(I published this on Ethnography Matters)

What are ethnography’s doings? I mean, really, how do you describe what exactly an ethnographer does? S/he watches people? Explains people’s feelings? Translates cultural ideas into concrete stuff? I’ve come up with some interesting ways that work for me to describe my work, but it still requires context and to a person who has never worked with an ethnographer before, it’s not always clear.

Heller Communication writes about the invisibility of socially innovative design.

Design for social innovation begins with the design of conversations themselves – it requires treating a conversation with the same care, and the same planning, that would be appropriate for the design of a product. Conversation starts everything – and yet we rarely think of them as an opportunity for design. This is not only the most important, upstream part of the systems that we need to change, it’s the fastest way for a designer to become a vital part of a strategic initiative. It’s where things begin, and where the most important things are decided.

On the hard side, it doesn’t provide much of a portfolio. Nothing to enter into design competitions, few samples to put on your website, harder to explain at a cocktail party just what it is that you do. In fact, most of the invisible things you’ll be designing are private and sensitive to CEOs and leaders of all types of organizations. You can’t even talk about them. This can be a tough shift for designers who are loathe to give up the artifacts of their work. Of course it doesn’t mean that you won’t design any artifacts, it only means that they will be the last thing you design, not the first.

The implication for Design for Social Innovation is that the most important design of all is invisible. It’s not the “stuff”, not the artifacts, not the technologies. It’s the beliefs, the ethos, the values, the systems behind the campaigns and products and events that form them. It’s designing events and products and behavior before they happen. And that is precisely where we need to be designing.

While they were talking about designers, I thought it was super relevant for ethnographers. The key point they emphasize is that great design starts with stories. I would add that for ethnographers, we don’t just listen to stories, we look at interactions and the field of ethnographic research has developed methods for the observation of human interactions.

There are two broad ways (though not limited these two) that ethnographers work inside a company. They either participate in the design process from the beginning or they come in after or in the middle of a product design.  In both cases, ethnographic work can often be invisible, but I think it can be harder for ethnographers to come in after a product has been designed.

(I use the words products & services interchangeably).

Ethnography all the way – Ethnographers often work with teams whose sole focus is to bring something to the market whether it be a product or service. Engineers, programmers, and designers all want to figure out the next big hit for the company and the industry. In this kind of milieu, you need people who can give you insight into what users want and what new “stuff” users could  incorporated into their everyday lives. Ideally, ethnographers need to be part of the design process from the very beginning and throughout the whole process as equals with other team members. So an ethnographer’s role in this case is to provide insights into features or assumptions that will not work for users. Depending on how much users are valued, this role can be seen as the voice of doom or the voice of wisdom. This strategy, often called user experience, has been cited as a core aspect of Apple’s success. Apple is great at minimizing a product’s complexity while delivering a fulfilling user experience. Steve Jobs has emphasized the importance of a social science & humanities perspective in designing products because it helps one understand the human experience. Why do we need to understand the human experience? Because technology is designed to fulfill social needs, not technological needs. Companies that connect with the users understand and practice this mantra to their core.

Ethnography mid-way – Ethnographers also work with teams who are trying to perfect or build on an existing product/service through user testing strategies. By this stage, assumptions about users have already been built into the product. So in a context where ethnographers are brought on after the product/service has been designed, they can guide the team through assumptions that have been made about user, how these assumptions affect users, and which assumptions are helping or getting in the way of the user experience. But this isn’t always the case.

In many cases, ethnographers are brought on with the sole expectations that they will give recommendations for how to create a better product. The issue here is that it’s hard to get to better without engaging in a conversation about what existing features don’t work; you can’t just keep adding without a reflection on minimizing. It’s often confusing for ethnographers who are in this position. It’s not that they don’t want to provide suggestions for how to improve the user experience, but programmers or designers often frame ethnographic critique as a case where the ethnographer does not appreciate or understand the full value of the technology.

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Ethnography mid-way and ethnography all the way have their own set of constraints. But both processes have to grapple with the invisibility of their work. One way to overcome this is that ethnographers have to find ways to visualize their work. Visuals make recommendations tangible and demonstrate the ethnographer’s value. This is one of the reasons I value and love learning from designers because they are experts at visualizing their process. Design used to be invisible or an after-thought. But with design companies like Frog and IDEO, the field of human computer interaction and design at large has really benefited from their process of formalizing design methodology.

I was at a conference and overheard a conversation about X company’s use of ethnography. Anika works at a well known tech company who has a whole team of ethnographers with multi-disciplinary backgrounds in anthropology, design, sociology, ethnomethodology, and psychology. The company produces various digital products and services.

Lestor: How is ethnography useful to the products your company creates?
Anika: It’s been useful in what you don’t see, the products we haven’t brought to the market.

I thought this conversation was such a lovely illustration of a specific way to explain the practical and financial benefits for companies to hire ethnographers.  It’s often hard to justify or show evidence of an ethnographer’s achievements because ethnographic work inside companies can often be invisible. Ethnographic insights can help a company figure out which products work for now, which products need to be shelved, or which products should be kept in R&D for well, more R&D.

As Jeff Yang reminds us in his tribute to Steve Jobs, great design is just as much about absence and elimination.

There’s a new blog about ethnography! Ethnography Matters explores what is means to be an ethnographer today.

Of all the amazing blogs out there on anthropology and design, there wasn’t a place where ethnographers who focus on technology & media could discuss and share ideas, methods, and tips. So Heather Ford, Rachelle Annechino, Jenna Burrell, and I decided to make a place just for that!

Here’s an excerpt from our About Us page that explains why we started this blog:

We came together to start this blog because we believe that ethnographic research — with its focus on human experiences in context — is critical for countering the trend towards users as numbers, as digits, as data and as markets. In the push to scale technologies globally, technological talk often focuses on the production and consumption of technological goods — There are Users, Makers, and Artifacts — and very little in between.

We believe in the in between.

This blog will be a place for conversation between academic and applied ethnography, for listening to and thinking about people’s stories, and for analysis and theory focused on the social patterns and contexts of technological (re)use, rejection and  (re)construction.
In the specific frame of technology research and design, ethnography matters because the practice of telling user stories, exposing how technology makes us and how we make technology, can help to direct information tools in the service of human values like empathy, global solidarity, surprise and joy. Ethnography matters because it provides a mechanism for evaluating theories of “revolutionary” technology as grounded in the lived experience of people and communities.

Ethnography matters because it helps to keep technology development real.  Through ethnography we can delve into what we have in common and where we diverge to better envision human possibilities. When we understand this we can, in turn, get a better grasp on why technology matters.

Come check out our latest posts.

• Jenna Burrell has written a great review of Divining a Digital Future: Mess and Mythology in Ubiquitous Computing by Paul Dourish and Genevieve Bell.
• Heather Ford has a reflective piece new geographies of social media.
• I just wrote a piece about the invisibility of ethnography.
• Rachelle wrote an insightful piece about drawings of places before and after big events, like the raids in Occupy Oakland.

Here are some different ways you can keep up with the convo:

1. add our RSS feed
2. follow the tweets for this blog @ethnomatters
3. sing up for the  EthnoZine monthly newsletter for blog updates
4. join the Ethnography Matters Google Groups

We would love ideas and your participation! We would love guest bloggers! Here are some ways you can contribute:

• QUOTES: Do you have a favorite quote about ethnography? Can you share it with us?
• OBJECTS of the TRADE: What’s in your bag? Tell us what you bring with you to the field? Take a picture and send it over! Do you have suggestions for outfits to wear or things to bring?
• QUESTIONS: What questions do you frequently get asked when you talk about ethnography? How do you answer them?
• INTERVIEWS: Any suggestions for who you would like to see interviewed?
• SYLLABUS AS ESSAY: Do you teach a class on ethnographic methods?  Check out the Atlantic’s Syllabus as Essay series for an example and let us know if you have an essay to submit
• TEACHING: What are some tips, videos, or readings that you find useful for teaching and talking about ethnography?
• FAVORITE TEXTS: What are your favorite texts ranging from books, quotes, and journal articles? What are your go-to texts when you need inspiration for ethnography? And would you suggest are the must-read texts?
• SUGGEST A BLOG: Do you have a blog about ethnography or do you know of a great blog about ethnography that we should add to your blogroll?
• PROMOTE A PUBLICATION: Do you have a publication you would like to share? We would love to highlight useful books and articles.
• EVENTS: Is there an upcoming conference that you know of or are organizing that is relevant to ethnography? Let us know and we’ll share it.
• BOOK REVIEW: Is there a book that you would like to see reviewed? Or would you like to review a book?

Send us an email if you have any ideas! ethnographymatters [at sign] gmail [dot] com

Heather Ford’s post, New Geographies, on the newly launched blog, Ethnography Matters, is a wonderful read. She asks a really good question - how do we know when we’ve moved from one place to another when we’re online? And why is that the questions we ask about social media, force it into a bad vs good dichotomy?

*btw  - do subscribe to Ethnography Matters! Heather was the wonderful mastermind behind this blog that I am also proud to be a part of the team!

I have taken an excerpt from the post below:

And if what defines a place is its signposts, its boundaries, the taken-for-granted ways of doing things, the expected and the unexpected, what are the equivalents in online spaces? How do we know that we have left one space and arrived at another? How does the experience of outsiders (or n00bs) differ from that of locals?

This new way of thinking about social media (new for me, at least) came about when I was asked to speak at a conference about the ‘crucial role of social media’ in the Middle East and elsewhere. Buried in the description of the session was the question: ‘Does what happened in the London Riots diminish the power of social media?’ As I thought about what to say and what was expected of me, it struck me that the problem with the current way questions around social media are framed is that they require defining technological artefacts as good or bad, when it might be more appropriate to talk about technology as a place where good and bad things can, and do, happen.

If we frame social media as places, we can understand more fully the role of people in those places, rather than talking about the technical characteristics of Facebook or Wikipedia as determining a particular type of behaviour. Looking only at the “bad” privacy features of Facebook, for example, we are tempted to assume that “privacy is dead” because of the “forced sharing” that is happening through changes in the technology. But this view fails to represent the ways that people self-censor or move to more intimate spaces in order to protect their privacy, something I noticed in my study of privacy in an educational context, for example.

Mark Graham, Internet geographer from the Oxford Internet Institute, asks the question: ‘What is the geography of articles in the Middle East and North Africa, and how does this compare to the rest of the world?’

Framing social media as places enables us to realise how we move between platforms (for example, Facebook and Google+) not only because of the new shiny gadgets we find there, but because of the people who inhabit those spaces. It is the flow of people and practices that defines the place as much as it is its landscape and architectural features. Facebook, for example, is defined by particular boundaries (my page, your page, a photograph that belongs to a particular group), taken-for-granted ways of doing things that define deviance and compliance among particular groups (don’t friend your teacher, don’t send too many updates and flood your friends’ streams, don’t tag drunk pictures of friends) and artefacts (the activity stream, wall and photo albums) that, taken together, define the place.

It seems kind of obvious when you think about it, and it isn’t a new way of thinking about technology: we’ve been talking about going online and migrating from different operating systems for a while. But the fact that we’re surprised that Google+ isn’t currently teeming with people, or that more Kenyans aren’t contributing to Swahili Wikipedia, or that women make up such a small percentage of Wikipedia edits suggests that we are thinking too much of social media as things rather than as places. If we thought about Google+ as a big, shiny, new complex, we’d begin to understand that people won’t necessarily move there just because the technology is better when few of their friends are there.

The key aspect that we miss in thinking of social sites as technological artefacts is that we tend to ignore culture and power – two really big and slippery aspects of what makes certain types of people have certain types of conversations in particular online spaces, and of what defines who feels welcome or unwelcome to participate. It has caused us to define Wikipedia or Facebook at a level of granularity that isn’t deep enough to really get an understanding of what is happening there, where the power is located and how we might engineer to encourage particular creations and conversations. This is not just about understanding the affordances of the software. In order to understand Wikipedia collaboration, I can’t only look at the MediaWiki software – in the same way that to understand Kenya, I couldn’t just read about its legal framework or look at the statistics about the country. Being there, experiencing how people to speak to me, noticing what the signposts say and what they leave out, is part of the necessarily long journey toward a full understanding of the place.

P1120774 on Flickr.

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

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

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

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

A Comedic & Educational Film Poking Fun At Ethnography

I am now assigning Walter Wippersberg’s 1994 Film, Dunkles, Rätselhaftes Österreich  - Dark, Mysterious Austria, to all my students! If you teach qualitative methods, consider including this in your syllabus.

Produced for Austria’s SBS-TV, this films poks fun at old-school ethnography from anthropologists and the National Geographic-esque like exposes on the exotic Africans and South American natives.

“A team of the All African Television network wanders into the darkest regions of the Eastern Alps. They observe the habits and rituals of the natives and make not one, but two ethnological major break-through discoveries.” IMDB

badethnography tell us that at

“At 5:40, we learn that the team has disproved the theory that Europeans are monogamous; starting at about 7:50, they describe the elaborate costumes and militaristic symbolism of clans of the Tyrol region of Austria; and at 15:00, there’s a great discussion of the curious obsession with “patently useless activities,” such as biking for no other purpose than biking itself.

Aside from the humorous commentary, it’s a great way of illustrating the sociological imagination,  which requires us to step out of our own culture and try to look at it through the eyes of an outsider — and, as C. Wright Mills put it, to recapture the ability to be astonished by what we normally take for granted.”

Often times ethnography can feel so heavy and serious power and culture, power and culture, power and culture. But what does power and culture look like? How do you explain exoticism, imperialism, and ethnocentrism? Dunkles, Rätselhaftes Österreich is a wonderful video to start those conversations because it’s silly! Part of why I love ethnography so much is that it is so fun and I think this is a great reminder for ethnographers to laugh a bit at ourselves. In all of our musing over the practice and theory of ethnography, we’ve got to remember that we live in a wonderfully silly world and how lovely it is that we live in a period where we get to play all day in collecting knowledge of “man,” a la Foucault.

I don’t think i could ever visit the Alps of Austria without constantly thinking of this video.

UPDATE: Also check out Kitchen Stories, a Swedish film about an ethnographic study on kitchens. It’s a comedy. You can buy the DVD on amazon and watch 2 clips here. Thanks Leila Takayama for the tip!

via badethnography

Tesco’s Homeplus Virtual Subway Store in South Korea is a great example of how to create a service based on existing user practices, rituals, and needs.

Behind the accessible yet super advertising-agency language of this marketing video is an example of great ethnography! (ignore their subjective claims that South Koreans are the 2nd hardest working people in the world- forgive Chiel - they are a marketing agency!)

Tesco’s advertising company, Chiel, observed existing user interactions and feelings around grocery stores. They took into account that South Korea is one of the most digitally wired and smartphone saturated phones in the world. They also noted user’s everyday transportation experience.

Based on their observations and understanding of real world context, they came up with the virtual subway store that only requires the use of a smartphone. 

What I love about this innovative service is that it doesn’t introduce too many contingencies or new practices.

 1. There aren’t any infrastructural contingencies around digital literacy or hardware issues - smartphone penetration is super high and mobile signal is consistent and widespread under- and above-ground.  

2. Homeplus is also being introduced into an existing ritual - the morning and post-work subway commute.

• Part of this is ritual physical- the action of going to the subway and waiting for the subway is familiar.
• Part of this ritual is digital - the continuous browsing on one’s mobile while waiting and riding the train.
• Another part of this ritual is mental - the accounting of daily tasks that need to get done like buying more toilet paper or eggs. Urban and working South Koreans already in these physical, digital, and mental activities.

3. There are already high levels of trust in online shopping in South Korea - so introducing this virtual service is something that complements beliefs about the internet.

A new contingency that comes to my mind is the delivery of the items - like people need to get used to the practice of arranging delivery. Like working out what time the products are delivered and how to time the delivery so that you get your items when you come home from your commute. But delivery issues can be solved relatively easily on the back end by working out database and coordination issues and building in flexibility for the user. Delivery is not a big cultural or mental contingency in this context.

The most difficult services/products to introduce are ones that require cultural or mental pivots along with new practices. If Tesco were to introduce the virtual service in a country with high bandwidth penetration but low trust in online shopping, then they are running up against a perception issue - that the internet is good for many activities, but not shopping.

Another outstanding aspect to note is that this service may not have been created if the designers didn’t take into account existing transportation patterns. If Chiel only did their observations inside the grocery store or inside a home, they wouldn’t have realized the potential for creating a service inside the subway - an everyday space. But now this everyday space has a new and exciting activity - shopping! This interaction in this space becomes more rich and complex. The subway space isn’t just a transportation, people watching, or casual gaming space, it is a consumption space now - thus introducing consumption desires into this activity.

The success of Homeplus fulfills the qualities that are critical for a seamless user experience - SUD: Simple, Usable, and Desirable

I want to comment a bit on desireability. Dan Lockton’s research on how architecture influences user behavior introduced me an urban planning concept of “desire paths,” that users create natural paths in their physical surroundings based on what works for them. Lockton points to Myhill (2004) who suggests that ““[a]n optimal way to design pathways in accordance with natural human behaviour, is to not design them at all.”

Myhill argues that companies who design products should allow for desire paths to emerge out of the user, not the designer. The company should them keep an eye on the desire paths and make adjustments or features based on these emergent paths. Myhill says that companies who do this will successfully fulfill the ‘Normanian Natural Selection,” a theory from Don Norman that people always interact naturally with objects and spaces in their everyday life.

Applying “desire paths” to Homeplus virtual grocery stores, could the appeal and success of it be partly based on that the system allows for users to create symbolic  “desire paths”? It would be so fascinating to do some ethnography to see how over the next few years, Homeplus calibrates their service to allow for users to create desire paths - because this keeps this service flexible for the user!  What kind of desire paths will emerge out of this service?

I ask these questions about desire paths with my fieldwork in China in mind - because I’m thinking about how youth and migrants are using social media to create symbolic desire paths to get to the information they need. But more on that in another post!

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I would bet Chiel included South Koreans on the design team. I know this may sound like the obvious - but MANY companies that hire design firms to create products/services for them DO NOT include local ethnographers/designers on the project. So while the design ideas they create may be amazing (or totally unimpressive), they may not be grounded in existing social practices. Or what happens is that companies will hire a local ethnographer or expert, but they don’t allow the local ethnographer to be in a position of power that is equal to other team members, so the local expert’s suggestions often get sidelined.

Thank you to Charlotte Yong San Gullach Büttrich for sharing this with me on Google+!

(video via Recklessnutter)

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

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

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

New RSS Feeds!

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

A New Vision for Field Work

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How can ethnography in a digital world capture culturally embedded practices and discourses that are specific to communities that are no longer place-based? What are the future routes for a field that has been traditionally rooted to a bounded sense of place? How do we identity not only when our field work begins, but where? I try to provide some preliminary answers in this field paper. 

I argue that several often-cited theorists of digital culture provide insufficient and misleading directions for conducting ethnography in a digitally mediated world. These theorists end up producing a dichotomy that assigns culture to place and ICTs (along with capital) to space. David Harvey, Paul Virilio, and Manuel Castells (to name a few) are exemplary of this type of theory building. They create a dichotomy where culture is tied to the local and the bounded, while capital is associated with global and the mobile.

The consequences of assigning the local to the immobile is that this leads to a divided ethnography—an ethnography of spatial flows versus an ethnography of fixed places. Working within this typology means the an ethnographer of marginalized communities has already pegged their field site as part of the invisible, oppressed, and fixed locales that exist in contrast to the global elite. This dichotomy forces ethnographers into a methodological cul-de-sac that is buttressed by theories that already support its outcomes—theories that reify spatially bounded and marginalized locales. What Appadurai (1996) had urged for ethnographers to avoid is being repeated—bounding culture to local places. Except for this time, global flows of technology are attacking local culture.  

But these theories depend on a binary of digital haves and have-nots. The haves are always the elites located in space of flows and the have-nots are always located in fixed places. Castells and Harvey do not attend to the complexity of a digital world where affordable access to digital tools is less of a problem than access to information. In Harvey’s “space-time compression,” Castells’ “space of flows” and Virilio’s “universal time”, capital’s global and technical flows obliterate the poor, the technology have-nots, and the local. The marginalized are located outside of these new global flows of capital and power that are facilitated by technology precisely because they do not have access to these technologies . 

I review several ethnographies of marginalized technology users that resist this type of divided  ethnography. I distinguish two different types of ethnographies: 1.) those that embrace  offline and  online field sites, and 2.) those that have restricted their field sites to only the online or the offline. Ethnographies of the former locate internet-related practices as embedded in a larger matrix of practices. Where as ethnographies of the latter treat digital-related practices as a wholly unique and bounded world. This difference in theoretical positioning had radical implications for how a researcher identifies a field site and uses ethnography (Hine 1998: 140).

Ethnographers can be attentive to the unproductive conceptualization of digital users that I have identified. I suggest that we examine Michael Peter Smith’s (2002) and Jenna Burrell’s (2009) methodological proposals for an updated version of multi-sited fieldwork and the emergence of the mobilities paradigm. I then close the paper with a reflection on why ethnography still matters. I explain that ethnography is needed for grounded theory building and to give a face to techno-utopic accounts of technology use that tends to discount marginalized communities. Ethnography reveals social processes that come along with ICTs that would otherwise be difficult to understand. I end the paper with Paul Willis’s discussion on the ethnographic imagination.

list of citations

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I’ve been writing up my field exams over the last few months, trying to cram what should be 1-2 years of reading and writing into a matter of 3 months. Field exams (or what others call oral exams) are part of the long process of getting your phd in the US. Prior to defending your prospectus (which grants you the permission to do dissertation field work), you have to pass the field exams. This process is different in every department.

For me, I  had to essentially write two thesis on two relevant fields to my dissertation research. I chose ethnography and urban sociology. The abstract above is from my ethnography paper. I plan on fleshing out some of the ideas from this paper for my prospectus and eventual dissertation. But that would suck if anyone has to wait that long to read it! So I’ll be posting different parts of my ethnography paper into several blog posts over the next few weeks. 

The next step is preparation for the orals exams. This is where I “defend” these field papers in front of my committee. They ask lots of questions - I try to answer…they ask more - and yes that goes on for a few hours. AFTEr I pass my oral defense, then I spend a few more weeks writing my prospectus in preparation for my prospectus defense. The prospectus is where you outline your field work plans. THEN I’ll be off to china! 

Here’s a link to the abstracts from my ethnography and urban field papers with a full list of citations for both papers. 

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As an aside - being new to academia, I thought that my department would just rationally waive this step considering that I’ve done more years of fieldwork and presentations around the world than most graduate students. But apparently 4 years of being in the field does not excuse me from the rules! I think that they still thought I was joking when I asked if I really had to do this. 

I’m happy to say that I’m finally done! I’ve been on a strict 15 hours/day 5,000 words/day schedule for the last 3 months. It’s now over. Thanks to a special writing buddy, a lovely coffee shop down the street from me, a great doggy, and friends who took care of me and came all the way to see in brooklyn - I was able to get these done! I am proud to say that I didn’t leave my neighborhood for these few months - didn’t even buy a metro card! 

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

Burrell, Jenna. 2009. “The Field Site as a Network: A Strategy for Locating Ethnographic Research.” Field Methods 21:181-199.

Castells, Manuel. 2000. The rise of the network society. Oxford ; Malden, {MA}.

Harvey, David. 1991. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Reprint. Wiley-Blackwell.

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

Virilio, Paul. 2007. Speed and politics. Semiotext(e).

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

I am delighted to read this quote below from Angell & Demetis, 2010, Science’s First Mistake: Misinterpreting Observation, Delusion and Paradox. (thanks webisteme for posting this!)

We cannot even know if reality is consistent with sense data, because we only perceive what is already consistent.

After all, under hypnosis we can be jabbed with a needle and yet feel no pain, or smell disgusting imaginary odors, or consider ourselves nailed to the spot unable to move, or a million and one other sensory sensations impressed upon us by the hypnotist. 

So what if our society is the hypnotist, and we experience everything in a way we have been pre-programmed and disposed to expect? What if there are other dimensions, available only to senses we do not have? That possibility is of no consequence. It is our blessing, and our curse, to be trapped in three dimensions with the senses we do have, or rather with the senses we have been deluded into having.

But damn my brain hurts to think about this quote in the context of reflexive ethnography.

I’ve been writing for 2 weeks straight so I can’t produce anything comprehensible. So I’m going to out-source the thinking to Mike Lynch - another wonderful recommendation from Barry Brown. Take some time to read Lynch (2000) Against Reflexivity as an Academic Virtue and Source of Privileged Knowledge. Lynch starts off by telling us what he’s pretty much going to rip other forms of reflexivity to shreds - he doesn’t even spare the anthropologists!

Although reflexivity often is associated with radical epistemologies, social scientists with more conventional leanings often speak of reflexivity as a methodological tool, substantive property of social systems, or source of individual enlightenment. Radical and conventional social scientists alike tend to stress the importance of being reflexive, as opposed to being unreflexive, but they do not share a coherent conception of what `being reflexive’ means or entails. As an alternative to reflexive self-privileging, I recommend an ethnomethodological conception of reflexivity as an ordinary, unremarkable and unavoidable feature of action. The ethnomethodological conception does not support a particular theoretical or methodological standpoint by contrasting it to an `unreflexive’ counterpart. It has little value as a critical weapon or source of epistemological advantage, which, in the present context, can have advantages of its own for promoting peace and epistemic democracy.

I love Lynch’s piece so much that I’ve put it online for anyone to download. This should not be stuck in the gallows of academic journals. The section that is most useful starts on page 28  where he outlines 6 different version of reflexivity, and then outline an reflexive ethnomethodology. 

Lynch just kills it in this piece. He really does. He pretty much demystifies the typical anthropological or sociolgical excercise of being reflexive about her/his fieldwork. 

Ya I know this is straight up ethnomethodology - but Mike Lynch’s work is excellent and super revelevant (unlike many other grumpy old ethnomethodology pieces).

After reading another suggestion from Barry, Mike Lynch’s Silence in Context: Ethnomethodology and Social Theory (1999), i’ve decided that i need to keep that one near my intellectual heart so that my work remains ethnographically driven, not theory driven. It’s a subtle distinction, but important to the work that I do. Hmmm I think it’s Barry’s secret mission to brainwash me with ethnomethodology. 

Well I really want to read Angell’s & Demetis’s Science’s First Mistake- but when will I have the time before I move to China! 

Another reason why I’m interested in reading this book is because it comes out of Information Systems Analysis.  

And this quote makes me of Ghost in The Shell, Denoi Coil, Fringe, and Tron. 

ahhhh maybe watching Tron will be a temporary solution. 

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

I just finished reading Rich Ling’s  New Tech, New Ties: How Mobile Communication Is Reshaping Social Cohesion. This  book is a lovely accumulation of the oeuvre of Ling’s research over the last decade. It is a healthy rain-forest of citations and unique connections between cellphones and sociological theory on interaction rituals. And if you don’t want to read thousands of pages of original Durkheim, Goffman, and Collins, Ling provides a GREAT summary of each theorist.

That being said, I have some major concerns with Ling’s latest book.

My concerns reflect a personal dialogue with myself that is getting louder as I prepare to enter into one year of continuous 24/7 fieldwork in China. This dialogue is about me making sure that I am as reflexive as possible about how I embed myself into my field site so as to avoid the concerns in Ling’s book that I outline below.

I find that there are few ethnographies about new ICTs that show the researcher being reflective about their position in the fieldsite. When I read danah boyd’s dissertation a few months ago, I was so delighted that she wrote about her deep and ongoing reflection about herself and her fieldwork. I hope that my review below shows why it is is important for ethnographers of ICTs to be  reflexive if you engage in deep ethnography of subjective, granular social interaction - which Ling did not do.

The interesting thing is that Rich Ling’s work was so invaluable to me  years in the early years of my research.  When the sociologists in my department laughed in my face when I told them that I research cellphones,  I found inspiration and validation in Ling’s research. I filled my office with his papers and his first book. Ling’s work was a reminder that someone else out there was a sociologist who talked about cellphones. 

This is all to say that Rich Ling has been an important intellectual partner from afar (even though he doesn’t know who I am). Ling’s work thing was the only one I could turn to when I wanted to leave academia (before I met Barry Brown). Barry then then introduced me to a world wide network of amazing researchers on the social use of cellphones, from his own work to Genevieve Bell to Alex Taylor to Richard Harper to Mimi Shelly and John Urry. So reading Ling’s latest book is quite a disappointment. It seems like he didn’t evolve as a researcher. This book amplifies all the problems of his papers and books instead of ameliorating them.  Nevertheless, I offer my critique below.

I question Ling’s main premise - that the mobile creates social cohesion. There are many other reasons why this book is questionable but my three biggest concerns are:

1) his sampling methodology
2) his over reliance on data that was obtained through primarily ethnographic participant observations
3) his elite normative assumptions of what makes a “successful” ritual of social cohesion

I worry that this book will be used by future ICT researchers use as a model in which to do research on tech use. I worry that non-qualitative researchers will think that this is good qualitative research OR that this is what all qualitative research looks like. This book has received a lot praise within the community and has won a lot of awards. For all the reasons I outline below, I don’t think his book serves as a good model for research.

Rather, I think this book is an excellent case study for what works and what doesn’t work — things like what kind of questions can be asked and what kind of methods are best for certain questions. Unfortunately, it’s a great case study for what happens when an ethnographer is not reflexive about their position in the field site.

Most worrisome to me is the way that Ling uses his own analysis to patrol how other communities use technologies. Researchers who are not conscious about class and culture may think that they can just make normative decisions of what counts as acceptable interaction. This is why I am so motivated about my own research - because if researchers only analyze how elite communities use technologies from their own elite position, then they’re going to produce analysis that reifies existing inequalities and assumptions about low-income and non-elite users.

1.) sampling methodology
Ling falls into the trap of sampling on the dependent variable: social cohesion.  So it goes like this - Ling was looking for data to prove that mobiles create social cohesion. He makes observations of mobiles creating social cohesion. Therefore, he concludes that mobile phones create social cohesion! He found what he was looking for - mobiles creating social cohesion! His methodological and analytical strategy makes no room for any other types of interactions or analysis because  his research design and methods to affirm an pre-determined outcome. 

2.) over-reliance on participant observation, limits of theoretical engagement
Most of Ling’s data is collected through casual participant observations of interaction in public places where he positioned himself as a witness within audible distance of callers. His participants did not know that they were being observed. He did not conduct follow up interviews with the co-present caller or the caller on the other end. He says that he “was not interested in the dialogue of the individuals” because he was more concerned with how [individuals] carried themselves in the situation” (19-20). It’s not the use of participant observation that is the problem, it’s that he used this method to answer his research question  - a question that needs subjective insight from BOTH callers on the context and content of interaction.

Ling assumes that all interactions are efforts to strengthen social cohesion. But he could never find out otherwise or even confirm. With his self-positioning as a witness to the interaction, he does not talk to either parties about the call afterwards. We can never ascertain the intent behind the interaction between the callers.

• What of the subjective intentions of the talker?
• What if the call was about information?
• What if the call was a fight?
• What if the caller felt obligated to take the call?
• What if the caller was having a secret affair with someone?

We will never know the answers to these questions because Ling never asks them. Hopefully readers are clever enough to know that human interaction isn’t ALWAYS about social cohesion - even if it’s within strong ties.

Part of the problem that Ling runs against is the limitations of the theories he draws upon. Durkheimian theories and its offshoots are functional theories - they seek to explain how a society functions instead of how it changes over time. As such, Ling has provided a functional theory of mobile use. Functional theories are not any less valuable or valid than other types of theories about ICT use, but in a book that’s supposed to be new transformations, they aren’t as useful for accounting for CHANGE in ICT practices.


3) his elite normative assumptions of what makes a “successful” ritual of social cohesion
The issue that concerns me the most is Ling’s normative definitions of what rituals of social cohesion look like. This is made apparent through the story that he opens the book with on page 1 where he details the interaction with a plumber at his house in Oslo, Norway.

Ling describes a moment outside on the front porch of his house where he was bidding goodbye to several guests who had just spent the night. In the middle of this intimate farewell interaction, a plumber— that Ling had called— arrived. The plumber, whom Ling had never met before, was on his mobile phone as he walked up to the porch. The plumber stayed on his phone, walked past Ling and his house guests, gave Ling a “minimal nod” and then “stopped in the vestibule and took off his shoes—as common in Norway—and then continued down the hallway into the kitchen.” (1).

Ling says that “the plumber’s entrance disturbed the farewells” (1). He was offended that there was “no salutation, no handshake, no exchange of names. This was a breach. It was a failed ritual” (21).  Ling says that

“the entrance of the plumber was… an example of how mobile communication has interrupted the flow of normal co-present ritual interaction. There was not the normal greeting we expect when receiving visitors into our home.”

Ling’s story reveals a lot more about social anxieties around technology use as it intersects with class and culture than it does about Ling’s argument of social cohesion. This interaction is a collision of Ling’s and the plumber’s differing cultural and class expectations. Ling, an international elite researcher, calls the plumber, a working-class local Norwegian plumber in Norway. The plumber is not on the same equal social standing as Ling’s house guests. Ling, a cosmopolitan researcher, has a different set of expectations for rituals of social cohesion.

Back in the early 20th century when landline telephones were first introduced in the US, AT&T and other phone companies created etiquette instruction booklets on the “proper” uses of the telephone. These booklets warned males against being too loud and to avoid the use of curse words that female telephone operators could over hear. Women were admonished for initiating phone calls to men, initiating new anxieties for mothers around the country. While the examples I have given speak to concerns around gender boundaries, Ling’s story essentially echoes the same concerns but in regards to class.  

Did Ling ever consider that the plumber only saw himself as a “hired worker” to accomplish a task? It is likely that the plumber didn’t see himself as a “visitor” but as a hired service worker.  A service worker is not the same as a house guest visitor. The interactions are different because the hired service worker and houses guests are embedded in different structural socio-economic positions. 

Ethnographies of class and social interaction have illustrated the vast number of ways normative expectations of social behavior map onto class positions. Elites from higher-income stratas, institutions, or social status often patrol, surveil, and regulate the ways non-elites interact with institutions, use technologies, and interact in everyday life. Sociological researchers have documented time and time again (to name a few Pierre Bourdieu, Paul Willis, Paul Gilroy, Carol Stack, Michael Dunnier, Annette Lareau, Michelle Lamont) that when working class people interact with those they perceive to be in a higher-income or social status bracket, working-class people behave in different ways and are often not comfortable in these situations. One behavior is to to retreat into the background and to make one’s self as invisible as possible so as to not disturb a situation. By giving just a minimal nod before walking in, the plumber may have doing exactly this - trying to avoid disrupting the intimate social conversation between Ling and his house guests!

• What if the plumber felt uncomfortable and unsure about how to interact at that moment?
• What if he saw all those people on the porch and felt anxiety about disrupting a ritual interaction?
• If is possible that the plumber realized this to be an important “ritual” that he didn’t want to interrupt? 

Or what if the plumber saw all the people on the porch and didn’t know who lived at the house? Who made the call for him to come? This is very likely considering that Ling says he had never met the plumber before, the door was open, and there were several people on the porch.

So what if Ling is the one who failed at a ritual interaction - what if he didn’t make himself known as the person who called the plumber? What if Ling misread the interaction and the plumber was giving a general nod to everyone on the porch? 

And what does it say about Ling who didn’t stop the plumber to say, “hey, are you the plumber? I’m the one who called. I live here.” Ling’s annoyance seems very passive-aggressive to me.

Essentially, what if Ling failed to understand local Norwegian culture?  In talking with my  Norwegian and Swedish friends, they have said that of all the Scandinavian countries, Norway is known to be the “least cultured.” This is not to say that they actually are, but among popular discourse and history - that is a stereotype. Norway was not a wealthy country until the last few decades when oil was discovered. The government was very smart about investing this money in tourism and social security for every Norwegian citizen. But the stereotype still holds that Norwegians are notorious for lacking what the French and Austrians would call “good manners.” Norway is also know for their strong working class culture and for having one of the strongest communal cultures. It is said that they emphasize the task to be accomplished over small talk or any interaction that gets in the way of getting the work done. If what my Northern Europeans friends have told me about Norway is more or less the case, than the interaction Ling described with the plumber is quite reflective of Norwegian cultural norms.

Another possibility is that  has nothing to with the cellphone but is instead a story of deep user experience. Haven’t you been so immersed in a book or the confusion of instructions - that you lost track of what was going on around you?

Now it is also just as likely that this was less about class etiquette than the plumber’s subjective priorities. The subject of the call could’ve been about the work. What if the plumber was obtaining crucial information to fix Ling’s pipes at the time he stepped into the frame? While Ling does consider this possibility he sees it as a matter of social cohesion, not of socio-economic priorities to fulfill a job.

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So hey Rich what was plugged up in your house that got you so anxious about the plumber? Did one of the house guests over-use your toilet? Maybe that was why you were so sensitive to the plumber? So did the plumber fix it? How was the interaction afterwards?  Were you so annoyed that the plumber sensed your annoyance, got embarrassed, and that just made the whole interaction sour and beyond rescue?

I am curious about how you handled the interaction afterwards. I wonder if you just didn’t say anything about it to the plumber at that moment only to years or months later write about this frustrating moment as the intro to your book - to essentially tell the world that this “naive” Norwegian plumber failed at a social ritual.
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REFLEXIVITY
My concerns point to several issues that all ethnographers encounter in the field - their own position in it and their relation to all their participants.  This is why reflexivity is super important. I would’ve loved for Ling to reflect more upon his own position in his work. This would’ve helped Ling account for his normative assumptions. There is no acknowledgment that the views he holds are partial and situated.

Because Ling does not engage in self-reflexivity of his own situated view, Ling allows his  normative expectations of a “normal greeting”  to cloud his analysis. When the plumber “fails” the ritual, Ling attributes this “awkward” social interaction to the plumber prioritizing his own mobile conversation over the co-present interaction with Ling.  Ling assumes that the plumber was solidifying a close social tie at the expense of the co-present interaction with Ling. It appears that Ling was projecting his own argument about mobiles onto the plumber.

Did Ling bother to talk to the plumber about this afterwards to find out the nature of the mobile phone call?  What Ling attributes to lack of social manners of “flawed etiquette” (21), is a possible social collision of globalization where people of different classes, backgrounds, nationalities, subjectivites are thrown together.  

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SOCIOLOGY and CELLPHONES

Now that the field of sociology is finally coming to realize that “society” uses digital tools - they are scrambling to find ways to analyze their recent discovery. Unfortunately many of them keep going back to the same old European scholars who were trying to make sense of a world in the 1800-1900’s (!). 

After years of sociology classes, I got tired of  writing about cellphones within the context of dead sociologists. There are limits to all theories, especially those that were written in a completely different era (industrial). though my department has urged me to publish my papers on cellphones and Marxian, Weberian, and Durkheimian  theory,  I chose not to. Instead I just make them available for download on my website because those papers were not based on thorough qualitative research. Because I had never been one for writing ungrounded theory papers, they felt more like writing exercises for me.

But it appears that Ling has found a lot of fans by grooming his data for the world of sociology. 

So here’s a lesson -  if you want to study cellphones and be loved by sociologists, here are are some book ideas and dissertations that might be embraced by a sociology department:

• cellphones are a form of alienation - Marx!
• cellphones tap into the collective concious - Durkheim!
• cellphones aren’t about class - they are about social status- Weber!
• cellphones allow for sociation - Simmel!
• cellphones create anomie - Durkheim!
• cellphones destroy primary ties of community (gemeniscaft), not loose ties of society (gesellschaft)  - Tonnies!