Dan Lockton’s blog post announcing his PhD, ‘Design with Intent: A design pattern toolkit for environmental & social behaviour change,” is super inspiring. 

My PhD involves developing a ‘design pattern’ toolkit, called Design with Intent, to help designers create products, services and environments which influence the way people use them. The toolkit brings together techniques for understanding and changing human behaviour from a number of psychological disciplines, illustrated with examples, to enable designers to explore and apply relevant strategies to problems.

I always love keeping an eye on thinkers whose work engages with academia and industry. Like Christina Dennaoui, Leila Takayama,  Danah Boyd, Barry Brown, Laura Watts, Paco Underhill, Nicholas Nova, Julian Bleeker, Lyn Jeffery, Jane Fulton Suri, Ian Bogost, Sam Ladner, John Battelle, and  James Landay. I try to learn from their work because they draw on academic research yet communicate their thoughts without the academic jargon. 

I now have to add Don Lockton to the list!

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Lately, I have been dreaming up of a visual component to my dissertation when I write it up next year after I finish my fieldwork in China. I have a collection of small books, pamphlets, guides, and materials from organizations that give me inspiration for my creation.

One of my favorite examples is Laura Watt’s ethnographic work on Orkney Islands in Scotland. We were both guest lecturing at Irina Shklovski’s seminar at IT University in Copenhagen, and Laura gave an amazing presentation about her research. In addition to her talk, she passed around a fieldwork tool kit that  created to help clients understand her research. I remember that her research was one of the first and few times (to date) where I can hear the word “innovation” and not roll my eyes. She created a beautiful book of stories and poems about possible futures of Orkney Islands and a digital booklet about the future scenarios of infrastructure.

Oh and another super cool project coming out of academic research is Reframing Mexico City, an interactive website from University of North Carolina School of Journalism and Tecnologico de Monterrey. To create part one of the scenarios on the website, UNC & TM students used data collected from UCSD Center for Comparative Immigration Studies’ (CCIS) interviews with Mexican immigrants on how they crossed the border into the US (research led by Leah Muse-Orlinoff). Data from the interviews were used to convey the perils and experiences of clandestine border crossing in Tijuana, Tecate, and Sasabe. Then users on the website actually have the opportunity to experience the border crossing - they get to “make decisions about where they would like to cross, how much they want to pay a coyote, and what to do when confronted with certain obstacles such as apprehension by the border patrol, extreme climatic conditions, and injury.” This is an excellent example of how academic research can be turned into story-telling and creating empathetic experiences.

Well, now I get to add Lockton’s toolkit to my collection! He (and David Harrison, Neville A. Stanton) created a wiki for the toolkit where you can download the cards and purchase a set.

Reading his dissertation summary reminds me of all the educational toolkits that I created for workshop that I led before I started my PhD. (I created conferences and workshop for educators on how to incorporate popular culture like hip-hop into educational curricula, and how to use new media in after-school programs in low-income communities.)

While my dissertation is vastly different from Lockton’s and making a toolkit does not make sense (at least for now), it’s inspiring to see how it could be done. It makes me excited to figure out the appropriate tools to create when it comes to my dissertation!

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Aside from creating a lovely tangible set of materials, Lockton’s dissertation has intellectual teeth.  His primary research questions is:

Can industrial designers use the Design with Intent toolkit to apply insights from other disciplines (psychology, ergonomics, architecture, human-computer interaction, behavioural economics) to generate novel, realistic design concepts, addressing briefs on influencing user behaviour, primarily to reduce the environmental impact of technology use, but also in other social benefit contexts?

One field to add to the disciplines that he’s mentioned is Sociology! While psychology helps you understand beliefs that influence user behavior from an individual’s point of view, sociology takes a more meta approach by situating beliefs that influence the user from a communal point of view.

Drawing on sociology would compliment Lockton’s last section that seeks to understand designers’ and users’ mental models about technological systems.  Sociological research on culture and group interaction can be incredibly useful to answering how mental models affect designers. Mental models are culturally grounded. As such, one has to understand the broader context of the society that that the designer AND user is embedded in to really get at this question.

Now I already anticipate some academic purists arguing that Lockton’s dissertation is super normative  - he’s explicitly trying to change user behavior, or that his work is too subjective - like creating his own index of measurement for his own products, or that it just isn’t academic to do a dissertation on something that one invented for industry use. But that’s really not fair to say this. Physicists, geneticists, or educators come up with their theories or ideas all the time and test it out with their dissertation. And just because research is normative form the get-go doesn’t mean that this isn’t legitimate academic research. Lockton is explicit in his research questions, and I think that is most important. Whereas many of academic research is hidden in super jargony language that is trying to prove something they already believe in, but hiding it under the cloak of reflexivity. Reflexivity is a mirage (according to Mike Lynch).

Thank you to Mark Vanderbeeken for tweeting & blogging about this!

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 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!
  

I just discovered this whole field called “DESIGN THINKING.” It’s a process for designing practical and creative resolutions for an end action/product/program that brings about improvement for a group of people. What I like about this process is that it defines itself against ANALYTICAL THINKING - because design thinking is a “creative process based around the ‘building up’ of ideas. There are no judgments early on in design thinking. This eliminates the fear of failure and encourages maximum input and participation in the ideation and prototype phases.”

NO JUDGEMENTS!!! This is big! So much of “analytical thinking” is about coming up with ideas that don’t look or sound stupid and ideas with minimum chances of failure. But that prevents people from thinking creatively and working as a team because everyone is too invested in their ego or their discipline or their theory.

EVERYDAY KNOWLEDGE! What I like about this philosophy is that it mirrors how people think about solutions in everyday life before they are socialized into institutionalized forms of thinking that require theoretical considerations or busines models. All around the world people are engaging in design thinking! India has been really good at tracking innovations by ordinary people who don’t have “design degrees” or have elite business social networks. Check out the National Innovation Foundation and Honeybee Network.

MULTIDISCIPLINARY THINKING!!! Yah I love things that promote multidisciplinary in a genuine way that values the role of professionals who work on understaning human values - so lookie I know where I fit in! There’s me - ethnographer/sociologist/anthopologist! I have a place in this world - this is so exciting :)  I love learning about new business models and technologies - but at the end of the day i’m not a technologist or a hard-core business person - but my entry into both of those worlds is from the perspective of understanding the cultural practices and beliefs of new users who are consuming new technologies. Companies, like Google and P&G, are using this process to understand new markets. This makes me excited that I am employable in non-academic sectors! (thanks Tania Menendez! for the link)

IT’s ABOUT PEOPLE! Design thinking brings it all back to the humans - humans are the ones who use and interface with products - so this process is all about putting humans in all their capacities in the center.  So much of design in the past focused on creating “sexy” products - I think that’s why people associate design with “aesthetic”  - while I appreciate that aspect for I am just as enamored in beautiful packaging as anyone else - design thinking as a process beings the process back to the people and the people who use the products. GOOD DESIGN THINKING around a product CREATES SEXY PRODUCTS - designing for aesthetics only gets you so far - designing for people takes you a lot farther.

The three approaches to Design Thinking are (cited from here):

1. Proactively understand customer needs and cultural norms unique to each country.

2. Use those insights to run low-fidelity, strategic experiments.

3. Use the resulting assumptions to drive the development of local business models, including product development, marketing and branding, sales and distribution, and manufacturing.

Stanford has a whole institute dedicated to Design Thinking- The Hasso Plattner School of Design at STandford, started by David Kelly, the founder of IDEO.  The whole philosophy at IDEO is Design Thinking:

Because design is messy and non-linear, each project we do is bespoke. We customize it for the challenge at hand. The scoping of the project plan is when our approach starts to take shape, and where our partnership with you begins…An inherently shared approach, design thinking brings together people from different disciplines to effectively explore new ideas—ideas that are more human-centered, that are better able to be executed, and that generate valuable new outcomes.

And I love Tom Brown’s (CEO of IDEO) blog on Design Thinking.

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I would like to think through the Design Thinking process for my work in Mexico with Barry Brown, Gloria Mark, Jesus Favela and Tanya Mendendez. We are working with a village in Oaxaca on designing appropriate technology for the people of this village. All along we’ve approached it from the circle that would be called “Human Values” according to DEsign Thinking. After two years of ethnography fieldwork in Oaxaca, we are finally in the phase where we are bringing in the technologists of CICESE and the people of the village to brainstorm ideas that would be useful for THEIR lives - not ours! We are hosting  the design workshop in 2 weeks so I will post about that later.

Thanks Al Abut for pointing out some critiques of DEsign Thinking here and here - that essentially say this process nurtures the designer’s ego instead of removing it. Perhaps I am not clear about this process since my entry point isn’t as a designer nor as a corporation - but I would think that a more genuine implementation of Design Thinking requires an equal level of respect given to all the team-members that come from the all the other disciplines and the users. For me Design Thinking is exciting because it’s discusses a formal way to equally valorize the role of ethnographers/sociologists/anthropologists alongside the technologists and business heads. For too long psychologists were the only “people”-centered research folks allowed at the table.

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

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

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

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

Read his paper and other writings here.

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

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

How do I apply this this my research?

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

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

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

Suggested Reading:

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

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

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