Experiencing the stories

Another information scholar asked me recently about the place of “inquiry” in my current research. This is a reference to research on how people search for information. Often, this research suggests, individuals begin with a need or a problem, and then engage in “information behaviors” to find information that will help. Think of a college student doing a research project. I think inquiry has very little to do with my current research, as individuals do not come to Carapace to fill an information need. They “seek” community and entertainment. I do think people learn things at Carapace; the most important thing, perhaps, being that they are not alone in their life’s struggles.

All this is to say that Roy’s beautiful description of how he experiences Carapace illustrates how absurd trying to apply an information seeking lense to this study truly is:

You know,

and here’s going to be my confession time,

is that

I often

let the stories wash over me,

so I experience them in the moment,

and then,

I have a friend who used to come with me to the story-

but she’s in Florida now,

so she’ll call me up,

and she’ll say, well what happened at Carapace tonight?

I say,

I can’t tell ya.

I don’t remember a thing.

If we look at the stories as information things, objects like packages that can be handed off from one person to another, that information doesn’t usually stick with Roy. He doesn’t go home with the package. Perhaps he has learned nothing after an evening at Carapace (which would be okay, since he didn’t come to do research). I suspect that the stories made some impression on him though, and this impression sticks with him. However, this also is irrelevant. The stories were meaningful to Roy in the moment. Hearing the stories was an experience.

I blame the poor fit of the information seeking lense on an over-reliance on the metaphor of information as an object that exists outside the body. The feeling of stories washing over you is an embodied experience. I’ve been finding it hard to conceptualize what embodied information actually “looks” like. McLuhan’s medium theory asserts that media are extensions of the body. Seeing the spoken (or written, or digital, etc.) word as part of the body, maybe a tool that we understand as part of the body, is making more and more sense to me. Also drawing on Ong’s assertion that talking to someone does something to them, I could see speaking as using words to poke someone, give them a hug, or any number of other physical acts. Both bodies are important, and each body changes the way the other body feels.