I had some fun reading!

The Bohnsack article was the first one I didn’t really enjoy. First of all, I’ve always had a problem with getting people together and making them talk and then observing them. How can we even say things are representative if we are creating the scene? Second, the author somehow managed to write a rather complicated article about focus groups and group discussion without dealing with the spiral of silence or the other psychological byproducts that follow the emergence of natural leaders and discussion monopolizers.
The Schmidt article was very informative, but it raised a few questions in my head, particularly the “coding” part (p. 256). The idea of having a “coding guide” (p. 256) strikes me as a very quantitative way of doing qualitative research, almost a Van Djik kind of deal. Why doesn’t she discuss methods that, in my humble opinion, are a lot more qualitative (Foucault’s cohesive elements or hardcore semiotics, for example)? In fact, the whole article struck me as kind of quantitative, almost as if the author had forgotten that a semi structured interview is far from a quantitative way of doing research.
I enjoyed the Reader article. The only thing that I missed, and it could be missing from the article due to the 5-thousand-word rule, was a discussion on how ethnic backgrounds, amongst other things, can affect “imagining communities” (p. 854). It seems to me that writing things according to what we think a community would like is not an easy process for a Nigerian journalist in Smithville, a Puerto Rican journalist in Little Rock or a Korean journalist in some small town in Idaho. How much can the interests of “minority groups” (p. 858) be taken care of when they have no representation in a newsroom?
Also, I felt like there was an underlying discourse about small newspapers, especially when quoting editors: small newspaper journalists are idiots… I guess the article, as with all qualitative research, was biased…ha!
I’ve met more than my share of people who suffer from cyberchondria (p. 523), but reading the word was completely new to me. The problem with the quality of the information that she brings up on page 526 was the first thing that came to mind when I began reading the article. Throughout the piece, the author mentions health websites, but aren’t people really getting most of their information from wikipedia, blogs and, as she mentioned, even e-mail and “unofficial” (p. 527) sites? How much of what’s going on can we call disinformation and “misinformation” (p. 527)?
So, besides the fact that the students interviewed were a bunch of narcissists and the Citymission kids were a bunch of uneducated fools who practice unprotected sex, what can we learn from her study? Here’s what I think: 1- health is too broad a topic and 2- if you bring lifestyle (diet, exercise, tattoos, etc.) into the game, everyone and their dog will eventually look for health information online. I was very happy that, after mentioning the health habitus time and again, she finally mentioned Bordieu.
Last but not least, the worst byproduct of all this is, in my humble opinion, expressed perfectly by Paul (p. 535 and… a bit of third person effect or projection?) and the fact that he considers himself a “health expert” even if he studies education. Would it be too much to say that the Internet helps breed these “experts” in a way no book ever could?
The Deuze article was funny. Reading how those “journalists” think of themselves and what they think of their work was a treat. When I read that guy calling it “investigative journalism” (p. 867) I laughed…hard (the same happened with the line “Our reader eats microwave food” on page 868). Why aren’t these folks getting Pulitzers on a regular basis?
A few more questions: I know how this type of journalism works in the US… why can’t we be a tad more like the Dutch? Is not killing a career the extent of ethical journalism? Haven’t “normal” journalists hurt journalism enough so that we are now all in that “low” bracket?
This article will surely be discussed in class. I can only say that, for those of you who say it was biased, you would’ve done the same damn thing if you had such quotable gems.