P1120774 on Flickr.

An Xiao Mina’s latest post about seat numbers in China is a great example of how design that attempts to understand the user’s world matters. She explains in her post why there is no 12E in this photo:

Contrary to intuition for English speakers, seats 12F and 12D are next to each other on the train. Why no 12E? After some time, I realized it’s because the letter E sounds like the number 1 in Chinese.

Without awareness of how the letter E sounds in this context, any designer (Chinese speaking or non-Chinese speaking) could easily overlook this very minor detail that would great confusion for a person who is looking for their seat.

Minimizing unintentional confusion in design requires attention to the details. This is why ethnography and user studies are important. 

This is a re-post from my Bytes of China blog. I discuss how a the singles phenomenon on Weibo is a culturally situated practice. You can also read Alexis Madrigal’s gloss of my post on The Atlantic, How China’s Twitter, Weibo, Became a Dating Platform.

What first started out with well-meaning citizens taking pictures of child beggers on the street has now turned into a national phenomenon of individuals uploading pictures of themselves and their friends in the hopes of finding a potential relationship.

Weibo is the most popular micro-blog in China, often compared to Twitter. 随手拍照解救乞讨儿童 Rescue Children (almost 300,000 followers) is a Weibo account that posts pictures of potentially kidnapped child beggers on the streets with the hopes of matching them with their original families. Charles Custer from China Geeks has written about Weibo’s child begging  and the backlash against it. Rescue Children was the first 随手拍 group. 随手拍 means Instant Photo.

Now, dozens of Instant Photo groups are springing up all over the country not to rescue homeless children, but to rescue single men an women.

Users @ the specific Weibo Instant Photo Singles accounts that they want to be featured on. So if a person is an older woman living in Shenzhen, she would @ the Shenzen Instant Photo Singles Older Women group.  Weibo users post their pictures accompanied with a description of their personality traits, weight, profession, instant messaging QQ number, and the kind of person they are looking for. Friends often upload pictures for their friends and some people upload their own pictures. Beijing Today has a lovely article about how this started.

Here are two examples below.

奈奈de小懒猪 posted this to her Weibo on March 31st 7:22pm for her friend and included Instant Photo Qing Nong University’s Rescue Single Men @随手拍解救青农大单身 in the post.

对@随手拍解救青农大单身 说：女，青岛农业大学外院大一学生，92年，身高162，狮子座，籍贯山东济宁，老家吉林延边，具有东北人的豪爽直率。想找一本校大一大二大三男皆可，身高176—183，偏瘦，阳光点的男生。不用太帅，感觉最重要。求解救哈。

Qingnong female, studying foreign language at Qingdao Agricultural University, born in 1992, 162 centimeters tall, hometown is Jining in Shandong Provence, has the loveliness of an eastern northerner. Looking for a university freshman, sophomore, or junior around the height of 176-183 cm, slim, and doesn’t have to be too handsome as this isn’t the most important thing, it’s more important that we hit it off.

@随手拍解救青农大单身 (Qing Nong University’s Rescue Single Men) reposted it to their weibo at 2.28pm Tues May 24th to their 218 followers.

同学很着急啊，这么好的女孩还不动心，大伙都忙什么呢？//@随手拍解救青农大单身：感觉不容易感觉，是因为感觉很珍贵。可心中很渴望感觉，求解救啊！

Ah friends are so worried. What are you all doing?  This is a good girl // @随手拍解救青农大单身   the hardest part is to hit it off because feeling sare very valuable. She must be rescued!

So far the original post has 68 comments and 22 forward.

In this post above, a student, 懂事么, posted this on his own Weibo on May 22, 8pm. It was then reposted (pic above) an hour later by the Wuhan Univeristy Singles Rescues 随手拍解救武大剩斗士  group.

@懂事么：对@随手拍解救武大剩斗士 说：哥们我来了，，华师大三学生，厦门人。88年 180cm 性格好 阳光 激情 喜欢打球 喜欢唱歌，属于熟了就很放得开的。想找人一起看电影 一起游凤凰。。。QQ340054497 原文转发(4)|原文评论(8)

Hey friends, I’m here! Born in 1988, 180cm tall, junior at Wuhan Normal University, from Xiamen. I’m a good person with a fun personality. I like to play basketball and sing. I’m pretty laid-back after we get to know each other. I want to find someone to relax with and watch movies. My instant messaging QQ number is 340054497.

There are Weibo Singles Rescues for cities based general age groups that is not city specific.  This Weibo group above, @随手拍解救大龄女青年, is for for all singles women (64,129 followers).

Some Instant Photo groups are organized by location with no gender separation. @随手拍解救惠州单身人 is for the couples of Hui Zhou with 698 followers.

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Students across the country have started to organize local in-person meet-ups. In the last meeting for Wuhan Singles Student Instant Photo, 10 couples were matched up. I think the student users of Weibo Instant Photo groups present some of the exciting emergent interactions on Weibo and the web at large.There are several things that come to my mind when I think about this 随手拍 Instant Photo phenomenon:

• People are finding ways to make existing services useful for them  - this is very disruptive innovation because Instant Photo for single men and women was not part of Weibo’s original plan, but now I’m sure they are paying attention to it and learning from it.
• People are finding ways to extend digital interaction into physical meet-ups in third places. “Third places” places are neither home or work, such as pubs, cafes, libraries, and public spaces. These are important sites of community formation in urban spaces. (I have written about internet cafes as third places for migrants)
• They are creating impromptu and temporary third places.  These meet-ups only last a few hours, but then are then discussed for several days or weeks back on Weibo. It’s like flash mobs but for more meaningful and lasting connections.
• These temporary meetings are done outside of any formal organizational support or approval from the government or any businesses. Many of times these are organized by individuals and some are able to pull together a few sponsors.
• Temporary places such as real-life Weibo singles dating events reveal how people are making urban spaces work for them. It also shows us the different needs of elite versus non-elite users; for these Instant Photo participants so far are all users that are not part of a social group that I would classify as disadvantaged or non-elite.
• We also get a chance to understand how internet regulations and policies are actually enforced, ignored, and negotiated in real life. Charles Custer’s discussion of the controversy around the original 随手拍照解救乞讨儿童 Rescue Children site provides great analysis on why the government decided to find this site problematic.
  
• It’s another example of how one of the most important types of interaction on the Chinese internet revolves around sex and love (I will write a post later about how porn is a reason why many Chinese users registered for twitter in the first place)
• This also reflects changing norms among younger and older people around love and relationship. Online dating isn’t a popular way to meet people; there’s still a social stigma attached to it. But many of the people I spoke to said that using Weibo for finding a girl/boy-friend wasn’t real online dating and that for them this was a very comfortable way of exploring “possibilities.”
• There’s something about the transparency of Weibo and the scale of Instant Photo Singles that makes it easier for people to participate in this than online dating sites. So far, my conclusion is that people are comfortable using Weibo for dating because it makes dating social - and making something social means that it that there has to be a degree of transparency and openness involved. Now finding a potential relationship though the internet isn’t something that you are doing on your own。All the stuff that you had to do before alone like sorting through profiles, wondering which ones were legitimate, and trying to figure out how to represent yourself - all can be done with the help of friends and the greater Weibo community. With Weibo Instant Photo, the entire Weibo-sphere is helping you find that “right” partner, your friends are helping you sort through comments, and you’re able to see the person’s past Weibo posts and get a sense of who they are.

I don’t think Weibo is a mere copy-cat of twitter. While it is a micro-blog, Weibo offers so many amazing features that make what I am describing in this post possible. On Weibo, you can have threaded conversations, track commentary on posts, embed various media formats, view media within the same window, and sort by content type. There are a lot of other features that I will talk about in a separate post, but this is all to say that communities like these can  develop on Weibo precisely because of its rich features and stable platform. Weibo simply works. There are no fail Weibo jokes. The only jokes you are hear are ones about internet censorship but that runs across all Chinese web services.

But it’s not just the Weibo technology that makes this Instant Photo Single phenomenon possible, it’s China and it’s the users that make this possible. The emergence of Weibo Instant Photo for Single Men and Women is a culturally situated phenomenon in Chinese society. It reflects current anxieties and changes around family, dating, marriage, the internet, relationship, and love.

Starting from around third grade (some earlier) and on, college bound students are expected to be be totally dedicated to school work 15 hours a day. Most parents scare their children out of having relationships and fill their time with so much academic training that they don’t have any free time to pursue their own interests much less a relationship. When these students enter college and are free from the confines of home, most of them have not had the chance to develop “dating” skills. They have not even had that much time to interact with youth of the opposite sex in a non-school context.

From what I’ve witnessed so far, the Instant Photo Phenomenon and its extended physical offline meet-ups fulfill a need that many students have - to talk with members of the opposite sex in a non-academic context where the mission and boundaries are clear: to hook up. Weibo Instant Photo and offline meet-ups offer a space for social interactions with a very transparent mandate: get into a relationship, not a friendship. I have heard so many times through my fieldwork over the years of how students would get stuck in the “friend box” with someone that they liked and felt that they had no way out it. Even if I encouraged them to confess their feelings just so they can relieve themselves of the pain of not knowing if that person liked them back,  they would give some excuse about not being able to express their feelngs. Most youth that I talk to just are simply lost when it comes to dating and have no idea how to tell someone they like them. They fear rejection so much that they would rather keep silent. And this is a very specific condition for the generation born in the late 80’s to early 90’s because these are the youth that have been subjected to this incredibly controlled education.

This is not to say that Chinese teenagers don’t have sexual feelings at a young age. Quite contrary, many students would tell me of epic 3 year to 10 year crushes where not one word was said, not even one brush of skin was touched. These crushes would start in junior high and high school and would continue on and on. I know that American teenagers often have crushes that are unvoiced, but in China most of these crushes happen in a context where no one is hooking up with anyone in high-school because there is no space or time to even TRY hooking up or voicing your crush to someone. If a female even hangs around a male student too much, the teachers will pull the female student in for a talk along with her parents. Students’ schedules are so tightly controlled that they don’t have time to interact with each other without adult supervision.

I think the Instant Photo Phenomenon for older women and men speaks to another type of culturally situated context - the emergence of divorcees in a society where divorces are still stigmatized and in the minority. Having done research on how divorced women and men date in China, I can tell you that it’s not easy for a divorcee. And it’s even harder for female divorcees; there is a double standard for women. If men are divorced, they usually want to marry someone younger who has never been married before. Divorced women are seen as leftovers and in many ways they see themselves as unrescuable.

So here comes a service, Weibo Instant Photo, that allows you to connect to all these other people who are also older, most likely divorced or seen as the leftovers of society, and finally have a chance to meet men who know that they are divorced but are willing to still explore a relationships - well these women are very happy because the have faith in being “rescued.”  It’s comforting to know that one doesn’t have to be ashamed of one’s age or background. I’ve noticed that some of the most popular Weibo Instant Photo are the ones for older women for all that info is posted publicly!  I haven’t heard of any single meet-ups for older people yet, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t happening. I’ve just begun to observe this and haven’t had a chance to do enough poking around yet.

Now if taking digital encounters into physical encounters such as these Weibo Singles meet-ups are  becoming socially acceptable, how can we design around this existing practice? What kind of games can we build on top of this? What other kind of offline activities could be extended from Weibo? Will Instant Photo Singles remain politically benign and out of the government’s concern?

I’ve only done a few interviews and spent a few weeks conducting ethnography so these are some very preliminary observations.  So I’ll have a lot more to write about this after a few months when I participate in the meet-ups, interview people who have posted for their friends and who have posted pictures of themselves, and get a better understanding of what this means for Weibo, SNS in China, and its users. 

I am also aware that these Instant Photo Singles meet-ups and the social circumstances that I’ve described so far apply for hetero-normative relationships. I have just started researching the LGBT community and will write more about this later also when I have some done more fieldwork.

Thank you to 孟繁永 for telling me about 随手拍!

___

Alexis Madrigal wrote up a great post about this on The Atlantic, How China’s Twitter, Weibo, Became a Dating Platform.

I’ve just moved to China for fieldwork. I’ve decided to keep a separate blog of all my ethnographic observations so that it doesn’t get mixed in with my general observations about culture and technology here on Cultural Bytes.

I will still blog here, but just not as often as most of my brain for the next year will be focused on just China. If I have Bytes of China posts that are specifically about culture and technology, I will repost them to Cultural Bytes.

See you on Bytes of China! Here is the RSS feed.

More about Bytes of China and the themes that I will be writing about.

En route to China, I stopped in Austin to give a talk at my first SXSW! Attendees were at 20,000 plus for interactive - 5,000 more than last year - a sign that this conference is growing in quality content or a sign that the economy is about to burst.

So what did I overhear the most at SXSW? 

The internet is really important! Web 3.0 is here!  The reign of the virtual! Networked sensors take over the world! This is all so new! Singularity transhumanism! Social media for good! Gaming to save the world!

These statements reflect the general level of techno-utopianism that I find at conferences on anything related to the internet. There usually is little room for critical analysis or social historicizing.

As Roy Christopher points out, we live in an age of information abundance but at times it seems like our abilities to historically contextualize current events is scarce. He’s right and this is particulary true for the SXSW audience who is so focused on the “new” that the “old” seems irrelevant. I have lots of qualms with technological utopianism, but I think what’s make it worse is historical amnesia. Many of the talks seem to think that the technology itself - or this year the focus was on social media or games themselves - will solve our reality and make us “better.”  An example of this is Simon Mainwaring’s We First: How Social Media can Remake Capitalism and Build a Better World and Jane McDonigal’s Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better.  The ideas promoted in these books aren’t necessarily wrong, but I find the analysis in these books resting more on future talk than on grounded research.

So for my first SXSW, I decided to give a talk that would not only illustrate my analysis and research on internet users in China, but also provide historical context for what we’re seeing in China.  I explored the idea of telling a story that would be an old one - a story that would historicize the internet so that we could see how human emotions can create powerful reactions that repeat itself in different mediums, processes, and outcomes. I did this by paralleling the contemporary panic around rural-urban migrants in Chinese internet cafes to the 20th century panic around Italian and Irish immigrant in American saloons.  

I also argued that internet cafes, like saloons, are important sites of social interaction. They are places of security, safety, and stability.

Internet cafes are important because they are new third places in cities. Privately owned spaces of technology access, such as internet cafes, are the new “third places” in cities because these are the places where poor people are actively reprogramming urban space to work for them. Third places like pubs, saloons, and public spaces are important for healthy diverse cities - they allow for new forms of community to develop because they allow a greater diversity of people to gather in informal settings outside of home and work.

 Here are the slides and notes for my talk.  Since I wrote this talk with visuals, I suggest that you read this pdf where I put the notes below each slide; it’ll probably make more sense this way!

SXSW filmed a video that will be up on youtube later, but for now, thanks so Elisha Miranda’s flipcam, here’s a video of the talk below. The sound isn’t that great on the video, so I suggest you listen to the audio recording below.

I would love to hear your feedback in the comments below or tweet about it with the #300MM hashtag. And thank you SXSW community for all the feedback after my talk!

I really appreciated all the comments on twitter so far post-talk! Some said that my talk was among their favorites and one of the best panels at SXSW! I heart twitter for connecting me to all these people who have interest in this topic. I’m really excited to now be in touch with other people who are researching similar stuff!

Thank you to friends who listened and gave me advice: Kristen Taylor, Kevin Slavin, Kenyatta Cheese, and Morgan Ames.

I also did an interview with the lovely Benjamin Walker for his WFMU radio show Too Much Information. Here’s the link to the show. Thanks Benjamin!

thank you to friends who listened and gave me advice: Kristen Taylor, Kevin Slavin, Kenyatta Cheese, and Morgan Ames. And thank you SXSW community for all the feedback after my talk!

I really appreciated all the comments on twitter! Some said that my talk was among their favorites and one of the best panels at SXSW! I heart twitter for connecting me to all these people who have interest in this topic. I’m really excited to now be in touch with other people who are researching similar stuff!

A few tweets from my talk:

• @narrowd: Learned more about Chinese culture in the last 15 mins than the last 30 years #300MM
• @cqwang: 下面翻译一个关于中国网吧的SXSW演讲，作者 @triciawang 是一坨文化研究者，研究中美墨低收入社群使用技术的文化背景。该讲座名为“睡在网吧（原文即为中文，也是唯一的中文）——中国的下三亿用户”，发生于3月12日SXSW。 #300MM
• @norabousteit: Loved @triciawang’s talk on migration and technology comparing Chinese Internet cafes with saloons before prohibition #300MM #SxSW
• @pandemia: Seguo la presentazione #300MM di Tricia Wang sugli internet café in Cina, cool! http://bit.ly/gsefC2 #SXSW
• @lucaconti: @triciawang great presentation about cybercafé in China, I’ll follow You here and on Bytes of China http://ow.ly/4dcGS #300MM #SXSW
• @mbelinsky: @triciawang fascinatingly juxtaposes American saloons & Chinese Internet cafes as bases if info exchange & public sanitation #300mm #sxswi
• @kenyatta: Culture survives precisely b/c it is distributed /by @triciawang #300mm #f15diversity #SXSW

I did an interview with the lovely Benjamin Walker for his WFMU radio show Too Much Information.
______________________________
Below are some random thoughts about my first SXSW experience  SXSW!

I’ve written a separate post of my Austin food review and my favorite personal moments.  Here are all my pictures!

Thanks to Glenda Bautista who has an eye on making SXSW topics more diverse, I was invited this year to be on the Future 15 series that addressed diversity on the intenret.  I’m not sure if I will give a talk next year at SXSW again because I felt that the conference was really US-centric. It was only after I arrived that I found out about the Technology Summitt with topic areas in China, India and more. But this was scheduled 2 days AFTER SXSW and there were no speaker names attached to any of the events.  The sad thing about the size of SXSW this year was that there were TOO many panels scheduled at the same time. And the program book, online schedule, and iphone app all had differnt information or unupdated info about the panels. Most people me that my panel was undiscoverable.

Some panel highlights:

• I loved reading all the great stuff coming out of Tim Shey’s Social TV panel.
• Kenyatta Cheese’s panel Indie Storytelling pulled out some great questions from the audience about content and storytelling.
• Roy Christopher’s panel, Disconnecting the Dots: How Our Devices are Divisive, was drawn out graphically! I’ll post a link to it when he puts up the images & notes for his talk. In the meantime, he’s written a lovely recap of his SXSW experience.
• And Jamie Wilkinson’s Star Wars Uncut panel was just so lovely because not only did we get to hear about how it was created, we got to see the first 15min of the film!
• I’m so happy to see the lovely Nora Abousteit finally speak in person! She engaged the audience with a lovely story about Burdastyle. But Etsy - please don’t host a panel in a bar - it’s hard to hear your panelists with half the room drinking and schmoozing. Nora congrats on Burdastyle reaching half million users!
• I missed David Sasaski’s panel on social media in Mexico, but lucky for us he’s going to post the panel details on his blog! In the meantime, he’s written up a wonderful review of Latin America-related events at SXSW and future Latin America meet ups!

Bad hashtags: I saw so many instances of bad twitter hashtags. But this one below from Nokia had to be the best. Come on nokia at least get your hashtags right!

change it up!  It was diappointing to see that all 4 of the keynote speakers were white males.  Even though there was more diversity in the keynote speaker set though still it was overwhelmingly white and male. I thought that the Future 15 panels   had more diversity, but SXSW didn’t make a big enough effort to promote these panels. You can’t even find a list of all the Future 15 speakers.  It’s really disappointing when a conference becomes this big and they still are unable to find people of color to promote. There are plenty of people I would love to recommend for next years line up - and I think SXSW could open it up and take suggestions to increase the diversity of its speakers. For starters, I’ll nominate a few close friends -  Baratunde Thurston,  Jay SMooth, Nora Abousteit, and Kenyatta Cheese.

tacky, sexist, and hetero-normative messages in the green room: I loved the green room for its calming pre-panel energy. But one thing that threw me off with the sexist shit that Ink Public Relations put on the tables. These cards were scattered all over each table in the green room. The last piece of advice was completely offensive.

A speech should be like a women’s skirt: Long enough to cover the topic, yet short enough to be interesting.

After seeing this, Anetv writes on twitter “tech-centric venues wonder why they’ve trouble recruiting women? & ppl wonder why young girls feel that tech isn’t “for them?”

Lovely Film! I didn’t get to see the screening of Surrogate Valentine, but according to my friend Elisha Miranda who saw it - it was amazing. Thanks Gary Chou for bringing the world another great film and giving us more Lynn Chen!

Yah new peeps! It was so lovely to finally meet people in person! And most importantly, SXSW is a time to bond with close friends.

I’ll be landing in CHina in a few days and blogging more actively on BytesofChina.com. See you there!

Good day world! it’s finally happening! I’m moving to China to do my research! wooohoo!

So I’m moving to China to do my research, and then coming back to write something that I hope to buddha doesn’t kill my soul to write creative non-fiction. (here’s some more details about my research). I have a post on my personal blog about all the things and people that I will miss so dearly.

So in addition to doing my research, I’ll be posting daily observations on Bytes of China. I’m making a committment to post a little thought every other day. One, this let’s friends know that I’m alive, and second when I’m writing up my fieldnotes every month I would love to see over time what observations I chose to make public. While I plan to keep 99% of notes just for my eyes, there’s something very lovely about posting a short blog post that will be immediately read. It keeps me connected to the real world - otherwise I would get lost in my thoughts and forget that I have a responsbility to carry out when I return from the field - a responsibilty to translate what I see into greater understanding.

New RSS Feeds!

And for people who use RSS readers - I’ve combined all my blogs into ONE feed (using yahoo pipes). I created one feed just for research blogs and another feed for all blogs. You can find all the rss feeds at the bottom of my website.

A New Vision for Field Work

I’m trying to re-envision what fieldwork will look like for me in China for the next year. Every past fieldwork trip for me in India, Mexico, US, or China has been under 3 months - which meant that I always working 15 hours a day minimum.

But now that I will be in one place for a year, I want to re-envision what does emotionally and physically sustainable ethnography look like in a fieldsite that never seems to sleep? I’ll be hanging out with a variety of groups from people who work at night to people who work 15 plus hours a day. How can I be everywhere - how can I see everything - how can I document it all -without wearing myself down physically or mentally?

I’ve come to the conclusion that in order for me to do great fieldwork I must be fully present. This past summer I learned that being fully present starts with sleeping, eating, and dancing. I know it sounds simple - but it’s taken a while to get here. Thich Nhat Hahn’s quote on being present for your loved ones is actually very relevant for ethnography.

The most precious gift we can offer others is our presence.

In ethnography and qualitative how-to books, they don’t really emphasize how the ethnographer’s energy can affect the types of observations that are gleaned from the fieldsite.  But I think it’s actually super important to think about how to keep yourself super balanced.  Does anyone have any tips? I would love hear them! Some ideas for taking healthy breaks from my field site:

• I won’t be near any dance studios in China, so I will have to make time everyday to turn on the music and blast it out!
• I also was thinking that it would be good to take 1 week off every month just to reflect.

Here are some important things for the fieldsite that I will packing:

I’m super big on brainstorming so I’m bought 4 of these white board dry-erase contact sheets from Go Write! on Amazon. I plan to transform my entire office into a dry erase heaven.
And of course I will be bringing box loads of Ssicky notes! this is beyond important.

I don’t like the idea of having to always pull out of my cellphone to look at the time when I’m hanging out in the field.  But I also hate the idea of wearing a watch - I find them ugly and annoying.  And watch jewelry is usually too pretty and shiny to wear in the fielsite.
But then I found this awesome robot necklace watch that wasn’t shiny but stylish at the same time - I thought this was a very appropriate for the field.
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Nail polish art  - this will be a great conversation starter in the field!  I will turn my nails into bunnies and other fun animals.

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Thieves hand sanitizer - very imporatant - non-toxic, no alcohol, and no preservatives. it’s my goal it NEVER get sick. I am not a clean freak but there will be times when it will be difficult to find running water for days at a time  - esp in the rural areas. So this will be life saver!

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I bought four 2TB external Western Digital drives and one 1.5 TB portable external drive. You never know what will happen to your data -  I’m preparing for my digital data to disappear at all times. I’m leaving two drives in two different locations in the US, and two others in two different locations in China. The portable drive I will always have on me or in my apt.

I have always treated encryption as something that just slows down someone who really wants to get to your data. But I do care about ensuring that the info for my informants are subjected to the best data protection I can personally enforce. So I will be storing all my contact data on an iphone - it’s pretty much the most secure mobile device out there after all the research I’ve done and it has remote wipe. Blackberry is secure too, but it doesn’t have a camera or a good app store! And android mobiles are no where near secure enough. Geeky Scmidt provides an excellent review of the most popular cellphones and their encryption plans (btw his blog is awesome!)

1. iOS – Encrypts the storage and allows developers to access the crypto library
2. Blackberry – Encrypts enough that countries around the world are putting pressure on RIM
3. Windows Mobile 6.5 – Encrypts storage and allows access through .Net
4. Symbian – Nope
5. Android – Nope
6. Meego – Nope
7. WebOS – Nope
8. Windows Phone 7 – Nope

Just bought my tickets to Austin, Texas for SXSW - who else will be there? This will be my first SXSW! I get to play with the amazingly smart and playful Glenda Bautista, who invited me to join the Futures 15 line up.  Future 15’s are a SXSW curated panel of short talks on specific topics. Last year Baratunde was on the same panel and I heard that he killed it with his talk: How to be Black. This year, Glenda is moderating the panel again and giving her own talk on how to actually put together a kick ass panel that is diverse. Not as easy as it sounds so she’ll be breaking it down!

I’ll be on the Diversity and Social Justice panel on Saturday, starting at 3:30pm. My talk will be about the future of the internets from the perspective of 300 million Chinese migrants and the possibilities for social change. 

Sleeping at Internet Cafes: The Next 300 Million Chinese Users #300MM

Saturday, March 12th, 4pm

In China, over 300 million migrants reside in cities; these communities represent some of the most marginalized and poorest groups that are now actively incorporating new communication tools into their lives. These migrants are also the fastest adopters of digital tools and the quickest growing population of digital users. What do these coinciding cultural-technical processes mean for the people undergoing these shifts? Based on my fieldwork in China over the past three years, I focus on three areas that I think will point to the future of social change and innovation in China: gaming, entertainment, and consumption.

My talk will be filmed and put on youtube so I’ll share the link when it’s up.

(Thanks to Kristen Taylor for helping me come with up with the title!) For the next year, I’ll be posting daily observations up on Bytes of China. 

My dear friend Morgan Ames will be speaking right after me! WOOOHOO! Her talk, Will OLPC Laptops Bootstrap Education in Latin America?, is about how OLPC is being used in schools. It will be a treat to hear her talk because she just returned from 6 months of fieldwork in Peru and Uruguay so we’ll be the first people to hear about her analysis. If you want some juicy background on OLPC, she recently published an article with Mark Warschauer, Can One Laptop Per Child Save the World’s Poor?.

My talk will be special to me because it will be last speaking engagement before I move to China for fieldwork. And I can’t imagine a more fun audience to speak to about my work. And it’s scary and exciting to imagine that the next time I give a talk in the United States will be after at least a year of fieldwork in China. So one of the best parts about presenting this at SXSW is that I’ll have to throw a going away party in Austin!

And I’m also excited to meet all these people I’ve been following on the internets. So who else is going? Let’s chat!

My friends will be speaking on these panels below - so here’s my tentative list of talks that I will be attending. Let me know if you will be there - would love to check out your panel! Oh and check out the SXSW schedule through SCHED - it’s much easier to use than the SXSW scheduler (thanks glenda for the tip!)

Saturday March 12th

9:30am-10:30am, Tim Shey (w/Chloe Sladden, Fred Graver, Gavin Purcell, Lila King, It’s Not Tv, It’s Social Tv

11:00am-12:00pm, David Sasaki, The Impact of Social Media Tools in Mexico

12:30pm-1:30pm Benjamin Bratton (with Molly Wright Steenson) ,Urban Technology on the Dark Side 

12:30pm-1:30pm Ryan Shaw, Time Traveling: Interfaces for Geotemporal Visualization

4:00pm - 4:10pm Tricia Wang, Sleeping at Internet Cafes: The Next 300 Million Chinese Users

4:15pm-4:30pm Morgan Ames, Will OLPC Laptops Bootstrap Education in Latin America?

5:00pm-6:00pm Jamie Wilkinson (w/ Annelise Pruitt, Casey Pugh) Star Wars Uncut: The Force of Crowdsourcing

Sunday March 19th

9:30am-10:30am Roy Christopher, Disconnecting the Dots: How Our Devices are Divisive

9:30am-10:30am Keely Kolmes, Patients/Caregivers on Facebook: Establishing Boundaries Without Barriers

Monday March 14th 

12:30-1:30 Baratunde Thurston, Comedic Communication: Developing User-centered Humor Design

Tuesday March 15th

9:30am Sarah Szalavitz (w/ Dan Ariely) Flexible Morality of User Engagement & User Behavior

11:00am-12:00pm Kenyatta Cheese (w/ Heather Gold, Allee Willis & Bill Corbett)  Indie success: Caching in on Collaboration 

I was a guest speaker at the wonderful Kristen Taylor’s seminar, Creating Community Environments, at New York University’s ITP program. 

I talked about my upcoming move to China to conduct one year of fieldwork. Here’s a short in-progress description of my research project and a link to my presentation. 

I also elaborated on the importance of understanding social ties as culturally embedded. Kristen had aleady assigned a piece that I wrote a few months ago as class reading, Privacy and The Anonymous user in China: Importance of understanding multiple cultural orientations towards guanxi/social connections. So we had a short discussion on why the meaning of a social ties are different China. 

I really enjoyed talking to a class of students from such diverse backgrounds. As I was leaving, Kristen started a discussion on potatoes as objects with agency based on their class assignment of Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire. Yes, that is how cool this class is - you too should consider going through a life transition, move to NYC,  and enroll at ITP just to take Kristen’s next course in the Fall of 2011. And companies - pay attention to these students if you want to hire people who really understand communities from a holistic point of view.

To learn more about the class, check out two things - 

1. The Atlantic’s feature on Kristen’s class, How To Build an Online Community. Kristen not only provides the entire course reading list, but she also explains the context of each reading. It’s a lovely syllabus that ends up sounding more like a story - a testament to a great syllabus! She also includes links to each guest speaker that has come to the class every week. This seminar also has a really awesomely curated reading list that only a seasoned professor with an understanding of the most contemporary issues could put together - Kristen!
2. Check out the course blog, CommunitP - this is a rich source of links, insights, and quotes on innovative approaches to online communities. Kristen also posts notes for each guest speaker’s talk. 

It also makes me happy to see that ITP is offering this type of class - it means that students are learning about how communities make use of technologies instead of just seeing communities as end-users of a design process.  ITP is an amazing program and they really do care about their students. You can tell because they take great efforts to bring in expert practitioners like Kristen  to teach courses in a field that changes faster than Tyra Banks. 

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Several students asked me for a suggested list of readings. So I’ve come up with a superest of super short list of key texts that I continue to return to throughout my research. I read a lot of theory and the ethnographies that I have included are theoretical to the bone. 

READING LIST FOR CREATING COMMUNITY ENVIRONMENTS

Agre, Philip E. 2002. “Real-Time Politics: The Internet and the Political Process.” The Information Society 18:311-331.

Amin, Ash, and Nigel Thrift. 2002. Cities: reimagining the urban. Cambridge.

Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at large: cultural dimensions of globalization. Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press.

Appadurai, Arjun. 1988. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge University Press.

Axhausen, Kay, Jonas Larsen, and John Urry. Mobilities, Networks, Geographies. Great Britain, 2006.

Boyd, Danah. n d “White Flight in Networked Publics ? How Race and Class Shaped American Teen Engagement with MySpace and Facebook.” 

Braman, Sandra. 2009. Change of State: Information, Policy, and Power. The MIT Press.

Brown, Barry, and Eric Laurier. 2002. “En-Spacing Technology: Some thoughts on the geographical nature of technology.” 1-11.

Capurro, Rafael. 2003. “Passions of the Internet.” Pp. 331-345 in Passions in economy, politics, and the media in discussion with Christian theology, edited by W. Palaver and P. Steinmair-Posel. Vienna: Lit Verlag.

Canclini, Nestor Garcia. 1995. Hybrid cultures: strategies for entering and leaving modernity. Minneapolis, {MN}.

Coleman, Gabriella, and Alex Golub. 2008. “Hacker practice: Moral genres and the cultural articulation of liberalism.” Anthropological Theory 8:255-277.

Crary, Jonathan. 1992. Techniques of the observer: on vision and modernity in the nineteenth century. MIT Press.

de Blij, Harm. 2008. The Power of Place: Geography, Destiny, and Globalization’s Rough Landscape. Oxford University Press, USA.

de Landa, Manuel. 1997. A thousand years of nonlinear history. Zone Books.

de Landa, Manuel. 2002. Intensive science and virtual philosophy. Continuum International Publishing Group.

Deleuze, Gilles. 1992. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October 59:3-7.

Dodge, Martin and Rob Kitchin. 2004. “Flying through code / space: the real virtuality of air travel.” Environment and Planning 36:195-211.

Dourish, Paul. 2007. “Responsibilities and Implications: Further Thoughts on Ethnography and Design.” Proceedings of the 2007 conference on Designing for User eXperiences - DUX ’07 2. 

Dourish, Paul and Geneviece Bell. 2007. ”The infrastructure of experience and the experience of infrastructure: meaning and structure in everyday encounters with space.” Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 34: 431 – 445.

DuGay, Paul, Stuart Hall, Linda Janes, Hugh Mackay, and Keith Negus. 1997. Doing cultural studies: the story of the Sony Walkman. London ; Thousand Oaks Calif.

Eglash, Ron. 2009. “Oppositional Technophilia.” Science And Technology

 Eglash, Ron. 2004. Appropriating technology: vernacular science and social power. U of Minnesota Press. 

Eglash, Ron, and Julian Bleeker. n d “The Race for Cyberspace: Information Technology in the Black Diaspora.” 1-12.

Foucault, Michel. 2001. Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. 2nd ed. Routledge 

Fisher, Mark. 2009. Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative? Winchester, UK; Washington, USA: Zero Books.

Gans, Herbert J. “The Sociology of Space: A Use-Centered View.” City & Community 1 (2002): 329-339.

Geyh, Paula. 2009. Cities, Citizens, and Technologies: Urban Life and Postmodernity. Routledge.

Gieryn, Thomas F. “Give Place a Chance: Reply to Gans.” City & Community 1, no. 4 (2002): 341-343. 

Graham, Stephen, and Simon Marvin. Splintering urbanism: networked infrastructures, technological mobilities and the urban condition. Routledge, 2001.

Green, Nicola. 2002. “On the Move: Technology , Mobility , and the Mediation of Social Time and Space.” The Information Society 18:281 - 292.

Gupta, Akhil, and James Ferguson. 1997. Culture, power, place : explorations in critical anthropology. Durham, {N.C.}.

Heidegger, Martin. 1954 “The Question Concerning Technology.”

Jacobs, Jane. 1961. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. First Edit. Vintage Books.

Jacobs, Jane M. 1996. Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City. 1st ed. Routledge.

Ladner, S. 2009. “‘Agency time’: A case study of the postindustrial timescape and its impact on the domestic sphere.” Time & Society 18:284-305.

Marcuse, Peter. 2002. “Depoliticizing Globalization: From Neo-Marxism to the Network Society of Manuel Castells. “pp. 131-158 in Understanding the city: contemporary and future perspectives, John Eade and Christopher Mele. Oxford, UK; Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Massey, Doreen. 1994. “A Global Sense of Place.” in Space, Place and Gender. Univ Of Minnesota Press.

Lynch, Michael. 2000. “Against Reflexivity as an Academic Virtue and Source of Privileged Knowledge.” Theory, Culture & Society 17:26-54. 

Lynch, Michael. 1999. “Silence in Context: Ethnomethodology and Social Theory.” 211-233.

Ong, Aihwa, ed. 2004. Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems. Wiley-Blackwell.

Orgad, S. 2006. “The cultural dimensions of online communication: a study of breast cancer patients’ internet spaces.” New Media & Society 8:877-899.

Porter, Theodore M. 1996. Trust in numbers: the pursuit of objectivity in science and public life. Princeton University Press.

Porter, Theordore, and Theodore M. Porter. 1994. “Information, Power, and the View from Nowhere.” Pp. 217-230 in Information Acumen: The Understanding and Use of Knowledge in Modern Business, edited by Lisa Bud-Frierman. London: Routledge.

Poster, Mark, and David Savat, eds. 2009. Deleuze and New Technology. Edinburgh University Press.

Poster, Mark. 2006. Information Please: Culture and Politics in the Age of Digital Machines. Duke University Press.

Postill, J. 2008. “Localizing the internet beyond communities and networks.” New Media & Society 10:413-431. 

Rakow, Lana. 1992. Gender on the line: women, the telephone, and community life. Urbana.

Roszak, Theodore. 1994. The cult of information: a neo-Luddite treatise on high tech, artificial … University of California Press.

Sanusi, Alena, and Leysia Palen. 2007. “Of Coffee Shops and Parking Lots: Considering Matters of Space and Place in the Use of Public Wi-Fi.” Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 17:257-273. 

Schiller, Dan. 2006. How to Think About Information. Urbana.

Seiter, Ellen. 2008. “Practicing at Home: Computers, Pianos, and Cultural Capital.” Digital Media 27-52.

Sheller, Mimi, and John Urry. 2006. Mobile technologies of the city. London ; New York.

Smith, Michael Peter. 2002. “Power in Place: Retheorizing the Local and the Global.” Pp. 111-130 in Understanding the city: contemporary and future perspectives, edited by John Eade and Christopher Mele. Oxford, UK; Malden, MA.

Swidler, Ann. 2001. Talk of love: how culture matters. Chicago.

Sundaram, Ravi. 2009. Pirate Culture and Urban Life in Delhi: After Media. Routledge.

Watts, Alan. 1998. The culture of counter-culture: the edited transcripts. C.E. Tuttle Co.

Whyte, William H. Jr. (1980) The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces.

Williams, Raymond. 1987. “When Was Modernism ?” New Left Review 48-52.

Willis, Paul. 2000. The Ethnographic Imagination. Polity.

Wolf, Margery. 1992. A thrice-told tale: feminism, postmodernism, and ethnographic responsibility. Stanford University Press.

Ureta, Sebastian. 2008. “Mobilising Poverty?: Mobile Phone Use and Everyday Spatial Mobility Among Low-Income Families in Santiago, Chile.” The Information Society 24:83-92.

Urry, John. Mobilities. {UK}, 2006.

I’m preparing for my move to China! I’m going to live there for 1 year so that I can touch, breath, and eat fieldwork 24/7. I’m beyond super excited for this. I’ve prepared a visual overview of my project on slideshare and a short in-progress description (will prob change every week!) for a more academic audience.  

Nokia Talk - Values in technology design and use: ethnography’s contribution View more presentations from triciawang.

I gave a presentation at Nokia Research Center, Palo Alto back in June, 2010.  I’ve already written a post that explains my sides on China, but I still need to create one for Mexico. So stay posted! In the meantime, the abstract is below and here’s the slideshow.

Values in technology design and use: ethnography’s contribution
As a sociologist, I’ve been trained to ask macro questions about underlying social conditions. While illuminating for society at large, sociological findings do not always readily appear to be relevant for the technology industry and/or people outside of academia. As an ethnographer, I’ve been trained to ask more grounded questions about the everyday lives of people and how they experience underlying social conditions. Ethnographical insights can offer more tangible, immediate, and actionable analysis. As such, companies have started incorporating ethnographic research into their strategy, product design, and marketing.

My talk today is about how I came into my research at Nokia wanting to answer the question: how can ethnographers contribute to the product design process of a mobile device? Ethnographically grounded research for technology use is a method that aims to reveal users’ values, beliefs, and ideas. Nokia was one of the first mobile companies to concertedly hire ethnographers as part of its design process,
In the mid to late nineties, Nokia changed the mobile industry forever by creating affordable, user friendly phones. More than a decade later, the hardware mobile phone market is nearing saturation. With Nokia transitioning from a company that produces hardware to software, how can ethnographically driven research  provide strategic insights for this shift?

I start off the presentation by reviewing the following  projects I worked on while at Nokia.
1.) Farmville:  (w. Liz Bales, Jofish Kaye): We did some preliminary surveying to gain insight into the most popular facebook game. I discuss my interest in how games like Farmville support less-meangingful social ties.  I wrote a blog post about this: Playing FarmVille?: Casual Games maintaining Less-Meaningful Ties on Facebook

2) Inventive Leisure Practices (Jofish Kaye): I interviewed local hackers to better understand how they form communities around their practice. We see leisurely hacking communities as critical, yet understudied sites of innovation.
3.) If time permits, towards the end of my presentation I will also discuss a third project, The If I Can Dream House. (w/ Janet Go, Liz Bales) The If I Can Dream House is the first “post-reality entertainment” production. As the show is only available online through a 24/7, 60+ camera live stream and weekly Hulu releases, we wanted to better understand how audiences connect with this new form of interactive media.

In the second half of my talk, I discuss how working at Nokia these past three months have initiated a critical shift in my research practices from being an ethnographer in the clouds to an ethnographer on the ground.
I provide two examples of how I’ve reframed my research in terms of how values influence technology design and use.
1.) The first case is from my ongoing fieldwork in Mexico where I have spent over three years in a rural, migrant-sending village. I share my analysis on how my research on Mexican migration and migrants’ use of technologies in Mexico and in the US had led me to believe that Nokia already has an American market with a strong brand connection with unfulfilled technology needs.
2.) The second case is my ongoing dissertation work in China where I discuss how my future fieldwork will include four central themes: gaming and leisure, value clashes, social connections, and communication.  I will also be interviewing Chinese entrepreneurs of failed copy-cat social networking technologies. Here’s the post that explains in greater detail my slides about social connections in China: Privacy and The Anonymous user in China: Importance of understanding multiple cultural orientations towards guanxi/social connections

Since my keynote on neo-informationalism in regards to the Google-China saga, I started thinking that one of the blind-spots of living in a neo-informationalist world is to see “free-information” as a binary  - either information is open or its not, either you make your identity known or not (update - I develop the idea of neo-informationalism in my piece on Haystack censorship tech). This totally builds upon danah boyd ‘s thinking about privacy as binary - either we have it or we don’t.  I’ll go back to danah’s work later.

So how is this blind spot built into our social media technologies and how do people make sense of this? (Eszter Hargittai and danah boyd’s recent research on facebook is a great example of how users are managing privacy settings.) I’m wondering how does that change the ways that they are used in places with different conceptions of privacy and information? How do people make decisions to share information with social technology applications? How can we understand privacy as a cultural practice?  I’ve been thinking a lot about these questions as it relates to privacy, trust, and relationships as I prepare for my fieldwork in China.

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In a country that is just beginning to create a rule of law based on individual rights and justice, the importance of maintaining anonymity in many contexts is critical because it means that one can put their idea(s) out there without the fear of personal retribution. So one of the most important priorities for online users in China is the ability to be anonymous.  

A western approach of complete information openness wouldn’t work in China because the anonymous user has an important role in maintaining information openness in a Chinese context. Countless online and offline stories in China have succeeded because of the mass participation of millions of anonymous users in leaving comments, making posts, and participating in online discussions.*  Privacy is critical for these individuals because it allows me them to have a voice—a voice they wouldn’t be able to have if they made their identity open. We have to recalibrate our expectations for places with different social-political contexts of information and privacy.  I’m afraid that Western companies don’t have a nuanced understanding of the cultural intricacies surrounding privacy in China (and as many scholars have pointed out in the West also).

How can companies design technologies with the understanding that anonymity is a right, not a privilege? Or even more relevant is to ask, how do companies design the right to privacy/publicness into our technologies? 

Google Buzz, a product recently launched by Google in the US ran into a lot of problems because Google misunderstood the importance of privacy for users and how users defined privacy. In her recent talk, danah boyd argued that Google understood privacy as a binary, private vs public, and failed to see privacy as a spectrum. After Danah’s talk, the Buzz team admitted that they had screwed up. So even Google had to learn that privacy isn’t always evil.

I think one of the interesting things to come out of this lesson that Google quickly learned from is that  open-access to information cannot always be the default. This default works for some of their products because these services (such as search) tend to work best in an open-access free-information environment.  Both searchers and search providers benefit from information non-scarcity. (There are unintended consequences to searching, but I’ll leave that alone for now.)

But social applications that serve to mediate personal ties do not operate in an open-access environment. No matter how much we design “openness” into our social technologies, social technologies operate under conditions of information scarcity because social ties are scarce. We value our ties because we have a limited of ties whether it is our 2 best friends from childhood or 60,893 Twitter followers or 300 facebook friends. Social ties - they take time to create and nuture, they can be fragile, unpredictable, meaningful and/or sensitive, and they are limited. 

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GUANXI  and SOCIAL CONNECTIONS - To really understand anonymity, we have to explore the meaning of guanxi in China. Guanxi is the Chinese equivalent to social connections.  Just like one’s social connections in the US, a Chinese person’s guanxi consists of people they know on a personal, familial, or professional basis. Guanxi also means that social connections require a level of mutual obligation. 

A lot of scholars and journalists have framed guanxi as a unique Chinese social phenomenon but I argue that they overemphasize practices of mutual obligation.

I just don’t buy the argument that Chinese people value their social network that much more than other people. This argument implies that others, such as Americans, care less about their social connections or place less value on social obligations than Chinese people. That’s simply not true. Look at our obsession with managing our social networks.  If anything, Americans want to believe that success is purely based on the individual. But any sociologist can tell you that income, social networks, race, education, parent’s education and all that stuff that helps you meet other people does matter. A lot. And they also matter in China, but in different ways.

WHY CHINESE PEOPLE MIGHT HAVE DIFFERENT IDEAS ABOUT PRIVACY - So why might Chinese people have a different cultural orientation towards social connections? I need to explore this further, but my initial hypothesis is that Chinese ideas about privacy are connected to the recent historical period of repression, a different cultural historical experience, and different orientations towards social visibility.

1.) Chinese history is still rife with fresh memories of people who suffered by making their social connections explicit. This is still true in mixed-market Communist China; however it may change as the people will not be penalized for their social connections and as there is more temporal distance from the traumatizing events of the past. Social amnesia can present an opportunity for new practices to be born. 
2.) Making social connections explicit can be seen as a form of bragging, which in general is not seen as a favorable trait in China. There is a cultural expectation that the more people you know, the more careful you are to not flaunt these social connections.
3.) People are much more judicious about making their social connections explicit. People don’t always invite someone else to be their contact on some social media site because they sometimes aren’t sure that the other person wants to be their contact or wants for their connection to be made explicit. They fear that the other person will feel obligated to become their social contact and from then on, the actual real-life social connection could be ruined due to this awkward dance in social media connections. In my research, adults and youth both expressed a lot of doubt, fear, and confusion about making someone a “contact.” Many of them preferred to just keep chatting with their private list of contacts over QQ because it was easier and more comfortable to manage their social connections privately than to engage in a platform that made their networks more visible to other people. 

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PRIVACY AS CULTURAL - I find it more useful to think of privacy as a cultural practice than as an act of rational choice between private vs. public.  As I state earlier, danahboyd insightfully makes the point that privacy is not a binary - it’s not just on or off - it’s a spectrum of contexts that are lot more complex than our online architectures are designed for right now. Following danah’s point, I am going to start thinking of privacy as a cultural practice. ‘Privacy as Cultural’ means that we have to start asking what are the multiple histories and narratives attached to various notions of privacy in any one place/region. There are multiple notions of privacy at any one time competing, conforming, complementing, and cohering.  Framing privacy as a cultural act means that we can observe it and describe it. Privacy is a process, it’s negotiated, and it’s constantly in flux. 

HOW TO UNDERSTAND CULTURAL ASPECTS of PRIVACY - Making the case that privacy is cultural all of sudden sounds kinda touchy feely. It can be difficult to get a handle on culture and it can be even more obscure to think about how companies could become more attuned to the nuances of privacy. 

GUANXI, PRIVACY, and TECHNOLOGY - What technology companies designing for the Chinese market need to grasp is that cultural orientations towards privacy — especially around guanxi — matter. They matter because if the technologies that are designed for social networking in the US are simply re-launched in China, they will fail. They will fail because Chinese people do not share the same cultural orientation towards anonymity, privacy, and user preferences in online or offline social networks as Americans. Guanxi is something that one holds near and dear to them, so close that they don’t want to reveal it.  Let me play with this analogy - Social connections in China are like underwear, whereas social connections in America are like a jacket. The difference is that Chinese people want to keep their social connections out of the public eye, while American people want to display their social connections. The difference here is that Americans and Chinese have different cultural orientations towards transparency, privacy, and anonymity.** In real life, social connections can defined on more implicit or explicit terms, depending on how social connections are made known in the specific context.

For example, we can learn so much from Chinese people who have tried to replicate successful American social networks and failed at it. One example is Linkedin. Linkedin is a US online social networking site where users list all the jobs they have ever had and all the people they know or have worked with in the form of “connections.” Around 2004-05, Lin Feng 林枫 copied Linkedin for the Chinese market. It was a total failure. Why? Because Chinese people didn’t want to show off their underwear. Chinese copy-cat of Linked in failed back then because Chinese people didn’t want to make their social connections explicit. 

Take the Chinese equivalent to Facebook on Kaixin. If you talk to most people who use it, they will tell you that they use it to connect to friends. But, if you actually observe what they are doing, you will see that they use it to look for music. Yes, music. It’s kind of like myspace stripped of social connections. Underlying this supposed social media network that seems to be a copycat of myspace and of facebook is an extensive music exchange network. That’s definitely different from how we use social media here in the US. The music industry has instilled enough fear and guanxi throughout American-based social media companies to ensure that music sharing does not become an easily sharable commodity.

The story of the Linkedin copy-cat and Kaixin show how cultural orientations towards privacy and social connections matter in how a technology is used. What companies and scholars have to understand is that:

1.) it’s not that social connections matters more to Chinese people and less to American people, it’s that they matter in different ways that we might not notice at first glance2.) technologies are NOT neutral 3.) “free-information” narratives must be contextualized - free to what ends? what are the socio-political contexts for free? What do people expect of “openness”?4.) social media apps are not universal in the ways they are used

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SO WHAT’S NEXT?  Understanding privacy as culture is an important lesson for tech companies that are increasingly focusing their design energy in the software business. Even companies, like Nokia, that were once hardware based companies, have to re-define  material practices as linked to cultural understandings around social media applications. (I’ll write another post on Nokia)

Well there is so much more to understand and explain that I hope to contribute more to this dialogue. I would love to see more research that makes clear how the values of guanxi in China differ from the values of connections in the US and how this difference can be turned into an awareness that is designed into technologies for the Chinese market. So one of the questions that I will be answering in my fieldwork is how can services/apps be designed for communities with alternative orientations towards transparency.

So I’ve decided to dedicate a portion of my fieldwork in China to understanding the cultural aspects of privacy. I thought one way to really to get at local notions of privacy is to spend time with local venture capitalists and entrepreneurs of failed or ongoing Web 2.0 technologies.

Research on failure offers many cultural insights for understanding how innovation takes places and how values are mis-read or mis-build into technologies. I am really excited to spend some time in Beijing and Shanghai with people who have created all these failed  twitter-lilke  copycats that the government has shut down. There’s more to do the story thaat Chinese Web 2.0 land is a just a pure copy of US web 2.0 apps. A recent techcrunch article portrayed Westerners rushing into China and licking their wounds over US introduced technologies that have failed in China. The article doesn’t mention all the exciting experimentation happening on the ground with Chinese VCs and entrepreneurs. For example, Farmville is actually a game invented in China.

The majority of my fieldwork will still involve making sense of how new users, the rural to urban migrants in Wuhan, and interact with these new online technologies. I’m going to be moving to Wuhan, China and making frequent visits to Beijing and China for 1 year for ethnographic research starting March 2011.  If you’re in China and am interested in these topics, let’s talk! Or if you are or know of any Chinese entrepreneurs or venture capitalists of the internets, I would love to chat with you!

(thanks Chun Xia for inspiring me to follow up on Chinese entrepreneurs!)

*Check out Min Jiang’s articles on online public deliberation in China. Her research suggests that the current limitations of speech online should also be examined alongside reforms being made on the ground in local citizen participation.

Jiang, Min. 2009. “Exploring Online Structures on Chinese Government Portals: Citizen Political Participation and Government Legitimation.”Social Science Computer Review 27:174-195. Jiang, Min. 2010.   “Running Head: Authoritarian Deliberation.”

**I realize that I’m generalizing here and that there are millions of Americans who don’t want to be online and have their social connections even documented, and that they are millions of Chinese people who would love to make all their connections public. But I do believe that social media technologies are designed for the greatest number of users and there is no doubt that facebook, twitter, myspace, linkedin, and other online apps wouldn’t be as successful in the US were it not for a larger social proclivity among users to make their social connections explicit. 

When Google left China in early 2010, many attributed Google’s move as a valiant and moral response to the Chinese government’s strict information filtering rules. I disagreed with this point of view and wrote a post on Cultural Bytes on what I thought were the real reasons for Google’s quick departure from China. 

A few months later, I was asked to keynote the New Directions in the Humanities Conference at UCLA on June 29, 2010. This gave me the chance to rethink some of the original comments I made back in early 2010. In my original post, I argued that Google failed to create successful brand recognition in the Chinese market, to launch a recognizable marketing campaign that stood out against Baidu (the reigning search engine in China), and to understand the values of non-elite users in China. I then suggested that Google should’ve put more time in understanding the cultural orientations of Chinese users before expecting services that they had originally developed for Western users to just be readily embraced by Chinese consumers.

As I started preparing for my talk, I began thinking more about why the world’s largest search engine left the largest online market. I realized that my original post only barely scraped the surface of the Google-China saga. The bigger issue was more than a matter of Google failing to conduct proper ethnography and user tests on the Chinese market. The real issue is that China and Google see the world in different ways and this informs their outlook on how access to information should be mediated. And ultimately Google assumed that their world view would eventually trump China’s.

For my keynote, I make the case that Google failed in China for two reasons. First, drawing upon the ideas that I made in my original post, I discuss how Google never created useful services for non-elite digital users based off of my ethnographic work in China.

Second, I argue that the Google-China saga is an example of a contemporary clash in moral orders centered around information politics. Google exemplifies a hacker ethic that can be traced back to Enlightenment ideals of individual achievement while China reflects Confucian cultural norms of social harmony that emerged 2,400 years ago during the early Han dynasty. A moral order rooted in Enlightenment ideals rewards rebels, while a moral order rooted in Confucian ideals rewards followers. 

Access to information has become a battle site of cultural imperialism. Information politics is ultimately a struggle over meaning and symbols. Google, one of the main players, has successfully linked the commodification of information to an ethical system of social change which I call “neo-informationalism,” a retooling of neo-liberal ideals and a re-envisioning of imperialism based on information as a primary means to wealth expansion in the digital age.

My talk is split into 3 parts.  I explain the history of the Google-China saga and my disclaimers in the introduction. Part 1 is about why Google failed in China due to a lack of deep cultural understanding of the market. Part 2 is about how Google and China ascribe to differing moral orders. Part 3 is about Google’s unintentional engagement in imperialism. And in my conclusion I provide directions for technologists, academics, and businesses for how to move forward with lessons from the Google-China saga.

Here’s an excerpt from Part 3 and the conclusion. Pease take a look at my talk here (pdf download here). My assertions will make much more sense when the talk is read in its entirety. I’ve also included footnotes for follow up readings in the full version. The slides that go along with my talk can be viewed/downloaded here. And some pics from the conference here, and lastly the audio from the conference talk is here.

So let’s go directly into Part 3!

*I look forward to your thoughts on this topic. Plus, this is only the beginning of the Google-China saga!

___________________________________________

PART 3

From doing business with guns, germs, and steel to computers, code, and clouds

Some business analysts, politicians, and the Western media cheered Google on for standing up to China and relocating to Hong Kong which, mind you, is still a part of China. Others thought that the sheer size of the Chinese market would sway Google to stay in China, much like Microsoft, Yahoo, and others. But I want to highlight one particular analysis.  

Umair Haque, an economist and Director of the Havas Media Lab, claimed on the Harvard Business Review blog that by leaving China Google had taken an ethically motivated, not an economically motivated stance.  He argued that Google’s decision gives them an

“ethical edge…that’s always been at the heart of Google’s disruptive success.” “…a Google that doesn’t play by China’s rules is a better business, which creates more thicker [sic], sustainable, meaningful value.” 

In his Awesomeness Manifesto, he asserted that corporations engaged in “ethical production” are more financially successful and meaningful than those that don’t because they innovate in the name of a “higher calling” not in the name of profits.

Let’s consider Umair’s proposal on Google’s ethical edge. 

I agree that Google believes that they have an “ethical edge.”  They believe that they draw upon the qualities that stand opposite from evil— benevolence, compassion, and kindness— to  serve their higher-calling of introducing the world to information.

But I absolutely disagree with Umair that this “ethical edge” is anything new. This is a common moral trope of colonialism, imperialism, globalization, and neo-liberalism: ethical beliefs that justify expansionary practices of extracting commodities and creating new markets in the name of a “higher calling.” 

But instead of extracting spices, opium, gold, bodies, labor or oil, Google was trying to extract information from the Chinese market and then commodify that information as it provided it back to Chinese consumers — ostensibly in the name of “freedom”. The weapon of choice is no longer guns, germs, and steel, but free-information, open platforms, and distributed architectures.

Tropes of colonialism 

To be fair, this “ethical edge” isn’t just being practiced by Google. It’s also practiced by countless other technology companies that make their way from the West to other continents. It’s also the very rhetoric employed by many proponents of the free and open-source software movement, the ICT4D field (Information Communication Technology for Development), and OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) community.

So I ask us, why are we so invested in the idea of Google being in mainland China?  I suspect that one of the reasons is that Google’s relocation of its servers to Hong Kong opened up an existing set of anxieties among ourselves about America’s place in the global order.

But what Americans don’t get is that this openness is contingent upon America’s vision of keeping markets open, tearing down national borders, and creating an open ICT network that preserves America’s interest in being the world’s police, superpower and economic leader.
We thought that we could bring the internet to the world and the architecture would remain open.  What we didn’t expect was for countries to use the internet to advance their own agendas in the same way that the US was already doing: using their own culture, policies, and system of ethics. 

Algorithms of social change: new technologies, same old games

And here’s the kicker - in leaving China because the Chinese government wouldn’t conform to their rules, Google reproduced the very imperialistic behavior that have characterized the greatest imperial powers: leaving a country or region when they couldn’t get the natives to abandon their own way of thinking or adopt a new way of behaving.

What’s emerging is a new rhetoric of development and globalization in what I am calling neo-informationalism: the belief that information should function like currency in free-market capitalism -  border-less, free from regulation, and mobile. The logic of neo-informationalism rests on an moral framework that is tied to what Morgan Ames calls “information determinism,” the belief that free and open access to information can create social change. This moral framework of neo-informationalism is so naturalized that Google and like-minded companies work their way around the world unquestioned for their position on open information. Phrases such as “information wants to be free” reflect the techno-anthropomorphizing of information, a necessary step in naturalizing any neo-informationalist agenda.

Neo-informationalism is a re-visioning of a non-redistributive laissez-faire ideology of modernization theory transplanted into Western technologies that assumes surely people cannot be self-sufficient without unlimited access to the tools that connect them to the world wide web. Underlying this ideology is the notion that information openness and market openness are inseparable and non-mutually exclusive. Information openness can only be achieved through free-market conditions.

This is a model of social change that puts faith in objects, not in governance processes. Neo-informationalism and neo-liberalism work symbiotically to create what Wendy Brown calls the governed citizen who seeks solutions in products as opposed to the political process. While Wendy wasn’t speaking of technological objects per se, I make the case that this is indeed a variant of the hacker ethic; social change is made through direct programming of software code and interaction with technological devices while maintaining distance from the state.

What I want to point out is that while this is a very reasonable process being accomplished by very reasonable people — Westerners creating products and policies for Westerners - I am not comfortable with pushing this belief on others in the name of a “higher calling.” This is a simply a redux of cultural imperialism that says “we know better than you, and if you don’t believe us, too bad you have no choice, because we’re offering you emancipation by giving you access to our Internets.”

We should question any ethical system that reproduces a familiar trope of colonialism. Whereas past waves of imperialism used Religion, Science, or Globalization as a rhetoric of development, the new rhetoric of neo-informationalism is used as a guiding principle for entering new regions—ethical principles that can be used as proxies for pushing our belief system onto other people. As a result, the work can be less about free information and unlimited compassion and more about desires for free-access to new markets and new commodities.

CONCLUSION

Create understanding

So does this mean that we have to give up on Google? No, the world doesn’t work in binaries and neither should you nor I. I depend on Google for most of on my online communication. I’m known among my friends as a Google evangelist. I force my friends onto gmail and its amazing filtering capabilities. I heart Google and could talk about its services ad naseum. But while I love the technical aspects of Google’s products, I am at the same time critical of the limits and affordances of its technologies. Technologies are never just technologies. They are machines laden with cultural expectations imbued by their creators.   

But herein lies my fear: What if we start thinking that there is no alternative to the institution of Google? What if the “Google model” starts to become what we think of as the most natural way to do things? We need to question any ”reality that presents itself as natural”and that includes something as apparently innocuous as Google.

We need to make sure that we don’t succumb to Googlist Realism. Much like Capitalist Realism, the belief that there is no alternative to the reality of capitalism as a way of life, Googlist Realism is the belief that there is no alternative to Google as our search engine and as our gatekeeper of information. The belief that capitalism can improve life is now supplanted by the free-information regimes of neo-informationalism - the belief that unfettered information access is life. 

 Google has successfully linked the commodification of information to an ethical system of social change. This rhetoric is so strong that I worry that we could lose our imagination for any other form of information reality or social change outside of a Google-like model. I also worry that those who question this model will be framed as enemies of freedom, information, and social change.

Google and China have their own visions for the social life of information and for the role of information in society. We should be equally critical of a corporation with algorithms that create a consensual consumer culture based on advertising clicks as we are of a country with policies that create a consensual citizenry based on obedience through a paternalistic form of governance. 

But we should also be equally hopeful of a corporation with digital applications that create access to information that was reserved for the privileged as we are of a country with social policies that empower people to explore their talents and scale their services through government-supported, free-market entrepreneurship.

Summarizing the five main points that I’ve made today

1. As countries create their own internet policies, information politics will become a key site of contestation in a globally networked society. 
 

As corporations and governments use the ethics of neo-informationalism to look for new markets and cheap labor, some countries will also counter these efforts with their own ethics. Capitalist growth depends not only on the physical architecture of ICTs, but also on the reach of an ethical system to support the open use of ICTs.  Ethics do matter. In the absence of religious or governmental heroes, the digital economy also needs its own goddesses.   

Just as we’ve created public institutions to regulate, debate, and check transnational corporations in times of excess neo-liberalism, we’ve got to create similar institutions for information in times of excess neo-informationalism. As Theodore Porter demonstrated in his insightful work on accounting as a system of information and a site of ethical battles, “the history of information is almost synonymous with the history of large enterprises.”

 
 2. Information disjunctures will increasingly fall along moral and ethical disagreements between institutions, reflecting tensions in regional values and beliefs.

Institutions that mediate information will increasingly have to deal with a diversity of moral orders that are regionally specific, originally proposed in the the “Górniak hypothesis” in 1996.  We have to realize that just like any other institution, the internet will be implemented and used in such a way that it maps onto existing social forces, institutions, and values.

That is why understanding regional internet culture is important.

Here I draw upon institutional theory and in particular Philip Agre’s amplification model of how new institutions don’t necessarily create new social behaviors, rather they amplify existing ones. This theory explains why Google has not “changed” China to become a nation modeled in the image of the US. Even something as open as the internet will be localized. This is because 1.) not all people/countries are the same and 2.) not all sovereign nations will welcome neo-informationalism as envisioned by the West. Many countries and individuals are suspicious of how “The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, alongside the U.S. Trade Representative, the Federal Communications Commission, and other apostles of neo-liberalism, used multiple levers to pry open global networking to corporate-commercial investment” argues Dan Schiller.

   
3. I also argue that what’s at stake in the clashes of moral orders is the determination of meaning. Google isn’t just an information processing entity, it is a meaning-making entity. 
As a meaning-making institution, Google is in the business of standardizing and universalizing the domination of “autonomous [and public] information” as attached to democracy, liberation, and excellence (Porter  228). Whoever controls information and the means of dissemination, controls meaning and the symbols associated with it—hence culture. 

For nation-states, culture becomes an even more powerful instrument of social control which will increasingly be mediated through digital means.

For corporations, culture becomes an an ever more powerful instrument of profit and this will increasingly be mediated over digital information spaces where our desires and preferences can be sorted and indexed.

4. There is a diversity in cultural orientations and they matter in how technologies are used, received, and created.

As companies start designing more software for a diversity of communities and conditions around the world, there is a greater need to understand how culture is exhibited in emotive and tangible ways. We can no longer ascribe to traditional binaries that place culture on a local level and money on a global scale. However geographically stationary some groups may be, ideas and energies are mobile. But this does not necessarily mean that mobility leads to greater flows in cooperation, rather it can also lead to greater fluxes in stability. A nuanced understanding of cultural orientations as an ongoing narrative will be required to navigate this space. 

5. Institutions will continue to make attempts to bound the internet. But in a digitally-mediated network society where communication streams and physical contact are more frequent than ever, it becomes harder to maintain silos of communication. The digital mobility of ideas, people, and images means that moral orders are coming into contact with each other.

As information, culture, symbols, and ideas become more mobile, it will become harder for any entity to unilaterally enforce their own moral orders. Because of this, we’re going to see more collisions in moral orders as information becomes destabilized and detached from its geographic point of origin. 

The internet is a host to amazing forms of participatory culture and will continue to be so precisely because its network architecture allows a diversity of interactions to take place - from gated communities to open spaces. Nation-states can try to create a bounded internet, but with some people and ideas more mobile than ever before, it becomes harder to enforce global digital walls. 

In a digitally mediated world, the logics of replication do not function according to a mechanical order. A la Gilles Deleuze, Manual de Landa, and Felix Guattari, I think of Lucretius’s quote on atoms:

“When atoms are traveling straight down through empty space by their own weight, at quite indeterminate times and places, they swerve every so little from their course, just so much that you would call it a change of direction. If it were not for this swerve, everything would fall downwards through the abyss of space. No collision would take place and no impact of atom on atom would be created. Thus nature would never have created anything.”

As the moral orders of nations collide, some will clash and some will cohere. But the guarantee is that something is going to happen. It’s already started and we’re going to need people to deconstruct this and place what’s happening in context amid all the noise.

Values in our technologies

Let us be attentive to the values that shape the way we interact with information and the architectures that mediate it.

Today I’ve talked about how beliefs and values are layered onto our technologies and inform our expectations for how they are used. These technologies are never just technical, but they are social and luckily for us they are observable.

A few week ago, Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple said, ”We’re not just a tech company, even though we invent some of the highest technology products in the world,” he said. ”It’s the marriage of that plus the humanities and the liberal arts that distinguishes Apple.” 

Let us be in dialogue with Steve Jobs and Google with some liberal arts magic. Kant, Bentham, and Descartes drew up a new ethical order at the turn of the Industrial Revolution that was a response to the social transformation from the printing age. This is happening now for the interneting age. The liberal arts is positioned with the analytical tools to be part of this dialogue. We should be doing all that we can to make our work public.   

We cannot just leave this agenda to the technologists. We cannot let the new myths about freedom and information to pass without question. We must use critical theory, ethnographic methods, and common-sense to question how cultural values play out, in and around technology. Values not only reproduce contemporary tensions, but they are also sites of contestation. 

*UPDATE: here are some articles published after my talk (June 29, 2010) that I think are worth the read

• July 23, 2010. Paul Denlinger. Google China Is Struggling To Rebuild Its Business  
• July 15, 2010. Paul Denlinger. Who Won in Google’s Showdown with China?
• July 10, 2010. Kai Pan. Henry Blodget Doesn’t Know Crap About the Google China Drama.
• July 11, 2010. Paul Denlinger China: Google backed Down Over Censorship Laws

UPDATE  - August 30. 2010:  I started a research blog, Information Peripeteia,  with Morgan Ames tracking the rhetoric and discourse around free-information.

UPDATE  - September 18, 2010: I extend some of the ideas I first introduced on neo-informationalism on my commentary about digital imperialism and Haystack.

The Great Internet Freedom Bluff of Digital Imperialism: Thoughts on Cyber Diplomacy, Cargo Cult Digital Activism… and Haystack

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been at a technology conference when a white male asks me what I research, and when I say something like “technology use in China,” they will at some point say, “oh man China is  like the Wild Wild West.” I usually respond by saying, “no, it’s not.” And then often they proudly respond with, “ya you’re right, China is the wild wild east!” By then I try to get out of the conversation as quickly as possible.

So here is a more well thought out response that I would like to give the next time I hear this. 

No, China isn’t like the West nor is China wild. During the Wild Wild West era in 18th and 19th century US, expansionists justified the take over of the western part of the US with the belief of Manifest Destiny - that it was America’s mission to bring democracy to the rest of the unconquered west. This is a misleading and pernicious metaphor to employ because it perpetuates a colonial view that those who are not like us and places that we have yet to conquer are unruly. It’s a metaphor simile thats says we are tame, they are wild.

The western part of America back then wasn’t so wild - it actually was filled with hundreds of thousands of Native Indians. It was filled with a complexity of knowledge systems, colonial histories with Spain and Mexico, and ongoing movement of people.

 This space was the “West” for the colonizers with a capital W - a place with its own myths and a place for to carry out Manifest Destiny.  But for the people already living there, it was their place, not the West. It confuses me when we (Americans) glorify the Wild Wild West Era without honoring the people who died during this period. Sure tons of technological feats were achieved. But it was an era of imported indentured slaves (Chinese) and a full slave production in the South that financed the companies that pushed for the fulfillment of Manifest Destiny through the massive genocide of Native Indians (Trail of Tears). American became rich, dirty rich during the Wild Wild West period. And as an America, I’m not proud of how we made our riches in the early years of our empire.  

Employing such a deprecating metaphor simile of the Wild Wild West renders China a place to be conquered, civilized, and remade. It reveals the underlying myths and stories we tell about China  - an unruly land of wild, lawless, people who will benefit from order, rules, and culture, just like how we once envisioned the West as a land full of animals, property, and uncivilized natives. It also frames China as a place frozen in time as people often draw upon China as the oldest and and continuous civilization on earth. The metaphor simile also culls up a way of thinking that not only says this place needs order, but is a worth our time for us to be the arbitrars of order. 

There is a reason why we don’t call Nigeria, Antarica, or Figi the wild wild west - it’s because we don’t see these places as worthwhile markets of investment. 

One of my favorite theorists, Doreen Massey, says that Westerners have a tendency to see space as a smooth flat surface from our own vantage point— a smooth space in which to roll out our ideas, technologies, and policies.

It sometimes seems that in the garadene rush to abandon the singularity of the modernist grand narrative (the singular universal story) what has been adopted in its place is a vision of an instantaneity of interconnections.  But this is to replace a single history with no history…deathlessness.” ( 2005, pg 14 in For Space.)

So by saying that China is the “Wild Wild West,” we are assigning it one narrative—ours.  Massey proposes that we see space as a production of relations, as the co-temporal existence of multiple people, competing histories, and contesting forms of knowledge. Space is a process that is continually being remade. 

What is at stake here if we don’t stop thinking of China as the Wild Wild West? Many things - but the most important thing for me is that  how we think about space actually influences how we interact with others who occupy the space. So thinking of China as the Wild Wild West will influence how you interact with Chinese people and institutions and I’m arguing it’s an undesirable way to interact if you really want to create understanding to accomplish whatever your project.

Ultimately what’s at stake is power and domination is understanding because if we imagine the world as places with singular narratives waiting for our discovery, then this serves a colonial project and legitimizes policies that end up harming the people in these places.

Massey says that all space is regulated. So with that being the case, I see that it’s up to us how this happens. And in a globalized world of networked digital technologies, it’s inevitable for dialogues about how a space is regulated to become more public as more of these conversations take place online. As American companies, IP lawyers, entrepeneurs, marketers, technologists make their way to China, I ask you to see China as part of the World Wide Web as opposed to the Wild Wild Web.  It’s a very simple re-orientation in the mind, but it can be very difficult when Americans grown up in a country that believes that democracy is best delivered through free-market mechanisms and is the best way of life. 

update June 9, 2010: Kenyatta Cheese and I were discussing the techcrunch article on how Web 2.0 companies are learning from their past failed attempts in China. Kenyatta made a point that it would’ve been even better if the article said something about the existing, exciting, and thriving web 2.0 culture in China and

“to at least mention that it isn’t unchartered territory — that there are thousands of Chinese web 2.0 companies already competing in the space.” 

I totally agree. 

update June 14, 2010 -  I just Mike Hudack’s blog post - very relevant:

“Ultimately, the entire universe will become saturated with our intelligence,” he continues. “This is the destiny of the universe.” — Merely Human? That’s so yesterday. NYT (via idlaurenn)

This quote pissed me off more than anything else in that article. What hubris! I can imagine a European explorer saying the same of the New World centuries ago. “Ultimately, the entire planet will become saturated with Western European intelligence and culture and religion. This is the destiny of the planet.”

Yes mike I totallllllly agreeee! pisses me off to to read this quote from Raymond Kurzweil of Singularity at this Google funded talk. This kind of thinking will be the topic of my upcoming talk that I’ve giving at The Humanities conference. 

I just found out that I have received a Fulbright! 

My proposal, Chinese Migrants Families in the Information Age: Intensive Technology and Digital Urbanism. has been approved for funding by the Chinese and US government for research!

The Fulbright require that researchers remain in the host country for at least 10 months. So I’ll be moving to  Wuhan, China next March to conduct fieldwork for 1 year. These long-term research grants are truly the research ethnographer’s dream; it’s a luxury to do really in-depth fieldwork and to be funded to do it.  Surveys and brief visits can give you insight into daily life, but relying soley on those methods does not get at the depth of everyday life and the processes that people are dealing with. 

So I’ll be looking at the socio-digital space for new ICT users in Wuhan. I’ll be asking how migrant families are appropriating new ICTs and how their ICT practices reflects the ways in which they are settling in to the city and making sense of the socio-economic changes in their lives. While most research on migrants have focused mostly on single or coupled migrants who intended to eventually return to their village, I see  a new wave of human mobility within China that points to migrants who move to the city as a family and who intend to stay in the city as a family. This new wave of migration is taking place in 2nd and 3rd tier cities (like Wuhan) that aren’t just economically open to migrants, but also socially and politically. I believe these understudied 2nd and 3rd tier cities are important sites of observation because not only are these cities projected to contain 75% of the growth in wealthiest families, they are also going to be sites of social transformations in China. 

I’ll write another more about my research in another post. I have some stuff up online on the research section of my website, but I’ve already been reformulating my research questions as I’ve learned so much more about what kinds of research is more valuable to industries and those outside of academia after these few months of researching at Nokia. 

Are you going to be in China in 2011? If so, let’s hang out!  I’m leaving in March 2011 for Wuhan and I am hoping to go to CSCW2011 in Hangzhou, China which also takes place in March. 

THANK YOUS! I could not have gotten this grant without the support of my amazing dissertation committee (Jim Hollan, Richard Madsen, Barry Naughton, Christena Turner, April Linton, and Barry Brown). All my fieldwork experience and design technology workshop trials in Mexico with Barry Brown has prepared me to think about my work in China in a totally different light. Christena Turner worked with my grant and personal statement down to the last revisions, offering her brilliant insights and making sure that I included all the details about my own work that I had forgetten. Richard Madsen is the best dissertation chair any graduate student could have. Kenyatta Cheese provided so much help in making sure that I presented my work in non-academic terms. And Linda Vong, UCSD grant expert and Fulbright representative provided tons of insights into the selection process. Thanks Seiko for letting me read your Fulbright grant, and thanks to Melissa Rock and Marcella Szablewicz for giving me tips on the new abstract. Without Jinge as my research sidekick in China, I would’ve never ended up in Wuhan.  Thanks for the grant support from Nokia Research Center so that I can hire a research assistant and increase my scope of analysis!  Leah Muse-Orlinoff you rock for being a great friend and the best graduate school sidekick! And thanks to Manny de la Paz and the entire UCSD Sociology staff for their continued support! 

WAITING HELL: Oh and I must say that this was one of the most excruciating grant wait times I have ever had to suffer! Even though most of the Fulbright application process has been administered online, the notification letter was sent out via regular mail through the USPS. The letter was sent from the UN building in NY. But I had forwarded my mail from NYC to Palo Alto because I moved here to work at Nokia. While everyone else was getting their rejection or acceptance letters  I was trying not to obsess over the daily mail! I seriously was getting panic attacks as I was waiting everyday in limbo for what my next 2 years would look like while everyone else had already received their rejection or acceptance letters. I am so happy to not wake up with a 100 pound weight on my chest in the mornings.  If you are considering to apply for the Fulbright, I’m more than happy to share my experiences about the application process, especially for putting in a proposal about technology usage. I found it really difficult to access info online and to talk with people who had been through this process, and that shouldn’t be the case. Sharing is excellent. 

I did some preliminary fieldwork at the Xinke Migrant school in Wuhan. Here is a story that I think illustrates the misunderstandings about “internet addiction” among youth in China and why government initiated policies limiting internet use among youth will not be effective. These policies aim to curb internet use among youth in public internet cafes, not in private homes. Middle-class and upper-class families have computers at home for their child, therefore most massive internet cafes are used by low-income populations.

*****

About the school: The XinKe school is for children of rural-urban migrants in Wuhan, China. Since migrants don’t have a residential permit (hukou) to be in the city, they are not allowed to attend any of the public schools or access any government-subsidized social services. Therefore, schools for migrant children have opened up around Chinese cities to serve this new population. Many of these schools are unstable, understaffed, unsanitary, and under-qualified. The XinKe school is government certified, therefore they are slightly more legitimate than other non-certified, essentially illegal, migrant schools.

Each student has to pay around 600 yuan ($75) each quarter to attend the school. If students were to attend the school in their birth village, they would not have to pay for their education. The government made high school in rural areas free of charge in 2007. Yet, with rural economies faltering all around China, migrants are pushing forward into cities with their children, regardless of the costs associated with being “illegal” in a city within their own country.

*****

My story: The principal of  the school told me that students often sleep in class because they are not living in places with good shelter.  The principal also said that one of his biggest concerns was the negative consequences of internet addiction among the students. He told me that youth, as young as seven years old, would spend eight hours a day at cyber-cafes playing online games instead of using the internet to do their homework.

When I asked students why they spent so much time in the cafes, they repeatedly told me that they thought it was fun; it was a place for them to play with their friends on and off-line. They told me that they often shared a computer between 2-3 friends and would spend the time playing games. If you think about this, this is a very physical process that involves the body in a physical place. Inside the cafes, you often see 2-3 kids (genders don’t mix) around one computer. One kid is playing a game, while the other two are giving advice, yelling at him, or trying to take over the round. There bodies are touching due to the spatial constraints. Kids will grab each other’s arms, try to take over the mouse, and point at the screen. What I’m describing here is a lot of bonding and touching that takes place off-line inside the internet cafe.

The key is the off-line part: the internet cafe for the kids are equivalent to an outdoor playground. In Wuhan, public playgrounds are rare. Therefore, the internet cafe serves as a digital and physical playground for youth to spend time together in place.

I then spoke to the parent of a child who had been spending a lot of time at the internet cafe and was receiving low marks in his classes. I asked whether or not this concerned her. Interestingly, she told me her and her husband were well aware of his internet habits, but they were partially relieved to know where he was spending his time. They were happy that he wasn’t hanging out on the street with local street gangs or engaging in activities that could get him trouble. While they weren’t happy that he wasn’t doing his schoolwork because of his time spent at the café, they could at least feel assured that he was safe and in one place at all times.

*****

This story illustrates how parents justify the time that their kids spend at the cafes despite the negative impact on their education. Although government laws try to prevent youth from spending excessive amounts of time online at internet cafes, the laws will not be as effective when low-income parents think of the internet cafe as the most ideal “babysitting” site that is affordable and safe. Parents only have to spend 10-20 yuan a day for their kids to spend all night or day at the cafe. The cafe has a bathroom and sells instant noodle.

And for the kids - they just see this as a fun place to hang out. They’re not just gaming with strangers online. The cafe is a physical place where friendships are negotiated face-to-face.

If the government wants kids to spend less time in internet cafes, they should think about building more public spaces for low-income families. They should improve the access to education for non-hukou residents in migrant destination cities.

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In the first picture (top left), the principal is trying to reach a mother of a ten-year old child who has been spending every afternoon at the internet cafe.  The picture on the top right shows the internet cafe that the student goes to every night. It is a one-minute walk from where he lives with his family. The picture on the bottom left shows the student being reprimanded by the teacher for not doing his homework. The picture on the bottom right shows the student’s classroom.

More pictures of the Xinke school for migrants here on flickr.