September 25, 2016
Associate Professor of Anthropology Ilana Gershon is interested in how new media affect highly charged social tasks. She knows the exact moment she decided to study computer-mediated communication. It was in class; she was teaching an introduction to linguistic anthropology, and she asked the students to write down what they thought constituted a bad breakup. She was expecting stories about infidelity, about DVDs that were never returned, or loud, dramatic arguments until 6 a.m. Instead, everyone answered “breaking up on Facebook” or “breaking up by text.” She realized she had a new research project.
Anthropologists often are adept at uncovering cultural assumptions by examining the frictions that emerge when designed objects, laws, or institutional forms travel into new cultural contexts. Instead of using cultural difference to produce the friction, however, she turned to media that were designed to connect people and investigated the quandaries people face when trying to disconnect – the opposite of what these technologies were meant to help people do. The book that resulted, The Breakup 2.0, received the kind of press attention that nothing had prepared her for. She realized that studying new media, combined with the right topic, might provide her with a chance to reach a wider audience than her previous research had.
Currently, she is researching how new media affect hiring in the contemporary US workplace. Many students today believe that they need to treat themselves as though they are a business with a brand, and being hired is entering into a business-to-business contract. People worry about their Facebook profiles harming their chances to get a job, or are puzzled over what good a LinkedIn profile is anyway. She decided to investigate how one can use the tools of linguistic anthropology to sort through the advice that all job-seekers are now inundated with. She spent 2013-2014 traveling throughout the San Francisco Bay Area doing fieldwork, attending free workshops on how to search for a job, and interviewing everyone involved in the hiring process. This research is the basis of her book coming out with University of Chicago Press in March 2017: Down and Out in the New Economy: How People Find (or Don’t Find) Work Today. She worked on this project as a fellow at Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (2013-2014) and a fellow at Notre Dame's Institute for Advanced Study (2015-2016).
For more information, visit Ilana's webpage:
http://www.indiana.edu/~anthro/people/faculty/igershon.shtml