“Surprising” would be a good to word to describe my Media Ethnography fieldwork. “Untimely” and “lucky” also could describe the whole experience just as well though. And after it was all done I look back on it as a positive experience. The untimely part of the experience is the date in which I decided to do the assignment. I left it up until last Thursday to do, but it was raining and I didn’t think many people would be too willing to participate. So after returning from my family’s “Early Thanksgiving” I decided to leave the project to do Monday the night before to add a little excitement and pressure to the situation. However all it did was force me do the one thing I tried to avoid on Thursday, going out to Baltimore in the rain.
So I got my Google Maps directions to the Inner Harbor and started driving. Within fifteen minutes I was lost but fortunately, unbeknownst to me, I had my friend’s GPS. I pulled over in a shopping mart parking lot to enter the address into Magellan and see there is a cop car parked in the lot. My first thought is a policeman is probably more than willing to help a student out right now since he seems to have some sort of down time where he is doing nothing particularly important. After turning me down by telling me “I don’t give out any personal information” he then went onto lecture me for five minutes about me giving out my own information. Only accomplishing two goals of wasting my precious time and causing me to get drenched by standing out the rain listening to his lecture.
After the failure I got into the car and used the GPS to get to the Inner Harbor. Upon arrival I paid a great parking fee of $10 for the whole forty minutes I was there, which really boosted my spirits. From there I walked the streets for ten minutes getting turned down another three times. Then all of a sudden I turn a corner and run right into a mall entrance. I was saved and my luck had turned! It was dry and filled with people increasing my chances to get the project done greatly.
Sike. I walked the mall for 10 minutes going floor by floor and started to notice by the third floor there wasn’t that many people in there as I thought. Also proving that another three people didn’t want to help me out. My luck was down and so was the morale. That was until I went to the fourth floor and the only person in the food court was a pleasant girl who was more than willing to help me out and do the interview. She was very interested in the project and read through all the papers carefully. Her answers were very different from what I expected and pretty inspirational. After the recording she told me a story from her native country of Cameroon that was very amusing and wished me luck with rest of my night.
On my drive back to my apartment I reflected on the night and concluded a one thing overall. What I thought was going to be a drag and a brutally boring night actually turned out to be the opposite. It was a night of moments of failure, depression and frustration, but also good fortune, relief and surprise. I definitely see this as a different experience and look back on it as something positive.
