I am so excited to find out that I have received a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant! I will be going this summer to work with in China with the China Internet Network Information Center 中国互联网络信息中心 (CNNIC), the government agency that manages all of China’s internet affairs (equivalent to the FCC in the US). I met with CNNIC last summer in Beijing. We agreed upon a summer project in which I would analyze how youths and migrants are using ICTs to manage their inter-personal communication networks, with a special interest in online gaming networks.

It’s pretty exciting that these next 3 months at CNNIC will be the start of my dissertation fieldwork. I will be in Beijing for two months this summer! Here’s the title and description of my project below. If you or anyone you know is working on anything related to China and the internet - I would love to talk to you or them! And let’s talk if you are you going to be in Beijing this summer!

Title: China’s Internet Policy and Digital Network Architecture: Information Communication Technology (ICT) Practices among Youths and Migrant

Project Summary: This project asks how China’s internet policies and digital architectures influence the communication practices of two important and growing populations of new users—youths and migrants. I investigate how the inter-personal communication patterns of youths and migrants are affected by two factors: (1) recent internet usage policies set by the Chinese administration and (2) cellphone and internet digital architecture—an infrastructural comparison that is a central feature of this study.

The availability of popular ICTs to all citizens in countries such as China, renders problematic any theoretically dichotomous notions of the “Digital Divide” that are based on ICT “haves and have-nots”—where the “haves” have more technology and are consequently more empowered than the “have-nots.” A central contribution of this study is that it has the potential to transform current concepts of technology access and of ICT usage by accounting for important and specific technological differences in digital architectures and communication policies in the practices of new ICT users in China.

Thank you to Christena Turner, Richard Madsen, Eric Cech, Shannon Spanhake, Kenyatta Cheese, leah muse-orlinoff, stephanie little, Bill Blanpied and Bill Chang for all your help!

In preparation for my summer research project, “China’s Internet Policy and Digital Network Architecture: Information Communication Technology (ICT) Practices among Youths and Migrant” at China Internet Network Information Center 中国互联网络信息中心 (CNNIC), I went to DC for an NSF-sponsored meeting for the EAPSI program through the Office of International Science and Engineering (OISE).

I was finally able to meet up with two Bill’s who made this oppotunity possible, Bill Blanpied on the left and Bill Chang on the right. I am grateful for their introductions to Dr. Mao Wei, who I will be working with this summer at CNNIC along with his amazing office of reseachers, including Wan En Hai! This is so exciting to work with Dr .Mao Wei - the person who started CNNIC and established many of the early efforts in China that has allowed it to grow so quickly and efficiently.

I met Bill Blanpied in India during the summer of 2008 for the China-India-US Workshop on Science, Technology and Innovation Policy in Bangalore, India. After the informative conference I was heading off to China for fieldwork from India, so Bill suggested that I meet up with Bill Chang, the Director of NSF’s Beijing office at that time.

I am so grateful for the guidance from Bill-Squared - thank you for all your encouragement on my project!

I am now in Wuhan, China, setting up fieldwork site. I’ve been talking to Wuhan University and some local schools about my dissertation research on analyzing how migrants’ use of technology is reshaping the urban space and how internet policies affect migrants’ communication patterns. Before I head to Beijing on June 14th to work with the CNNIC (China Internet Network Information Center) to look at how their policies affect migrants use of internet cafes and mobile phones - I thought it would be a good idea to travel to other parts of China to talk to youth and families about their use of internet cafes.

I am so glad I did this for 2 reasons. 1) because I now understand the extent of internet addiction as a serious problem among youth in China.
2.) and I have a better sense of the social context of the addiction problem among migrant youth in urban China.

There are critiques coming from the West about China’s “heavy handed” internet policies, such as the stopping of internet cafe permits. But many of these critiques don’t understand the social context of this policy. Internet addiction among under-served urban youth is a serious problem in China. A policy such as a temporary halt in internet cafe permits is an example of an state attempt to deal with this social problem. In the West - we tend to see any attempts to regulate “information access” as a violation of rights - but we do it all the time with parental controls on televisions, internet browsers, search engines and etc - so why we not willing to understand it within a Chinese context?

From my brief talks with the principal of a local school for children of migrants - I found out that the principal is absolutely bewildered by how to deal with internet addiction among the teenage youth. The school serves 1st through 9th graders - and he says that starting at 5th grade they are going to internet cafes for hours and whole nights to just play games - they aren’t doing their homework.

With this new information - i am considering changing the focus of my dissertation to be about technology usage within the context of an urban migrant family unit. I would still look at how migrants’ use of technology is reshaping urban space - but i specifically would look at migrant families - so that i can understand how the youth, mother and/or father is using ICTs. So a new focus would be how technology is used across generations within one family. For example - is the mother primarily relying on her mobile to find work while the teenage youth is using the internet cafe as a form of entertainment and hanging out with friends? What are they using to contact their family in the villages? to what extent are parents aware of their child’s use of ICTs? How do parents use ICTs to secure social resources for themselves or their child? I have all these new questions after my visit to the school and new framework in which to place internet addiction as a social problem.

i told the principal that I wanted to suggest some sites for the youth to check out to improve their english and math - he absolutely forbade me to encourage them to spend time online - even if it was for educational purposes. he then explained China doesn’t have any free educational sites.

when I spoke to the parent’s of children who spend hours upon hours at internet cafes - all of them told me tht they were fully aware of their child’s pastime - however they said that at least we know they are in ONE place and the internet cafe is safer and cleaner than where we live. Migrants live on the edges of urban areas, many of which may not be as safe as these internet cafes.

I suspect that internet cafes are a form of an after-school program for the kids - the parents feel comfortable knowing that they are in one place. I also suspect that the youth do not know how to use the internet for educational purposes - or more so are their educational resources in China for students? Must find that out.
I also think that parents aren’t able to provide as much material resources for their children compared to middle-class parents - but at the same time they still feel guilty or as if they aren’t doing enough. Therefore, giving them 5 RMB a hour for internet access is the least they feel they can do. It’s kind of like the candy problem in the village where I do fieldwork at in Oaxaca - poorer mothers want to give their child a full meal but are unable to - so they give them a few pesos to buy candy to fill their tummy up - to give them a fake sense of fullness. They don’t know that they are contributing to a future in diabetes by doing this - and even if they did - what can they do? their child is hungry - but they don’t have enough money for food - candy holds off hunger - and the kids love eating it.

ok back to the internet and China- I wonder if in a way parents are showing their care through giving their children $ for internet cafes and mobile credit to send text messages.

another thought comes to my mind is to find out how the ICTs reshape urban familial relationships.

ok will write more later - I’m writing from an internet cafe with lots of smoke so gotta go!

pic below -me with Jin Ge, founder of the school and the principal

I visited the school while the students were sleeping - i will be returning today to chat with some of the youth during non-nap hours. you can read more about the school and see more photos on my personal blog post about the school visit.

7th Chinese Internet Research Conference: The Chinese Internet and Civil Society: Civic Engagement, Deliberation and Culture May 27-29, 2009

This was a conference that I am very upset that I couldn’t attend! It was help at U. of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of Communication’s Center for Global Communication Studies. I found out last minute while attending the 2009 International Communication Association Conference (May 22-26) in Chicago.

Hopefully I can go to the 8th CIRC wherever it will be held. Webcasts of the 2009 conference are available here.

CIRC 2009 “is designed to bring together scholars and professionals to examine the Chinese Internet from socioeconomic, political and cultural perspectives. While there has been significant research on the political implications of the Internet in China, we have yet to fully understand the changes the Internet is fostering in civil society, or on the intersection between the market and the state, as well as the Internet’s cultural implications for identity formation, emergent cultural phenomena and social networking. This conference seeks to explore these uncharted areas through sessions on Public Sphere and Deliberation; Censorship, Surveillance, and the State of the Chinese Internet; Civil Society in China - Challenges and Opportunities; Women and Minorities; Civic Engagement and Participation; Panics, Nationalism; and Grassroots Culture, among others. On May 29, a small post-conference workshop will concentrate on prominent academics, bloggers and policy analysts on Chinese Perspectives on Internet governance. “

i’ve started doing preliminary interviews with youth who are from villages and are now residing in Beijing. I’m trying to get a better understanding of the different ways that youth use ICTs in their village before coming to the city.

Ultimately my research in Wuhan will focus on ICT usage in the city, but I think it’s important that I am able to situate urban ICT usage in a larger context and one that includes rural ICT usage since the migrants I speak to will all be from the countryside.

I’ve been speaking to Beimeng (named changed), an 18 year female who is now studying in Beijing. We were hanging out on the subway talking about her home, a village with a population of 3,000  in Dongei. Her family is financially stable and considered to be me more well off than others. Her mother is a school teacher and her father is a truck driver.

Their family just installed broadband at the beginning of this year. I asked her what it was like to have internet at home. She told me that it was “nice” but no one is really home that often. She is now living in the city, her mom is always at work, and her dad is usually gone for weeks at a time driving his truck.

Since people aren’t home very often, I asked if they were still going to keep paying for the service.  Beimeng said that they definitely plan on keeping it because they plan on surveillancing their fertilizer through the internet. I thought that I had misheard or mis-translated some word - but indeed Beimeng was talking about fertilizer.

Like many other villages, the introduction of fertilizers has changed life in Xiheyuancun Village (pseudonym). The village is now considered prosperous with great crop yields. Beimeng’s family is able to purchase high-end fertilizer. Their family is known for having some of the best fertilizer in the village so people often steal their fertilizer. A few years ago, they installed a camera surveillance system where they could monitor the fertilizer from inside their home.

But none of their family members are home that often. As a result, they will stream the surveillance of their fertilizer over the Internet so that they can keep an eye on it from anywhere they can get online. I asked her where and with with her and her family would most likely use to check the video stream. She said that she would most likely take a look from the internet cafes or her cellphone. Her father would only check in on the fertilizer through his cellphone because he is usually on the road. As for her mom, she would most likely be the person who will consistently keep an eye on the camera feed from her work computer at school.

i find this story fascinating for many reasons.

1.) it’s an example of how rural-urban migrant populations keep ties to their village. For Beimeng, she still felt very involved in the family process of monitoring the fertilizer.

2. ) use of technology in a context specific this village. Streaming video as a form of surveillancing is an old idea. Security guard firms to doggy day care centers do it.   Yet here we have an individual farming family using the internet to monitor their fertilizer, which is a very contextually specific idea.

3.) this story is indicative of the level of trust and intimacy in the village. Beimeng was telling me that as a child, the village was more poor but her mom said that robbery was not a problem.

4.) I find it interesting that they installed the internet,  realized that no one really used it, yet still found a way to make it useful for their mobile lives.

5.) Beimeng said that her father (truck driver)  would check in through his cellphone (using the mobile internet) and her mother would check in through her work computer. This point illustrates the increasing differences that we will see in how people use the internet versus mobile internet. Beimeng’s father is a truck driver, so relies on his mobile. But her mother has a stationary job with constant access to her work computer.

6.) we tend to think of the only entity that uses the internet to monitor activities is the government (esp. in China), but in this case we have an individual household who has decided to use it as a monitoring device

7..) This is a story very specific to China’s countryside as land reforms in the late 70’s the give every individual household  a plot of land. With parceled plots, this means that families can make choices about what and how to plant the land. Families  who can afford high-grade fertilizer, like Beimeng’s, can keep making more money. Within one village, there can be a lot of class distinctions—with fertilizer being one of the markers of class in this story.

I plan on visiting Beimeng’s village next year after they’ve installed the streaming fertilizer surveillance monitoring systems. It will be exciting to talk to her parents about how they check in online.

Now off on a totally different track - Fertilizer is a critical part of modern China’s history. China’s and US’s modern history starts with fertilizer - one of the agreements that came out of the famous 1972 Nixon visit is that China placed an order for 13 fertilzer factories from Cargill.

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.

*****

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.

Google announced on its company blog that Chinese hackers had attacked its users and as a result Google.CN may leave China due to the security breaches.

While unfortunate that Google.CN may be shutting down, my ethnographic work in China revealed five things that aren’t being told in the current story:

1. Many Chinese internet users don’t find Google to be very useful. Therefore, a Google withdrawal would not have any immediate impact on the daily Chinese internet user because most people search with Baidu, the reigning search engine in China.
2. Many Chinese internet users prefer Baidu over Google because using Baidu makes them feel more “Chinese.” Baidu does an excellent job at tapping into nationalistic fervor to promote itself as being the most superior search engine for Chinese users.
3. Chinese internet users don’t know how to get to the Google site. While they may “know” of Google, it’s a whole other matter when it comes to typing or saying Google’s name.
4. Google is primarily used by highly educated netizens. And even these users prefer Google.COM over Google.CN.
5. Google is not successful at reaching the mobile internet market.
   

I arrived at these insights after I spent over 300 hours conducting participant observation and informal interviews this past summer with government policy-makers, academics, youth, migrants, and low-income users. I was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) (more info) to be a research scholar at the China Internet Network Information Center 中 国互联网络信息中心 (CNNIC), located in Beijing, China. The center is overseen by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT). CNNIC manages the hardware aspect of China’s internet and produces quantitatively oriented research on internet usage in China. Their data provides policy direction for party ministries, information for private companies, and statistics for the government. While my main focus was not on Google (more info on research), the topic frequently came up and I started realizing that the non-use of Google provided a lot of cultural insights into the practices of Chinese internet users.

The blame for Google’s lack of success in China cannot solely be placed on this most recent episode with Chinese hackers. Other complications have started long before this occurrence, such as the myriad of ways in which policies work to favor Chinese companies over international ones, the difficulty in competing against government paid search results on Baidu, and the impossibility of providing consistent service when the government shuts down access to the entire Google site for few days. All of these reasons lie beyond Google’s control.

There are, however, other explanations that do lie within Google’s control in which they have failed to execute. The 3 main factors are: achieving brand recognition, creating a successful marketing campaign, and understanding usage contexts of non-elite internet users. Google should hold themselves accountable for these factors.

Google has failed at brand recognition. They have not been successful at making their services relevant for the average Chinese internet user nor have they made it easy for people to recognize, say, or even type in their name on a keyboard.

• People didn’t even know how to correctly pronounce and agree on the pronunciation of the name “Google.” When I was with a group of 5 youth, I asked them if they used Google, instead of getting an answer we launched into a 10 minute conversation trying to figure out the correct name. While it was clear that we were all referring to Google, the IT company, it was not clear which characters to use for its name. Google does not have an immediately recognizable name like Apple (Pingguo) or Yahoo (Yahe) or Baidu.  I, like many other Chinese people still refer to Google by its colloquial name, GouGou - doggy (狗狗).  While Google did consider GouGou as a name, in 2006 it announced that its new name would be Gu-Ge” (谷歌). But the name didn’t stick and so many people still continued to refer to Google as GouGou. Gu-Ge is supposed to mean “harvest songs”— romantic referral to a  “fruitful and productive search experience, in a poetic Chinese way”.  I guess that Google excecs thought, “Hey if Chinese peasants sings happy harvest songs for their productive crops, then Chinese netizens will use Gu-Ge for happy productive online searches!” Hmmmm…Back in 2006 I argued that the new name was quiet “a semantic stretch.” Even worse, it conjured up images of “slow and remote agricultural scenes,” said  Jin Ge, a researcher on Chinese online gamers. The new name was so unpopular that Google fans started an online petition in 2006 for Google to abandon Gu-Ge. Google didn’t listen. The lesson? When your market cannot pronounce, remember or correctly identify your name, you’ve got a major problem—especially when your names invokes images of sterile hinterlands or groins, grasshoppers, and shaving breasts.

The confusion over Google’s Chinese name also has other consequences: people were unsure of how to type in the name “Google” on the computer keyboard. When I asked people to take me to the Google site, I received a lot of similar responses of uncertainty.

• Some youth would attempt to type GouGou (the colloquial name for Google) and they would reach GouGou.cn or GouGou.com thinking that they were at the Google site because it looked similar to Google’s bare aesthetics even though the corporate symbol is a dog. Since many people, even me, still refer to Google as GouGou,  it’s not a surprise that people thought that they were at Google’s site even though they were at GouGou.com.  Others would type “Gogel,” which lead to nowhere.
• Those who typed Google with just one “O” (Gogle) would get to the Google site only IF they typed in .COM. domain.  If they just pressed the enter key after typing in “Gogle” it would take them to Gogle.CN, which is a phishing site (phishing sites try to get you to enter your password and email in the hopes to steal the information). This is even more confusing because Gogle.CN is designed to look like Google’s bare aesthetics. If you click on “Login 登录” in the top right corner where the Gmail login is usually located on the real Google site, you’re taken to a page that says Gogle.CN Login but its page is titled Google!  As you can see in the picture below and where I’ve circled in pink, it’s really misleading! I’ve noticed that most computers default to the .CN site in internet cafes, so this could hypothetically happen quite often if Chinese users try to go to Google and they type in the name  with one less “O.”
• IF youth did get to Google’s site successfully by either typing in the name correctly or going to Google.com, Gogle.COM, or Guge.COM/CN, it would usually be on their 5th or 7th or even 8th try - that is if they hadn’t given up yet and by then it was just clear that they were doing it because I had asked them to show me how to get to the Google site. It was quite obvious that going to the Google site was never part of their internet routine.

It’s not the case that people are unfamiliar with Google.  People know of Google, but they don’t want to use it because it’s associated with being “Un-Chinese.” Part of Baidu’s success lies in its successful marketing campaign against Google, using nationalism as one of their publicity strategies. It’s been working well. The campaign is so effective that netizens associate the use of Google with being unpatriotic. In this infamous Baidu commercial from 2006 (below), Baidu wins an intelligence contest over the its unnamed foreign competiter who is represented by the white male actor. Baidu succeeds in “knowing more” in the back and forth banter over the meaning of the scroll. Even the white man’s Chinese female lover decides to leave him for the Chinese scholar who “knows more.”

I don’t think Baidu is playing unfairly because American companies often tap into US nationalism with “Buy Made in the USA” campaigns. Google could be more creative in using strategic marketing to overcome its negative cultural stigma in China—a stigma that is actively nurtured by its competitor.

Another way that Baidu has had an advantage over Google is that Chinese and Hong Kong TV programming will show screen-shots of Baidu when they refer to the internet. Most recently I watched a a show on the Phoenix Channel (Hong Kong based) on January 22nd that showed several screen-shots of how Baidu helped a kidnapped child reunite with his biological parents after 12 years of separation. There are so many stories that talk about how the internet, as symbolized by Baidu, has helped citizens in everyday life. I have yet to see a negative TV segment on the internet that is associated with Baidu, rather these negative associations are blamed on specific applications, such World of Warcraft or specific places, such as internet cafes. Baidu itself is always in the clear, whereas Google is not. The only screen time Google gets on Chinese TV programming is when it is featured as another Western company disobeying Chinese laws. Google should be aware of how Baidu’s onscreen TV time contributes to its popularity and reinforces the notion that Baidu is good for the Chinese, Google is not.

But here’s the thing, solving the marketing and brand recognition problem is relatively simple when the bigger problem is that Google’s services are not useful!

• Youth didn’t see how any of the services offered by Google were easier to use than the ones that they were already using. This is because Google operates in an e-mail paradigm while other services operate in a messenger paradigm. One time when I was checking my Gmail account at an internet cafe, a youth asked me, ” how do you leave pictures and messages for others?” I would say, “just send them an email.” But here’s the thing - youth don’t have to send emails when they are using MSN Messenger. There’s a major disconnect in communication culture. Messenger-like services don’t operate on an email paradigm. QQ and MSN users can go to a friend’s MSN Live profile or QQ box to leave a message or post a photo. You can check on each friend’s page to see their last update.  It’s like a mini-facebook for every MSN user but just for your own contacts. If a friend wasn’t online, youth didn’t send them an email. Rather, they would click on the user’s name and write a direct message that would be sent immediately but read later when the recipient logged in at a later point in time.
• One teenager asked me how I shared music with Gmail. I tried to explain that I used Dropbox and I put the file my public folder and then give the url to my friend. By the time I was done with my explanation, she looked totally confused. I asked her how her and her friends shared music. She said, oh I just put it in my QQ box and my friends can go in and download it. My way didn’t make sense for them and my method didn’t even involve Google.  QQ and MSN make it easy for youth to exchange files without emails and without having to own your own computer. We need to understand what it means to live in an instant messaging paradigm as opposed to an e-mail paradigm.
• By the way, this is also what I’ve observed outside of the US in Mexico, where my most recent fieldwork continues to show that the primary online communication method are messenger services, not email.
• Baidu offers really good mp3 searches, Google doesn’t. Quite simple. MP3 is the most common file format for digital music. Chinese consumers really like to listen to music and they are used to having easy access to it. Music is one area of the internet that is most free from censorship and mostly widely available in China. Google did not provide mp3 search in fear of lawsuits from music labels. And when Google finally did sign a contract with 4 music labels to offer mp3 search, it didn’t work. Larry Salibra discusses his experience with google mp3. (Check our Charles Frith’s comments on this in “Is Google Stupid?”)

• Mobiles are becoming more popular and other companies are doing a better job of delivering mobile content and services. For example, several high school students showed me how they could access MSN Messenger and QQ chat on their cellphone for mobile internet. I asked them why they chose to use these apps. Some youth told me that they were already on the phone when they bought it (some were used), and others told me that it was really easy to download when you go the MSN or QQ site at an internet cafe. One of the most important reasons is that most people already have a MSN or QQ account. So when they begin to use mobile internet, the transition to using mobile MSN or QQ Messenger is an obvious one.
• For many of these low-income youth, mobile internet was used more frequently than internet cafes. They didn’t have a computer at home but what they did have was a cellphone that always had a signal. Another example is that cellphone companies have partnerships with Baidu or QQ Tencent to deliver mobile content. People would often show me a SMS of the latest news updates from Baidu. They told me that when they bought the cellphone, the vendor would help them sign up for the services. Google needs to think about how to cross into mobile services because other companies have deep relationships with mobile carriers to ensure that a new mobile user receives content from their company.

So who is using Google in China? Google is primarily used by elite Chinese users while Baidu is mainly used by non-elites. What’s the difference between elite and non-elite users? Elite users are those who are highly educated and can speak or at least read English. Interestingly, the biggest fans of Google were Chinese academics age 18 years and older. They used Google Scholar, Google Translation and Gmail for the same purposes as Western users. They relied on Google for their research and said that there was no site that even matched Google’s services. The way that Chinese professors, researchers, and academics work is more akin to the way that Westerners manage their relationships and projects. Therefore, the adoption of Google among highly educated Chinese is not surprising. Highly educated Chinese users organize and prioritize information in ways that are much more similar to Western users than non-elite Chinese users.

Sometimes you will hear me say, “I cannot imagine life without Google!” And it’s true - I can’t imagine living without my Gcal, Reader, Apps, Voice, Docs, and etc.  Chinese academics who read English would often say the same thing when we talked about Google, frequently professing their love for Google. For these intellectuals, they didn’t feel less “Chinese” for using Google. My impression was that they felt more informed, could access media beyond China, and were more aware of global discourses (this includes celebrity gossip).

While Google may have a loyal following among Chinese academics, they only make up a small percentage of the population. If Google wants to become a more popular search engine in China, it has to do a better job at reaching non-elite users. Google isn’t going to get anywhere as the search engine for the intellectuals of China. 

Google has built an empire of services that work for Western contexts and values. So it’s no surprise that their most loyal fans outside of the US are elite users who share similar class and occupational backgrounds with Western users. To reach new users with an entirely different set of cultural practices, Google has to rethink and reinvent itself for the Chinese market.  Sometimes, one size does not fit all.

It’s one thing if Google’s difficulties could just simply be attributed to government interference, and bad marketing and publicity. But that’s not the case. Their services just simply are not useful for most Chinese users. I suggest that Google dedicate itself to understanding the Chinese market in a socio-anthropological way. They should be hiring teams of Chinese and non-Chinese  ethnographers, sociologists, and anthropologists to work intimately in all phases with human-computer interaction designers, programmers, and R&D managers. Google should invest in long-term fieldwork for teams to immerse themselves in a diversity of environments. While usability tests and focus groups are useful for specific phases of app development, they aren’t as useful for understanding cultural frameworks and practices because by the time an app is being tested, it already has accumulated so many cultural assumptions along the way in the design process that users are asked to test something that functions in the programmer’s world, not the user’s world.

I hope Google doesn’t leave China because both sides would lose. I would like to see the Chinese government ease off of Google. And I would like to see Google.CN re-orientate itself to create such overwhelmingly great and relevant services that Chinese netizens will WANT to use their apps.

Competition and collaboration are essential factors for an innovative market.

The last thing that China wants to communicate to the world is that it does not offer a fair playground for companies to compete against each other or against government-cozy companies. One of the keys factors to sustain and increase China’s growth this century depends on its ability to attract capital. It doesn’t look good when the largest IT company does not want to work in China.

The success of China also depends on its ability to innovate. In the last few decades, followers have been favored over leaders. While this is slowly changing, companies like Google are a positive influence on the Chinese work culture because the company promotes a culture of innovation, research, and transparency. What this means is that it values risk-takers and creative minds. Working at Google gives many Chinese researchers, programmers, and managers an opportunity to engage with companies that have different protocols and values than local Chinese companies.

And lastly, collaboration is critical for innovation. If Google and the Chinese government cannot work through this together, then China would be signaling to the world that it just pushed out one of the world’s most innovative IT companies. If Google stays in China, it should think about how to become a leader for IT innovation in China. Some good ideas to consider can be found in Isaac Mao’s open letter to Google to “save [the] Internet in China.” Mao suggests that Google create a VC fund, develop anti-censorship tools, and improve Adsense. I am a big fan of his first suggestion of creating a VC fund as a way to nurture new Chinese IT companies. This is an excellent idea that would infuse the market with innovative companies that are more closely aligned with Google’s culture. With Google running a R&D like VC fund, it would diversify the players in the Chinese internet landscape, increase Google’s industry alliances, and nurture its ties to other IT leaders that may have deeper connections to other sectors

Whatever the outcome, we should not be misled to think that everyone is on the same page in the Chinese government. Like all large institutions, there are different alliances and divergent opinions. The Chinese government is not a unified front that necessarily agrees across all levels on its censorship policies. I believe that there is a lot of opportunity for change. I worked with a lot of smart and open minded people who were willing to explore different positions. The question is are those talented people in the position to bring things like innovation, competition, and collaboration together.

In the beginning of this post, I said that that if Google were to leave China, there would be no immediate impacts on the average Chinese internet user. However, the long-term impacts would be devastating. The Chinese IT industry would lose such a critical player. The Chinese government would appear and be stigmatized for being hostile towards international businesses and privacy protocols. The citizens of China would have less access to unfiltered information. And the world beyond China would lose a critical link to the country.  But also if Google really were to leave, it will be to their loss. Business wise, it just wouldn’t make sense. I hope that a compromise can be reached.

very side side note: aside from the design and branding issues that I discuss above, my personal opinion is that I don’t understand the rationale in the first place to hire a non-globally-minded-connected-Chinese to run Google China. Surely this could be the root of many of the issues? 

——-

Other view points on this topic:

• Alex Pasterneck -  Don’t be Evil v. Serve the People: Is Google a Benign Version of China?
• Larry Salibra - Google’s China Lessons: Forbidden Fruit and Face Saving Retreat

UPDATE - July 30, 2010: I gave a keynote on the Google-China Saga in June.

GOOGLIST REALISM: The Google-China saga and the free-information regimes as a new site of cultural imperialism and moral tensions

UPDATE  - September 18, 2010: I extend some of the ideas I first introduced on digital diplomacy 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 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 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. 

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

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. 

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

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.  

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.

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