In Class Writing Questions

1. In the scene of my mini-ethnography, I am right in the middle. I am as involved as it gets. I am an equal within the industry, only separated by experience. When interviewing my informants I am close to them in physical space. The people I am interviewing are good friends that I can converse with closely and off the record without that typical interviewer-interviewee distance. We're not sitting in chairs across from each other, instead we are at a table or on a couch; somewhere casual. My subculture is not one that is extremely formal so it would be out of place for me to expect and conduct an interview as so.
2. There can be much meaning behind recorded words in some subcultures though since I am closely related to the people with whom I am speaking I take their recorded words exactly the way in which they intended them to be taken. It helps to know your informant to understand where he or she is coming from, though this could be considered a fixed position. The could be times when knowing my informant so well inhibits me from actually hearing what they are saying and twisting it to the way I think they mean something, so I think you have to take what they say and keep yourself out of it. Not much of a power difference exists between me and my informants. We're all on a pretty level playing field. Experience is the only thing that separate people in the industry so if there are some power issues they are derived from that.
3. When I listen to my informant I here a lot of joy in their voices. They are talking about something they enjoy doing. Gaps appear when they are trying to word something a certain way, maybe not exactly speaking from the heart and instead trying to make something sound better than it really is. The tone is full of humor usually resulting in reminiscing about old memories and laughing. The emphasis is on the important things in the conversation. the things that make us angry or we feel strongly about. Sometimes the tone or emphasis is placed in order to try to make the other person understand where we're coming from.