My Suggestions for Making Google's Services More Relevant for Non-Elite Chinese Users (involves some ethnography!)
Google announced on its company blog that Chinese hackers had attacked its users and as a result Google.CN may leave China due to the security breaches.
While unfortunate that Google.CN may be shutting down, my ethnographic work in China revealed five things that aren’t being told in the current story:
- Many Chinese internet users don’t find Google to be very useful. Therefore, a Google withdrawal would not have any immediate impact on the daily Chinese internet user because most people search with Baidu, the reigning search engine in China.
- Many Chinese internet users prefer Baidu over Google because using Baidu makes them feel more “Chinese.” Baidu does an excellent job at tapping into nationalistic fervor to promote itself as being the most superior search engine for Chinese users.
- Chinese internet users don’t know how to get to the Google site. While they may “know” of Google, it’s a whole other matter when it comes to typing or saying Google’s name.
- Google is primarily used by highly educated netizens. And even these users prefer Google.COM over Google.CN.
- Google is not successful at reaching the mobile internet market.
I arrived at these insights after I spent over 300 hours conducting participant observation and informal interviews this past summer with government policy-makers, academics, youth, migrants, and low-income users. I was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) (more info) to be a research scholar at the China Internet Network Information Center 中 国互联网络信息中心 (CNNIC), located in Beijing, China. The center is overseen by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT). CNNIC manages the hardware aspect of China’s internet and produces quantitatively oriented research on internet usage in China. Their data provides policy direction for party ministries, information for private companies, and statistics for the government. While my main focus was not on Google (more info on research), the topic frequently came up and I started realizing that the non-use of Google provided a lot of cultural insights into the practices of Chinese internet users.
The blame for Google’s lack of success in China cannot solely be placed on this most recent episode with Chinese hackers. Other complications have started long before this occurrence, such as the myriad of ways in which policies work to favor Chinese companies over international ones, the difficulty in competing against government paid search results on Baidu, and the impossibility of providing consistent service when the government shuts down access to the entire Google site for few days. All of these reasons lie beyond Google’s control.
There are, however, other explanations that do lie within Google’s control in which they have failed to execute. The 3 main factors are: achieving brand recognition, creating a successful marketing campaign, and understanding usage contexts of non-elite internet users. Google should hold themselves accountable for these factors.
Google has failed at brand recognition. They have not been successful at making their services relevant for the average Chinese internet user nor have they made it easy for people to recognize, say, or even type in their name on a keyboard.
- People didn’t even know how to correctly pronounce and agree on the pronunciation of the name “Google.” When I was with a group of 5 youth, I asked them if they used Google, instead of getting an answer we launched into a 10 minute conversation trying to figure out the correct name. While it was clear that we were all referring to Google, the IT company, it was not clear which characters to use for its name. Google does not have an immediately recognizable name like Apple (Pingguo) or Yahoo (Yahe) or Baidu. I, like many other Chinese people still refer to Google by its colloquial name, GouGou - doggy (狗狗). While Google did consider GouGou as a name, in 2006 it announced that its new name would be Gu-Ge” (谷歌). But the name didn’t stick and so many people still continued to refer to Google as GouGou. Gu-Ge is supposed to mean “harvest songs”— romantic referral to a “fruitful and productive search experience, in a poetic Chinese way”. I guess that Google excecs thought, “Hey if Chinese peasants sings happy harvest songs for their productive crops, then Chinese netizens will use Gu-Ge for happy productive online searches!” Hmmmm…Back in 2006 I argued that the new name was quiet “a semantic stretch.” Even worse, it conjured up images of “slow and remote agricultural scenes,” said Jin Ge, a researcher on Chinese online gamers. The new name was so unpopular that Google fans started an online petition in 2006 for Google to abandon Gu-Ge. Google didn’t listen. The lesson? When your market cannot pronounce, remember or correctly identify your name, you’ve got a major problem—especially when your names invokes images of sterile hinterlands or groins, grasshoppers, and shaving breasts.
The confusion over Google’s Chinese name also has other consequences: people were unsure of how to type in the name “Google” on the computer keyboard. When I asked people to take me to the Google site, I received a lot of similar responses of uncertainty.
- Some youth would attempt to type GouGou (the colloquial name for Google) and they would reach GouGou.cn or GouGou.com thinking that they were at the Google site because it looked similar to Google’s bare aesthetics even though the corporate symbol is a dog. Since many people, even me, still refer to Google as GouGou, it’s not a surprise that people thought that they were at Google’s site even though they were at GouGou.com. Others would type “Gogel,” which lead to nowhere.
- Those who typed Google with just one “O” (Gogle) would get to the Google site only IF they typed in .COM. domain. If they just pressed the enter key after typing in “Gogle” it would take them to Gogle.CN, which is a phishing site. This is even more confusing because Gogle.CN is designed to look like Google’s bare aesthetics. If you click on “Login 登录” in the top right corner where the Gmail login is usually located on the real Google site, you’re taken to a page that says Gogle.CN Login but its page is titled Google! As you can see in the picture below and where I’ve circled in pink, it’s really misleading!
I’ve noticed that most computers default to the .CN site in internet cafes, so this could hypothetically happen quite often if Chinese users try to go to Google and they type in the name with one less “O.” - IF youth did get to Google’s site successfully by either typing in the name correctly or going to Google.com, Gogle.COM, or Guge.COM/CN, it would usually be on their 5th or 7th or even 8th try - that is if they hadn’t given up yet and by then it was just clear that they were doing it because I had asked them to show me how to get to the Google site. It was quite obvious that going to the Google site was never part of their internet routine.
It’s not the case that people are unfamiliar with Google. People know of Google, but they don’t want to use it because it’s associated with being “Un-Chinese.” Part of Baidu’s success lies in its successful marketing campaign against Google, using nationalism as one of their publicity strategies. It’s been working well. The campaign is so effective that netizens associate the use of Google with being unpatriotic. In this infamous Baidu commercial from 2006 (below), Baidu wins an intelligence contest over the its unnamed foreign competiter who is represented by the white male actor. Baidu succeeds in “knowing more” in the back and forth banter over the meaning of the scroll. Even the white man’s Chinese female lover decides to leave him for the Chinese scholar who “knows more.”
I don’t think Baidu is playing unfairly because American companies often tap into US nationalism with “Buy Made in the USA” campaigns. Google just needs to be more creative in using more strategic marketing to overcome its negative cultural stigma in China—a stigma that is actively nurtured by its competitor.
Another way that Baidu has had an advantage over Google is that Chinese and Hong Kong TV programming will show screen-shots of Baidu when they refer to the internet. Most recently I watched a a show on the Phoenix Channel (Hong Kong based) on January 22nd that showed several screen-shots of how Baidu helped a kidnapped child reunite with his biological parents after 12 years of separation. There are so many stories that talk about how the internet, as symbolized by Baidu, has helped citizens in everyday life. I have yet to see a negative TV segment on the internet that is associated with Baidu, rather these negative associations are blamed on specific applications, such World of Warcraft or specific places, such as internet cafes. Baidu itself is always in the clear, whereas Google is not. The only screen time Google gets on Chinese TV programming is when it is featured as another Western company disobeying Chinese laws. Google should be aware of how Baidu’s onscreen TV time contributes to its popularity and reinforces the notion that Baidu is good for the Chinese, Google is not.
But here’s the thing, solving the marketing and brand recognition problem is relatively simple when the bigger problem is that Google’s services are not useful!
- Youth didn’t see how any of the services offered by Google were easier to use than the ones that they were already using. This is because Google operates in an e-mail paradigm while other services operate in a messenger paradigm. One time when I was checking my Gmail account at an internet cafe, a youth asked me, ” how do you leave pictures and messages for others?” I would say, “just send them an email.” But here’s the thing - youth don’t have to send emails when they are using MSN Messenger. There’s a major disconnect in communication culture. Messenger-like services don’t operate on an email paradigm. QQ and MSN users can go to a friend’s MSN Live profile or QQ box to leave a message or post a photo. You can check on each friend’s page to see their last update. It’s like a mini-facebook for every MSN user but just for your own contacts. If a friend wasn’t online, youth didn’t send them an email. Rather, they would click on the user’s name and write a direct message that would be sent immediately but read later when the recipient logged in at a later point in time.
- One teenager asked me how I shared music with Gmail. I tried to explain that I used Dropbox and I put the file my public folder and then give the url to my friend. By the time I was done with my explanation, she looked totally confused. I asked her how her and her friends shared music. She said, oh I just put it in my QQ box and my friends can go in and download it. My way didn’t make sense for them and my method didn’t even involve Google. QQ and MSN make it easy for youth to exchange files without emails and without having to own your own computer. We need to understand what it means to live in an instant messaging paradigm as opposed to an e-mail paradigm.
- By the way, this is also what I’ve observed outside of the US in Mexico, where my most recent fieldwork continues to show that the primary online communication method are messenger services, not email.
- Mobiles are becoming more popular and other companies are doing a better job of delivering mobile content and services. For example, several high school students showed me how they could access MSN Messenger and QQ chat on their cellphone for mobile internet. I asked them why they chose to use these apps. Some youth told me that they were already on the phone when they bought it (some were used), and others told me that it was really easy to download when you go the MSN or QQ site at an internet cafe. One of the most important reasons is that most people already have a MSN or QQ account. So when they begin to use mobile internet, the transition to using mobile MSN or QQ Messenger is an obvious one.
- For many of these low-income youth, mobile internet was used more frequently than internet cafes. They didn’t have a computer at home but what they did have was a cellphone that always had a signal. Another example is that cellphone companies have partnerships with Baidu or QQ Tencent to deliver mobile content. People would often show me a SMS of the latest news updates from Baidu. They told me that when they bought the cellphone, the vendor would help them sign up for the services. Google needs to think about how to cross into mobile services because other companies have deep relationships with mobile carriers to ensure that a new mobile user receives content from their company.
So who is using Google in China? Google is primarily used by elite Chinese users while Baidu is mainly used by non-elites. What’s the difference between elite and non-elite users? Elite users are those who are highly educated and can speak or at least read English. Interestingly, the biggest fans of Google were Chinese academics age 18 years and older. They used Google Scholar, Google Translation and Gmail for the same purposes as Western users. They relied on Google for their research and said that there was no site that even matched Google’s services. The way that Chinese professors, researchers, and academics work is more akin to the way that Westerners manage their relationships and projects. Therefore, the adoption of Google among highly educated Chinese is not surprising. Highly educated Chinese users organize and prioritize information in ways that are much more similar to Western users than non-elite Chinese users.
Sometimes you will hear me say, “I cannot imagine life without Google!” And it’s true - I can’t imagine living without my Gcal, Reader, Apps, Voice, Docs, and etc. Chinese academics who read English would often say the same thing when we talked about Google, frequently professing their love for Google. For these intellectuals, they didn’t feel less “Chinese” for using Google. My impression was that they felt more informed, could access media beyond China, and were more aware of global discourses (this includes celebrity gossip).
While Google may have a loyal following among Chinese academics, they only make up a small percentage of the population. If Google wants to become a more popular search engine in China, it has to do a better job at reaching non-elite users. Google isn’t going to get anywhere as the search engine for the intellectuals of China.
Google has built an empire of services that work for Western contexts and values. So it’s no surprise that their most loyal fans outside of the US are elite users who share similar class and occupational backgrounds with Western users. To reach new users with an entirely different set of cultural practices, Google has to rethink and reinvent itself for the Chinese market. Sometimes, one size does not fit all.
It’s one thing if Google’s difficulties could just simply be attributed to government interference, and bad marketing and publicity. But that’s not the case. Their services just simply are not useful for most Chinese users. I suggest that Google dedicate itself to understanding the Chinese market in a socio-anthropological way. They should be hiring teams of Chinese and non-Chinese ethnographers, sociologists, and anthropologists to work intimately in all phases with human-computer interaction designers, programmers, and R&D managers. Google should invest in long-term fieldwork for teams to immerse themselves in a diversity of environments. While usability tests and focus groups are useful for specific phases of app development, they aren’t as useful for understanding cultural frameworks and practices because by the time an app is being tested, it already has accumulated so many cultural assumptions along the way in the design process that users are asked to test something that functions in the programmer’s world, not the user’s world.
I hope Google doesn’t leave China because both sides would lose. I would like to see the Chinese government ease off of Google. And I would like to see Google.CN re-orientate itself to create such overwhelmingly great and relevant services that Chinese netizens will WANT to use their apps.
Competition and collaboration are essential factors for an innovative market.
The last thing that China wants to communicate to the world is that it does not offer a fair playground for companies to compete against each other or against government-cozy companies. One of the keys factors to sustain and increase China’s growth this century depends on its ability to attract capital. It doesn’t look good when the largest IT company does not want to work in China.
The success of China also depends on its ability to innovate. Historically, the culture has favored followers over leaders. While this is slowly changing, companies like Google are a positive influence on the Chinese work culture because the company promotes a culture of innovation, research, and transparency. What this means is that it values risk-takers and creative minds. Working at Google gives many Chinese researchers, programmers, and managers an opportunity to engage with companies that have different protocols and values than local Chinese companies.
And lastly, collaboration is critical for innovation. If Google and the Chinese government cannot work through this together, then China would be signaling to the world that it just pushed out one of the world’s most innovative IT companies. If Google stays in China, it should think about how to become a leader for IT innovation in China. Some good ideas to consider can be found in Isaac Mao’s open letter to Google to “save [the] Internet in China.” Mao suggests that Google create a VC fund, develop anti-censorship tools, and improve Adsense. I am a big fan of his first suggestion of creating a VC fund as a way to nurture new Chinese IT companies. This is an excellent idea that would infuse the market with innovative companies that are more closely aligned with Google’s culture. With Google running a R&D like VC fund, it would diversify the players in the Chinese internet landscape, increase Google’s industry alliances, and nurture its ties to other IT leaders that may have deeper connections to other sectors
Whatever the outcome, we should not be misled to think that everyone is on the same page in the Chinese government. Like all large institutions, there are different alliances and divergent opinions. The Chinese government is not a unified front that necessarily agrees across all levels on its censorship policies. I believe that there is a lot of opportunity for change. I worked with a lot of smart and open minded people who were willing to explore different positions. The question is are those talented people in the position to bring things like innovation, competition, and collaboration together.
In the beginning of this post, I said that that if Google were to leave China, there would be no immediate impacts on the average Chinese internet user. However, the long-term impacts would be devastating. The Chinese IT industry would lose such a critical player. The Chinese government would appear more hostile towards international businesses and privacy protocols. The citizens of China would have less access to unfiltered information. And the world beyond China would lose a critical link to the country. I hope that a compromise can be reached.
Internet cafes in China: The Closest Thing to a Playground for Migrant Children
I did some preliminary fieldwork at the Xinke Migrant school in Wuhan. Here is a story that I think illustrates the misunderstandings about “internet addiction” among youth in China and why government initiated policies limiting internet use among youth will not be effective. These policies aim to curb internet use among youth in public internet cafes, not in private homes. Middle-class and upper-class families have computers at home for their child, therefore most massive internet cafes are used by low-income populations.
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About the school: The XinKe school is for children of rural-urban migrants in Wuhan, China. Since migrants don’t have a residential permit (hukou) to be in the city, they are not allowed to attend any of the public schools or access any government-subsidized social services. Therefore, schools for migrant children have opened up around Chinese cities to serve this new population. Many of these schools are unstable, understaffed, unsanitary, and under-qualified. The XinKe school is government certified, therefore they are slightly more legitimate than other non-certified, essentially illegal, migrant schools.
Each student has to pay around 600 yuan ($75) each quarter to attend the school. If students were to attend the school in their birth village, they would not have to pay for their education. The government made high school in rural areas free of charge in 2007. Yet, with rural economies faltering all around China, migrants are pushing forward into cities with their children, regardless of the costs associated with being “illegal” in a city within their own country.
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My story: The principal of the school told me that students often sleep in class because they are not living in places with good shelter. The principal also said that one of his biggest concerns was the negative consequences of internet addiction among the students. He told me that youth, as young as seven years old, would spend eight hours a day at cyber-cafes playing online games instead of using the internet to do their homework.
When I asked students why they spent so much time in the cafes, they repeatedly told me that they thought it was fun; it was a place for them to play with their friends on and off-line. They told me that they often shared a computer between 2-3 friends and would spend the time playing games. If you think about this, this is a very physical process that involves the body in a physical place. Inside the cafes, you often see 2-3 kids (genders don’t mix) around one computer. One kid is playing a game, while the other two are giving advice, yelling at him, or trying to take over the round. There bodies are touching due to the spatial constraints. Kids will grab each other’s arms, try to take over the mouse, and point at the screen. What I’m describing here is a lot of bonding and touching that takes place off-line inside the internet cafe.
The key is the off-line part: the internet cafe for the kids are equivalent to an outdoor playground. In Wuhan, public playgrounds are rare. Therefore, the internet cafe serves as a digital and physical playground for youth to spend time together in place.
I then spoke to the parent of a child who had been spending a lot of time at the internet cafe and was receiving low marks in his classes. I asked whether or not this concerned her. Interestingly, she told me her and her husband were well aware of his internet habits, but they were partially relieved to know where he was spending his time. They were happy that he wasn’t hanging out on the street with local street gangs or engaging in activities that could get him trouble. While they weren’t happy that he wasn’t doing his schoolwork because of his time spent at the café, they could at least feel assured that he was safe and in one place at all times.
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This story illustrates how parents justify the time that their kids spend at the cafes despite the negative impact on their education. Although government laws try to prevent youth from spending excessive amounts of time online at internet cafes, the laws will not be as effective when low-income parents think of the internet cafe as the most ideal “babysitting” site that is affordable and safe. Parents only have to spend 10-20 yuan a day for their kids to spend all night or day at the cafe. The cafe has a bathroom and sells instant noodle.
And for the kids - they just see this as a fun place to hang out. They’re not just gaming with strangers online. The cafe is a physical place where friendships are negotiated face-to-face.
If the government wants kids to spend less time in internet cafes, they should think about building more public spaces for low-income families. They should improve the access to education for non-hukou residents in migrant destination cities.
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In the first picture (top left), the principal is trying to reach a mother of a ten-year old child who has been spending every afternoon at the internet cafe. The picture on the top right shows the internet cafe that the student goes to every night. It is a one-minute walk from where he lives with his family. The picture on the bottom left shows the student being reprimanded by the teacher for not doing his homework. The picture on the bottom right shows the student’s classroom.
More pictures of the Xinke school for migrants here on flickr.
New Product: Microsoft Mischief, an interactive student/teacher teaching tool for the classroom
The new Microsoft Mischief seems like an ingenious extension of powerpoint! I would love to see this technology being used in the classroom.
This product is being marketed as a tool for teachers in less unevenly developed countries.
One of the things that came to my mind was that other than the basic tools needed (computer, projector, stable electricity for at least 1 hour), do classrooms need to have desks/tables that are smooth enough for the wifi mouse? Many of the classrooms that I’ve seen in under-served areas don’t even have a desks with a smooth surface. The picture on the left is taken from a school that I visited in Wuhan, China. It’s a school for children of migrant workers. Many of the desks were mottled with holes and missing pieces of wood. So I wonder how smooth a desk surface needs to be for mice to work on it? Or can this be easily remedied with a smooth binder as a surface area?
Regardless, this is a totally awesome tool and I can imagine it being useful in classrooms all around the world regardless of the income-level of the school or region. And I like that this tool was built for a classroom with just one computer.
I don’t always think that more computers = more learning. One of the things that I’ve noticed in classrooms where each student has their own computer is that the computer can come between the student and the teacher. And if teachers want to control or monitor what their students are doing while they are teaching, they either have to walk around and look their students’ screens or use a remote screen where they can see every students’ screen. But by doing this, it interrupts what they are teaching.
Well I can’t wait to hear from teachers what they think of this tool.
Teachers who want to try this out should register on Microsoft Connect.
The developers recommend that teachers buy this mouse: Frisby Model #: M5096G 2.4 GHz Mouse, costs around $10.
There will soon be a site where teachers can upload their PPTs to share!
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Exceprt from the developer, Neema Moraveji’s site,
We put normal mice on each desk of a classroom and connect them to a single computer. We connect a projector to that computer so all the children using those mice are looking at the same large screen. The teacher controls (and creates) the social activities on the computer easily and scores of students can join in simultaneously.
From the student’s perspective, they are engaged with the teaching content because they can reach out and ‘touch’ it, playing with their friends on-screen and completing the activities. The children enjoy the fact that everybody can see everybody else’s on-screen avatar, making it a shared experience.
From the teacher’s perspective, she remains in control of the class but can easily switch on interactive activities that keep students engaged and allow once quiet children a voice. Mischief reads normal PowerPoint files and makes them come to life, so creating new activities is easy: just add slides and clip-art.
Paper: Mischief: supporting remote teaching in developing regions; authors: Neema Moraveji, Taemie Kim, James Ge, Udai Singh Pawar, Kathleen Mulcahy, and Kori Inkpen
April 2008
Leaving for 3rd ethnographic fieldwork trip to Mexico in a migrant-sending Oaxacan village.
This will be the 3rd time over a period of 3 years that I’m going into the mountains of Oaxaca (Sierra Madre y La Madre del Sur) to do research on ICT usage in a rural Oaxacan migrant-sending village. This year is particularly exciting because I feel that after two years of building up my relationship with the village the families really have become my friends. And I get to spend New Year’s Eve in the village!
The Mixteca Baja is one of my favorite places in the world because the people and the place are so hospitable. I feel really at home here. As an urbanite, getting to know how people live in rural areas is such a great learning experience. It is amazing the amount of knowledge that is required to live off the land. Here are pictures below from the last trip in 2009. In the first few pics, I am riding Mocho, a one-eared donkey. I am playing with some of the kids and the last few pictures are of the village cemetery. The rest of my pics are here.
So this year I’m going with a research colleague, Tanya Menendez, who came as a research assistant 2 years ago. Tanya is now very involved in the currently funded project. She has also developed a close relationship with many of the families. I’m really excited to have her come with me this time. Plus, it’s always good to do fieldwork in teams of two when the language you are working in not your first. I am sure there will be many times that Tanya is going to correct me on my Spanish.
This time we are going to live with some of the families in the village. In the previous years we stayed in a hotel in a town 45 minutes away. This year we get to experience the village 24/7! This means that I can focus a lot of my ethnographic efforts on the social practices inside homes and really observe family interaction. It also means more home cooked yummy meals!
In terms of the fieldwork, I’m super interested in seeing what kind of social changes have taken place since last year and in comparison to two years ago. When I was there last year, there was a noticeable increase in the population of young males (from around 20 in the village to around 50) because many of them had been deported - not because they were criminals - simply because ICE (US immigration and customs enforcement) had picked them up while they were walking on the street looking for work.
With the economy as it is, I wonder how the families are doing economically and socially. In one family, the father had shown up in the village over night after having been deported. The family couldn’t get in touch with him for many weeks because he was held up in a detention center. When he appeared in the village 1 month later after no contact with his family, overnight they realized that they had lost their only source of income. Having to return back to a complete subsistence lifestyle, the mother had to make some tough decisions about the finances. They had to take their oldest son (15 years old) out of school even though he wanted wanted to finish high school. Their plan was to have being work or migrate to the US so that he could help with the fees of his two younger brothers staying in school. The mother also had to cut off cellphone usage for both sons. With no father working in the us, the kids’ social circle had shrunk down to their own village overnight. It became difficult for them to reach or even see their friends in other villages.
Another major change that we had noticed was that the youth were no longer treating their cellphones as a necessary object. Rather, many of them were using MSN Messenger as their primary communication tool with their friends. The novelty of a cellphone had worn off. This was a noticeable difference from the 1st year where the youth carried their cellphones with them everywhere in EVEN though the signal was horrible within the village. These cellphone carrying youth were the first cellphone adopter in the village and they made their cellphone ownership status very obvious. They never let it leave their hands and it was always visible. However, during the 2nd year, the youth rarely carried their cellphones on them. Many of them reported that they had forgotten it or that it wasn’t charged.
This year, I wonder how the youth will be using the cellphones and MSN. I’ve noticed that they sign on to MSN less often and I wonder if this is due to the economy tightening up.
I have a long fieldwork guide, but I would like share a quick glimpse into some of the topics that Tanya and I would like to find out from this year’s fieldwork trip:
understanding spatial perspectives: We will have people draw mental maps of their daily activities within the village and point out when and where they use their cellphones or make time to go to the internet cafe 45 minutes away. Some questions to ask: where they usually leave their cellphones, why do they carry it with them, what areas have good signals, how to they manage sharing a cellphone, when does their schedule change, where are all the places they visit in the surrounding area on a typical month?
Do more research on the caseta telefonica: when do they chose to make or receive calls at the caseta, who calls them, have they noticed any differences in calling patterns in the last 3 years, who initiates calls in the family, have they changed the way that they use the caseta?
private communication and inside the home: how to women manage the finances, how do they use the cellphone, what do they use it for, how do they communicate with other women, how to they manage their kid’s schedules, how often to they talk to their husbands and sons in the US, what is most important to them, how often to they leave the village, do they take a cellphone with them, when was the first time they used a cellphone, do they prefer to use the caseta, the telefono fijo, or the cellphone and why, and what made them decide that a cellphone was important for their child, who taught them how to use the cellphone?
undocumented migrants in detention centers: Talk to return migrants who have been held in federal detention centers: what phone #’s do they call, how often are they allowed a call, who tells them when they can make a call, do they have difficulty reaching their family in Mexico, how do they feel in the detention centers, do they hear of stories where people can’t reach their family in Mexico, what makes them want to stay longer or plead their case, did they try to look for a lawyer, and do their friends and relatives in the US know when they are picked up?
how families are dealing with the slow economy: are migrants getting or maintaining jobs, are they feeling the economic slowdown, how are families managing with less income, what kind of decisions have to be made with less money in the family, are documented versus undocumented migrants experiencing the economic slowdown in different ways, are migrants sending less money?
Changes in usage of communication tools: how do people decide when to use IM vs cellphone vs the caseta, has cellphone signal improved this year, how often are people using their cellphones, have prices changed for cellphone usage, are people on special plans and if so how did they find out about it, how much are people spending per month on cellphone usage
going to the cybercafe: I would like to go to do some mobile ethnography again and travel with the youth to the cybercafe in the town 45 minutes away. what kind of websites are they visiting, how have their internet viewing patterns changed, how often they go to the cafe, how do they negotiate getting money from their moms to pay for internet time, how often to they talk to their friends online, how have their viewing patterns changed over the last 3 years, what new things have they discovered about the internet, how often to they use email, who do they email with.
life histories: understand life changes among informants, what they plan to do, what kind of path they see for themselves, will they chose to migrate to the US, what are some difficulties they are dealing with, any stories from the previous year, what are they excited about, how they feel about their role in the village?
Cultural changes with the village and migration: how the village is doing with its resources, how the tree replanting project is going, status on water treatment, status on the library initiative, how do the older people feel about the younger people, are people moving back from the US, is there a population decline, how was the fiesta this year, why do people decide to not migrate, how do young people feel about migration, what does the village do with the return migrants and the deported migrants, how quickly do the deported migrants return to the US,
Corporate Responsibility in the Age of Algorithms: HP overlooks "Dark Skin" users for its new HP Cam
Type in HP + Cam + Racism in Google Search and you will see 1,000 posts on this topic in the past 24 hours and 13,000 in the past week.
What I am most amazed by is the language that HP used in their online acknowledgment of the Youtube video:
“Everything we do is focused on ensuring that we provide a high-quality experience for all our customers, who are ethnically diverse and live and work around the world…
…. The technology we use is built on standard algorithms that measure the difference in intensity of contrast between the eyes and the upper cheek and nose. We believe that the camera might have difficulty “seeing” contrast in conditions where there is insufficient foreground lighting.”
Notice that HP never actually claims responsibility in overlooking users with darker skin color. They blame the HP Cam’s inability to track black people on the camera’s algorithm. Essentially, they blame the algorithm and the camera. HP never says that their programmers didn’t program the algorithm to process conditions with less contrast. They didn’t blame themselves for not doing careful ethnography on its diversity of users. They didn’t blame managers for not even considering non-light skin users during the entire design process!
Does this signal a new era of corporate responsibility? In the Industrial age, if a worker’s arm was cut off, the blame was placed on the machines. In the Digital Age, is the blame placed on 1’s and 0’s—those ignorant algorithms?
In both eras, the blame is placed on the inorganic objects - the technology. The managers, the programmers, the designers and the company are put in the clear.
In HP’s case, I suspect that their focus groups (if they held any), did not reflect the diversity of their customer base. I suspect that the programmers are light-skinned and do not have many friends with darker skin colors. This is a great example of how a technology’s design fails to be relevant for populations that have been historically ignored by tech companies. While in this youtube video Desi claims that “Hp Computers are Racist” with irony, underlying his statement is a history of companies ignoring black users, even them they prove to be a profitable customer base.
I hope this teach’s HP a valuable lesson, that non-light skin users, are not just end-clients. During the entire design process, the diversity of its user base should inform the way its technology is designed, programmed, tested, and launched.
great quote about ethnography
All of us are watchers—of television, of clocks, of traffic — but few of us are observers. Everyone is looking; not many are seeing.
Todos somos miradores—de la tele, de los relojes, del transito—pero pocos de nosotros somos observadores. Todos estan mirando, pero no todos estan viendo.
— Peter M. Leschak”
I think this such a great quote for teaching or understanding the role of ethnography. It’s not so much about the passive act of watching but the more engaged notion of seeing - peering into something - a world - beyond yours.
I originally posted this on my quotes blog, Dichos y Vida.
Map-hole: Technologies of the Mundan and Inscriptions of Power
(reblogged on Digital Urbanims)
this is a great example of how there’s always room for exciting innovation in everyday objects- even the mostly seemingly mundane can become layered with meaning and knowledge. Maphole is a guide to pedestrians (invented by Jiae Kwon). I wonder if a cut will make these real!
IWhat I would love to observe is the use of these map-holes in a city and to see how power and narrative is reinforced through these map-holes.
Who are these map-holes for? Who controls these map-holes? Who makes decisions on what is being pointed to - what kind of information will these show - where will it lead a pedestrian? Will they be for tourists? Will they be for the urban citizen? Will the location specific map-holes, such as in an art district? Who benefits from the map-hope?
how do they maps-holes respatialize the city? How do map-hopes reconfigure pedestrian movement?
I think that these mapholes could work to reinforce existing class-drawn boundaries in city.
For example, when I spent a few weeks in Stockholm a few years ago - for a social welfare country known for its social equality - I had a difficult time finding the low-income parts of the city. When I arrived, with a little online research about the hip-hop and yummy international food scene - I found out that a lot of undergrounded artists were from Rinkeby, a area of Stockholm that has lots of new immigrants, newly accepted Iraqi refugges, and older immigrants from countries such as Turkey. But after trying to look up information on Rinkeby online, talking to local residents, researching local guide books - I still had a difficult time finding any info on Rinkeby other than people’s advice that “you don’t need to go there.” Which of COURSE anytime someone tells me that I always take as a great indicator for me to go there.
My point is that the absence of information on Rinkeby, or any neighborhood can render it an invisible place. I was being told the dominant narrative that local citizens gave to outsiders - here are beautiful parts of Stockholm that you should see and here are the parts that you don’t need to see. But that very narrative is laced with assumptions of what kind of outsider I was and what I valued. My moment illustrates how the dominance of one platial (yes I made that word up) narrative can render another place invisible. Could map-holes work in the same way? By only pointing out some places, other places get left out. Could map-holes become map-hopes - pointing people to a version of the city that you can’t find in tourists books? Or could these map-holes become wired with blue-tooth and tourists could beam the hole for information that they were interested in finding?
Well if I start seeing these pop up in NY, I will put up stickers that say “Bed-Stuy” over the arrow pointing towards “Soho” or stickers that say “yoga center” over “Macys” or a sticker that says “Fresh Food” over “McDonalds.
Here are some other bloggers who have commented on map-hopes, Yankodesign, GIS-Lounge, Inventor spot, and DoGizmo.
oh and I had a GREAT time in Rinkeby. I visited a local school, met residents, ate great turkish sweets, and hung out with some newly arrived iraqis. It was just as great as my day wandering around in Gamla Stan. My photos from a day in Rinkeby and photos from my time in STockholm.
zadi:
“Map Hole is a new road guidance tool designed to direct pedestrians and travelers to their final destination using existing elements in the urban landscape. It locates the pedestrian with a starting point and provides information on the exact distance or average walk time to the listed landmarks.”
- Yanko Design (h/t The Daily What)
I'm starting to think about how to visualize my data
I created this post on my other site, Digital Urbanisms (I just started it a few weeks ago). It’s about my current efforts to begin thinking about how to visualize my data - so it’s relevant for Cultural Bytes since this is where I talk about my research process.
Ever since I moved back to the US from China, I’ve been on a visualization craze - inspired by many of the architects and city planners that I met when I wasn’t doing fieldwork in Beijing.
What’s so great is that one of my advisors, Jim Hollan, actually teaches Information visualization!!! He introduced me to the world of Processing (visualization software). I think I should learn it - at least on some basic level in order to begin imaging how to visualize my data. Even though I want to work with a professional data visualizer, I still need to understand the depths of this software.
My reward for finishing my field exams in April is that I will be allowed to spend some time learning the program. I struggle EVERyday to not open the application. I don’t want to tell my committe that the reason why I dropped out of grad school is because I got stuck in processing world. hmmm I may have to uninstall it from my computer. yes good idea. going to do that……..now.
This post is not directly about Digital Urban Mapping - rather it’s a commentary about the state of data visualization in urban mapping. Mario Klingemann (Quasimondo), the creator of this image, made a statement that resonated with me. He notes that the current festish around data visualization may be more indicative of aesthetics being prioritized over data comprehension.
“The goals of data visualization as I understand them are to make complicated issues more understandable, to make obscured connections visible and to reveal hidden patterns in the data. After all these tasks have been solved ideally the result should be aesthetically pleasing as well.
But when I look around what is being done in data visualization today I have the suspicion that in many cases the design is more important than the actual information and that the use of data is more an excuse to justify the use of aesthetics.”
This makes me think about the world of visualization and digital mapping for visualizing urban processes. So far, my only experience with urban mapping has been with architects - professionals who tend to be great at visualizing cityscapes and not so great at observing and explaining human interaction. but hey more reasons for architects and sociologists to team up! One of the reasons why I want to work with architects is because I think sociologists are missing the imaginative, the scale, and the visual. A lot of our work gets stuck under so many theoretical barrels and methodological corners that to even begin to think about visualizing our data when we can’t even explain it in everyday language just seems overwhelming. And the very aspect that Mario brings up - about processing information - well I think that sociological studies overall (there are many exceptions) fail to really make the research understandable to a wider public.
I am afraid of my work falling into that trap as I feel that’s what graduate school has trained me to do - write in obscure language that doesn’t communicate with other disciplines or practitioners. So I’m realllly trying hard to make a commitment early on in my fieldwork to think about how to visually communicate my research.
The difficulties in visualization is that as visual objects they are excellent at showing the snapshot of situations, the state or the result or the change over time in X/Y variables. On the other foot, visuals are not as excellent at communicating processes or motivations - the cultural reasons for why X/Y happened or changed over time (more techniques are being developed to make this easier- that’s why processing is so awesome).
I wonder if all these trends towards data visualization is also a reflection of the information overload that we deal with in everyday life and a desire to just quickly get the facts and jump out before the nitty gritty details come in to overwhelm the moment. There are countless times when I’ve come across a looooooong article and I’m debating whether or not to read it and I then become really happy when I see a chart - even better when it’s a pretty chart! :) My brain just things - “get me the details - I don’t always need to know or have time to know why.”
Nothing bad can happen with trying to make data prettier right? Especially when it’s in the hands of people who care just as much about the data as the color palette.
You can read about his project here.
via @lennyjpg
flash ethnography: observations of a doctor's use of mobile tech with a patient
I took my grandma to the doctors for her annual today. The doctor that we have been with for the last 5 years moved to another office. So today we had a new doctor. I gave the new doctor a brief overview of the last 5 years of my grandma’s medical history. Our new doctor was wonderful, personable, and attentive.
During the entire updating process, the doctor was primarily talking to me because I was translating and I have been the primary overseer of my grandma’s health for the last few years.
I noticed that she was carrying around a new netbook. She was typing my notes in the netbook while constantly referring back to my grandmother’s file that contained her entire medical history being various doctors.
I noticed that the entire time we talked, it was very hard for her to have any direct interaction with my grandma. Her back was faced towards her as the netbook was placed on a stationary built in counter. As she typed the notes, she looked at me and then would periodically turn her entire body around 360 around to smile at my grandma and then immediately turn back to her netbook.
When we were done with the exam, I chatted with the doctor for a few minutes about the netbooks. She said that the office was trialing these netbooks out and had rented them for 6 months. She seemed ambivalent about the netbook, as if it was forced upon her. She said,
“Well I can take it with me everywhere and look up notes on each patient, but the file of the patient’s history still isn’t on the laptop so we still have to pull up files and deal with a lot of papework. It just feels like another thing to carry around and keep track of.”
When I asked her how it affected her interaction with her patients, she said that this was her primary reason for not liking these laptops. She showed me that using the netbook meant that she had to spend more time with her back towards her patients. I asked her if she had tried sitting down and putting it in her lap so that she could face the patient, but she said that was also inconvenient because of all patient history paper file. She then want on to explain that she preferred the stationary big screen desktops on carts at her old office because it was on a table that could face the patient or be moved around within the room.
Post observation thoughts?
spatial layout of material objects matters
I think a big fix in the problem would be the way rooms are designed. Spatial layout of an office/room matters for the introduction of a new technology. Therefore, the reception and usage of a new technology, such as this netbook, will vary across different offices. And it’s cool to think about how even minute furniture and room layouts can make a difference.
In this instance, the only place for the doctor to place her netbook in such way that her physical paper files could also be accessed meant that her face-to-face time with her patient was compromised. Imagine if there was an extra cart in this room with a big computer screen and each doctor could plug in their own netbooks. Or imagine if all the stationary computers in each were networked so doctors didn’t have to keep track of their netbooks. This was a such a great learning moment for me in terms of witnessing how the consideration of spatial layout is especially salient for conducting comparisons in technology usage for a new tool across communities.
This reminds me of the time I spent working in the projects of the South Bronx. I had noticed that the layout of a small apartment that housed 4-8 people would’ve made it impossible for a student to use a desktop computer with broadband the same way as a student in larger apartment or home of middle-high income families.
the extent of digitization of info matters
the mobility of laptops were useful for accessing only recent notes because most of the files had yet to be scanned into computers. For all the promises that mobile tools deliver to professionals in service industries, it’s difficult to take full advantage of these tools when the entire information base of an organization has yet to be digitized. As the doctor had explained, she still had to rely on physical paper files for the patient history. The netbook was only useful for accessing recent visits. I wonder what she would’ve thought about the laptop if ALL patient histories was on it. Would she have sat down and put the netbook in her lap so that she could have more time with the patient?
human connection matters
decreased face-to-face time was the primary issue for the doctor. This was such a great example of when a technology appears to offer more mobility may work to compromise other forms of interactions that may be more valued in a certain social setting.
Mobility as a feature is neutral
There is a lot of excitement across HCI and CSCW for studies on mobilites and how digital tools can complement a more mobile lifestyle. Aside from my observation that most of these studies are on elite Western (usually Anglo) travelers or mobile workers and tend to undervalue informal economy workers who rely just as much on mobility - I think this is such an exciting area of research that has pushed me to bring the concept of mobility closer to lived practices of mobilities.
That being said, I think that it should not be considered a priori that mobility is a “good” or “desired” aspect of X. In the case of the doctor’s office, having a mobile laptop seemed to be novel technology that the doctor was obligated to carry around. Of course it was not an ideal office with patient history files still on paper format and badly designed patient rooms - but that is just the point. Rarely are technologies introduced into ideal or perfect settings. So it’s good to think more critically about the role of mobility for a specified audience and what mobility means to them. In this case, increased mobility of note taking and accessing for doctors compromised personal connections with their patients.
One of the ways I thought about this in the past was trying to think about the other end of mobile cellphones as mobility saviours - so what groups wouldn’t want to be as mobile - what situations would mobility as an option not be valued?
What came to my mind?
• cheating spouses who don’t want to be located
• paraplegics
• people who hate cellphones
yah ok this is a totally lame list - I couldn’t really come up with any other groups because I think my problem is that I live too much in a paradigm where mobility is valued and an absolute! I am one of those working professionals who travels a lot and would stop breathing if I didn’t have my cellphone or my laptop on a work day.
ok so here’s some things questions in conclusion:
• How do new technologies affect work flows?
• How do new technologies affect client/patient interaction?
• What are the compromises that are made for a more mobile lifestyle/interaction?
• How does spatial placement of objects affect technology usage?
Useful Links
• Microsoft Research on Health and Wellbing
Ethnography and Healthcare
• Multi-tasking in practice: Coordinated activities in the computer supported doctor–patient consultation. International Journal of Medical Informatics, Volume 74, Issue 6, Pages 425-436. M.Gibson, K.Jenkings, R.Wilson, I.Purves
• Clinician style and examination room computers: a video ethnography. W Ventres, R Marlin, N Vuckovic, V Stewart - Fam Med, 2005 - stfm.org.
• Mapping the integration of social and ethical issues in health technology assessment.
Lehoux P, Williams-Jones B. Int J Technol Assess Health Care. 2007 Winter;23(1):9-16.
• Making a Case in Medical Work: Implications for the Electronic Medical Record. M Hartswood, R Procter, M Rouncefield, R … - Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 2003 - portal.acm.org
Erving Goffman, Cellphones, Social Cohesion
Andy Orum most recent post, What sociologist Erving Goffman could tell us about social networking and Internet identity on O’Reilly Radar, has brought back graduate course work memories of reading the works of our dear 73rd President of the American Sociological Association.
Goffman is most famous for his work on presentation of one’s identity in American culture. He studied micro-personal interpersonal interactions and argued that people’s actions could be seen as a type of performance, making active choices to display one’s self to an audience (friends, co-workers and etc).
Oram find’s Goffman’s work
” rather distasteful…I don’t see my entire life as a performance and everyone around me as an audience. That seems to be just what Goffman wants me to do. (He calls this attitude his “dramaturgical perspective.”)”
I had the similar thoughts when I first read Goffman. But Oram redeems Goffman’s work by saying that he does provide some useful ways for thinking online internet identity. Read Oram’s blog post - he makes great connections to Yang’s book on the internet in China, The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online.
I think that from an ethnographer’s point of view, the issue with Goffman is that his project was not to describe the world from an individual’s point of view, but rather to describe the social interaction that was taking place from his (Goffman’s) point of view. This means that fundamentally, his frameworks and theories will look from different from say Harold Garfinkel - an ethnomethodologist, who is concerned about understanding the world from the subject’s perspective. Goffman primarily relied on observation as his fieldwork method - that in itself should reveal his goals.
I wonder what would’ve happened if Goffman didn’t use the word “performance” to describe micro-interaction because that insinuates that we are all identity-making peons on a stage unengaged with our “real selves” (as if there was a real non-performing self), but rather just called it “gaming.” Games can take on a range of qualities from being collaborative to individualistic, from being playful to serious, and from being zero-sum to non-competitive. The stakes are always different depending on the game. Decisions are always being made. Perhaps “gaming” would’ve been a less condescending way to describe interpersonal interaction.
This is where Randall Collins comes in - another sociologist who is a Goffman’s fan - who takes Goffman’s work on interaction rituals and publishes a book that reframes GOffmans’ theory, Interaction Ritual Chains. What I like about Collin’s work is that it doesn’t make a judgement on the interaction - so a swinging SMS club to a bible study reading group can both be put on the same analytical plane - both are evidence of interactions that are attempting to increase social bonds.
Goffman’s and Collin’s work heavily informs Rich Ling’s work on the social uses of cellphones. His latest book was published in 2008. New Tech, New Ties: How Mobile Communication Is Reshaping Social Cohesion. His central argument is that cellphones increase social cohesion. I like how Ling draws on Goffman’s and Collin’s work for his analysis. Ling’s methods ranged from interviews to participant observation.
One of the luxuries of Ling’s studies is that he is working in countries with exceptional cellphone coverage, stable governments, and responsive cellphone companies. While we are hearing reports of increased adoption of cellphone usage outside of Europe and the US - I think we should be careful to make the jump to say that all around the world people are now becoming more connected with cellphones without any consideration of political and economic situations.
One thing that I am observing in my field site in rural Mexico is that while youth are now the first owners of cellphones in their village, they are no longer using it or relying on it after their first year of ownership because they’ve become frustrated with the poor coverage and expensive costs. Rather, youth have switched over to IM’ing as their primary technology tool for maintaining and/or increasing their social connections.
This just goes to speak that mobiles are not where ALL the connections are at - and that it’s important to consider a variety of ICT tools when examining social uses of technology.
Livescribe Pulse SmartPen: An Ethnographer's dream tool?
Livescribe just announced the next iteration of their beautiful Pulse Pen, a new 4gig model in titanium and black. The Livescribe pen is a digital pen that writes on digital paper, records your writing, records audio, and does many other cool stuff. Essentially you dont’ ever have to scan in what you write anymore! With their special paper and pen, you can have everything digitally recorded foreeeeever! Here’s a good review from Berry Review comparing scanned notebook with livescribe paper and a demo from the Livescribe website.
I bought this pen for several reasons.
- I like to write on paper still. And I’ve stopped because I was always losing my paper. So now Livescribe solves that problem!
- I want to record audio while I write - this is awesome for doing fieldwork! As I am interviewing people I can write down my notes while recording their voice! OMG
- I want to doodle again. I love doodling, drawing graphs, mapping ideas out - livescribe allows me to upload all my doodles easily!
After I bought it I found even some more cool features that I didn’t know of!
- you can play the piano! this was soooo cool! you can add beats and change the instrument. Here’s a video of me making my piano and composing a masterpiece - THIS IS too fun
- you can have it translate basic words in several languages - Mandarin, Swedish, ARabic, and Spanish - probably more but I didn’t look into. Here’s a video of me translating “beer” into all the available languages on the demo card.
- they sell small notebooks that you can carry around with you the size of a book for only $13 for a pack of two. So that means you’re not stuck with the big 8x11 notebook that they include in the box when you buy the pen.
After I started using the Livescribe, I was faced with some new questions from an ethnographer’s perspective.
While the pen is useful for the ethnographer, what does it communicate to the interviewee? Is it ethical to use a tool that doesn’t look like a traditional audio recorder to audio record an interview or interaction? With note-taking for ethnographer moving beyond the traditional pen/pencil paper to a digital process, the benefits for the ethnographer are clear but does this effect the interview process?
The site of an audio recorder can sometimes prevent people from being as free to share information and personal thoughts. So I thought this is cool - the livescribe pen can help ME ease my anxiety about taping! But then I thought from the participant’s perspective - what do they think when I tell them in the beginning of the interview that I would like their permission to tape this interview and that I will be taping it with this “pen”?
In many of the places that I am working, communication technology such as cellphones is relatively new and people don’t have spending money for creative gadgets. I think this pen might freak people out! Ok Maybe they wouldn’t be freaked out, but I can imagine them being a bit weirded out and curious at the same time - and then I wonder if their processing of the “pen” as an audio recorder would get in the way of the interview goals at hand.
I wonder if they would think well if this thing *looks* like a pen but is an audio recorder but also is a pen because she’s writing with it - what else could she have on her that is not really what it appears to be? Or what if this also doubled as a video camera (which would be totally awesome! Livescribe designers build a video cam into this!) Would people start thinking what other conspicuous looking devices are recording the interaction?
There’s something very clear when you take out a separate tool that functions as an audio recorder or camera to document an interaction. It sends a clear message about the intention of the interaction: this process, your actions, the surrounding - is being recorded. The tools can makes the “ethnographic moment” explicit. Whereas if are using tools that look like pens to do all those things - perhaps that takes some of the power away from the participants. In the Human Subjects Review Process, the assumption in the application is that when you say you’re going to ask a subject for permission to tape an interview, the researcher is going to audio record with a traditional digital audio recorder.
I was even thinking that if I had the chance to take this pen into my fieldsite, when I ask for permission to tape an interview, I could take out my audio recorder and place it on the table. But then I would actually tape with it with my pen
Now I hope that my relationship with my participants are always based first and foremost on trust. So I don’t think they would be suspicious of my intentions or of my “tools” But I am just imagining for general research purposes and situations where maybe it’s not deep ethnography - maybe it’s just one time or 2 week project where you don’t get the chance to establish a close relationship.
Well either way, the Livescribe pen I believe is an ethnographer’s dream come true.
Here’s where this post becomes very personal and sad and also why I don’t have any stories of me taking my pen into my field sites. Please do not proceed if you do not want to hear heart-wrenching news….
I bought my dream pen in March of 2009.
and here comes the horrific news…
I LOST MY LIVESCRIBE PEN 33 DAYS AFTER I PURCHASED IT.
Only 5 months later am I able to admit this without pain. I’ve only told 4 people in the world before this post - a close friend, two of my phd advisors, and a stranger I saw in the airport with the pen. Weeks after I lost it I had high hopes of finding it again - so I wasn’t ready to admit that it really gone.
I lost it on a my flight from DC to JFK on Delta. I have NEVER had a pleasant experience flying on Delta Airlines. So losing my precious Livescribe pen on one of their flights is one more reason to avoid flying Delta. I called and called their lost and found. I even went back to the Delta lost and found office at their JFK terminal in person - but it was never to be found.
I have to blame someone, and certainly I cannot blame the loss of the Livescribe on myself. So I would like to officialy transfer the blame from myself to Delta Airlines.
Delta, you suck. You lost my pen. One of your morally deficient customers took my pen and they never returned it to the Delta Lost and Found. Your airline and your customers suck.Your Lost and Found customer service agents were always rude and they didn’t take me seriously when I told them that I had lost a very special pen. They laughed at me. you suck.
Ok now that I’ve finished transferring the blame to Delta, I would love to expound on why I was so in love my Livescribe. My feelings are still raw, full of passion and pain - but I am in a state where I’ve moved beyond anger and am able to talk about my pen without tears.
Ode to Livescribe
Livescribe, you were always good to me when we were together. you never left my purse. you never walked out on me for another notebook. Although then you only worked on a PC - I comprised and took you to my netbook. I see now that you operate on OSX. Well if we were together still I would introduce you to my Mac Air. I love you still. you are committed to excellence. I filled up your 2 gig capacity so quickly, but now I see you’ve grown up to a 4 gig adult. I wanted to take you everywhere with me to all my research sites around the world we could’ve seen the mountains in Mexico, the <polluted> Rivers in china, the stars in the Appalachia - but…alas, we were separated…but only in this lifetime.
SO i’ve thought long and hard about this - about why I lost it.
- is it because I treated it (in my tired state) as just any other pen? I don’t keep track of my regular pens and I never have invested in those $100 pens or received any expensive White gold-plated pens.
- Is it because my brain hadn’t switched to thinking - this pen is FREAKING expensive and special - don’t let it leave your hands?
- it is because I am not mature enough for creative gadgets that look conspicuous yet have multiple functions?
While those are all possible answers, I have another theory. I think I lost it because I didn’t have it strapped around my neck. I should’ve used the neck strap that came with the Livescribe pen.
Now Livescribe designers - this is where you have to listen to me - I didn’t use the strap because it was reallllly ugly! I don’t think I am the only customer retarded enough to lose their pen (ok it’s quite possible I am the only one so far) - so I think you should make it easier for people to fashionably hang their pen around their neck. I suggest moving away from the rounded string to a flatter shoe-lace like strong. Also the thinner the better - and something that is adjustable would be great. like a slide knot. i can definitely tell you that the black string will not look good with your new beautiful titanium pen.
Also Livescribe you HAVE to design a better looking case! the black case that was included in the box was disappointing - I couldn’t even get my pen out of the case half the time! it was to tight and it was just plane ugly. You’ve designed such a beautiful pen so there’s not excuse for failure with the pen’s case. The case itself (if used) can become a reminder to someone who’s lost-prone like me to take special care of the pen - so the case has to be beautiful ok? I didn’t use the case after the first day when I realized that it would take me at least 5 sec to struggle to get the pen out of the case.
while I am at it - is there any way to make a tiny indent for the fingers? my fingers would ache after writing because the pen is so thick.
(btw now I know that if you buy something with your American Express card they have a protection plan that will give you your money back if you lose or have something stolen within 90 days. I know this 6 months too late.)
The first moment of Livescribe love - Setting up the pen (all the photos of my pen)
Village Technologies: Remote Fertilizer Monitoring
i’ve started doing preliminary interviews with youth who are from villages and are now residing in Beijing. I’m trying to get a better understanding of the different ways that youth use ICTs in their village before coming to the city.
Ultimately my research in Wuhan will focus on ICT usage in the city, but I think it’s important that I am able to situate urban ICT usage in a larger context and one that includes rural ICT usage since the migrants I speak to will all be from the countryside.
I’ve been speaking to Beimeng (named changed), an 18 year female who is now studying in Beijing. We were hanging out on the subway talking about her home, a village with a population of 3,000 in Dongei. Her family is financially stable and considered to be me more well off than others. Her mother is a school teacher and her father is a truck driver.
Their family just installed broadband at the beginning of this year. I asked her what it was like to have internet at home. She told me that it was “nice” but no one is really home that often. She is now living in the city, her mom is always at work, and her dad is usually gone for weeks at a time driving his truck.
Since people aren’t home very often, I asked if they were still going to keep paying for the service. Beimeng said that they definitely plan on keeping it because they plan on surveillancing their fertilizer through the internet. I thought that I had misheard or mis-translated some word - but indeed Beimeng was talking about fertilizer.
Like many other villages, the introduction of fertilizers has changed life in Xiheyuancun Village (pseudonym). The village is now considered prosperous with great crop yields. Beimeng’s family is able to purchase high-end fertilizer. Their family is known for having some of the best fertilizer in the village so people often steal their fertilizer. A few years ago, they installed a camera surveillance system where they could monitor the fertilizer from inside their home.
But none of their family members are home that often. As a result, they will stream the surveillance of their fertilizer over the Internet so that they can keep an eye on it from anywhere they can get online. I asked her where and with with her and her family would most likely use to check the video stream. She said that she would most likely take a look from the internet cafes or her cellphone. Her father would only check in on the fertilizer through his cellphone because he is usually on the road. As for her mom, she would most likely be the person who will consistently keep an eye on the camera feed from her work computer at school.
i find this story fascinating for many reasons.
1.) it’s an example of how rural-urban migrant populations keep ties to their village. For Beimeng, she still felt very involved in the family process of monitoring the fertilizer.
2. ) use of technology in a context specific this village. Streaming video as a form of surveillancing is an old idea. Security guard firms to doggy day care centers do it. Yet here we have an individual farming family using the internet to monitor their fertilizer, which is a very contextually specific idea.
3.) this story is indicative of the level of trust and intimacy in the village. Beimeng was telling me that as a child, the village was more poor but her mom said that robbery was not a problem.
4.) I find it interesting that they installed the internet, realized that no one really used it, yet still found a way to make it useful for their mobile lives.5.) Beimeng said that her father (truck driver) would check in through his cellphone (using the mobile internet) and her mother would check in through her work computer. This point illustrates the increasing differences that we will see in how people use the internet versus mobile internet. Beimeng’s father is a truck driver, so relies on his mobile. But her mother has a stationary job with constant access to her work computer.
6.) we tend to think of the only entity that uses the internet to monitor activities is the government (esp. in China), but in this case we have an individual household who has decided to use it as a monitoring device
7..) This is a story very specific to China’s countryside as land reforms in the late 70’s the give every individual household a plot of land. With parceled plots, this means that families can make choices about what and how to plant the land. Families who can afford high-grade fertilizer, like Beimeng’s, can keep making more money. Within one village, there can be a lot of class distinctions—with fertilizer being one of the markers of class in this story.
I plan on visiting Beimeng’s village next year after they’ve installed the streaming fertilizer surveillance monitoring systems. It will be exciting to talk to her parents about how they check in online.
Now off on a totally different track - Fertilizer is a critical part of modern China’s history. China’s and US’s modern history starts with fertilizer - one of the agreements that came out of the famous 1972 Nixon visit is that China placed an order for 13 fertilzer factories from Cargill.
7th Chinese Internet Research Conference: The Chinese Internet and Civil Society: Civic Engagement, Deliberation and Culture May 27-29, 2009
This was a conference that I am very upset that I couldn’t attend! It was help at U. of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of Communication’s Center for Global Communication Studies. I found out last minute while attending the 2009 International Communication Association Conference (May 22-26) in Chicago.
Hopefully I can go to the 8th CIRC wherever it will be held. Webcasts of the 2009 conference are available here.
CIRC 2009 “is designed to bring together scholars and professionals to examine the Chinese Internet from socioeconomic, political and cultural perspectives. While there has been significant research on the political implications of the Internet in China, we have yet to fully understand the changes the Internet is fostering in civil society, or on the intersection between the market and the state, as well as the Internet’s cultural implications for identity formation, emergent cultural phenomena and social networking. This conference seeks to explore these uncharted areas through sessions on Public Sphere and Deliberation; Censorship, Surveillance, and the State of the Chinese Internet; Civil Society in China - Challenges and Opportunities; Women and Minorities; Civic Engagement and Participation; Panics, Nationalism; and Grassroots Culture, among others. On May 29, a small post-conference workshop will concentrate on prominent academics, bloggers and policy analysts on Chinese Perspectives on Internet governance. “
City Street Conference: Nov. 18-20th in Lebanon, by Nortre Dame University Louaize-Lebanon’s Faculty of Architecture, Art and Design
“City streets are the places where more than half of the world’s population dwell,communicate, exchange and interact. At the turn of the millennium, the “City Street” conference issues the most vivid and established part of the wold’s cities, the street,and proposes a (re)reading and a (re)thinking about its people, physicality, image and virtuality and questions the street’s multi scalar dimensions, disciplines, textuality and structure.
The millennium’s culture, technology and manifestations (from political and economical to philosophical, artistic and media manifestations) become part of the street’s discussion.
Upon the request of many who would like to participate in the City Street Conference, the organizing committee has decided to extend the deadline for accepting abstracts until July 21, 2009. Please send you abstract, between 300-500 words, to Dina Baroud at citystreet09@ndu.edu.lb See Call for papers for abstract template.”
International Conference: The New Urban Question - Urbanism beyond Neo-Liberalism on Nov. 26th-28th in Amsterdam -
This looks like a great conference for those working on urban issues. I have sworn off conferences until I finish my fieldwork - so I must resist the force!
“The New Urban Question – Urbanism beyond Neo-liberalism” is the title of the 4th Conference of the International Forum on Urbanism (IFoU) that will take place from November 26th to 28th, 2009 at Zuiderkerk in Amsterdam and Delft University of Technology (TU Delft). The theme of the conference is about the recovery of the discipline of Urbanism under the conditions of urbanization and urban transformation, ecological threats and economical crises.
The conference will be organized in the framework of the International Forum on Urbanism (IFoU) by the Department of Urbanism, TU Delft and the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam in collaboration with the Dutch Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and the Environment (VROM) and the Municipality of Amsterdam as well as other participating universities of the IFoU-network.
