This week’s blog is quite interesting as I’ll be talking about my class field trip; a journey to a shopping mall while observing the use of public information displays and media services and reflect on how people transit from private media practice to public media practice. It was interesting to see the difference between the private and the public space as we observed the ethics surrounding photography and photographing people. According to one of the reading article titled “The Art Laws Centre,” there are some limitations while taking a picture of other people like being respective by making sure that first, you get the person’s consent before clicking their picture especially if the to be photographed person is underaged or you’re in a private space.
Coming back to my ethnography field research surroundings, as a field trip me and my partner Nazia had to go to H&M Megbox. On our way, we had to observe our surrounds and people’s behaviour. We went to take a free shuttle bus to Megabox and when we got there it was empty like no one was in the queue because everyone had got in the bus so we ran to catch the shuttle bus and made it just in time. As we got in the bus was pretty full and during the whole ride, I saw that most of the passengers were on their phone barely let’s say maybe around 2-3 of them weren’t on their phone and just looking out the window. After like 10 minutes we reached Megabox and made out way to H&M.
We reached H&M around 3:10 pm and just looking from outside there were quite a lot of people inside the store. There were various groups of customers inside the store from young adults, middle ages, elderly, children to all. So we can say that H&M is a go-to place for almost all age range. Most of the people in the store looked like they were with their family members, friends or their partner. The people who ha company were chatting and laughing while getting each other’s opinions looking at clothes. As for some of the other shoppers who looked like they were by themselves had an earphone plugged in their ear while some others seemed to be enjoying the store music that plays in the background. This makes me realize that shopping has become quite an interesting activity as now we can enjoy this soft background music creating an ambient to keep the shoppers entertained.
Just like the background music, there was some other digital signage as a part of the media practice in the public sphere to display and advertise the store like the RED BIG LETTER SALE banners to let the people know about the sale and tempt them to spend more. I bet it’s easy to catch people’s attention with these BIG RED lettered SALE banners cause me and my friend couldn’t hold back ourselves and actually end up looking around the shop for an hour and trying clothes and later bought some cause they were on SALE. We tried our best not to go get any media involved but we had to break that rule as we took pictures in the fitting room.
After that, I took that same free shuttle bus back to the Kowloon plaza and unlike before we had to wait for 5-10 mins for the bus. As we were waiting the queue got longer in an instant and the waiting area was flooded with people. While waiting I saw the lady in charge of maintaining the area had a walkie talkie attached to her and a kid in front me was playing a candy crush game on an iPhone while a kid behind us was crying because his brother didn’t want to share his Dragon toy which had sparkled light and roaring automated voice. I so wanted to record that and maybe post in on my story but since it wasn’t ethical of me to do so without their consent and given that he was a kid I didn’t do so. And I don’t think people in Hong Kong would stop and listen to you if you were to try and ask them for consent to take pictures.
References
- Arts Law Centre of Australia. (2016). Street photographer’s rights. Retrieved July 3, 2020,from https://www.artslaw.com.au/information-sheet/street-photographers-rights/
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