Written Reminiscences and Media Ethnography. Television Creating Worldview

in Loshini Naidoo (ed.) An Ethnography of Global Landscapes and Corridors, InTech ISBN: 978-953-51-0254-0, pp. 233-252. http://www.intechopen.com/books/an-ethnography-of-global-landscapes-and-corridors/written-reminiscences-and-media-ethnography-television-creating-worldview

Collecting written reminiscences, ethnographic writing, has a long tradition in Finnish history and folklore studies, and methodologically they have been categorized as oral history research data. In my study on the history of Finnish television I used two collections of written reminiscences about television in Finnish everyday life. One of the objects of the project was to study the impact of television on the worldviews of Finns between the mid-1950s and early 21st century.

In my article I discuss the cons and pros of this kind of research data in ethnographic research, more precisely in media ethnography. Written oral history data is rarely used in media ethnographic studies. Belonging to the tradition of cultural studies, media ethnography highlights the importance of social and cultural context. In my study, the importance of context is widened to the history of media experiencing. The framing of television viewing is crucial in the study. Besides the television experiences of individuals, it also relates to the institutional, political and economic history of Finnish television.

However, the experiences, in their own words, of ordinary Finns lead the narrative. With the help of narrative texts, the researcher is able to get into the narrator’s worldview and mentality. Narrative folklore, oral history, memoirs, life histories, legends, humorous anecdotes and gossip can be put in a dialectic relationship with literature, mass communication and official historical writings.

One of the contextual macro narratives of the post-Second World War Europe are the different modernization processes. Television as a technological and institutional medium operates within the sphere of these processes of society and culture. In Finland, the modernization was extremely rapid, and spreading of television at the same time has a major impact in the making sense of the world.

The article introduces the possibilities of written reminiscences as an ethnographic research data. As an example how this kind of oral history data can serve media ethnography, the article depicts how ordinary Finns experiences the changing of their world views caused by television. The sources for the article come from the data collections mentioned.