The attached article by ryansd2011

¶ … Tracy Bowen set out in 2003 to ask six artists how they were "exchanging and integrating manual and digital procedures as a way of producing images" (Bowen, 2003, p. 220) and their comfort levels with the evolving, then still somewhat new, digital platforms like Photoshop or Paint. Themes emerged from the responses Bowen (2003) discovered, of which she focused on the increased access to images provided by the Internet (p. 222), ease of manipulation and reproduction of images using digital programs (p. 223), and a "tug-of-war between the seductive authority of digital imaging programs and the web, and the artists' yearning for the physicality of the material art object and being immersed in its hand-made realisation" (p. 224). This was the theme Bowen explored by interviewing six artists aged 25-55, who "represent many other artists" (219) balancing work and creative time. She concluded that moving into the digital platform came with a loss of "autonomy" (Bowen, 2003, p. 227) from limitations inherent to the digital programs. Since programmers defined what choices digital artists could make, this limited creativity for some, particularly the older artists (Bowen, 2003, p. 227). What was independent work in plastic, 'real' material became collaborative with invisible Others setting the parameters in consumer software packages. This inquiry is interesting from a modern perspective now that we look back from nearly a decade, over which what Bowen (2003) describes as a "new dialectic" (p. 119) has become so prevalent that the facility to support speech with graphics, usually digital, has become a core compentency for graduating students, the newest classes of whom have never known a world without the Internet. Bowen implied as much in her selection of subjects of various age groups who make up her interview case studies, and points those dynamics out in her conclusions.

Bowen adapts a template from Aronowitz and Menser (1996), who theorized that humans interface with computers through ontological, pragmatic and phenomenological relationships, which become "the emergent locale for manual and digital selves to exchange and integrate so they may become a mutable self engaged in cultural production across multiple real and virtual contexts" (Bowen, 2003, p. 221). But as social science researchers very often discover, "[c]reating a context for exploring emerging themes" (Bowen, 2003, p. 221), thus imposes form on whatever results emerge. Researchers get what they look for to some degree if they fall into the practice of imposing whatever faddish simplification is popular at the moment (there always is one) whether that is "Porter's Five Forces" in business (Lima, 2006, n.p.) or "Maslow's Heirarchy" (Gwynne, 1999, n.p.) in psychology or any number of other schema from every silo in across the humanities. Likewise just as the word 'silo' has become cliched, so too must have 'emergent' been a buzzword in 2003, 'seductive' enough for Bowen to employ about a dozen times. While Maslow's Heirarchy and such schema can be profoundly useful explanatory metaphors, imposing frame on content, here proposing a dialectic that "prompts my exploration" (Bowen, 2003, p. 220), is about as useful as concluding five cases "offer insight into how individuals [implied, 'in general'] negotiate" anything (Bowen, 2003, p. 220). Would the artists have referred to a digital Other had Bowen not introduced that construct? The Other decides what paint, paper, brushes and clay are available but Bowen does not find a loss in autonomy subordinating creativity to those limitations. How digital selves locate viz. older plastic selves may not have emerged at all had Bowen not assigned those priority in order to fit the adopted schema. This is why researchers test for various types of validity before launching extensive and costly social surveys, because if they slant the questions then no surprise, the results confirm what they set out to 'discover.' Without falling into the trap of what John Gerring for example calls "methodological monism" (2011, p. 632) or the myth of 'one right way to do research,' it is difficult not to wonder whether Bowen simply sifted for what she was looking for.