Tag Archives: Phenomenology

Liked on YouTube! The “Door” Study

The “Door” Study
This video shows footage from a 1998 study by Daniel Simons and Daniel Levin in which a participant fails to notice when the person he is talking to is replaced by someone else. The study was among the first to demonstrate that the phenomenon of “change blindness” can occur outside the laboratory. This was the first of many studies by Simons, Levin, and colleagues to explore how change blindness can occur in the real world.
via YouTube

This video featured on the Mooc I’m following. Change blindness reveals how little of the whole picture it is possible to see, whilst we remain sure in our certainty. Is ethnography a useful methodology for studying communities and might it help avoid single-perspective blindness? Perhaps ethnography helps us to perceive where the subject’s blindnesses lie? How can we reveal this in the knowledge of our own imperfect vision? Ha ha, I’m getting sucked down a vortex!

Mise en abîme

The Conscious Mind edX Mooc

I have enrolled on the edX Mooc The Conscious Mind: A Philosophical Road Trip. It is all about phenomenology so I think it will be interesting to make an ethnographic study of students studying this subject. In an introductory video the course leader explores active observation as a means of getting at a multiplicity of viewpoints, or accessing alternative viewpoints, in order to see and understand something more clearly or to admit of other ways of perceiving. This detailed method of looking at the world seems to fit well with the ethnographer’s goal of understanding what lies behind an entity’s representation or manifestation as if in ‘first person view’.