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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is the 1st post of a 4-part post on my fieldwork experience in Oaxaca, Mexico. This are unedited field notes that show the moments that have nothing to do with technology during my fieldwork. Here is where I explain the context for why I’m sharing these notes. (Post 1,Post 2,Post 3,Post 4)

Manny and Leonardo came with us to the Jaripeo. Leonardo drove to the Jaripeo. We parked the car. It was complete darkness as we were driving on the carretera and then you can see the fabric of the stage for the bands. The Jaripeo’s smell started coming through the windows. As we drove closer, we could make out people standing out front waiting for their friends. All of sudden the night seemed to brighter. The moon was full and the dogs were howling at the noise. In the middle of the mountain crevices, was a firefly - the light of the jaripeo. I imagines those who lived in the sierras who were looking down at us with their binochulars trying to find out when the bulls would be let out.

The jaripeo entrance fees were 100pesos a ticket. Originally they had been 80, he raised the price last minute!! 

We sat in the bleachers next to the entrance. Many people are there with families. 

 Leonardo  said that he never has ridden a bull. 

I took lots of photos of the band and of the jaripeo.

There were two clowns - payasos - performing to the music. They were engaging in very homosexual behavior. They simulated anal sex and blow jobs. The clown grabbed the other clown from behind and pushed him over and rocked himself on his butt. This was very shocking to see at at Jaripeo. They were very sexual with each other. 

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The stadium was only 50% filled.

We drank some cafe de holla. I bought it from Esmeralda’s aunt. We talked about a bit. 

I saw Esmeralda (Jacinto’s grandaughter).  Esmeralda talked this year, but she whispered a lot inside my ear. It was hard to understand her. She sat on my lap while I was observing the crowd.

I would’ve liked to talked to Carlos about how he organized the event. He was too busy with running the event and he said that he could talk more when he done returning all the bulls but that would be after we were gone. I had the chance at least to chat with him a but when I was near the bullriders by the stage taking pictures. Octavio let me into the area and said I could take pictures.

I spent about an hour near the band and I saw the photographer/videographer of the event. He was about 40-50 years old. He was using an old handheld video camcorder.  He walked like he owned the place. He had a humongous photography camera and he made sure that his hands were always on it. When he walked up, one of the bull rider assistants gave him a cigaratte. He sat down, put his feet on the table. He didn’t take any pictures of the band. I couldn’t hear what they were saying to each other because the stereo was right behind my ears. During the event, the photographer/videographer was walking around selling his dvd’s of the event for 100 pesos. He was the only the one who had the tools to record the event. other than the person with the hand-held cam, I didn’t see anyone with cameras or video cameras. 

The jaripeo announcer was also treated with a lot of respect from the bull riding assistants. The bull riders were preparing themselves near the bulls. The photographer and the announcer acted like they were the most important people in the area. 

When the announcer was resting in this area, there was an assistant announcer. The head announcer would shout out announcements  and make lots of hand motions to the assistant. He seemed frustrated when the assistant wasn’t saying things on time or would forget to mention things. For example he was motioning like crazy to the band, and then the assistant mentioned the band.

When it was time for the announcer to enter the ring, he was puffing up his hands, shaking his limbs and took his vest off. 

There were only men in the area. The only time a woman entered the area was when Esmeralda’s aunt came into sell beers to the Jaripeo riders.  I was very aware that I was the only female in this space. But I didn’t feel unwelcomed. 

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The announcer started the event by introducing each bullrider. He kept saying each bullrider was “la seleccion Poblana.” When each bull rider was introduced, he would come up and draw a sign in the dirt - maybe the bull rider was making a sign of a cross? 

The bullrider (jinetes) wore colorful bullriding pants. They would kiss their hands and wave to the crowd.

Carlos  owned two of the bulls. He was asked to come out and the announcer thanked him for organizing the event. He then asked the photographer/videographer to come out and he talked him up big time - like he’s the best photographer and he makes the best videos and you should all buy them. When he was finished with the introductions, the announcer said a prayer and asked the virgen mary to protect each rider. 

The first novice rider to come out fell off his bull and then the bull stepped on his back. He crawled back out of the ring and barely made it. He needed people to pull him out. He lost conciousness for about 5 minutes. The clowns and Octavio were trying to wake him up. The bull had stepped on him several times. He didn’t look paralyzed at least. He woke up and then they put him in a chair. He look so young. 

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We noticed that people weren’t using their cellphones at all to take pictures. I wonder if people had even brought their cellphones with them. 

We saw one person with a handheld video-cam.

We saw someone taking out their phone for about 1 minute and then they put it back in their pockets. 

A lot of people were complaining that the bulls weren’t good. That means that they weren’t going crazy.

Leonardo’s cousins kept walking by and trying to give him beers. Lots of youth were drinking beers. Lots of youth were also smoking. There were people from surrounding pueblos - not everyone was from the Sabinilo even though Carlos organzied the event. 

When we left the event, a lot of men were drunk. They smelled so bad. Lots of alcohol in the air. As we were crowding around the exit to leave, there were several men lined up and trying to say hello.

There was a total of 9 bulls.  Octavio paid 2000 pesos for 7 bulls and he owned 2 bulls.

Each jinete gets 4,000 pesos to come out and compete.

Leonardo mentioned that Carlos will end up losing money on this Jaripeo, and realized that after he summed up all the costs; but decided to go through with it anyway since he had already told people he was doing it — this is also why he raised the price last minute, so he wouldn’t lose as much money. It was supposed to originally cost 80 pesos, but it ended being 100 pesos to enter.

Post 1 of 4: I touched the stomach of a pregnant Donkey!

Post 2 of 4: spending New Year’s Eve Dancing til 5am

Post 3 of 4: Time for the Jaripeo - Bullriding

Post 4 of 4: Eating Live Insect

This is the 1st post of a 4-part post on my fieldwork experience in Oaxaca, Mexico. This are unedited field notes that show the moments that have nothing to do with technology during my fieldwork. Here is where I explain the context for why I’m sharing these notes. (Post 1,Post 2,Post 3,Post 4)

-post-4-of-4-eating-live-insect”>Post 4)  

I felt the heartbeat of a baby donkey inside the mother’s tummy!

I haven’t even felt the heartbeat of a human baby inside a mother’s tummy before! It was totally crazy! We were hiking back to the village after we spent a morning learning about how the pueblo is reforesting its land to capture water and how it currently receives water from the mountains without any pumps - just through pure gravity - and on our way back we saw two donkey’s tied up to a tree. This donkey is pregnant. Can you see it’s big tummy?

It was such a beautiful moment - the air was so clean and all you could hear were the birds and crunching of the earth from the donkey moving around. I really happy to be so connected to everything around me at that moment  - the air, the clouds, the blue sky,  the animal, the grass, the earth, and the water. I breathed in the smell of fresh trees and sometimes whiffs of donkey poo - even that was lovely.

Leonardo taught us so much that morning about water supply, management, and distribution. I am amazed at the knowledge that each pueblo to maintain themselves.

I think that a lot of times in urban areas, we are so removed from our daily resources - we don’t really understand how seeds become the food on our plate, who picks the fruit so that we can afford vegetables without running a farm, how water arrives in the house and etc. Massive infrastructure is highly capitalist societies automates and centralizes many functions so that larger populations can be organized in more concentrated or spread out areas. But the flip side is that we lose so much knowledge about our basic necessities.

I don’t mean to say that I felt that life in a rural area is more “simple” - I don’t like that connotation - that urban areas are more complex and rural areas are more simple. Everything that I was learning while I lived in the village was super complex.

For example, there was an immense amount of complexity involved in the village’s water system - but what was most interesting was that the level of complexity was most relevant for the village and it was one that the chose for themselves, it was not something that was decided by the government or some water company. The current water system relies on pure gravity. The water is from the ground and it is delivered through pipes that were built 20 years ago. Since it is from the ground and they do not use massive fertilizers, the ground water is clean. The village has plans to build a electro water pump but they are trying to figure out the best way to do it sustainably without negatively impacting the land. Therefore, they’ve started a reforestation project to capture water in several parts of the mountains before they proceed with the electro water pump. To me, this is really complex thinking because it’s strategic. They are thinking through the consequences of over-digging a hole to suck out ground water with an electric pump - they are thinking about the future of the village. That is just beautiful.

Anyways - I ended that morning with touching a baby donkey inside its mommy! What a great morning to start a day of fieldwork. I got some great interviews so far.

Post 2 of 4: spending New Year’s Eve Dancing til 5am

Post 3 of 4: Time for the Jaripeo - Bullriding

Post 4 of 4: Eating Live Insect

I started to write this post about how much I love fieldwork when I had just returned  from my last field work trip to Oaxaca, Mexico from December 2009 to January 2010. But I’m just getting around to posting it!  This will be a 4 part post that shows 4 excerpts taken out of my field notes (unedited) on observations that have nothing to do with technology usage. 

I just returned from Oaxaca, Mexico and this was the one of the most fun fieldwork trips ever. I miss everyone in the village so much as a I’m reading through my fieldnotes. Three things really stand out in my fieldwork trip this year. 

1.) After three years of visiting the village, I felt so welcome this year. I really felt like the people trusted me and were so much more open with me. I could just chill with families and feel confident that they were very comfortable with me in their house. In the past two years, I didn’t live in the village. This year, I went with my research colleague, Tanya Menendez, and we both lived in the village with several families. It makes such a different to go to sleep with the family in the same house and to wake up together, eat breakfast together, brush your teeth together - you get to see all the little things and hear all the stories that people talk about at the end of the day. 

2.)  I’ve noticed that I’ve become a better ethnographer. After three years of doing fieldwork in China, Mexico, and the US, I can actually see how my fieldwork notes have improved this time!  One of the best things I’ve learned about doing excellent and honest ethnography (yes I put a value on that!) is something that my adviser Barry Brown told me and it’s something that has stuck with me ever since.

Barry and I were on a bus ride back from an exhaustive fieldwork workshop in Mexico. It was 7pm and really dark. With the Pacific Ocean to our left, our bus felt like it was hugging the mountain as we were making our way up the Pacific Coast from Mexico back into the US. We were chatting about my dissertation and  I was saying something to the effect that my fieldwork in China during the summer didn’t go as expected because I didn’t get to observe what I had wanted to research. He responded to me, “you don’t get to chose what you observe.”  Barry’s advice was so simple, yet so true. He reminded me that every moment is ethnographic. So this time I took his advice with me into the mountains of Oaxaca. I ended up writing everything down. I almost became obsessive about what I recorded. Glancing over my fieldnotes, I am surprised about how much of it isn’t about technology. 

And then that’s when I realized that this is precisely what informs my analysis and my way of thinking about technology usage - I have to understand all those little moments that do and don’t involve technology. Communication technologies is only a sliver of people’s everyday lives. We forget how much time it takes to prepare a tortilla, make a blanket, and farm the fields.

3.) This realization of the importance of moments that have nothing to even do with technology made me realize how I was transformed by the fieldwork. There’s always the concern for an ethnographer when going into a field site of how much time it takes to feel like you’re a part of the community, get adjusted to the food and lifestyle (I never have a problem with the food!), and understand local rhythms. I was pretty proud of myself for just how quickly I adapted to life in the village.

There was one moment when I first arrived where I was craving for something I owned but didn’t bring - my sunglasses. We were 1600 meters above sea level so I was not used to the strong sun rays. We were walking up the mountain to the cemetery with several kids around the ages of 6 to 10 years old and two participants around the age of 25 years old. The kids were running around us and I was trying to keep up but the sun was directly hitting my eyes. I kept squinting and rubbing my eyelids, my contacts slightly in pain from the burning sun. I tired to focus on the semi-trail beneath my feet where the grass had been flattened over time, trying to avoid the dried cow dung and rocks.

After 20 minutes of climbing, I looked up and saw little white tips poking out of the mountain top. We climbed for another half hour and by the time we reached the top, the sun has moved slightly above our heads. By now I could see the white tips revealing themselves into large white Catholic crosses that were on top of tombs. We walked into the middle of the cemetery. One of the kids brought me to their uncle’s tomb. He  told me that he had just recently died of diabetes at a young age, only early mid-50’s. Their was still a candle burning inside his tomb.

I started thinking about the cycle of poverty and health. Many of the kids I was with are fed candy all day because it is less expensive to buy candy than to make food. This leads to early diabetes. It’s hard to reverse this practice of candy feeding because candy is also seen as a luxury - it’s a new food product and when guests arrive, one is always given candy in the way that males offer other males a cigarette in China. Children are always stuffing little sticky balls that are half-melted into my hands. And there is no way I can turn it down because I know how much it costs and more so I know the intent behind the gift. I squinted my eyes to focus on the date of his passing.

I looked up from his grave and as I readjusted my eyes to the landscape. I realized that we were were standing on top of a mountain peak and we were surrounded by the deep juts of the Oaxacan Sierras. I put my hand over my eyes from the hard sun that lit up the glittering peaks all around us.

The kids were running around on top of the graves and one of the participants, Ivan, stood on a cement block and just looked out into the valley. He too, put his hand over his eyes as he surveyed the view. He had just returned from 3 years of living in the US as an undocumented migrant. This was his first time visiting the village cemetery since he has crossed the desert into the United States 5 years ago. I was looking at his back, but I didn’t focus on just his body. This time I wasn’t squinting to look at the details of a trail or tomb,  but I was squinting to see the entire magicalness of the place. There I stood, behind Ivan, with the sun shining on us. Surrounded by a forest of raised tombs, the lifted weight of the moment fell on all of us like snow. And a pattern emerged to tell a story of attachment, home, and belonging. All the stories from the first and second field site visits over the past 3 years streamed into the moment. It became clear to me why all the phone calls to the US, the caseta visits, the trips to the internet cafe 1 hour away - why it all matters so much. They matter because these are the ties that are greatest to them. So despite years of no contact between an undocument migrant and her/his family, the village as an infrastructure survives. Despite peso depreciation, unequal immigration laws, deathly crossings into the deserts, expensive telephone access, and inconsistent mobile access, the weight of a place can carry the heart of a Oaxacan back to here - this cemetery. 

No matter how far a villager goes or how long one lives outside of the village, everyone wants to be buried in the place they were born (women who marry in adopt the male’s village). This is the underlying tie that binds migrants to their home, no matter how many thousand miles they travel for work or how many trips they make to the US. The elaborate governing system of Usos y Costumbres (Uses and Customs), reminds each villager of their attachment. The system dictates that every migrant male has to serve several terms throughout their life in the political governance of the village. It doesn’t matter what you are doing or how far away you are, you must come back to serve the cargo for 1 year every time you are voted into the position. If one fails to serve their cargo (responsibility), then they are denied burial in the village. It may not sound like a big deal, but it would be the equivalent of telling someone that if you don’t serve in an administrative government position every few years in the town that you were born, then you will not be allowed to die in the company of friends and family - you will die alone. So no matter where you are at with your career, if you are voted into the role, it is not negotiable. Now, imagine that.

Usos and Costumbres is practical in that it creates a stable and obligatory system to maintain village political and social structure. It is also cultural because it creates an emotional investment to the village, a common language and practice, and shared pressures - all factors that contribute to the strong village identity. The system tells every male villager (and their family) that nothing is more important than the ties to your village, and if you forgo these ties then you forgo your community.These ties are stronger than the ties that bond a Oaxacan to her/his nation.

People tend to gravitate towards what they can connect to. This - the Usos y Costumbres and the migration process - as intense as it sounds, I could connect with it. All of it came back to family. We tend to think of America as a place of rapid change and opportunities. And then places like this village in Oaxaca seem to never change. But the tethers of the global economy shake even the mountain tops.  Anytime rapid changes come through the winds, power, love, and dreams are constantly being centered and de-centered. In the process of all that centering and de-centering, hearts can waiver and the choices that appear before us often pull us away from those we love and those who love us.

And in this one visit to the cemetery, I could understand how the Usos y Costumbres was a system of centering - centering the actual body and heart to the village. One could not tele-serve his cargo from the United States. One had to come back to Oaxaca and then risk the crossing across the desert again to enter into the US.

So there I stood in the cemetery, surrounded by every single person who had ever been born in the village or married into this village was buried or will be buried in one of the tombs. I was squinting to read the words on the tombs and squinting to see the grandness.

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Squinty has been my online moniker for over 10 years and my friends have always said that I squint a lot when people are talking. I squint a lot because I want to understand the details of a conversation ( I also am Chinese so my eyes are already squinty). But after this fieldwork trip, I was thinking about squinting as a way to understand the connections and patterns of a context. Ethnography is the constant negotiation of the micro and macro. If an ethnographer is always focused on the micro, then s/he can easily get lost in the details. One has to pop up a layer to get perspective on the details. So engaging with the macro is an engagement with patterns. Ethnography, like squinting, is the constant moving between the micro and the macro. I think this is a lovely way to explain the work of ethnography or any kind of work that involves a holistic understanding of details and patterns.

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One of the other side thoughts that came out of this story about me wishing that I had sunglasses with me is the idea of similarity.  An important part of ethnography, but rarely discussed, is the ethnographer’s goal of achieving sameness with his/her participants. To garner the trust of your participants, you want to minimize any obvious  visuals that would make you different from the people you are hanging out with. I say this not because I think one should trick participants. Participants are not stupid and it’s almost impossible to lie about your background, especially when doing fieldwork in close communities or doing deeply emotive ethnography where people share their hopes and dreams. I saw this because one of the most important assests and ethnographer has are her/his eyes and smile. You want to minimize anything that would take your participants away from focusing on your face.  So when working in a village where no one wears sunglasses, it means I can’t wear sunglasses even if I wanted to. You don’t want to block your eyes from being seen. 

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Overall I must admit that I was nervous about how quickly I could adjust to living in a place where I couldn’t shower everyday and have running water and electricity 24/7. But I did just fine. I didn’t even really think about it after a while.

Is there such thing as conducting ethnographic fieldwork where you are not transformed by the process? I always feel like I am an undergoing a new experience when I’m in the field and I’m not sure if I ever want to change that. Perhaps that’s a good way to gauge my interest in a project - my personal degree of internal transformation. I see no other way to conduct engaged and passionate ethnography.

So I’m going to provide 4 excerpts out of my unedited field notes of moments that have nothing to do with technology directly. But these moments inform my research and they maintain my connection to the village. I hope they give a sense of why my heart is in Oaxaca.

Post 1 of 4: I touched the stomach of a pregnant Donkey!

Post 2 of 4: spending New Year’s Eve Dancing til 5am

Post 3 of 4: Time for the Jaripeo - Bullriding

Post 4 of 4: Eating Live Insect

I just found out that I have received a Fulbright! 

My proposal, Chinese Migrants Families in the Information Age: Intensive Technology and Digital Urbanism. has been approved for funding by the Chinese and US government for research!

The Fulbright require that researchers remain in the host country for at least 10 months. So I’ll be moving to  Wuhan, China next March to conduct fieldwork for 1 year. These long-term research grants are truly the research ethnographer’s dream; it’s a luxury to do really in-depth fieldwork and to be funded to do it.  Surveys and brief visits can give you insight into daily life, but relying soley on those methods does not get at the depth of everyday life and the processes that people are dealing with. 

So I’ll be looking at the socio-digital space for new ICT users in Wuhan. I’ll be asking how migrant families are appropriating new ICTs and how their ICT practices reflects the ways in which they are settling in to the city and making sense of the socio-economic changes in their lives. While most research on migrants have focused mostly on single or coupled migrants who intended to eventually return to their village, I see  a new wave of human mobility within China that points to migrants who move to the city as a family and who intend to stay in the city as a family. This new wave of migration is taking place in 2nd and 3rd tier cities (like Wuhan) that aren’t just economically open to migrants, but also socially and politically. I believe these understudied 2nd and 3rd tier cities are important sites of observation because not only are these cities projected to contain 75% of the growth in wealthiest families, they are also going to be sites of social transformations in China. 

I’ll write another more about my research in another post. I have some stuff up online on the research section of my website, but I’ve already been reformulating my research questions as I’ve learned so much more about what kinds of research is more valuable to industries and those outside of academia after these few months of researching at Nokia. 

Are you going to be in China in 2011? If so, let’s hang out!  I’m leaving in March 2011 for Wuhan and I am hoping to go to CSCW2011 in Hangzhou, China which also takes place in March. 

THANK YOUS! I could not have gotten this grant without the support of my amazing dissertation committee (Jim Hollan, Richard Madsen, Barry Naughton, Christena Turner, April Linton, and Barry Brown). All my fieldwork experience and design technology workshop trials in Mexico with Barry Brown has prepared me to think about my work in China in a totally different light. Christena Turner worked with my grant and personal statement down to the last revisions, offering her brilliant insights and making sure that I included all the details about my own work that I had forgetten. Richard Madsen is the best dissertation chair any graduate student could have. Kenyatta Cheese provided so much help in making sure that I presented my work in non-academic terms. And Linda Vong, UCSD grant expert and Fulbright representative provided tons of insights into the selection process. Thanks Seiko for letting me read your Fulbright grant, and thanks to Melissa Rock and Marcella Szablewicz for giving me tips on the new abstract. Without Jinge as my research sidekick in China, I would’ve never ended up in Wuhan.  Thanks for the grant support from Nokia Research Center so that I can hire a research assistant and increase my scope of analysis!  Leah Muse-Orlinoff you rock for being a great friend and the best graduate school sidekick! And thanks to Manny de la Paz and the entire UCSD Sociology staff for their continued support! 

WAITING HELL: Oh and I must say that this was one of the most excruciating grant wait times I have ever had to suffer! Even though most of the Fulbright application process has been administered online, the notification letter was sent out via regular mail through the USPS. The letter was sent from the UN building in NY. But I had forwarded my mail from NYC to Palo Alto because I moved here to work at Nokia. While everyone else was getting their rejection or acceptance letters  I was trying not to obsess over the daily mail! I seriously was getting panic attacks as I was waiting everyday in limbo for what my next 2 years would look like while everyone else had already received their rejection or acceptance letters. I am so happy to not wake up with a 100 pound weight on my chest in the mornings.  If you are considering to apply for the Fulbright, I’m more than happy to share my experiences about the application process, especially for putting in a proposal about technology usage. I found it really difficult to access info online and to talk with people who had been through this process, and that shouldn’t be the case. Sharing is excellent. 

Since my keynote on neo-informationalism in regards to the Google-China saga, I started thinking that one of the blind-spots of living in a neo-informationalist world is to see “free-information” as a binary  - either information is open or its not, either you make your identity known or not (update - I develop the idea of neo-informationalism in my piece on Haystack censorship tech). This totally builds upon danah boyd ‘s thinking about privacy as binary - either we have it or we don’t.  I’ll go back to danah’s work later.

So how is this blind spot built into our social media technologies and how do people make sense of this? (Eszter Hargittai and danah boyd’s recent research on facebook is a great example of how users are managing privacy settings.) I’m wondering how does that change the ways that they are used in places with different conceptions of privacy and information? How do people make decisions to share information with social technology applications? How can we understand privacy as a cultural practice?  I’ve been thinking a lot about these questions as it relates to privacy, trust, and relationships as I prepare for my fieldwork in China.

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In a country that is just beginning to create a rule of law based on individual rights and justice, the importance of maintaining anonymity in many contexts is critical because it means that one can put their idea(s) out there without the fear of personal retribution. So one of the most important priorities for online users in China is the ability to be anonymous.  

A western approach of complete information openness wouldn’t work in China because the anonymous user has an important role in maintaining information openness in a Chinese context. Countless online and offline stories in China have succeeded because of the mass participation of millions of anonymous users in leaving comments, making posts, and participating in online discussions.*  Privacy is critical for these individuals because it allows me them to have a voice—a voice they wouldn’t be able to have if they made their identity open. We have to recalibrate our expectations for places with different social-political contexts of information and privacy.  I’m afraid that Western companies don’t have a nuanced understanding of the cultural intricacies surrounding privacy in China (and as many scholars have pointed out in the West also).

How can companies design technologies with the understanding that anonymity is a right, not a privilege? Or even more relevant is to ask, how do companies design the right to privacy/publicness into our technologies? 

Google Buzz, a product recently launched by Google in the US ran into a lot of problems because Google misunderstood the importance of privacy for users and how users defined privacy. In her recent talk, danah boyd argued that Google understood privacy as a binary, private vs public, and failed to see privacy as a spectrum. After Danah’s talk, the Buzz team admitted that they had screwed up. So even Google had to learn that privacy isn’t always evil.

I think one of the interesting things to come out of this lesson that Google quickly learned from is that  open-access to information cannot always be the default. This default works for some of their products because these services (such as search) tend to work best in an open-access free-information environment.  Both searchers and search providers benefit from information non-scarcity. (There are unintended consequences to searching, but I’ll leave that alone for now.)

But social applications that serve to mediate personal ties do not operate in an open-access environment. No matter how much we design “openness” into our social technologies, social technologies operate under conditions of information scarcity because social ties are scarce. We value our ties because we have a limited of ties whether it is our 2 best friends from childhood or 60,893 Twitter followers or 300 facebook friends. Social ties - they take time to create and nuture, they can be fragile, unpredictable, meaningful and/or sensitive, and they are limited. 

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GUANXI  and SOCIAL CONNECTIONS - To really understand anonymity, we have to explore the meaning of guanxi in China. Guanxi is the Chinese equivalent to social connections.  Just like one’s social connections in the US, a Chinese person’s guanxi consists of people they know on a personal, familial, or professional basis. Guanxi also means that social connections require a level of mutual obligation. 

A lot of scholars and journalists have framed guanxi as a unique Chinese social phenomenon but I argue that they overemphasize practices of mutual obligation.

I just don’t buy the argument that Chinese people value their social network that much more than other people. This argument implies that others, such as Americans, care less about their social connections or place less value on social obligations than Chinese people. That’s simply not true. Look at our obsession with managing our social networks.  If anything, Americans want to believe that success is purely based on the individual. But any sociologist can tell you that income, social networks, race, education, parent’s education and all that stuff that helps you meet other people does matter. A lot. And they also matter in China, but in different ways.

WHY CHINESE PEOPLE MIGHT HAVE DIFFERENT IDEAS ABOUT PRIVACY - So why might Chinese people have a different cultural orientation towards social connections? I need to explore this further, but my initial hypothesis is that Chinese ideas about privacy are connected to the recent historical period of repression, a different cultural historical experience, and different orientations towards social visibility.

1.) Chinese history is still rife with fresh memories of people who suffered by making their social connections explicit. This is still true in mixed-market Communist China; however it may change as the people will not be penalized for their social connections and as there is more temporal distance from the traumatizing events of the past. Social amnesia can present an opportunity for new practices to be born. 
2.) Making social connections explicit can be seen as a form of bragging, which in general is not seen as a favorable trait in China. There is a cultural expectation that the more people you know, the more careful you are to not flaunt these social connections.
3.) People are much more judicious about making their social connections explicit. People don’t always invite someone else to be their contact on some social media site because they sometimes aren’t sure that the other person wants to be their contact or wants for their connection to be made explicit. They fear that the other person will feel obligated to become their social contact and from then on, the actual real-life social connection could be ruined due to this awkward dance in social media connections. In my research, adults and youth both expressed a lot of doubt, fear, and confusion about making someone a “contact.” Many of them preferred to just keep chatting with their private list of contacts over QQ because it was easier and more comfortable to manage their social connections privately than to engage in a platform that made their networks more visible to other people. 

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PRIVACY AS CULTURAL - I find it more useful to think of privacy as a cultural practice than as an act of rational choice between private vs. public.  As I state earlier, danahboyd insightfully makes the point that privacy is not a binary - it’s not just on or off - it’s a spectrum of contexts that are lot more complex than our online architectures are designed for right now. Following danah’s point, I am going to start thinking of privacy as a cultural practice. ‘Privacy as Cultural’ means that we have to start asking what are the multiple histories and narratives attached to various notions of privacy in any one place/region. There are multiple notions of privacy at any one time competing, conforming, complementing, and cohering.  Framing privacy as a cultural act means that we can observe it and describe it. Privacy is a process, it’s negotiated, and it’s constantly in flux. 

HOW TO UNDERSTAND CULTURAL ASPECTS of PRIVACY - Making the case that privacy is cultural all of sudden sounds kinda touchy feely. It can be difficult to get a handle on culture and it can be even more obscure to think about how companies could become more attuned to the nuances of privacy. 

GUANXI, PRIVACY, and TECHNOLOGY - What technology companies designing for the Chinese market need to grasp is that cultural orientations towards privacy — especially around guanxi — matter. They matter because if the technologies that are designed for social networking in the US are simply re-launched in China, they will fail. They will fail because Chinese people do not share the same cultural orientation towards anonymity, privacy, and user preferences in online or offline social networks as Americans. Guanxi is something that one holds near and dear to them, so close that they don’t want to reveal it.  Let me play with this analogy - Social connections in China are like underwear, whereas social connections in America are like a jacket. The difference is that Chinese people want to keep their social connections out of the public eye, while American people want to display their social connections. The difference here is that Americans and Chinese have different cultural orientations towards transparency, privacy, and anonymity.** In real life, social connections can defined on more implicit or explicit terms, depending on how social connections are made known in the specific context.

For example, we can learn so much from Chinese people who have tried to replicate successful American social networks and failed at it. One example is Linkedin. Linkedin is a US online social networking site where users list all the jobs they have ever had and all the people they know or have worked with in the form of “connections.” Around 2004-05, Lin Feng 林枫 copied Linkedin for the Chinese market. It was a total failure. Why? Because Chinese people didn’t want to show off their underwear. Chinese copy-cat of Linked in failed back then because Chinese people didn’t want to make their social connections explicit. 

Take the Chinese equivalent to Facebook on Kaixin. If you talk to most people who use it, they will tell you that they use it to connect to friends. But, if you actually observe what they are doing, you will see that they use it to look for music. Yes, music. It’s kind of like myspace stripped of social connections. Underlying this supposed social media network that seems to be a copycat of myspace and of facebook is an extensive music exchange network. That’s definitely different from how we use social media here in the US. The music industry has instilled enough fear and guanxi throughout American-based social media companies to ensure that music sharing does not become an easily sharable commodity.

The story of the Linkedin copy-cat and Kaixin show how cultural orientations towards privacy and social connections matter in how a technology is used. What companies and scholars have to understand is that:

1.) it’s not that social connections matters more to Chinese people and less to American people, it’s that they matter in different ways that we might not notice at first glance2.) technologies are NOT neutral 3.) “free-information” narratives must be contextualized - free to what ends? what are the socio-political contexts for free? What do people expect of “openness”?4.) social media apps are not universal in the ways they are used

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SO WHAT’S NEXT?  Understanding privacy as culture is an important lesson for tech companies that are increasingly focusing their design energy in the software business. Even companies, like Nokia, that were once hardware based companies, have to re-define  material practices as linked to cultural understandings around social media applications. (I’ll write another post on Nokia)

Well there is so much more to understand and explain that I hope to contribute more to this dialogue. I would love to see more research that makes clear how the values of guanxi in China differ from the values of connections in the US and how this difference can be turned into an awareness that is designed into technologies for the Chinese market. So one of the questions that I will be answering in my fieldwork is how can services/apps be designed for communities with alternative orientations towards transparency.

So I’ve decided to dedicate a portion of my fieldwork in China to understanding the cultural aspects of privacy. I thought one way to really to get at local notions of privacy is to spend time with local venture capitalists and entrepreneurs of failed or ongoing Web 2.0 technologies.

Research on failure offers many cultural insights for understanding how innovation takes places and how values are mis-read or mis-build into technologies. I am really excited to spend some time in Beijing and Shanghai with people who have created all these failed  twitter-lilke  copycats that the government has shut down. There’s more to do the story thaat Chinese Web 2.0 land is a just a pure copy of US web 2.0 apps. A recent techcrunch article portrayed Westerners rushing into China and licking their wounds over US introduced technologies that have failed in China. The article doesn’t mention all the exciting experimentation happening on the ground with Chinese VCs and entrepreneurs. For example, Farmville is actually a game invented in China.

The majority of my fieldwork will still involve making sense of how new users, the rural to urban migrants in Wuhan, and interact with these new online technologies. I’m going to be moving to Wuhan, China and making frequent visits to Beijing and China for 1 year for ethnographic research starting March 2011.  If you’re in China and am interested in these topics, let’s talk! Or if you are or know of any Chinese entrepreneurs or venture capitalists of the internets, I would love to chat with you!

(thanks Chun Xia for inspiring me to follow up on Chinese entrepreneurs!)

*Check out Min Jiang’s articles on online public deliberation in China. Her research suggests that the current limitations of speech online should also be examined alongside reforms being made on the ground in local citizen participation.

Jiang, Min. 2009. “Exploring Online Structures on Chinese Government Portals: Citizen Political Participation and Government Legitimation.”Social Science Computer Review 27:174-195. Jiang, Min. 2010.   “Running Head: Authoritarian Deliberation.”

**I realize that I’m generalizing here and that there are millions of Americans who don’t want to be online and have their social connections even documented, and that they are millions of Chinese people who would love to make all their connections public. But I do believe that social media technologies are designed for the greatest number of users and there is no doubt that facebook, twitter, myspace, linkedin, and other online apps wouldn’t be as successful in the US were it not for a larger social proclivity among users to make their social connections explicit. 

Nokia Talk - Values in technology design and use: ethnography’s contribution View more presentations from triciawang.

I gave a presentation at Nokia Research Center, Palo Alto back in June, 2010.  I’ve already written a post that explains my sides on China, but I still need to create one for Mexico. So stay posted! In the meantime, the abstract is below and here’s the slideshow.

Values in technology design and use: ethnography’s contribution
As a sociologist, I’ve been trained to ask macro questions about underlying social conditions. While illuminating for society at large, sociological findings do not always readily appear to be relevant for the technology industry and/or people outside of academia. As an ethnographer, I’ve been trained to ask more grounded questions about the everyday lives of people and how they experience underlying social conditions. Ethnographical insights can offer more tangible, immediate, and actionable analysis. As such, companies have started incorporating ethnographic research into their strategy, product design, and marketing.

My talk today is about how I came into my research at Nokia wanting to answer the question: how can ethnographers contribute to the product design process of a mobile device? Ethnographically grounded research for technology use is a method that aims to reveal users’ values, beliefs, and ideas. Nokia was one of the first mobile companies to concertedly hire ethnographers as part of its design process,
In the mid to late nineties, Nokia changed the mobile industry forever by creating affordable, user friendly phones. More than a decade later, the hardware mobile phone market is nearing saturation. With Nokia transitioning from a company that produces hardware to software, how can ethnographically driven research  provide strategic insights for this shift?

I start off the presentation by reviewing the following  projects I worked on while at Nokia.
1.) Farmville:  (w. Liz Bales, Jofish Kaye): We did some preliminary surveying to gain insight into the most popular facebook game. I discuss my interest in how games like Farmville support less-meangingful social ties.  I wrote a blog post about this: Playing FarmVille?: Casual Games maintaining Less-Meaningful Ties on Facebook

2) Inventive Leisure Practices (Jofish Kaye): I interviewed local hackers to better understand how they form communities around their practice. We see leisurely hacking communities as critical, yet understudied sites of innovation.
3.) If time permits, towards the end of my presentation I will also discuss a third project, The If I Can Dream House. (w/ Janet Go, Liz Bales) The If I Can Dream House is the first “post-reality entertainment” production. As the show is only available online through a 24/7, 60+ camera live stream and weekly Hulu releases, we wanted to better understand how audiences connect with this new form of interactive media.

In the second half of my talk, I discuss how working at Nokia these past three months have initiated a critical shift in my research practices from being an ethnographer in the clouds to an ethnographer on the ground.
I provide two examples of how I’ve reframed my research in terms of how values influence technology design and use.
1.) The first case is from my ongoing fieldwork in Mexico where I have spent over three years in a rural, migrant-sending village. I share my analysis on how my research on Mexican migration and migrants’ use of technologies in Mexico and in the US had led me to believe that Nokia already has an American market with a strong brand connection with unfulfilled technology needs.
2.) The second case is my ongoing dissertation work in China where I discuss how my future fieldwork will include four central themes: gaming and leisure, value clashes, social connections, and communication.  I will also be interviewing Chinese entrepreneurs of failed copy-cat social networking technologies. Here’s the post that explains in greater detail my slides about social connections in China: Privacy and The Anonymous user in China: Importance of understanding multiple cultural orientations towards guanxi/social connections

Somehow the internets connected Dhiren Shingadia and I, which then evolved into a skype convo and then his interview with me: Understanding communities through ethnography (I recommend reading it here on Future Lab - better formatting).

Here are some of the questions that Dhiren asked me:

As a sociologist and ethnographer, what are the core outputs of your studies at the moment?

What are the types of questions that you are asked the most?

Corporations, advertising agencies and communications consultancies are all moving to deliver cultural relevance or a degree of value to real-world communities. What are your thoughts on this?

From your perspective, are these actions translating into a greater a demand for research and ethnographic skills?

Your work requires you to observe people and investigate what motivates their actions and behaviour. Is the “power of the peer” as strong outside of west as it is in?

And finally…your work takes you across the globe, from one place to place another, and this allows you to become familiar with societies from all walks of life. Outside of the US, which country or region has some of the most interesting digital practices? Do any activities surprise you?

What can we learn from this country?

So Dhiren and I chatted about our interests, the future of the internets, innovation, social media, Baidu, China, building communities, and cultural relevance. I explained to him the strategy I’ve been using since I start community organizing 8 years ago in NYC, which is that I focus on achieving community relevance, not cultural relevance.

Oh and yes we also addressed the gazillion dollar question - what will happen when China rules the world? 

Dhiren also has an amazing blog full of intellectual and silly goodies - I knew the moment that I went on his blog, Uba Contraversie, that I would love his energy! and I turned out to be right! Here’s Dhiren’s twitter, another twitter-trove of goodies. 

oh and through Dhiren I found his colleague, Eli Gothill’s post on the rise of financial activism - definitely something to keep an eye on for the future.

En route to China, I stopped in Austin to give a talk at my first SXSW! Attendees were at 20,000 plus for interactive - 5,000 more than last year - a sign that this conference is growing in quality content or a sign that the economy is about to burst.

So what did I overhear the most at SXSW? 

The internet is really important! Web 3.0 is here!  The reign of the virtual! Networked sensors take over the world! This is all so new! Singularity transhumanism! Social media for good! Gaming to save the world!

These statements reflect the general level of techno-utopianism that I find at conferences on anything related to the internet. There usually is little room for critical analysis or social historicizing.

As Roy Christopher points out, we live in an age of information abundance but at times it seems like our abilities to historically contextualize current events is scarce. He’s right and this is particulary true for the SXSW audience who is so focused on the “new” that the “old” seems irrelevant. I have lots of qualms with technological utopianism, but I think what’s make it worse is historical amnesia. Many of the talks seem to think that the technology itself - or this year the focus was on social media or games themselves - will solve our reality and make us “better.”  An example of this is Simon Mainwaring’s We First: How Social Media can Remake Capitalism and Build a Better World and Jane McDonigal’s Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better.  The ideas promoted in these books aren’t necessarily wrong, but I find the analysis in these books resting more on future talk than on grounded research.

So for my first SXSW, I decided to give a talk that would not only illustrate my analysis and research on internet users in China, but also provide historical context for what we’re seeing in China.  I explored the idea of telling a story that would be an old one - a story that would historicize the internet so that we could see how human emotions can create powerful reactions that repeat itself in different mediums, processes, and outcomes. I did this by paralleling the contemporary panic around rural-urban migrants in Chinese internet cafes to the 20th century panic around Italian and Irish immigrant in American saloons.  

I also argued that internet cafes, like saloons, are important sites of social interaction. They are places of security, safety, and stability.

Internet cafes are important because they are new third places in cities. Privately owned spaces of technology access, such as internet cafes, are the new “third places” in cities because these are the places where poor people are actively reprogramming urban space to work for them. Third places like pubs, saloons, and public spaces are important for healthy diverse cities - they allow for new forms of community to develop because they allow a greater diversity of people to gather in informal settings outside of home and work.

 Here are the slides and notes for my talk.  Since I wrote this talk with visuals, I suggest that you read this pdf where I put the notes below each slide; it’ll probably make more sense this way!

SXSW filmed a video that will be up on youtube later, but for now, thanks so Elisha Miranda’s flipcam, here’s a video of the talk below. The sound isn’t that great on the video, so I suggest you listen to the audio recording below.

I would love to hear your feedback in the comments below or tweet about it with the #300MM hashtag. And thank you SXSW community for all the feedback after my talk!

I really appreciated all the comments on twitter so far post-talk! Some said that my talk was among their favorites and one of the best panels at SXSW! I heart twitter for connecting me to all these people who have interest in this topic. I’m really excited to now be in touch with other people who are researching similar stuff!

Thank you to friends who listened and gave me advice: Kristen Taylor, Kevin Slavin, Kenyatta Cheese, and Morgan Ames.

I also did an interview with the lovely Benjamin Walker for his WFMU radio show Too Much Information. Here’s the link to the show. Thanks Benjamin!

thank you to friends who listened and gave me advice: Kristen Taylor, Kevin Slavin, Kenyatta Cheese, and Morgan Ames. And thank you SXSW community for all the feedback after my talk!

I really appreciated all the comments on twitter! Some said that my talk was among their favorites and one of the best panels at SXSW! I heart twitter for connecting me to all these people who have interest in this topic. I’m really excited to now be in touch with other people who are researching similar stuff!

A few tweets from my talk:

• @narrowd: Learned more about Chinese culture in the last 15 mins than the last 30 years #300MM
• @cqwang: 下面翻译一个关于中国网吧的SXSW演讲，作者 @triciawang 是一坨文化研究者，研究中美墨低收入社群使用技术的文化背景。该讲座名为“睡在网吧（原文即为中文，也是唯一的中文）——中国的下三亿用户”，发生于3月12日SXSW。 #300MM
• @norabousteit: Loved @triciawang’s talk on migration and technology comparing Chinese Internet cafes with saloons before prohibition #300MM #SxSW
• @pandemia: Seguo la presentazione #300MM di Tricia Wang sugli internet café in Cina, cool! http://bit.ly/gsefC2 #SXSW
• @lucaconti: @triciawang great presentation about cybercafé in China, I’ll follow You here and on Bytes of China http://ow.ly/4dcGS #300MM #SXSW
• @mbelinsky: @triciawang fascinatingly juxtaposes American saloons & Chinese Internet cafes as bases if info exchange & public sanitation #300mm #sxswi
• @kenyatta: Culture survives precisely b/c it is distributed /by @triciawang #300mm #f15diversity #SXSW

I did an interview with the lovely Benjamin Walker for his WFMU radio show Too Much Information.
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Below are some random thoughts about my first SXSW experience  SXSW!

I’ve written a separate post of my Austin food review and my favorite personal moments.  Here are all my pictures!

Thanks to Glenda Bautista who has an eye on making SXSW topics more diverse, I was invited this year to be on the Future 15 series that addressed diversity on the intenret.  I’m not sure if I will give a talk next year at SXSW again because I felt that the conference was really US-centric. It was only after I arrived that I found out about the Technology Summitt with topic areas in China, India and more. But this was scheduled 2 days AFTER SXSW and there were no speaker names attached to any of the events.  The sad thing about the size of SXSW this year was that there were TOO many panels scheduled at the same time. And the program book, online schedule, and iphone app all had differnt information or unupdated info about the panels. Most people me that my panel was undiscoverable.

Some panel highlights:

• I loved reading all the great stuff coming out of Tim Shey’s Social TV panel.
• Kenyatta Cheese’s panel Indie Storytelling pulled out some great questions from the audience about content and storytelling.
• Roy Christopher’s panel, Disconnecting the Dots: How Our Devices are Divisive, was drawn out graphically! I’ll post a link to it when he puts up the images & notes for his talk. In the meantime, he’s written a lovely recap of his SXSW experience.
• And Jamie Wilkinson’s Star Wars Uncut panel was just so lovely because not only did we get to hear about how it was created, we got to see the first 15min of the film!
• I’m so happy to see the lovely Nora Abousteit finally speak in person! She engaged the audience with a lovely story about Burdastyle. But Etsy - please don’t host a panel in a bar - it’s hard to hear your panelists with half the room drinking and schmoozing. Nora congrats on Burdastyle reaching half million users!
• I missed David Sasaski’s panel on social media in Mexico, but lucky for us he’s going to post the panel details on his blog! In the meantime, he’s written up a wonderful review of Latin America-related events at SXSW and future Latin America meet ups!

Bad hashtags: I saw so many instances of bad twitter hashtags. But this one below from Nokia had to be the best. Come on nokia at least get your hashtags right!

change it up!  It was diappointing to see that all 4 of the keynote speakers were white males.  Even though there was more diversity in the keynote speaker set though still it was overwhelmingly white and male. I thought that the Future 15 panels   had more diversity, but SXSW didn’t make a big enough effort to promote these panels. You can’t even find a list of all the Future 15 speakers.  It’s really disappointing when a conference becomes this big and they still are unable to find people of color to promote. There are plenty of people I would love to recommend for next years line up - and I think SXSW could open it up and take suggestions to increase the diversity of its speakers. For starters, I’ll nominate a few close friends -  Baratunde Thurston,  Jay SMooth, Nora Abousteit, and Kenyatta Cheese.

tacky, sexist, and hetero-normative messages in the green room: I loved the green room for its calming pre-panel energy. But one thing that threw me off with the sexist shit that Ink Public Relations put on the tables. These cards were scattered all over each table in the green room. The last piece of advice was completely offensive.

A speech should be like a women’s skirt: Long enough to cover the topic, yet short enough to be interesting.

After seeing this, Anetv writes on twitter “tech-centric venues wonder why they’ve trouble recruiting women? & ppl wonder why young girls feel that tech isn’t “for them?”

Lovely Film! I didn’t get to see the screening of Surrogate Valentine, but according to my friend Elisha Miranda who saw it - it was amazing. Thanks Gary Chou for bringing the world another great film and giving us more Lynn Chen!

Yah new peeps! It was so lovely to finally meet people in person! And most importantly, SXSW is a time to bond with close friends.

I’ll be landing in CHina in a few days and blogging more actively on BytesofChina.com. See you there!

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

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

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

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

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