For my fieldnotes practice, I decided to interview my younger sister over Google Duo while she made a smoothie, a not infrequent activity in our family home. Keeping in mind Emerson’s suggestions and employing Sunstein and Chiseri-Strater’s “double-entry notes,” I additionally approached the fieldnotes assignment with a few key questions: how would this familiar family activity change once digitally mediated, how would the knowledge that she was being observed affect her actions, and how would the double-entry style assist with my fieldnotes? This post begins by showing my initial jottings in the two column format, then moves into my more in-depth write-up, and finally raises, resolves, and raises again some questions in a summative reflection.

Field jottings, as initially written:

Left-hand side (physical observations):

  • playing with hair
  • art and light in background, multicolored wall
  • keeps camera on her face as she moves
  • father as a voice in the background
  • moves camera to display the person speaking
  • backlit
  • moves out of space of camera
  • central space of the kitchen
  • vocally describes the activities that she is doing but keeps the camera in the same place
  • father becomes interviewer
  • starts holding items as if presenting
  • “should we put oat milk in the smoothie?”
  • “then I go to the drawer and grab a spoon”
  • two large windows
  • “bout [sic] a cup maybe less”
  • imitates food show host
  • flips hair
  • “sometimes when blending you’ll have to shake it up a bit”
  • does not show the actual blending
  • continues talking while off-screen
  • “I’d like it a touch thinner so I’ll add milk”
  • she begins putting away the milk and the fruit and the yogurt
  • left me on the table because her hands were full
  • talks despite blender going
  • doesn’t know where my video is
  • long silence as she washes things in the dishes
  • she matches the smoothie’s color to the straw and the ring
  • mixes smoothie with straw
  • once every two weeks
  • coves camera when drinking

Right-hand side (personal reactions)

  • distinct spaces in the house
  • expands space by moving it to father
  • space of room is large than the space of the camera, made by light, sound, and disappearance of actors
  • she treats me like I am not there, leaving me on the table
  • she puts the actions in the context of her and her desires and her routine and her logic
  • her familiarity with me might lead to this comfort
  • she is not trying to control my attention and assumes my familiarity with the space

Fieldnotes, rewritten:

When she answers the call, Frances is facing the selfie camera on her phone. I appear as a small video in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen, my own face darkened by the varied light of my apartment bedroom. I lay my phone against the wall and sit cross-legged on the bed, holding my notes in my lap. Meanwhile, she keeps the camera tight around her face, and behind her I can the multi-colored walls of a bedroom—orange over her right shoulder and purple over her left—each adorned with canvas paintings, pixelated but vibrant, that hang from the middle of the wall to its highest height. As she moves, the window behind her on the purple wall, affixed with a blue cloth covering, moves into and out of view, shifting the light around her.

Frances is a young white woman, no older than 20 but a high school senior at the youngest. She has long dirty blonde hair that falls down beneath her elbows, and her eyes are encircled by a round pair of black glasses. She mumbles through our pleasantries, slurring words in an inattentive confusion and playing with her hair, until I ask her if she could instruct me on doing an everyday activity. She pauses, then her eyes go wide, “Well now I have to think of something.” She overplays her panic until I suggest making a smoothie, at which point her eyes light up. As she walks out of her room, more paintings are revealed behind her—watery blue skies and colorful eyeballs peer around the room. She keeps the camera close to her face as she walks, looking past it on her way to the kitchen, down a long hallway of yellow walls and fluorescent overhead lights. It’s hard to get a grasp on where she is, or even the kind of space she’s in, though it’s clearly a family home. Suddenly the narrow hall opens up to a vaulted green ceiling and she announces my digital presence, “I’m talking to Peter.” I hear a muffled response somewhere in this vast room. The ceiling lowers again, back to a yellow, now spotted with more lights, and she enters the kitchen. For the duration of this walk, she looks ahead at the destination, and she doesn’t address me so much as she addresses the room, alternating between talking to herself and biting her lip.

A man’s voice echoes from off camera and greets me. At first I find myself propped up on some object, facing a black granite countertop mounted over some brown drawers and beneath a set of glass cabinets. The man’s voice gets closer, and I find myself turned inwards towards what appears to be a kitchen island, my vision obscured by a variety of little bowls and papers, but mostly by the light coming in from two large windows that overwhelm the camera’s sensors. Frances doesn’t seem to care about how much I can see, and she disappears without a word after setting me down. I then shift ever so slightly, likely by Frances, in order to bring the man into view. He makes a salad in front of me and asks me about my day and a book that’s he’s been reading by David Mitchell. He then talks about poetry. He seems to enjoy literature. He sits down at the island but out of the camera’s view as he eats his salad. I ask about Frances, and she reappears, stating, “Well I didn’t know if I was starting yet.” She disappears again, and ingredients begin to pile up on the island. First, a gallon of milk, then a cup of yogurt, and then a bag of frozen fruit. She contemplates getting a banana, but they’re apparently too old. As she does all of this, she talks to me as if she were talking to herself. The man still eats his salad.

It’s now clear that the camera is not being moved to follow her actions or the person speaking; instead, I have been lain down in a particular place where I shall make my visual home. From here, though, the space of the room extends beyond the camera. When she gathers ingredients, the speed with which she moves and the various diegetic sounds give me a sense of the space beyond my view. The fridge must lie just to the left, past where the man eats his salad, and the sink and blender must lie just to the right, next to the cabinets I saw initially. The man’s continued speech gives the space beyond the lens more life, and now he imitates an interviewer, asking Frances about the ingredients she’s grabbing. When she asks him why, he says, “Isn’t that what Peter’s supposed to be doing?” His questions, the sounds of the space, the brief movement of the camera in the beginning, her entrances and exists, and the position of windows demarcated by the influx of light all help to build a scene that reaches past what is available to my eyes. It also appears that—being place on an island—I have been given a central view of the space, the sun with planetary orbit of people, ingredients, and sounds.

She then begins holding the ingredients in front of the camera as if displaying them for a game show, stating, “This is the milk, this is the yogurt…” Puzzled, she returns to the fridge and emerges with oat milk: “Should we put oat milk in the smoothie?” Despite not being actively involved in the production or consumption of the smoothie, she fields my advice, using “we” to include me, and then lists the feelings each family member has about the oat milk as well as how it compares to other non-dairy milk. From this point forward, she becomes very clear about two things: her actions and her reasoning. Rather than simply disappear off camera, she explicitly states what she is doing: “…then I go to the drawer and grab a spoon.” Further, she contextualizes these decisions, such as why she doesn’t include banana or oat milk, creating the environment of characters, time, and desires that influence her decisions. (Family doesn’t like oat milk, so she doesn’t trust it; the bananas have been out for too long; she wants to keep the smoothie simple.) On camera, she combines the milk, yogurt, and fruit, then moves to blend. While she blends I cannot see her and cannot hear her, but she is still talking. At this point it becomes clear that she is not aware of how she is mediated to me—I cannot see some of her actions because my face is covering parts of the screen, I cannot see everything because of the lighting, and I cannot hear everything because of other sounds. Partially out of a lack of care, but also partially because she is unaware, there is a disconnect between what she wants to present and what I can see and hear.

She continues to explain her logic, including why she adds more milk and re-blends as well as why she puts items away in the fridge in the order that she does based on spatial logic. However, she rarely addresses me, and she maintains the affect of a food show host, having lost her mumble and slurring, enunciating clearly as she displays, instructs, and explains. It is as if I am not there but that an unknown, unseen audience is. She dwells in long silences as she washes the dishes, and then she picks me up and sits where the man once sat, showing me her smoothie. She explains that the straw color matches the smoothie color which matches the colored ring which fits on the blender cup (as it is a small handheld blender). Back to addressing me, her voice returns to a mumble, with longer pauses and more questions. She says she couldn’t show me the whole process because her hands were full, and then she briefly switches back into food show host mode as she explains that she can use the straw to mix the smoothie more.

Overall, I found her presentation fun, and while it as sometimes disorienting to be thrown into conversation with off-screen voices or placed in a space with limited visibility, the fact that the people and space were familiar to me counteracted any unpleasantness. I was rarely confused, and while her visible actions were not always clear, her explanation during and after the fact accounted for the anachronism of what I saw and knew, filling in visual gaps with audio.

Reflection:

I thought that this was an interesting assignment, and I found my sister’s interview an interesting encapsulation of the way she interacts with myself as well as digital technology. I think her food show host persona was less the result of the screen and more the result of her being asked to demonstrate something, and that she would have done the same regardless of the physical or virtual world. However, her casual demeanor was likely the result of my being her older brother, as she did not try to control the space in quite the same way that one might on an interview. Instead, she was aware of my knowledge of the space, and thus she haplessly left me in a dark little corner, as if I truly were just occupying another seat in the home. The gaze she gave me was an insider’s gaze, one which knew the space and which she didn’t care about giving the full view. Thus, I don’t think the digital medium really changed how she acted, but her familiarity with me changed how she used the digital medium. So I am left wondering: how does one’s position affect the way in which another person interacts with them digitally? From my own feelings and considerations, I know that I am more careful about my appearance and attention when speaking to a professor on Zoom than speaking to a friend. Finally, I thought the double-note style was interesting, but I find the listing of personal reactions to be less efficacious than the listing of theoretical implications. Were I in the field with a subject that I have hypotheses and theories about, I would use the right-hand column to make argumentative, not personal, notes.

Frances and her smoothie!