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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ok one more blog post on something that informs thought process (again Kevin this is your fault!)

I read lots of books from economic geographers and communication theorists about the effects of new technologies on society. Many theorists agree that digital tools cause spatial and temporal disconnects, shifting the way we experience everyday life. Within this group are scholars who propose widely popular and cited phrases about time and pace.

Some examples:

• David Harvey says that this creates “time-space compression.”
• Manuel Castells claims that the global IT workers in the tech industry are increasingly located in the “space of flows,” the distributed geographic digital networks that mediate virtual communication.  In such a society, “places do not disappear, but their logic and their meaning become absorbed in the network” so that the structural logic that runs a network society is not based on places (pg 443).
• Even the economists agree but they tend to have a more positive take. George Gilder (2000, Telecosm: the world after bandwidth abundance) believes that global diffusion of telecom will emancipate people from face-to-face relations.
• Frances Cairncross (2001, The Death of Distance: How the Communications Revolution is Changing our Lives) doesn’t see distance as a limiting factor in social interaction.     

Essentially, what these authors claim of digital tools are the same claims that we have heard about all preceding technologies from trains to telephones to the cotton gin to cars - technologies compress space-time. They create confusion, chaos and overload. 

There seems to be a great sense of urgency on the affects of our new digital time. This urgency is borderline fear and fetish of a new so-called compressed space-time experience where daily life at increasing at speeds so fast, so FAST THAT WHAT? What will happen??? We will explode!!! And now social media is killing us! Info Overload! 

Paul Virillo, a theorist on speed, politics, and wars, is very concerned about time-space compression and outlines a possible future of time concussions:

What lies ahead is a disturbance in the perception of what reality is; it is a shock, a mental concussion. And this outcome ought to interest us. Why? Because never has any progress in a technique been achieved without addressing its specific negative aspects. The specific negative aspect of these information superhighways is precisely this loss of orientation regarding alterity (the other), this disturbance in the relationship with the other and with the world. It is obvious that this loss of orientation, this non-situation, is going to usher a deep crisis which will affect society and hence, democracy……For the first time, history is going to unfold within a one-time-system: global time. Up to now, history has taken place within local times, local frames, regions and nations. But now, in a certain way, globalization and virtualization are inaugurating a global time that prefigures a new form of tyranny. If history is so rich, it is because it was local, it was thanks to the existence of spatially bounded times which overrode something that up to now occurred only in astronomy: universal time. But in the very near future, our history will happen in universal time, itself the outcome of instantaneity - and there only.

Now when I need to find some sanity in all these calls to deconstruct grand meta-narratives of  super-modernity’s time-space compression - there is one woman that I always call upon, the amazing Doreen Massey. She is freaking AWESOME. I worship her brain. I put her in the cloud with Donna Haraway. Donna and Doreen  - solid.

Doreen Massey’s work is in many ways a response to a deficiency in spatial theory to account for practices and conceptions of place beyond elite individuals who can jet set from one time zone to another and effortlessly relocate and disassociate from places. Many of the compression-space-time scholars theorize broadly about a very elite and narrow experience of life with digital tools, of which Massey avoids doing.  She is one of the key thinkers who deplore universal accounts of place as bounded and fixed across social relationships and the dichotomy of place as bounded and space as open. 

For Massey, even if a place appears to be bounded, she argues that this place is located in a grander scheme of space that is constantly in flux.  She employs the concept of “power geometry” in insisting that the production of place and space be examined across class, gender, nations, cultures, economies, and race, and that this analysis  must be examined together in relation to the flow and movement within one place and in relation to other places (1993).  For Massey, places are constantly in flux and reflect hybrid forms of power and culture, and to see it any other way would gloss over the mobile, imaginative and unpredictable practices of everyday life. 

Doreen Massey reminds me why I do the research that I do with who I do it with. Massey always has a great sense of justice and power infused into her work. Working in low-income or marginal communities isn’t exactly sexy and I don’t produce research that affirms what Western tech companies want to see or hear. But I have tons of fun and I believe in the importance of my work because it addresses uneven distribution of power and resources.

Massey is so awesome that I’ve cut some of my fave sections out of one the most beautiful essays every written by a geographer - A Global Sense of Place in Reading Human Geography (1997). Someone has put her essay up here - download while it’s avail!

I’m just going to let Doreen do her thing now - these are several excerpts that I can’t even cut up - every word is beautiful. But the essay really does need to read in its entirety so that you can see the narrative she traces. If you end up really liking her, I suggest that you also read For Space. It’s another deeply thoughtful meditation on space and place.

Now I want to make one simple point here, and that is about what one might call the power geometry of it all; the power geometry of time-space compression. For different social groups, and different individuals, are placed in very distinct ways in relation to these flows and interconnections. This point concerns not merely the issue of who moves and who doesn’t, although that is an important element of it; it is also
about power in relation to the flows and the movement. Different social groups have distinct relationships to this anyway differentiated mobility: some people are more in charge of it than others; some initiate flows and movement, others don’t; some are more on the receiving-end of it than others; some are effectively imprisoned by it.

In a sense at the end of all the spectra are those who are both doing the moving and the communicating and who are in some way in a position of control in relation to it  - the jet-setters, the ones sending and receiving the faces and the e-mail, holding the international conference calls, the ones distributing films, controlling the news, organizing the investments and the international currency transactions. These are the groups who are really in a sense in charge of time-space compression, who care really
use it and turn it to advantage, whose power and influence it very definitely increases.

On its more prosaic fringes this group probably includes a fair number of western academics and journalists - those, in other words, who write most about it. But there are also groups who are also doing a lot of physical moving, but who are not ‘in charge’ of the process in the same way at all. The refugees from El Salvador or Guatemala and the undocumented migrant workers from Michoacan in Mexico, crowding into Tijuana to make a perhaps fatal dash for it across the border into the US to grab a chance of a new life. Here he experience of movement, and indeed of a confusing plurality of cultures, is very different. And there are those from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Caribbean, who come half way round the world only to get held up in an interrogation room at Heathrow.

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This is, in other words, a highly complex social differentiation. There are differences in the degree of movement and communication, but also in the degree of control and initiation. The ways in which people are placed within ‘time-space compression’ are highly complicated and extremely varied.

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But this in turn immediately raises questions of politics. If time-space compression can be imagined in that more socially formed, socially evaluative and differentiated way, then there may be here the possibility of developing a politics of mobility and access. For it does seem that mobility, and control over mobility, both reflects and reinforces power. It is not simply a question of unequal distribution, that some people
move more than others, and that some have more control than others. It is that the mobility and control of some groups can actively weaken other people. Differential mobility can weaken the leverage of the already weak. The time-space compression of some groups can undermine the power of others.

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Many of those who write about time-space compression emphasize the insecurity and unsettling impact of its effects, the feeling of vulnerability which it can produce. Some therefore go on from this to argue that, in the middle of all this flux, people desperately need a bit of peace and quiet - and that a strong sense of place, or locality, can form one kind of refuge from the hubbub. So the search after the ‘real’ meanings
of places, the unearthing of heritages and so forth, is interpreted as being, in part, a response to desire for fixity and for security of identity in the middle of all the movement and change. A ‘sense of place’, of rootedness, can provide - in this form and on this interpretation - stability and a source of unproblematical identity. In that
guise, however, place and the spatially local are then rejected by many progressive people as almost necessarily reactionary. They are interpreted as an evasion; as a retreat from the (actually unavoidable) dynamic and change of ‘real life’, which is what we must seize if we are to change things for the better. On this reading, place
and locality are foci for a form of romanticized escapism from the real business of the world. While ‘time’ is equated with movement and progress, ‘space’/’place’ is equated
with stasis and reaction.

There are some serious inadequacies in this argument. There is the question of why it is assumed that time-space compression will produce insecurity. There is the need to face up to - rather than simply deny - people’s need for attachment of some sort, whether through place or anything else. None the less, it is certainly the case that there is indeed at the moment a recrudescence of some very problematical sense of
place, from reactionary nationalisms, to competitive localisms, to introverted obsessions with ‘heritage’. We need, therefore, to think through what might be an adequately progressive sense of place, one which would fit in with the current global local times and the feelings and relations they give rise to, and which would be useful in what are, after all, political struggles often inevitably based on place. The question

is how to hold on to that notion of geographical difference, of uniqueness, even of rootedness if people want that, without being reactionary.

There are a number of distinct ways in which the ‘reactionary’ notion of place described above is problematical. One is the idea that places have single, essential, identities. Another is the idea that place - the sense of place - is constructed out of an introverted, inward-looking history based on delving into the past for internalized origins, translating the name from the Domesday Book.

These arguments, then, highlight a number of ways in which a progressive concept of place might be developed. First of all, it is absolutely not static. If places can be conceptualized in terms of the social interactions which they tie together, then it is also the case that these interactions themselves are not motionless things, frozen in time. They are processes. One of the great one-liners in Marxist exchanges has for long been, ‘Ah, but capital is not a thing, it’s a process.’ Perhaps this should be said also about places, that places are processes, too.

Second, places do not have boundaries in the sense of divisions which frame simple enclosures. ‘Boundaries’ may be of course be necessary, for the purposes of certain turn of studies for instance, but they are not necessary for the conceptualization of a place itself. Definition in this sense does not have to be through simple
counterposition to the outside; it can come, in part, precisely through the particularity of linkage to that ‘outside’ which is therefore itself part of what constitutes the place. This helps get away from the common association between penetrability and vulnerability. For it is this kind of association which makes invasion by newcomers so
threatening.

Third, clearly places do not have single, unique ‘identities’; they are full of internal conflicts. Just think, for instance, about London’s Docklands, a place which is at the moment quite clearly defined by conflict: a conflict over what it past has been (the nature of its ‘heritage’), conflict over what should be its present development, conflict over what could be its future.

Fourth, and finally, none of this denies place nor the importance of the uniqueness of place. The specificity of place is continually reproduced, but it s not a specificity which result from some long, internalized history. there are a number of sources of this specificity - the uniqueness of place. There is the fact that the wider social relations in which places are set themselves geographically differentiated.

Globalization (in the economy, or in culture, or in anything else) does not entail simply homogenization. On the contrary, the globalization of social relations is yet another source of (the reproduction of) geographical uneven development, and thus of the uniqueness of place. There is the specificity of place which derives from the fact that each place is the focus of a distinct mixture of wider and more local social relations. There is the fact that this very mixture together in one place may produce effects which would not have happened otherwise. And finally, all these relations with and take a further element of specificity from the accumulated history of a place, with that history itself imagined as the product of layer upon layer of different sets of linkages, both local and to the wider world.

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.

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.