcripts to me to receive a grade for this interview assignment.  Interestingly, this year’s interview transcripts had multiple instances of references to various digital tools.

For instance, one student who attended a local Thai temple for his NCE, was discussing representations of the Buddha with his interviewee (another university student who is a member of the Thai temple community), and in the middle of the interview his interviewee pulled out his phone to show the student some other images of the Buddha.   Similarly, a different student who attended our university’s Bhangra Team tryouts for her NCE, interviewed a member of the team whose family came from India.  Their interview extended to topics well beyond Bhangra to more personal topics, and at one point in the interview, as he was discussing his travels to India with his family, her interviewee showed her (again, on his phone) an image of the city where his father was born.  (In both cases, neither of my students remarked at all on the images they had been shown by their interlocutor and the conversation just continued on, which tells me that this is a completely normal, taken-for-granted, interactional practice that has been seamlessly integrated into many forms of talk.)  This same interviewee went on to describe how one of the famous temples in India he has visited is known for feeding 100,000 people a day, adding “there’s videos on YouTube about it.”  In this instance, the interviewee’s reference to YouTube serves as a form of evidence and bolsters his claim about a practice that is geographically removed from the current interaction.

I thought to myself: “Ok, these are university students in their 20s who interviewing other so-called ‘millenials.’  It’s really not that surprising that they variously integrate digital technologies into all of their activities – including while they are being interviewed.”  But then I found a few additional intriguing examples.

One of my students selected greyhound racing as her NCE.  After attending the dog races for an afternoon, this student returned to the site to interview the manager of the track.  As their conversation turned to the more sensitive topic of animal welfare, her interviewee (a man in his 40s or 50s) spoke emphatically about how the employees of the track are all dog lovers, telling her that she can even “go on Facebook and look” at all of the posted photos of track employees with dogs .  So here is another instance of an image, or video, posted on social media serving an evidential function.  Both of these examples also reveal something about our contemporary “semiotic ideologies”: that is, if we can point to a YouTube video, or a Facebook photo, about some phenomenon… then it must be true/real.  It seems that these days, we are treating visual images as more trustworthy than language, without very much acknowledgement of the fact that visuals (just like language) are subject to multiple interpretations – as well as to manipulation.

The final example is from an interview where neither participant is a ‘millenial’: in fact, both interviewer and interviewee are retired.  This particular student decided to attend a meeting of the Society of Friends (aka “Quakers”) for his NCE.  As my student asked his interviewee about the historical origins of this community,  his interviewee impressed me with his vast knowledge of early American history.  He supplied numerous details about important 17^th century figures and events that were relevant to the discussion.  But when he started to speak about contemporary demographics – that is, the distribution of the Quaker population around the world – he provided a few percentages, ending his response with “It’s available if you Google it.”  And I totally understand this: we tend to treat historical facts as static or “fixed,” whereas current information is less stable, which encourages us to rely less on memorizing such information, knowing that the most current data will surely be available online somewhere.

Although they were completed as part of a class assignment, these transcripts actually shed light on much wider social practices, and specifically, on some of the many ways in which we interweave the “digital” into our “offline” interactions.  These  include using our phones to show images which would take much longer to describe using words; using references to images or videos on social media as forms of “evidence” for the existence of some given phenomenon that is remote from our immediate experience; and relying on online sources for current information rather than committing it to memory.