Cultural Bytes engages with research on information communication technology (ICT) users of low-income communities. This is run by Tricia Wang - me! My motivation is to better understand how low-income/under-served populations manage their social connections with a variety of practices. I bring attention to the ways that low-income users challenge, change, and innovate ICT usage patterns.  I focus on mobile populations, such as migrants and youth in Mexico, China and US.

The term “mobile” is beginning to take on new meaning.  Conventionally, a “mobile lifestyle” is associated with jet-setting corporate workers; however, a “mobile lifestyle” is also a way of life for migrants all around the world. Instead of taking airplanes, they walk. Instead of holding passports, they have no papers. Instead of staying in five star hotels, they stay anywhere they can. But for the first time, these new mobile workers, migrants, have access to the same digital networks and tools as elite mobile workers.

ICT tools enable people to create coherence between seemingly fragmented networks spread over greater distances.  In a more mobile society, we are seeing a new kind of mass movement of people—telecommuters to seasonal workers—in non-wartime conditions.  The reach of everyday life encompasses management of space.

These changes prompt new kinds of questions that allow us to grasp what mechanisms and ways of thinking make-up these new forms of mobility and connection. What social conditions may emerge? What practices become visible from the adaptation to older and how power and control is exerted. Conversely, what does immobility look like in a world that seems to be increasingly mobile? What are the various tiers of mobility and immobility? How do things stick, how do people capture moments, and how do places stay meaningful for communities?

These are the questions that I care about. Read about me here and about my research here. I would love to talk to you about your work so contact me!

I have been thinking a lot about fractals lately. I first discovered fractals 10 years ago when Kenyatta Cheese introduced me to godel, Escher, Bach (the book I dream of finishing and comprehending). Well just recently on some Friday night at 2am I was watching Nova’s special on fractal love, Hunting the Hidden Dimension.  As I was falling asleep to Mendelbrot’s soothing voice, I started thinking about fractals and culture - how we could use fractals to think about cultural practices, communities and groups.

The organizing principle of fractals is similarity in forms. When something appears dissimilar, many of times the recursive logic of fractals reveals that the more you look, the more similarities you will see in the form. So the lines in a leaf may look disorganized, but really they are organized in form, hence recursive.

Using fractal logic to look at cultures around the world can reveal that there are more similarities in practices than we think!

Since a lot of my research is multi-sited and in totally different parts of the world, I find that I look for commonalities in what I observe between the various sites. I try to look beyond the physical and obvious differences.  For example, I try to look at how new users are engaging or reacting to technology in similar ways even when people live in totally different countries or even geographies. But at the same time I try to not devalue the specificities that make each community unique. I find this to be something I have to be aware of when I think about commonalities across different regions.

So what would a fractal mindset to ethnography look like?  How would recursiveness be used in ethnographic analysis? How can we think of culture as an iterative process?

1.) can’t be culturally reductive - It becomes more difficult  to make culturally reductive statements about a group of people if we think in terms of cultural fractals. The most common one I hear about China is that Chinese culture is all about guanxi, therefore everything that happens in China, from success to failure, is attributed to the resilience of traditional guanxi culture. I often read that the culture of guanxi encourages networking, therefore this explains why Chinese people are so good at networking when starting new businesses. In terms of cellphone usage guanxi is used to explain why the Chinese have adopted texting so quickly. But what groups or society not have social networks? If we go with the “Chinese love texting because they have guanxi,” argument, then how do you then explain why regions in Nigeria or Mexico with horrible cellphone signal still have taken up texting so readily?  My point is that Nigerians and Mexicans also have a culture based on strong social ties.  Not that the way Chinese guanxi is practiced is not a unique and  complex tradition in it of itself, but attributing guanxi to mobile phone usage also dumbs down actual practices of guanxi. Perhaps the answer isn’t a simple culturally reductive explanation, rather one that is tied to existing cultural practices, policy efforts and geographical context. So a fractal logic would encourage us to see the similarities between the ways the Chinese or the Mexicans text - and to come up with an explanation that do not rest on simplorifitized cultural statements.

2.) fractal logic encourages a more relativistic way of thinking about cultures. Instead of thinking in linear models with clear independent and dependent variables, fractals gives us a mental break to look at practices more cyclically and over greater amounts of time.  In terms of cross-cultural comparisons  - instead of thinking about two different regions as two distinct places, how about thinking of as two separate nodes on one large multi-dimensional net? “Christena Turner refers to cross-cultural comparisons as working with two nodes on the same piece of woven cloth - each node of thread with different colors coming together with different layerings so that it appears to be two separate knots, but actually two parts of the same quilt. Cross-cultural comparisons i think are most beautiful when they honor this “net” metaphor as reality - this reminds me of Richard Feynman’s quote about science and life,

“Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.”

Feynman’s quote entangles with the fractal notion - that you can look at one part of society/object and abstract out properties of other parts of the world/universe. absolutely beautiful.

3.) expanded temporalities - since fractals have this sense of infinite-less levels of fractalness, there is sense that we are working in a different temporality, one that is not bound to the strict temporalities of the project timeline or stated anount of time in the field.

4.) fractal logic is useful for technology designers. For communication technologies to have market reach beyond Europe, USA and middle- to upper-class Chinese, there are aspects of the communication tool that need to be more or less useful in different cultural settings. Fractal logic encourages designers to look for common denominators in usage. For example, the concept of a text message is a common denominator, but how it is used in various contexts is what makes its use setting different from each other.

5.) cultures are non-deterministic - how a nation or group is going to act, believe and value is very hard to determine!  but there are certain feature we know all cultures have. A key feature of fractals is that they are usually stochastically self-similar, meaning they are approximately similar to itself. While groups of people  may be very self-similar across the board- for example take the nuclear family - it too is also subject to stochasticity because the way each nuclear family develops in each community and across communities is non-deterministic. A family’s current emotional, psychological or financial state is subject to its prior circumstances and also some random element - such as being a nuclear family in rural India or in suburban UK. Applied stochastic processes tend to describe complex systems that are difficult to determine- like warfare, diplomacy. So why not apply this concept to communities?  I like the idea of thinking as cultural practices as non-deterministic. I don’t believe that causal models do much else than serve as an analytical exercise for the researcher - real life is stochastic - because how groups of people live are hard to predict because there are always elements that are unpredictable.

6.) ok going totally metaphysical here - stop reading if you feel the twilight</a>- we can think of all groups of people or nations or communities as a reduced-size copy of the whole -the wholeness of humanity! so instead of looking for differences in each reduction, what happens we look for similarities in form?  Entropy as organanized chaos  - capillaries in orderly run-offs - rivers meandering in systematic carvings - textile hypnosis - where’s waldo find you.  Looking for similarities in form doesn’t mean that we still can’t celebrate differences. Alan Watts, a buddhist teacher, has a great quote that totally operates with fractal logic - and I like using it as an approach to ethnography,

Differences, borders, lines, surfaces and boundaries do not really divide things from each other at all, they join them together. All boundaries are held in common.

Alan Watt’s quote is an excellent way to prepare one’s mindset for doing fieldwork and post fieldwork analysis. Especially when doing fieldwork in another culture, it is too easy to treat them as “the other.” This quotes speaks to a way thinking that discourages distancing of the researcher from the fieldsite.

In another metaphysical turn, the organization logic of fractals is based on replication of form based on his quote also reminds of Lao Tzu’s quote on Taoism that also operates with fractal love:

“The Tao is in all things, in their divisions and their fullness. What I dislike about divisions is that they multiply, and what i dislike about multiplication is that it makes people want to hold fast to it. So people go out and forget to return, seeing little more than ghosts.”

At the heart of fractals is that with each division is a multiplication into more similar forms! So Lao Tzu is heeding us to find balance between division and fullness. Alan Watt’s and Lao Tzu’s quote make me think of one of my favorite fractal artworks, Implied. Implied is a fractal of “messy human droplets and straight machine cuts dance[ing] together.”

I end this long winded post with a something yummy to eat from my fave food blog , serious eats (run by the fabulous alaina brown) - cuz you gotta tie everything in life back to food!  Well all this talk about fractals makes me want to eat a fractal cupcake!

*for a cool discussion that isn’t about fractals per se - more about trees, design, repesentation and a point about stochastic processes - check out Fred’s blog post on tree drawings

When does something stop being a “technology”? The word technology is a loaded term that is full of futuristic newness— the information age, the network society, the post-industrial era—-all the hopes and fears of “modernity.” These thoughts swirled in my mind when my friend forwarded me Karen’s Leland’s column from The Huffington Post, Does Friendship Trump Technology?

In the article, she talks about how utility technicians accidentally cut the internet line to her house just as she was trying to get online to map directions to a meeting. She gets in her car and starts considering several options to get to an internet connection and then realizes that the quickest way to find directions was to actually use her cellphone to call her friend, who could then look up the direction online from her house. With her friend’s help, Leland gets to the meeting place early enough to even get a cup of coffee. Leland’s point is that friendship is more important than technology because in the end it was her friend who helped her, not the internet: “Technology is great, but a girl’s got to have friends.”

When I read this, i thought that it didn’t make any sense. Her friend fulfilled her role as a good “friend” through the use of technology. Her friend answered the phone call at an inconvienient hour, but nevertheless did so because Leland used her cellphone to wake up her good “friend.

Essentially Leland’s whole entire story could not have taken place without technology tools. To even get to her meeting, Leland is driving in a car that has an engine powered by an internal computer. To even reach her friend, Leland has to use the cellphone. For her friend to even process images, she has to find her glasses. For her friend to even give direction, she has to turn on her computer to get to mapquest (btw tell your girlfriend to use google maps - she can tell you traffic patterns and give you street view).

We can even look at it in another way - the stoplights that are programmed to direct the traffic that Leland is driving in, the coffee machine that makes her coffee, the cellphone towers that enables the calls through the electro-magnetic spectrum, the internet router her friend uses to get online - on and on. Anything and everything can be technological. The entire story is only possible with objects that create the space for the rich interaction that she has described.

Leland’s article points to one common way that technology is defined, as a new system or set of practices that are antithetical to human interaction, alienating people from friendship, love, and human touch. Technology (for Leland the unavailable internet) is seen as the anti-connector -  but the ironic part is that Leland uses technology to connect to her friend who could then connects online to connect her to the directions she needed to connect to her meeting.

Technology and human interaction are not mutually exclusive - we use tools to get things done. What if the article was titled, Does Friendship Trump Tools? Or Does Friendship Trump Cars? Or Does Friendship Trump Pencils? It just sounds ludicrous because it points to the illogical boundaries on what we define as “technological.”

Leland’s point that technology does not trump friendship also reveals an underlying fear that technology would even be in a place to trump friendship. Her statement is an affirmation that her friend was there for her when her technology failed her. Is this a new way of defining friendship? Who do we turn to when our technologies fail us in critical moments?

What I think is interesting in this article, is that it actually points to a discursive cultural change in the way that elites or let’s middle- to upper-class people think about cellphones - that it has become so integrated into their lives that it’s taken for granted now as a mundane tool - just like a car or pencil or eyeglasses. NOW That’s interesting!

So at what point is an object not a “technology” and just a mundane object? Well one way is to see how it is incorporated it into discourse.  In this article, the discourse of the cellphone is dis-associated from “technology” because it referred to as a non-technology.

Another way is to notice how images of technology are incorporated into our visual culture. Look at the way visual culture in music videos and movies reenact scenes of everyday life.   Do you notice when your favorite TV shows incorporates a pencil into the story - no because it is just a mundane object (unless the specific topic is about the pencil). For example, movies and music videos often show characters using cellphones as part of the interaction. I know that from a more mainstream cultural studies point of view this is usually interpreted as the selling of “coolness” - the selling of the need to consume a cellphone as part of a modern consumer. ok  - point taken and yes I agree.

However, another way to think about it is that many of the interactions cannot take place without the cellphone - and that speaks to the role of this technology as an everyday object that is assumed to be part of interaction  - as if only with the cellphone such interaction could be accomplished. It’s hard to imagine how Leland could’ve reached her friend from her car without the cellphone unless she did it telepathically.

The first time I actually thought that the cellphone may be a mundane technology for Americans or Westerners or middle- to upper-class users was when I was watching Rupaul’s Drag Race (part 6 episode 6) where the drag queens had to compete for the best impersonation of a female executive.

When the queens took to the runway, each of them had a different outfit with various tools to support their look   - such as a briefcase of files or glasses or purse. 3 out of the 4 contestants drag queens started their “Executive Realness” impersonation with a cellphone!  They pretended to be on an important business call.  The one who didn’t use the cellphone chose a briefcase as the stand in for “executiveness.” (oh and just in case you are curious, Phoebe, middle, was “excutive fabulousness.” A judge said that Rebecca Glasscock, far left,  looked like “Donald’s Trump next ex-wife.”)

So what’s the connection between Leland’s Huffington Post article and Rupaul’s Drag Race? The cellphone is mundane! From Leland’s post to Rupual’s drag queens - it’s just a part of the everyday - and who better than drag queens to exaggerate the everyday - the queens of impersonations are best at pulling out the mundane ways we re-enact power in a gendered way.

Ok Tricia so why is it so important to understand that the cellphone could now be considered mundane? In terms of my research with new technology users, it just reminds me how careful I need to be in what kind of assumptions I bring to my research, such as my research questions, analysis and conclusions. I live in a country where a cellphone may mean one thing - which I am saying may have become a mundane everyday tool - but I do research in other countries where the cell means an entirely different thing - a non-mundane tool.

Even with technologies that are not mundane - the researcher still needs to be aware of what that the tool means to her/him - but my point is that one has to work even harder to be self-reflective about the taken for granted ideas that we bring to our fieldsites or to the design process with technology that have become ordinarialized (yes I made that word up).

I think one of the consequences of technologies becoming everyday, is that it’s hard to think about its usage in a context entirely different from our own experience. That then leads to certain assumptions and hope about the role of the technology. I find that this is most problematic in technology projects that are tried in “developing” areas of the world. You have all these “first world” or Western funded NGO’s going into these impoverished regions “bringing” or “introducing” technology with the hopes that it will jump-start economic development in the region. I find myself cringing at these projects because one, there is already lot of criticism over the failure of technology-based development projects, but also because these projects are run by people who come from the US or Europe - where technology is used in a very socially and culturally specific context. What happens then is that these people think, “well the internet is helpful for me, so it will be helpful for others who won’t have it. Life for these people will be better with internet access.” I don’t dispute that people have more choices with access to more information, but access to information is sooo socially contexual that how information is then used, processed, fulfilled, interpreted, recycled, managed and mashed - is specific to each region/community/country and I it is too often that this is not considered.

Instead, technology for development projects tend to take a linear approach where the goal is to bring the community “up” and out of poverty. There are assumptions that quality of life is a uni-directional march towards modernity and the tools that come with it.

One way to get out of this trap is that I think researchers of technology use need to spend more time understanding the mundane among new users. This takes time. This it one of the roles of ethnography. The mundane is the everyday - the take for granted. If we can better understand the everyday, then we can better understand the role and meaning of new technologies, which then leads to the greater possibility of more relevant designs for new users in new-to-us markets.

I must admit that although I say that technology usage is grounded in a cultural context, I struggle to operationalize “culture” for the fear of reducing it to some causal variable or some vague concept that dilutes what I am arguing. I haven’t found much solace in sociology’s linear models that isolate “culture’s” effects - as it repeats the whole divide of structure versus agency. Neither have I found much clarity in the interpretive tradition of culture, not because I don’t agree with it, but because am confused at how to methodologically move forward with an interpretive approach.

Well then came my meeting with Prof. Alladi Venkatesh, Assoc. Director of UC Irvine’s Center for Research on Information Technology and Organizations (CRITO) (thanks for gloria mark for the introduction!).

Prof. Venkatesh has created methodology magic!
Ethno-consumerism is a methodology for doing cross-cultural research. It encourages the researcher to “study culture not merely as providing the context for the study of consumer behavior but study consumption itself as culturally constituted behavior. “In principle, the ethnoconsumerist perspective goes beyond the distinction of emic and etic research approaches.” The etic approach encourages the researcher to interpret from her/his point of view. On the other hand, the emic approach tells the researcher to look at the subject’s point of view. But ethnoconsumerism advocates for the next critical step, which is to then develop knowledge from subject’s point of view. “The research becomes more than an etic interpretation (researcher’s point of view) of the culture, but a view of the culture informed by the culture itself as demonstrated by the above” (Venkatesh and Meamber, 1997).

Venkatesh makes clear that this is methodology, not a method. It does not seek to promote any data collection methods.
Of course I think that qualitative methods (or a mixed-method approach of qual + quant) is the best way to arrive at what he is saying is the crux of ethnoconsumerism - developing a cultural framework of analysis from the consumer’s point of view.

Read his paper and other writings here.

I highly encourage you to read his 1995 paper below on Ethnoconsumerism (citation below). It’s a beautifully written paper that feels intellectually and spiritually moving at the same time. When I read it I felt as if the words has fallen out of the sky onto self-organizing fractals of joy. After 3 years of sociology coursework, I’ve become averse at times to theories by sociologists because the words just don’t stick in my brain or they just don’t inspire me anymore. There was something this 1995 piece that helped me deconstruct 3 years of wonderful and hellish sociological self-discovery to even learn about the cultural divide within the field of sociology (culture vs structure or culture as interpretive model). Dr. Venkatesh, coming from a business/economics background, beautifully reconstructs all the various authors of the interpretive tradition who I have come to love. He has inspired me to think of these authors - such as Geertz, in a new way for my own work on new technology users.

I will be thinking about this methodology for a while as I try to figure out if this framework makes sense for my dissertation. So I will be writing more about this model. In the meantime, two things come to my mind: how I can apply this for my research and how this intersects with Stuart Halls, et. al. 1997 book on Sony Walkmans.

How do I apply this this my research?

• study how new users use their technology as culturally constituted behavior.
• look at tech usage as  set of practices
• Do not treat new tech users as objects.
• Do not treat their practices as economically motivated.
• People use techology to get things done. It is my job to understand as an outsider what is being “done” in their context.
• Don’t be culturally reductive by picking one feature of the culture and anchoring all analysis around the feature.
• If I want to compare two different regions with a cultural framework - this takes a realllllly long time because I have to understand the cultural categories and experiences of all the sites.

Circuit of Culture
In 1997, Stuart Hall, Paul Du Gray, and Linda James published Doing cultural studies: the story of the Sony Walkman. They created a model for the analysis of cultural objects called the circuit of culture. On page 3, they show this graph below. The book walks one through on how to deconstruct the Sony walkman as a cultural object.

In an upcoming post, I would like to discuss ways I could combine Ethnoconsumerism and the Circuit of Culture to work for my research. What’s interesting is that while both authors are talking about objects and the people who use the, these are two slightly different approaches. I want to think about to spatialize these approaches. I need to give this some more thought so until the next post on this!

Suggested Reading:

Gay PD, Hall S, Janes L. Doing cultural studies: the story of the Sony Walkman. SAGE; 1997.

Easterly W. The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good. Penguin Press; 2006.

“Ethnoconsumerism: A New Paradigm to Study Cultural and Cross-cultural Consumer Behavior,” Alladi Venkatesh. Marketing in a Multicultural World, J.A. Costa and G. Bamossy (eds.), SAGE Publications, 1995, 26-67.

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. “

(reblogged on Digital Urbanims)

this is a great example of how there’s always room for exciting innovation in everyday objects- even the mostly seemingly mundane can become layered with meaning and knowledge. Maphole is a guide to pedestrians (invented by Jiae Kwon). I wonder if a cut will make these real!

IWhat I would love to observe is the use of these map-holes in a city and to see how power and narrative is reinforced through these map-holes.

Who are these map-holes for? Who controls these map-holes? Who makes decisions on what is being pointed to - what kind of information will these show - where will it lead a pedestrian? Will they be for tourists? Will they be for the urban citizen? Will the location specific map-holes, such as in an art district? Who benefits from the map-hope?

how do they maps-holes respatialize the city? How do map-hopes reconfigure pedestrian movement?

I think that these mapholes could work to reinforce existing class-drawn boundaries in city.

For example, when I spent a few weeks in Stockholm a few years ago - for a social welfare country known for its social equality - I had a difficult time finding the low-income parts of the city. When I arrived, with a little online research about the hip-hop and yummy international food scene - I found out that a lot of undergrounded artists were from Rinkeby, a area of Stockholm that has lots of new immigrants, newly accepted Iraqi refugges, and older immigrants from countries such as Turkey. But after trying to look up information on Rinkeby online, talking to local residents, researching local guide books - I still had a difficult time finding any info on Rinkeby other than people’s advice that “you don’t need to go there.” Which of COURSE anytime someone tells me that I always take as a great indicator for me to go there.

My point is that the absence of information on Rinkeby, or any neighborhood can render it an invisible place. I was being told the dominant narrative that local citizens gave to outsiders - here are beautiful parts of Stockholm that you should see and here are the parts that you don’t need to see. But that very narrative is laced with assumptions of what kind of outsider I was and what I valued. My moment illustrates how the dominance of one platial (yes I made that word up) narrative can render another place invisible. Could map-holes work in the same way? By only pointing out some places, other places get left out. Could map-holes become map-hopes - pointing people to a version of the city that you can’t find in tourists books? Or could these map-holes become wired with blue-tooth and tourists could beam the hole for information that they were interested in finding?

Well if I start seeing these pop up in NY, I will put up stickers that say “Bed-Stuy” over the arrow pointing towards “Soho” or stickers that say “yoga center” over “Macys” or a sticker that says “Fresh Food” over “McDonalds.

Here are some other bloggers who have commented on map-hopes, Yankodesign, GIS-Lounge, Inventor spot, and DoGizmo.

oh and I had a GREAT time in Rinkeby. I visited a local school, met residents, ate great turkish sweets, and hung out with some newly arrived iraqis. It was just as great as my day wandering around in Gamla Stan. My photos from a day in Rinkeby and photos from my time in STockholm.

zadi:

culturemodding:

“Map Hole is a new road guidance tool designed to direct pedestrians and travelers to their final destination using existing elements in the urban landscape. It locates the pedestrian with a starting point and provides information on the exact distance or average walk time to the listed landmarks.”

- Yanko Design (h/t The Daily What)

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.

                                                                          *******

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. 

                                                                          *******

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. 

                                                                          *******

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

                                                                          *******

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. 

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. 

_______________________________

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

READING LIST FOR CREATING COMMUNITY ENVIRONMENTS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Urry, John. Mobilities. {UK}, 2006.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are two examples below.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

______

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

___

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

From the beginning, IBM had a concept of itself as an institution, not just a technology company.

I read this quote by Rosabeth Moss Kanter in “1100100 and counting,” an article in The Economist about IBM’s success.

Kanter wrote SuperCorps, a book about successful companies.

I really love this quote because it reflects exactly what I love about the intersection of culture, technology, and business. How a company views themselves, their own identity and their own purpose, has RADICAL effects on how they build technology and build relationships with customers to sell the technology.

Kanter’s quote is essentially saying that culture matters - beliefs matter - and they matter because they determine your growth strategy and they contribute to how you innovate.

This is not to say that institutions are can be incredibly un-innovative and ingrained in irrelevant practices that the market no longer supports, but the larger point here is that longevity is part of IBM’s culture and by seeing itself as an institution it focused its resources on building out its legacy by staying relevant to the technology market.

The question now is which of the technology companies today will become institutions 100 years from now?