New things are hard to study. You spend your whole time getting all excited about how they are new: "LOOOKKK, you say, kids rapping on streetcorners!!!! If I hang out with them for a couple of years, I can argue that I've done a particpatory ethnography!"

At the end of seventeen years of music corner rap ethnography you find you have completely replicated W.F. Whyte's Street Corner Society (which does have a Wikipedia page, I'll have you know).

The older my topic gets, the better I like it. I get to ask better questions: what happens when the social contexts change? Why are some projects successful and others not? What is the significance in shifts in ways that ideas are presented? Why is this important, and what does this mean for the future?

If this were in the 14th century you would find me in the college quadrangle, asking all the same questions -- but about God - because today's questions about technology were the 14th century's questions about God.

There's nothing new under the sun, but that doesn't make it less marvellous.