WEEK 4: Choose your Adventure…A Precursor to the Internet Rabbit Hole?

Consider the following.  An innocuous search for the meaning of an academic term, for example, “thin description,” produces a hyperlink to a related term, “thick description,” which initiates the viewing of a YouTube video on the same subject https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NLVucF9kBM, when, unexpectedly, a video in the periphery about a woman who gave birth to 44 children materializes and must be examined. Three hours later, the researcher realizes that they have surveyed three episodes of Pop the Balloon, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KluNOvWjkWY&list=PL2IJe17TPnDyso-Yp5nP4G774XbQB-QEg&index=3  a brutal and unabashedly vacuous reality game show in which red balloons act as metaphors for a person’s relational viability.

Three precious hours wasted? Perhaps. Conversely, viewing the show may generatively lead to the formulation of a thesis about men and women’s acts of gender performativity in an artificially produced environment or, in conjunction with a pseudo-anthropological video about a multipara with 44 children https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJCvudu4-KA , may lead to an examination of the correlation between pervasive stereotypes of Black people and their portrayal in popular social media formats. Thin or thick description may then be reverted to after the researcher determined which line of inquiry to follow.  

Excursions into such rabbit holes made me think about multimodality, distant reading, thin description and the strange places where a journey of any kind may end because of turns and patterns identified, as is the case in word watching. Mueller (2017) notes that the “word watcher seeks to make explicit the tacit and unexplored subtleties…” and adds “perspective that hopes to unstick, ease and differentiate” (p. 74). Ultimately, the decision to click a link is where the rabbit hole begins and, likewise, determines the end point, much like the Choose Your Adventure series. The ultimate outcome is determined by the path that is selected by the reader.

 Also associated with rabbit holes is the issue of time, which is perceived only after the reader has emerged from the hole. Why is this the case? One’s awareness of time is certainly heightened when engaged in the uninterrupted reading of a lengthy online text. Maybe the diversion of variety in rabbit holes creates a lightness of being much like a cloud [of words] allows for lightness by the falling away of extraneous text, resulting in a “roiling openness, an ongoing quality, incomplete and vaporous” (Mueller, 2017 p.78). Is Mueller waxing poetic here while simultaneously drawing attention to the ethereal nature of the creation of new thought? Socrates would be proud.

What is clear is that the idea of multimodality is not just limited to texts. We are living in a multimodal world, of which distant readings and thin descriptions are integral parts. An interaction with Google maps precedes a drive to a business establishment, but also leads to recommendations about a nearby coffee shop. Sitting in the coffee shop results in a conversation with a stranger in which the rhetoric of the current political landscape is considered. Post discussion, ideas which were expressed orally are investigated further digitally at a later time. Thus, it continues, ad infinitum, the constant processing of information and a continual shift between modalities which inform our epistemological conclusions.

Post script confessions https://www.youtube.com/shorts/6hWo2lT1zI4 :  Voyant Tools https://voyant-tools.org/ - a web -based analysis tool for digital texts referred to in one of the supplementary readings - was my rabbit hole du jour. This entry was revised multiple times to produce a higher reading index (see added words in bold) moving it from 12 to 15 (see chart below). It's an example of the active use of thin description technology to produce a desired result.