Privacy and The Anonymous user in China: Importance of understanding multiple cultural orientations towards guanxi/social connections
Since my talk 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. 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.
*******
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.
*******
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.
*******
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
*******
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.
Surveillancing Technologies and Informal Economy Workers: Creating Trust with Invisible People
Whenever I start a new gig, I always get to know the cleaning staff right away. To me, those are the people who are most overlooked for very sensitive work - they are trusted with the keys to the entire building and access to every office and desk. Also, janitors tend to have more personality than office workers (sorry friends!).
So I noticed that one day a time monitoring surveillance device was installed in my friend’s office - only her office. We’ll call her Fuerza. Fuerza is the janitor.
Fuerza told me that the company that she works for (janitorial services are usually out-sourced) was worried other janitors were leaving early so they installed this machine to better monitor their schedule.
I tried not to show my frustration with this when I asked her how she felt about it. Fuerza told me that she was fine with it and that the company already didn’t show confianza - trust in the staff so she wasn’t surprised that this machine was installed. If anything she felt that now her boss wouldn’t be suspicious that she was leaving early. This had been a problem over the last year and she was happy that this machine could resolve this.
I was upset at the installation of this machine for it contributes to this inflexible monitoring of work and time of informal economy workers. We have all this talk of flex work time for white collar workers but we rarely consider the lives of informal economy workers and their needs for flex work time. Fuerza leaves her house at 4am for a 2 hour public transportation bus commute to work. Even though she often times finishes all the cleaning by 3pm, she still has to stay til 4pm. She told me that she wishes on some days she could leave early to pick her son up from school or the library.
But what’s interesting is that Fuerza wasn’t really upset about it like me. She felt this relief that she no longer would be questioned about her work hours because for her nothing changed with her schedule- she couldn’t leave any earlier, but she could have the trust of her boss.
To me this is an interesting story about trust and privacy of low-income workers and in particular, informal economy workers. It’s always been odd to me the unequal power relationship between office workers and janitors.
I haven’t worked inside a corporate building for a long time. And being there reminded me again of the power dynamics of traditional American office life. Janitors are invisible. They float in and out of a room with no recognition, not even a face nod or a blink from anyone. Yet we know of their presence through empty trash cans, clean sinks, and full water dispensers. They are so invisible yet so highly monitored. Machines like this speak to the low-trust that we have in their word.
But how could trust be built with people who are invisible? Is this the role of surveillancing machines? Building trust between people who have little physical interaction, personal trust, and mutual respect?
As interactions become less personal and more formal, I wonder about how this impacts informal workers. There’s plenty of literature and research on the impact of surveillance machines - such as airport security check, cameras in public spaces, and etc - but there is little work on the place of these machines in blue-collar work life or the lives of undocumented people. How will undocumented or under-served populations respond to ubiquitous surveillance and smart-recognition technologies? How do notions of trust, privacy, and judgement change with the use of these technologies?
What I found interesting from my conversation with Fuerza is that she welcomed the machine as a something that could help build trust, whereas most people have looked upon surveillancing technologies with distrust. People who are undocumented have complex relationships with technologies of surveillance. The underlying technology of this fingerprinting tech are also part of the very data scanning machines at the border that prevent her from entering into the USA.
This was also an important reflexive moment for me as an ethnographer - that I have to be aware of my own biases. I was aware of how upset I was at the installation of this machine - but this is because I have a very different relationship with everyday surveillance technology than an undocumented worker. If all of sudden I was told that I had to scan my hand to enter and exit the building so that my boss could monitor my schedule, I would see this as a form of distrust, but in this moment for Fuerza it was an opportunity to build trust.
The word “JANITOR” is from the Roman god JANUS-the keeper of keys. Historically cleaners were honored & trusted. Now they occupy one of the lowest social positions in the US. But not in my mind. Fuerza you rock! And you have one of the hardest commutes ever. Whenever I hear people bitching about their commutes because they chose to live in some far off suburb, I think that no one can beat you for the longest commute trophy.
Btw - one of my favorite artists is Dulce Pinzon. She is as photography from NYC. She has awesome photos of Mexican informal economy workers dressed up as heroes. We had a great time playing with her costumes a few years ago at my fave museum, Queens Museum of Arts!
GOOGLIST REALISM: The Google-China saga and the free-information regimes as a new site of cultural imperialism and moral tensions
When Google left China in early 2010, many attributed Google’s move as a valiant and moral response to the Chinese government’s strict information filtering rules. I disagreed with this point of view and wrote a post on Cultural Bytes on what I thought were the real reasons for Google’s quick departure from China.
A few months later, I was asked to keynote the New Directions in the Humanities Conference at UCLA on June 29, 2010. This gave me the chance to rethink some of the original comments I made back in early 2010. In my original post, I argued that Google failed to create successful brand recognition in the Chinese market, to launch a recognizable marketing campaign that stood out against Baidu (the reigning search engine in China), and to understand the values of non-elite users in China. I then suggested that Google should’ve put more time in understanding the cultural orientations of Chinese users before expecting services that they had originally developed for Western users to just be readily embraced by Chinese consumers.
As I started preparing for my talk, I began thinking more about why the world’s largest search engine left the largest online market. I realized that my original post only barely scraped the surface of the Google-China saga. The bigger issue was more than a matter of Google failing to conduct proper ethnography and user tests on the Chinese market. The real issue is that China and Google see the world in different ways and this informs their outlook on how access to information should be mediated. And ultimately Google assumed that their world view would eventually trump China’s.
For my keynote, I make the case that Google failed in China for two reasons. First, drawing upon the ideas that I made in my original post, I discuss how Google never created useful services for non-elite digital users based off of my ethnographic work in China.
Second, I argue that the Google-China saga is an example of a contemporary clash in moral orders centered around information politics. Google exemplifies a hacker ethic that can be traced back to Enlightenment ideals of individual achievement while China reflects Confucian cultural norms of social harmony that emerged 2,400 years ago during the early Han dynasty. A moral order rooted in Enlightenment ideals rewards rebels, while a moral order rooted in Confucian ideals rewards followers.
Access to information has become a battle site of cultural imperialism. Information politics is ultimately a struggle over meaning and symbols. Google, one of the main players, has successfully linked the commodification of information to an ethical system of social change which I call “neo-informationalism,” a retooling of neo-liberal ideals and a re-envisioning of imperialism based on information as a primary means to wealth expansion in the digital age.
My talk is split into 3 parts. I explain the history of the Google-China saga and my disclaimers in the introduction. Part 1 is about why Google failed in China due to a lack of deep cultural understanding of the market. Part 2 is about how Google and China ascribe to differing moral orders. Part 3 is about Google’s unintentional engagement in imperialism. And in my conclusion I provide directions for technologists, academics, and businesses for how to move forward with lessons from the Google-China saga.
Here’s an excerpt from Part 3 and the conclusion. Pease take a look at my talk here (pdf download here). My assertions will make much more sense when the talk is read in its entirety. I’ve also included footnotes for follow up readings in the full version. The slides that go along with my talk can be viewed/downloaded here. And some pics from the conference here, and lastly the audio from the conference talk is here.
So let’s go directly into Part 3!
*I look forward to your thoughts on this topic. Plus, this is only the beginning of the Google-China saga!
___________________________________________
PART 3
From doing business with guns, germs, and steel to computers, code, and clouds
Some business analysts, politicians, and the Western media cheered Google on for standing up to China and relocating to Hong Kong which, mind you, is still a part of China. Others thought that the sheer size of the Chinese market would sway Google to stay in China, much like Microsoft, Yahoo, and others. But I want to highlight one particular analysis.
Umair Haque, an economist and Director of the Havas Media Lab, claimed on the Harvard Business Review blog that by leaving China Google had taken an ethically motivated, not an economically motivated stance. He argued that Google’s decision gives them an
“ethical edge…that’s always been at the heart of Google’s disruptive success.” “…a Google that doesn’t play by China’s rules is a better business, which creates more thicker [sic], sustainable, meaningful value.”
In his Awesomeness Manifesto, he asserted that corporations engaged in “ethical production” are more financially successful and meaningful than those that don’t because they innovate in the name of a “higher calling” not in the name of profits.
Let’s consider Umair’s proposal on Google’s ethical edge.
I agree that Google believes that they have an “ethical edge.” They believe that they draw upon the qualities that stand opposite from evil— benevolence, compassion, and kindness— to serve their higher-calling of introducing the world to information.
But I absolutely disagree with Umair that this “ethical edge” is anything new. This is a common moral trope of colonialism, imperialism, globalization, and neo-liberalism: ethical beliefs that justify expansionary practices of extracting commodities and creating new markets in the name of a “higher calling.”
But instead of extracting spices, opium, gold, bodies, labor or oil, Google was trying to extract information from the Chinese market and then commodify that information as it provided it back to Chinese consumers — ostensibly in the name of “freedom”. The weapon of choice is no longer guns, germs, and steel, but free-information, open platforms, and distributed architectures.
Tropes of colonialism
To be fair, this “ethical edge” isn’t just being practiced by Google. It’s also practiced by countless other technology companies that make their way from the West to other continents. It’s also the very rhetoric employed by many proponents of the free and open-source software movement, the ICT4D field (Information Communication Technology for Development), and OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) community.
So I ask us, why are we so invested in the idea of Google being in mainland China? I suspect that one of the reasons is that Google’s relocation of its servers to Hong Kong opened up an existing set of anxieties among ourselves about America’s place in the global order.
But what Americans don’t get is that this openness is contingent upon America’s vision of keeping markets open, tearing down national borders, and creating an open ICT network that preserves America’s interest in being the world’s police, superpower and economic leader.
We thought that we could bring the internet to the world and the architecture would remain open. What we didn’t expect was for countries to use the internet to advance their own agendas in the same way that the US was already doing: using their own culture, policies, and system of ethics.
Algorithms of social change: new technologies, same old games
And here’s the kicker - in leaving China because the Chinese government wouldn’t conform to their rules, Google reproduced the very imperialistic behavior that have characterized the greatest imperial powers: leaving a country or region when they couldn’t get the natives to abandon their own way of thinking or adopt a new way of behaving.
What’s emerging is a new rhetoric of development and globalization in what I am calling neo-informationalism: the belief that information should function like currency in free-market capitalism - border-less, free from regulation, and mobile. The logic of neo-informationalism rests on an moral framework that is tied to what Morgan Ames calls “information determinism,” the belief that free and open access to information can create social change. This moral framework of neo-informationalism is so naturalized that Google and like-minded companies work their way around the world unquestioned for their position on open information. Phrases such as “information wants to be free” reflect the techno-anthropomorphizing of information, a necessary step in naturalizing any neo-informationalist agenda.
Neo-informationalism is a re-visioning of a non-redistributive laissez-faire ideology of modernization theory transplanted into Western technologies that assumes surely people cannot be self-sufficient without unlimited access to the tools that connect them to the world wide web. Underlying this ideology is the notion that information openness and market openness are inseparable and non-mutually exclusive. Information openness can only be achieved through free-market conditions.
This is a model of social change that puts faith in objects, not in governance processes. Neo-informationalism and neo-liberalism work symbiotically to create what Wendy Brown calls the governed citizen who seeks solutions in products as opposed to the political process. While Wendy wasn’t speaking of technological objects per se, I make the case that this is indeed a variant of the hacker ethic; social change is made through direct programming of software code and interaction with technological devices while maintaining distance from the state.
What I want to point out is that while this is a very reasonable process being accomplished by very reasonable people — Westerners creating products and policies for Westerners - I am not comfortable with pushing this belief on others in the name of a “higher calling.” This is a simply a redux of cultural imperialism that says “we know better than you, and if you don’t believe us, too bad you have no choice, because we’re offering you emancipation by giving you access to our Internets.”
We should question any ethical system that reproduces a familiar trope of colonialism. Whereas past waves of imperialism used Religion, Science, or Globalization as a rhetoric of development, the new rhetoric of neo-informationalism is used as a guiding principle for entering new regions—ethical principles that can be used as proxies for pushing our belief system onto other people. As a result, the work can be less about free information and unlimited compassion and more about desires for free-access to new markets and new commodities.
CONCLUSION
Create understanding
So does this mean that we have to give up on Google? No, the world doesn’t work in binaries and neither should you nor I. I depend on Google for most of on my online communication. I’m known among my friends as a Google evangelist. I force my friends onto gmail and its amazing filtering capabilities. I heart Google and could talk about its services ad naseum. But while I love the technical aspects of Google’s products, I am at the same time critical of the limits and affordances of its technologies. Technologies are never just technologies. They are machines laden with cultural expectations imbued by their creators.
But herein lies my fear: What if we start thinking that there is no alternative to the institution of Google? What if the “Google model” starts to become what we think of as the most natural way to do things? We need to question any ”reality that presents itself as natural”and that includes something as apparently innocuous as Google.
We need to make sure that we don’t succumb to Googlist Realism. Much like Capitalist Realism, the belief that there is no alternative to the reality of capitalism as a way of life, Googlist Realism is the belief that there is no alternative to Google as our search engine and as our gatekeeper of information. The belief that capitalism can improve life is now supplanted by the free-information regimes of neo-informationalism - the belief that unfettered information access is life.
Google has successfully linked the commodification of information to an ethical system of social change. This rhetoric is so strong that I worry that we could lose our imagination for any other form of information reality or social change outside of a Google-like model. I also worry that those who question this model will be framed as enemies of freedom, information, and social change.
Google and China have their own visions for the social life of information and for the role of information in society. We should be equally critical of a corporation with algorithms that create a consensual consumer culture based on advertising clicks as we are of a country with policies that create a consensual citizenry based on obedience through a paternalistic form of governance.
But we should also be equally hopeful of a corporation with digital applications that create access to information that was reserved for the privileged as we are of a country with social policies that empower people to explore their talents and scale their services through government-supported, free-market entrepreneurship.
Summarizing the five main points that I’ve made today
1. As countries create their own internet policies, information politics will become a key site of contestation in a globally networked society.
As corporations and governments use the ethics of neo-informationalism to look for new markets and cheap labor, some countries will also counter these efforts with their own ethics. Capitalist growth depends not only on the physical architecture of ICTs, but also on the reach of an ethical system to support the open use of ICTs. Ethics do matter. In the absence of religious or governmental heroes, the digital economy also needs its own goddesses.
Just as we’ve created public institutions to regulate, debate, and check transnational corporations in times of excess neo-liberalism, we’ve got to create similar institutions for information in times of excess neo-informationalism. As Theodore Porter demonstrated in his insightful work on accounting as a system of information and a site of ethical battles, “the history of information is almost synonymous with the history of large enterprises.”
2. Information disjunctures will increasingly fall along moral and ethical disagreements between institutions, reflecting tensions in regional values and beliefs.
Institutions that mediate information will increasingly have to deal with a diversity of moral orders that are regionally specific, originally proposed in the the “Górniak hypothesis” in 1996. We have to realize that just like any other institution, the internet will be implemented and used in such a way that it maps onto existing social forces, institutions, and values.
That is why understanding regional internet culture is important.
Here I draw upon institutional theory and in particular Philip Agre’s amplification model of how new institutions don’t necessarily create new social behaviors, rather they amplify existing ones. This theory explains why Google has not “changed” China to become a nation modeled in the image of the US. Even something as open as the internet will be localized. This is because 1.) not all people/countries are the same and 2.) not all sovereign nations will welcome neo-informationalism as envisioned by the West. Many countries and individuals are suspicious of how “The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, alongside the U.S. Trade Representative, the Federal Communications Commission, and other apostles of neo-liberalism, used multiple levers to pry open global networking to corporate-commercial investment” argues Dan Schiller.
3. I also argue that what’s at stake in the clashes of moral orders is the determination of meaning. Google isn’t just an information processing entity, it is a meaning-making entity.
As a meaning-making institution, Google is in the business of standardizing and universalizing the domination of “autonomous [and public] information” as attached to democracy, liberation, and excellence (Porter 228). Whoever controls information and the means of dissemination, controls meaning and the symbols associated with it—hence culture.
For nation-states, culture becomes an even more powerful instrument of social control which will increasingly be mediated through digital means.
For corporations, culture becomes an an ever more powerful instrument of profit and this will increasingly be mediated over digital information spaces where our desires and preferences can be sorted and indexed.
4. There is a diversity in cultural orientations and they matter in how technologies are used, received, and created.
As companies start designing more software for a diversity of communities and conditions around the world, there is a greater need to understand how culture is exhibited in emotive and tangible ways. We can no longer ascribe to traditional binaries that place culture on a local level and money on a global scale. However geographically stationary some groups may be, ideas and energies are mobile. But this does not necessarily mean that mobility leads to greater flows in cooperation, rather it can also lead to greater fluxes in stability. A nuanced understanding of cultural orientations as an ongoing narrative will be required to navigate this space.
5. Institutions will continue to make attempts to bound the internet. But in a digitally-mediated network society where communication streams and physical contact are more frequent than ever, it becomes harder to maintain silos of communication. The digital mobility of ideas, people, and images means that moral orders are coming into contact with each other.
As information, culture, symbols, and ideas become more mobile, it will become harder for any entity to unilaterally enforce their own moral orders. Because of this, we’re going to see more collisions in moral orders as information becomes destabilized and detached from its geographic point of origin.
The internet is a host to amazing forms of participatory culture and will continue to be so precisely because its network architecture allows a diversity of interactions to take place - from gated communities to open spaces. Nation-states can try to create a bounded internet, but with some people and ideas more mobile than ever before, it becomes harder to enforce global digital walls.
In a digitally mediated world, the logics of replication do not function according to a mechanical order. A la Gilles Deleuze, Manual de Landa, and Felix Guattari, I think of Lucretius’s quote on atoms:
“When atoms are traveling straight down through empty space by their own weight, at quite indeterminate times and places, they swerve every so little from their course, just so much that you would call it a change of direction. If it were not for this swerve, everything would fall downwards through the abyss of space. No collision would take place and no impact of atom on atom would be created. Thus nature would never have created anything.”
As the moral orders of nations collide, some will clash and some will cohere. But the guarantee is that something is going to happen. It’s already started and we’re going to need people to deconstruct this and place what’s happening in context amid all the noise.
Values in our technologies
Let us be attentive to the values that shape the way we interact with information and the architectures that mediate it.
Today I’ve talked about how beliefs and values are layered onto our technologies and inform our expectations for how they are used. These technologies are never just technical, but they are social and luckily for us they are observable.
A few week ago, Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple said, ”We’re not just a tech company, even though we invent some of the highest technology products in the world,” he said. ”It’s the marriage of that plus the humanities and the liberal arts that distinguishes Apple.”
Let us be in dialogue with Steve Jobs and Google with some liberal arts magic. Kant, Bentham, and Descartes drew up a new ethical order at the turn of the Industrial Revolution that was a response to the social transformation from the printing age. This is happening now for the interneting age. The liberal arts is positioned with the analytical tools to be part of this dialogue. We should be doing all that we can to make our work public.
We cannot just leave this agenda to the technologists. We cannot let the new myths about freedom and information to pass without question. We must use critical theory, ethnographic methods, and common-sense to question how cultural values play out, in and around technology. Values not only reproduce contemporary tensions, but they are also sites of contestation.
*UPDATE: here are some articles published after my talk (June 29, 2010) that I think are worth the read
- July 23, 2010. Paul Denlinger. Google China Is Struggling To Rebuild Its Business
- July 15, 2010. Paul Denlinger. Who Won in Google’s Showdown with China?
- July 10, 2010. Kai Pan. Henry Blodget Doesn’t Know Crap About the Google China Drama.
- July 11, 2010. Paul Denlinger China: Google backed Down Over Censorship Laws
(Rant Alert) Spatial geographies of the World Wide Web: China is NOT the Wild Wild West
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been at a technology conference when a white male asks me what I research, and when I say something like “technology use in China,” they will at some point say, “oh man China is like the Wild Wild West.” I usually respond by saying, “no, it’s not.” And then often they proudly respond with, “ya you’re right, China is the wild wild east!” By then I try to get out of the conversation as quickly as possible.
So here is a more well thought out response that I would like to give the next time I hear this.
No, China isn’t like the West nor is China wild. During the Wild Wild West era in 18th and 19th century US, expansionists justified the take over of the western part of the US with the belief of Manifest Destiny - that it was America’s mission to bring democracy to the rest of the unconquered west. This is a misleading and pernicious metaphor to employ because it perpetuates a colonial view that those who are not like us and places that we have yet to conquer are unruly. It’s a metaphor simile thats says we are tame, they are wild.
The western part of America back then wasn’t so wild - it actually was filled with hundreds of thousands of Native Indians. It was filled with a complexity of knowledge systems, colonial histories with Spain and Mexico, and ongoing movement of people.
This space was the “West” for the colonizers with a capital W - a place with its own myths and a place for to carry out Manifest Destiny. But for the people already living there, it was their place, not the West. It confuses me when we (Americans) glorify the Wild Wild West Era without honoring the people who died during this period. Sure tons of technological feats were achieved. But it was an era of imported indentured slaves (Chinese) and a full slave production in the South that financed the companies that pushed for the fulfillment of Manifest Destiny through the massive genocide of Native Indians (Trail of Tears). American became rich, dirty rich during the Wild Wild West period. And as an America, I’m not proud of how we made our riches in the early years of our empire.
Employing such a deprecating metaphor simile of the Wild Wild West renders China a place to be conquered, civilized, and remade. It reveals the underlying myths and stories we tell about China - an unruly land of wild, lawless, people who will benefit from order, rules, and culture, just like how we once envisioned the West as a land full of animals, property, and uncivilized natives. It also frames China as a place frozen in time as people often draw upon China as the oldest and and continuous civilization on earth. The metaphor simile also culls up a way of thinking that not only says this place needs order, but is a worth our time for us to be the arbitrars of order.
There is a reason why we don’t call Nigeria, Antarica, or Figi the wild wild west - it’s because we don’t see these places as worthwhile markets of investment.
One of my favorite theorists, Doreen Massey, says that Westerners have a tendency to see space as a smooth flat surface from our own vantage point— a smooth space in which to roll out our ideas, technologies, and policies.
It sometimes seems that in the garadene rush to abandon the singularity of the modernist grand narrative (the singular universal story) what has been adopted in its place is a vision of an instantaneity of interconnections. But this is to replace a single history with no history…deathlessness.” ( 2005, pg 14 in For Space.)
So by saying that China is the “Wild Wild West,” we are assigning it one narrative—ours. Massey proposes that we see space as a production of relations, as the co-temporal existence of multiple people, competing histories, and contesting forms of knowledge. Space is a process that is continually being remade.
What is at stake here if we don’t stop thinking of China as the Wild Wild West? Many things - but the most important thing for me is that how we think about space actually influences how we interact with others who occupy the space. So thinking of China as the Wild Wild West will influence how you interact with Chinese people and institutions and I’m arguing it’s an undesirable way to interact if you really want to create understanding to accomplish whatever your project.
Ultimately what’s at stake is power and domination is understanding because if we imagine the world as places with singular narratives waiting for our discovery, then this serves a colonial project and legitimizes policies that end up harming the people in these places.
Massey says that all space is regulated. So with that being the case, I see that it’s up to us how this happens. And in a globalized world of networked digital technologies, it’s inevitable for dialogues about how a space is regulated to become more public as more of these conversations take place online. As American companies, IP lawyers, entrepeneurs, marketers, technologists make their way to China, I ask you to see China as part of the World Wide Web as opposed to the Wild Wild Web. It’s a very simple re-orientation in the mind, but it can be very difficult when Americans grown up in a country that believes that democracy is best delivered through free-market mechanisms and is the best way of life.
update June 9, 2010: Kenyatta Cheese and I were discussing the techcrunch article on how Web 2.0 companies are learning from their past failed attempts in China. Kenyatta made a point that it would’ve been even better if the article said something about the existing, exciting, and thriving web 2.0 culture in China and
“to at least mention that it isn’t unchartered territory — that there are thousands of Chinese web 2.0 companies already competing in the space.”
I totally agree.
update June 14, 2010 - I just Mike Hudack’s blog post - very relevant:
“Ultimately, the entire universe will become saturated with our intelligence,” he continues. “This is the destiny of the universe.” — Merely Human? That’s so yesterday. NYT (via idlaurenn)
This quote pissed me off more than anything else in that article. What hubris! I can imagine a European explorer saying the same of the New World centuries ago. “Ultimately, the entire planet will become saturated with Western European intelligence and culture and religion. This is the destiny of the planet.”
Yes mike I totallllllly agreeee! pisses me off to to read this quote from Raymond Kurzweil of Singularity at this Google funded talk. This kind of thinking will be the topic of my upcoming talk that I’ve giving at The Humanities conference.
Three useful perspectives on technology, design, and social change (and countering the ICT4D hype)
As someone who researches the social side of technology, I am constantly trying to find new ways to talk to technologists that technology itself does not create social change, rather it’s how technology is socially embedded in a variety of institutions and cultural contexts.
Even though I am constantly trying to avoid the ICT4D literature, I find that I am always coming back to the the field. ICT4D to me is a field that ascribes to interventionists acts where people are led by the belief that a technology system can make social change in less-evenly developed areas. I find that the field has *some* really smart thinkers but overall the people i’ve met so far have been primarily uncritical technocrats. Whether or not these are the intentions of the field, this is my impression based on my few encounters and readings.
A few years back, I went very naively to a conference at the School of Information at Berkeley. It was the first conference I ever presented at and a made a total ass of myself because I didn’t do my homework ahead of time to find out what exactly was ICT4D. I was totally new to academia and academic conference. I had just started graduate school in sociology and was wanting to drop out and when I found a conference that was willing to talk to sociologists about technologies outside of the West - I was so excited! But man was I naive about how I presented my work. I went off on how technology with development agendas were bad ideas and I did this without talking enough about the social aspects of technology use and without giving any recommendations for how to avoid a tech determinist way of thinking. I can imagine how I came off as super arrogant and uninformed. I was pretty mad myself.
So now that I’ve learned more about ICT4D and the field’s epistemological and ontological framework, I feel that I can now contribute my thoughts on this topic in a much more constructive ways. So I’m always on the look out for theories and new ways of thinking that can help me explain why tech determinist ways of thinking are faulty. If my goal is really to work with technologists and leader in less evenly developed areas, I realized that I have to be more critical of the way I am critical about it. I can’t just go off on tech determinism and expect people to listen to me. It’s easy to bitch about ideas, but much harder to pitch alternatives (that rhymes!)
Three resources have been very useful to me lately.
1.) I am in love with Batya Friedman’s work. She is the director of the Value Sensitive Design Research Lab at University of Washington. I saw her talk at Stanford University at Morgan Ame’s conference on Designing for Freedom: Values in Communication Technologies. Her talk, Multi-Span Information System Design, was about how she applied Value Sensitive Design to a project on the Rwandan Genocide. It was seriously one of the best talks I have ever seen. And Bayta was so friendly and approachable!
Some take-aways from her talk:
- what makes sense for freedom of expression in grounded in what socio-political context is in which people are living their lives
- how do we support out info design support freedom of expression as socio-political system evolves??
- Mulit-Span Info Sys Design is about looking at information system to support solutions for problem that can’t be solved within a human life-span
- what happens when we support structure and process in the design of information processes?
- become a “recorded” society , this brings up questions of access, saliencey, fading
- If I want the freedom to make certain expression then I need the freedom to know that it won’t go anywhere else
- the way our human psyche heals has to do with the ideas of forgiving and forgetting - we’re not talking about changing reality but it’s about what allows us to go forward and repair
- our agenda is to provide access, this is DIFFERENT from oral history cuz we’re not seeking truth or trying to control the material
2.) I just came across Kentaro Toyama’s TedX Tokoyo Talk. ok Kentaro I thought you were pretty cool the first time I met you, but this is soooooo AWESOME and refreshing to hear!
“ He believes that the ICT4D movement is being hijacked by overblown claims about the potential for technology to change situations. His major assertion is that ‘Technology only magnifies human intent and capacity. It cannot substitute for them’.” from Stanford University’s Liberation Tech.
I also find Kentaro’s 10 Myths about Technology and Development to be a really simple way to explain why technology determinism just doesn’t work.
“How do you design user interfaces for an illiterate migrant worker? Can you keep five rural schoolchildren from fighting over one PC? What value is technology to a farmer earning $1 a day?
Interventionist ICT4D projects seek to answer these kinds of questions, but the excitement has also generated a lot of hype about the power of technology to solve the deep problems of poverty. In this talk, I will present 10 myths of ICT4D which continue to persist, despite increasing evidence to the contrary. My hope is to temper the brash claims of technology with realism about its true potential.”
3.) Philip Agre is one of the most brilliant writers on the internet. I love his article on institutions and the role of technology as social amplifiers. Agre’s amplification model of how new institutions don’t necessarily create new social behaviors, rather they amplify existing ones, explains how the internet doesn’t change society but draws out existing social forces.
Abstract: Research on the Internet’s role in politics has struggled to transcend technological determinism—the assumption, often inadvertent, that the technology simply imprints its own logic on social relationships. An alternative approach traces the ways, often numerous, in which an institution’s participants appropriate the technology in the service of goals, strategies, and relationships that the institution has already organized. This amplification model can be applied in analyzing the Internet’s role in politics. After critically surveying a list of widely held views on the matter, this article illustrates how the amplification model might be applied to concrete problems. These include the development of social networks and ways that technology is used to bind people together into a polity. Keywords: Amplification Model; Digital Democracy; Electronic Politics; Institutions; Internet; Reinforcement Model
Agre, Philip E. 2002. “Real-Time Politics: The Internet and the Political Process.” The Information Society 18:311-331.
What I love about Agre’s work is that he shows that tech determinist and socially determinist models don’t have as much explanatory power of real world technology use. In providing an institutional model for techno-social change, he gives an alternative to the social construction determinism model vs tech determinist model. I’ve only read his article 2 times, and I still need to read it 10 more times to really grasp the depths of his argument. His article has already been so helpful in getting me to think through how the internet exists as an institution among many other ones in China.
Sadly he has had another mental breakdown and has chosen to live with a homeless community in Los Angeles. I’ve uploaded his paper here for those without access to online journals.
I have been awarded a Fulbright! Off to China for 1 year of fieldwork!
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.
Upcoming Workshop - Transnational Times: Locality, Globality and Mobility in Technology Design and Use
My great friend (and China researcher sidekick), Silvia Lindtner, is putting on a workshop (along with Irina Shklovski, Janet Vertesi, Paul Dourish) about the issues specific to technology design and research for transnational users or use contexts. It will take place on September 26, 2010 in Copenhagen, Denmark. Submit a 2-4 page paper about your related research to Silvia by June 15, 2010. More info below or check out the conference website.
________
Transnational Times: Locality, Globality and Mobility in Technology Design and Use: A workshop at Ubicomp 2010
September 26, 2010 Copenhagen, Denmark
Organizers: Irina Shklovski, Silvia Lindtner, Janet Vertesi, Paul Dourish
This workshop will bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to explore the role of ubiquitous computing, the use of information and communication technologies and the politics of technological design in transnational practices. The ultimate goal of this workshop is to investigate the implications for the design and development of ubiquitous technologies in non-western contexts. We will consider the implications for conducting research and technology design within and across global and networked sites of technology production and use. The aim of the workshop is to gain a deeper understanding of the social, cultural and economic practices within global IT development.
We will explore the following questions:
- What makes a transnational technology? What kinds of political, local and translocal, projects are at stake in the management of new technological sites?
- How unified is the internet? Can we speak of many internets? What are the various stakeholders involved in designing and using these many Internets?
- What is local and what is global? What is the role of mobility and circulation in constructing or moving between localities and globalities?
- What methods and methodologies might we constructively use to analyze and design for such complex, hybrid, and often virtual spaces?
“
Ethnography’s tremendous potential for initiating contradictory dialogues that violate cross-class and interracial taboos in our home environments remains mostly untapped.
Academics of all ethnic background usually remain trapped in white public space; they flee the personal vulnerability and hideous, emotionally confusing brutality that engaging addicts, dealers, and petty criminals on their own turf requires.
In this attempt to convey through my conversations with drug dealers the cacophony of victims who victimize on the street, I worry about the inherent pornography of violence that automatically engulfs any presentation of the details of extreme social suffering in the United States.
Someone like Caesar does not need to be apologized for; he does not represent the Puerto Rican or Nuyorican communities; and his existence does not cast aspersions upon the “worthiness” of the poor in the inner city more broadly.
Caesar does, however, embody the social injustice of a nation that systemically chews up its most vulnerable citizens and spots them out onto inner-city streets where their desperate celebration of suffering terrorizes themselves, their neighbors, and their love ones. Worse yet, the agency of their internalized self-destructive rage convinces society to blame individual victims for social problems.
Understanding and representing these problems offers more than an intellectual exercise for ethnography: It is an urgent political challenge.
”(via anthropophagous)
(via fuckyeahanthropology)
“I was not prepared for the elementary fact that an anthropologist is at work from the moment he opens [her] his eyes in the morning until [s]he closes them at night.”
pg xviii, James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. Yale University Press, 1987.
Upcoming Conference! Designing for Freedom: Values in Communication Technologies, May 17 Stanford University
My good friend Morgan Ames is putting on a really great afternoon conference in a few weeks at Stanford University, Designing for Freedom: Values in Communication Technologies. It’s a critical examination into how communication technology designers build certain values into their products and how users react to these products.
Morgan will be speaking on the panel about her dissertation research on OLPC (One Lap Top Per Child) along with two other panelists, Batya Friedman, Jenna Burrell, and Mark Warschauer. And Fred Turner will be moderating the panel!
So get out of the office for a few hours and meet all the awesome people who are coming together for this! If you are in the Bay Area you should come! I will be there so let me know if you end up coming - would love to chat!
Designing for Freedom: Values in Communication Technologies
Monday, May 17, 2010, 3pm-5:30pm
Stanford UniversityMendenhall Library, McClatchy Hall, Stanford University
Reception following, Free and Open to the Public
Communication technologies have long been heralded as the harbingers of unprecedented freedoms, including the promise of decoupling expression from physical constraints and political scrutiny. These promises are not accidental: many organizations, from private corporations like Google to open-source software projects like One Laptop Per Child, specifically build their machines and software to embody these values. When we account for the sundry cultures of designers and users, what are the implications of these technologies for society and free expression? The 2010 Rebele First Amendment Panel will explore the ways in which the design and use of communication technologies can help or hinder freedom of expression. We will discuss the process by which technologies come to embody and symbolize values, how values are negotiated by various groups as the technology goes into use, and the implications of these processes for free communication.
This panel brings together three pre-eminent scholars at the forefront of this research area: Batya Friedman,Mark Warschauer, and Jenna Burrell. These scholars draw from myriad disciplines, including anthropology, cultural studies, communication, education, information science, and computer science. Batya Friedman, Professor at the University of Washington and Co-director of the Value-Sensitive Design Research Laboratory, has provided a methodological framework for studying values in the design of technologies and offers a designer’s perspective on the integration of values into technology. Mark Warschauer, Professor at University of California, Irvine and Founding Director of its Digital Learning Lab, is a leading scholar of technology in education, the digital divide, and technology and development. Jenna Burrell, Assistant Professor at University of California, Berkeley, has analyzed technosocial practices in post-colonial countries, particularly Africa. Organizer Morgan Ames will join these scholars by discussing her recent work on the values that families create around communication and media technologies and her upcoming dissertation research on the social meanings of the One Laptop Per Child project. Associate Professor Fred Turner will moderate the discussion.
Playing FarmVille?: Casual Games maintaining Less-Meaningful Ties on Facebook
One of the fun things that I get to do while working at Nokia Research is play Farmville! Apparently Farmville has more players than twitter users - that is craaazy! And now you can buy crops that are sponsored by advertisers!
I started thinking that something else is going on in Farmville other than the fertilizing and planting of crops. And the good thing is that my colleague Liz Bales was thinking the same thing! And when we both mentioned it to Jofish Kaye we found out that he too was stumped by Farmville’s success and was particularly interested in all the gifting of Spring eggs and chickens in Farmville. Naturally we all decided that we just had to do some fun research on all this plowing and harvesting.
After playing Farmville for some time, I was telling Liz that I honestly am more comfortable fertilizing the crops of an old friend from high school who I haven’t spoken to in 15 years than commenting on her wall.
So after we discussed this, Liz and I are hypothesizing that Farmville is being used to manage less meaningful ties on facebook. I think we’re onto something here because when most people speak of social gaming often we think of MMORPGS as a place where “real” gaming interaction takes place - such as the organizing of guilds in WoW and collective cooperation required to level up. Joi Ito said that playing WoW was a great way for him to interact with friends that he night not have enough time to see in person and was an excellent training for leadership skills. But in light-weight games that demand minimal skills and interaction, we don’t always think of them as places of “serious” social interaction or the development of complex real life qualities.
The thing is that facebook is increasingly less about personal networks - there are tons of contacts on facebook that I simply just don’t interact with on a day-to-day basis or even more personal basis. It’s not that my contacts aren’t meaningful, it’s just that some of them are less-meaningful. Neverthelss those are ties that I want still want to maintain and check in on in a low-stake and low-engagement way. I think a lot of people are using facebook as a way to manage any social contact that one wants to maintain.
And now as the most successful game to built on top of facebook to date, Zynga is changing the way we virtually manage our ties. So what danah boyd’s been saying for a long time about myspace and faceook as a place for youth to manage their social ties can be applied to Farmville.
We’re proposing that Farmville helps people manage their social ties and furthermore Farmville is particularly useful and successful in managing less-meaningful ties.
Ties obligate, but depending on the weight of them, they obligate people in different ways. A lot of research has been done on people using complex games and MMORPs to reinforce strong ties and loose ties. But we know less about casual online gaming as a way to maintain loose ties. We think it’s interesting to look at how people make choices in who they engage with and how in FarmVille. Could these be new forms of light-weigh management of light-weight ties?
We’ll have to see what the data says - so we’re looking for people to interview on the phone. If you play Farmville or know of anyone who does - can you ask them to fill out this initial survey?
With Liz and my interests in casual games as management of social ties and Jofish’s interests in gifting I think we’re going to produce some interesting research and have something to contribute to the role of causal gaming the everyday life.
So how does this relate to my research in less-evenly developed communities? I am more interested in casual games as a source of leisure than complex games like WoW. I think a lot times research in less resource intense areas can be so serious - such as focusing totally on indicators of social mobility or “practical” solutions for water purification or something.
But look - even people who are economically poor wanna have fun! Just because someone is poor doesn’t mean that they are socially poor. Many of the places and communities that I research simply don’t have the technological architecture to handle the bandwidth required by MMORPGS. Also many people don’t have disposable time to dedicate themselves to complex games.
In China, people are quiet adept to using virtual platforms for relationship management. QQ is the largest virtual economy in China - so large that the Chinese government was concerned about QQ money disrupting the RMB.I think as low-income areas start getting more access to the internet and higher-end mobile phones, we’re going to see an explosion in casual games. So this will definitely be area I should pay close attention to my dissertation fieldwork in China.
__
update 5/15 A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz has written an excellent post about Farmville. He is much more critical of Farmville, “Farmville is not a good game. While Caillois tells us that games offer a break from responsibility and routine, Farmville is defined by responsibility and routine.” ”The secret to Farmville’s popularity is neither gameplay nor aesthetics. Farmville is popular because in entangles users in a web of social obligations. “ Liszkiewicz’s critique is that Farmville is less about fun and more about obligations. I love how he links game playing on Farmville to citizenship.
Why I love fieldwork: becoming a better ethnographer, personal tranformations - Four Posts to Follow
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. If I am to truly call myself an advocate for low-income communities and their access to technology, I have to understand all those little moments that do and don’t involve technology. I have to understand their life completely from their point of view.
3.) This realization of the importance of moments that have nothing to even do with technology made me realize how I was so transformed by the fieldwork. I truly felt like I had come back a different person. I was really proud of myself for just how quickly I adapted to life in the village. 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. And I must admit, I was nervous myself 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. I came back to the US transformed.
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 interal transformation. I see no other way to conduct engaged and passionate ethnography. This is the best job ever!
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
Why I Love Fieldwork - Post 1 of 4: I touched the stomach of a pregnant Donkey!
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
Why I Love Fieldwork - Post 2 of 4: spending New Year’s Eve Dancing til 5am
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)
After eating tamales and hugging everyone with the New YEars blessing, Elizabet went to the stereo to turn the radio on. She put in a CD. It was around 11pm and a couple started dancing and then they were joined by Eva and her husband Alex. Eva was wearing high heels - they were too big for her. The shoes were at least 1 inch too long. She painted her nails.
As I was watching the two couples on the dance floor, I was wondering what the process was to invite more people onto the dance floor and how it people could dance to 5am in the morning.
Then all of sudden, Ricardo, the 60 year old man, asked me to dance. Now we were the 3rd couple. I had no idea what I was doing, but I just hopped around like a bunny hoping that I could pass. This was my first time dancing the Chilena. while it seems easy - just a two step tap with no hands and the couples spin around each other. it was kinda hard. I was really embarrassed at first. Ricardo wasn’t too drunk and I heard everyone cheering me on so I kept dancing. When we finished, we sat down.
Then Ricardo asked me to dance again, this second time around everyone had joined the dance floor. I was trying to get the Chilena steps down and every-time I felt tired, I would smile at other people and they would give me energy by giving me words of encouragement.
Alvaro was very encouraging, every time I looked at him he would smile and be really positive. He always danced with Elizabet.
In between the Chilenas, people would sit down and wait to be asked onto the dance floor. I eventually started sweating because I wasn’t getting any breaks. The minute I would sit down, someone would ask me to dance.
Manny dances with such happiness.
Some parents were dancing. Married couples only dance with each other - they never dance with anyone else.
During the slow dances, husbands and wives usually dance together - even the ones who didn’t dance the Chilena would get up to dance the slow songs. I only did one slow dance with some uncle of Leonardo. He wasn’t creepy. I didn’t like the slow dance because you had to hold hands.
The males were drinking tequila. The women didn’t drink at all.
Ricardo kept wanting to dance with me. Dancing with Ricardo beccame increasingly difficult because he was sweating tequila by the end of the night. He kept asking me to dance.
I danced with Beni a few times and I also danced with Leondardo.
The dancing continued through 5am. There wasn’t out right pressure to stay, but everyone did through the entire night except for Leondardo’s sister who just had a newborn. Her husband stayed.
I used the bathroom outside- they have a really nice bathroom - a stall for a toilet and a stall for the shower. They have running water inside where they wash the dishes. Two story house.
Dancing appears to be a way to socialize kids into dancing at a young age. Adults would dance with kids and old people would dance with younger people. No one ever danced with a partner of the same gender unless it was between two young girls under the age of 12 years old.
Some people didn’t dance and they just sat there and watched the whole entire time.
This reminds me of the first time I came in 2007 when there was the big dance fiesta in SAbinillo. All the older people would stand outside of the fences as they watched young people dance inside.
We just danced the Chilenas allll night with the occasional romantico. There were probably only 3-4 songs that were not a romantico or a ____some other type of dance. I kept thinking surely they would change the song….nope…chilenas….ALLL night!
While everyone was dancing, Ricardo made an announcement inviting everyone back over for a posole breakfast in the morning at 8am. It was already around 3am when he made this announcement.
I never saw Beni take his cellphone out. I noticed that the girl with the camera would occasionally take her camera out to take pictures.
There were no calls to the caseta during the entire night.
It’s impossible to find a clock in the village. People never know the time and if people do have cellphones, they don’t carry it on them.
I couldn’t believe that everyone stayed until 5am. Even the oldest people!
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
Why I Love Fieldwork - Post 3 of 4: Time for the Jaripeo - Bullriding
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.
.
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.
.
.
.
.
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.
.
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
