Actually

What do you guys think about doing an ethnography project looking at how "Mouthwestern" works? Sort of a comparison to how the game Telephone worked when we were little? I'm not really sure how I'd do participant observation on that, but it could be interesting? And I know that a lot of people have a lot to say about it because we've all been affected by it at some point. The only problem I foresee with doing a project on "Mouthwestern" is that the outcome I feel would be really obvious since we all know what it is and basically what it does. Would it be too lame to chose something like that? I'm thinking that maybe I could listen to conversations in the cafeteria to see what people are talking about and if it's about other students (which would be evidence of the "Mouthwestern" subculture?), or would that not be okay because I'm supposed to inform the people that I'm studying about what I'm doing. I know we talked about how people fall back into old habits fast, but if I chose to study a group of friends since I feel like they'd be more likely to let me eaves drop on them, do I have to explicitly tell them that I'm trying to see if they are gossiping or not?