About Cultural Bytes!
Cultural Bytes engages with research on information communication technology (ICT) users of low-income communities. This is run by Tricia Wang - me! My motivation is to better understand how low-income/under-served populations manage their social connections with a variety of practices. I bring attention to the ways that low-income users challenge, change, and innovate ICT usage patterns. I focus on mobile populations, such as migrants and youth in Mexico, China and US.
The term “mobile” is beginning to take on new meaning. Conventionally, a “mobile lifestyle” is associated with jet-setting corporate workers; however, a “mobile lifestyle” is also a way of life for migrants all around the world. Instead of taking airplanes, they walk. Instead of holding passports, they have no papers. Instead of staying in five star hotels, they stay anywhere they can. But for the first time, these new mobile workers, migrants, have access to the same digital networks and tools as elite mobile workers.
ICT tools enable people to create coherence between seemingly fragmented networks spread over greater distances. In a more mobile society, we are seeing a new kind of mass movement of people—telecommuters to seasonal workers—in non-wartime conditions. The reach of everyday life encompasses management of space.
These changes prompt new kinds of questions that allow us to grasp what mechanisms and ways of thinking make-up these new forms of mobility and connection. What social conditions may emerge? What practices become visible from the adaptation to older and how power and control is exerted. Conversely, what does immobility look like in a world that seems to be increasingly mobile? What are the various tiers of mobility and immobility? How do things stick, how do people capture moments, and how do places stay meaningful for communities?
These are the questions that I care about. Read about me here and about my research here. I would love to talk to you about your work so contact me!
Cultural Fractals: The Recursiveness of Practice
I have been thinking a lot about fractals lately. I first discovered fractals 10 years ago when Kenyatta Cheese introduced me to godel, Escher, Bach (the book I dream of finishing and comprehending). Well just recently on some Friday night at 2am I was watching Nova’s special on fractal love, Hunting the Hidden Dimension. As I was falling asleep to Mendelbrot’s soothing voice, I started thinking about fractals and culture - how we could use fractals to think about cultural practices, communities and groups.
The organizing principle of fractals is similarity in forms. When something appears dissimilar, many of times the recursive logic of fractals reveals that the more you look, the more similarities you will see in the form. So the lines in a leaf may look disorganized, but really they are organized in form, hence recursive.
Using fractal logic to look at cultures around the world can reveal that there are more similarities in practices than we think!
Since a lot of my research is multi-sited and in totally different parts of the world, I find that I look for commonalities in what I observe between the various sites. I try to look beyond the physical and obvious differences. For example, I try to look at how new users are engaging or reacting to technology in similar ways even when people live in totally different countries or even geographies. But at the same time I try to not devalue the specificities that make each community unique. I find this to be something I have to be aware of when I think about commonalities across different regions.
So what would a fractal mindset to ethnography look like? How would recursiveness be used in ethnographic analysis? How can we think of culture as an iterative process?
1.) can’t be culturally reductive - It becomes more difficult to make culturally reductive statements about a group of people if we think in terms of cultural fractals. The most common one I hear about China is that Chinese culture is all about guanxi, therefore everything that happens in China, from success to failure, is attributed to the resilience of traditional guanxi culture. I often read that the culture of guanxi encourages networking, therefore this explains why Chinese people are so good at networking when starting new businesses. In terms of cellphone usage guanxi is used to explain why the Chinese have adopted texting so quickly. But what groups or society not have social networks? If we go with the “Chinese love texting because they have guanxi,” argument, then how do you then explain why regions in Nigeria or Mexico with horrible cellphone signal still have taken up texting so readily? My point is that Nigerians and Mexicans also have a culture based on strong social ties. Not that the way Chinese guanxi is practiced is not a unique and complex tradition in it of itself, but attributing guanxi to mobile phone usage also dumbs down actual practices of guanxi. Perhaps the answer isn’t a simple culturally reductive explanation, rather one that is tied to existing cultural practices, policy efforts and geographical context. So a fractal logic would encourage us to see the similarities between the ways the Chinese or the Mexicans text - and to come up with an explanation that do not rest on simplorifitized cultural statements.
2.) fractal logic encourages a more relativistic way of thinking about cultures. Instead of thinking in linear models with clear independent and dependent variables, fractals gives us a mental break to look at practices more cyclically and over greater amounts of time. In terms of cross-cultural comparisons - instead of thinking about two different regions as two distinct places, how about thinking of as two separate nodes on one large multi-dimensional net? “Christena Turner refers to cross-cultural comparisons as working with two nodes on the same piece of woven cloth - each node of thread with different colors coming together with different layerings so that it appears to be two separate knots, but actually two parts of the same quilt. Cross-cultural comparisons i think are most beautiful when they honor this “net” metaphor as reality - this reminds me of Richard Feynman’s quote about science and life,
“Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.”
Feynman’s quote entangles with the fractal notion - that you can look at one part of society/object and abstract out properties of other parts of the world/universe. absolutely beautiful.
3.) expanded temporalities - since fractals have this sense of infinite-less levels of fractalness, there is sense that we are working in a different temporality, one that is not bound to the strict temporalities of the project timeline or stated anount of time in the field.
4.) fractal logic is useful for technology designers. For communication technologies to have market reach beyond Europe, USA and middle- to upper-class Chinese, there are aspects of the communication tool that need to be more or less useful in different cultural settings. Fractal logic encourages designers to look for common denominators in usage. For example, the concept of a text message is a common denominator, but how it is used in various contexts is what makes its use setting different from each other.
5.) cultures are non-deterministic - how a nation or group is going to act, believe and value is very hard to determine! but there are certain feature we know all cultures have. A key feature of fractals is that they are usually stochastically self-similar, meaning they are approximately similar to itself. While groups of people may be very self-similar across the board- for example take the nuclear family - it too is also subject to stochasticity because the way each nuclear family develops in each community and across communities is non-deterministic. A family’s current emotional, psychological or financial state is subject to its prior circumstances and also some random element - such as being a nuclear family in rural India or in suburban UK. Applied stochastic processes tend to describe complex systems that are difficult to determine- like warfare, diplomacy. So why not apply this concept to communities? I like the idea of thinking as cultural practices as non-deterministic. I don’t believe that causal models do much else than serve as an analytical exercise for the researcher - real life is stochastic - because how groups of people live are hard to predict because there are always elements that are unpredictable.
6.) ok going totally metaphysical here - stop reading if you feel the twilight</a>- we can think of all groups of people or nations or communities as a reduced-size copy of the whole -the wholeness of humanity! so instead of looking for differences in each reduction, what happens we look for similarities in form? Entropy as organanized chaos - capillaries in orderly run-offs - rivers meandering in systematic carvings - textile hypnosis - where’s waldo find you. Looking for similarities in form doesn’t mean that we still can’t celebrate differences. Alan Watts, a buddhist teacher, has a great quote that totally operates with fractal logic - and I like using it as an approach to ethnography,
Differences, borders, lines, surfaces and boundaries do not really divide things from each other at all, they join them together. All boundaries are held in common.
Alan Watt’s quote is an excellent way to prepare one’s mindset for doing fieldwork and post fieldwork analysis. Especially when doing fieldwork in another culture, it is too easy to treat them as “the other.” This quotes speaks to a way thinking that discourages distancing of the researcher from the fieldsite.
In another metaphysical turn, the organization logic of fractals is based on replication of form based on his quote also reminds of Lao Tzu’s quote on Taoism that also operates with fractal love:
“The Tao is in all things, in their divisions and their fullness. What I dislike about divisions is that they multiply, and what i dislike about multiplication is that it makes people want to hold fast to it. So people go out and forget to return, seeing little more than ghosts.”
At the heart of fractals is that with each division is a multiplication into more similar forms! So Lao Tzu is heeding us to find balance between division and fullness. Alan Watt’s and Lao Tzu’s quote make me think of one of my favorite fractal artworks, Implied. Implied is a fractal of “messy human droplets and straight machine cuts dance[ing] together.”
I end this long winded post with a something yummy to eat from my fave food blog , serious eats (run by the fabulous alaina brown) - cuz you gotta tie everything in life back to food! Well all this talk about fractals makes me want to eat a fractal cupcake!
*for a cool discussion that isn’t about fractals per se - more about trees, design, repesentation and a point about stochastic processes - check out Fred’s blog post on tree drawings
Interpretive Magic!: Ethnoconsumerism with Prof. Alladi Venkatesh
I must admit that although I say that technology usage is grounded in a cultural context, I struggle to operationalize “culture” for the fear of reducing it to some causal variable or some vague concept that dilutes what I am arguing. I haven’t found much solace in sociology’s linear models that isolate “culture’s” effects - as it repeats the whole divide of structure versus agency. Neither have I found much clarity in the interpretive tradition of culture, not because I don’t agree with it, but because am confused at how to methodologically move forward with an interpretive approach.
Well then came my meeting with Prof. Alladi Venkatesh, Assoc. Director of UC Irvine’s Center for Research on Information Technology and Organizations (CRITO) (thanks for gloria mark for the introduction!).
Prof. Venkatesh has created methodology magic!
Ethno-consumerism is a methodology for doing cross-cultural research. It encourages the researcher to “study culture not merely as providing the context for the study of consumer behavior but study consumption itself as culturally constituted behavior. “In principle, the ethnoconsumerist perspective goes beyond the distinction of emic and etic research approaches.” The etic approach encourages the researcher to interpret from her/his point of view. On the other hand, the emic approach tells the researcher to look at the subject’s point of view. But ethnoconsumerism advocates for the next critical step, which is to then develop knowledge from subject’s point of view. “The research becomes more than an etic interpretation (researcher’s point of view) of the culture, but a view of the culture informed by the culture itself as demonstrated by the above” (Venkatesh and Meamber, 1997).
Venkatesh makes clear that this is methodology, not a method. It does not seek to promote any data collection methods.
Of course I think that qualitative methods (or a mixed-method approach of qual + quant) is the best way to arrive at what he is saying is the crux of ethnoconsumerism - developing a cultural framework of analysis from the consumer’s point of view.
Read his paper and other writings here.
I highly encourage you to read his 1995 paper below on Ethnoconsumerism (citation below). It’s a beautifully written paper that feels intellectually and spiritually moving at the same time. When I read it I felt as if the words has fallen out of the sky onto self-organizing fractals of joy. After 3 years of sociology coursework, I’ve become averse at times to theories by sociologists because the words just don’t stick in my brain or they just don’t inspire me anymore. There was something this 1995 piece that helped me deconstruct 3 years of wonderful and hellish sociological self-discovery to even learn about the cultural divide within the field of sociology (culture vs structure or culture as interpretive model). Dr. Venkatesh, coming from a business/economics background, beautifully reconstructs all the various authors of the interpretive tradition who I have come to love. He has inspired me to think of these authors - such as Geertz, in a new way for my own work on new technology users.
I will be thinking about this methodology for a while as I try to figure out if this framework makes sense for my dissertation. So I will be writing more about this model. In the meantime, two things come to my mind: how I can apply this for my research and how this intersects with Stuart Halls, et. al. 1997 book on Sony Walkmans.
How do I apply this this my research?
- study how new users use their technology as culturally constituted behavior.
- look at tech usage as set of practices
- Do not treat new tech users as objects.
- Do not treat their practices as economically motivated.
- People use techology to get things done. It is my job to understand as an outsider what is being “done” in their context.
- Don’t be culturally reductive by picking one feature of the culture and anchoring all analysis around the feature.
- If I want to compare two different regions with a cultural framework - this takes a realllllly long time because I have to understand the cultural categories and experiences of all the sites.
Circuit of Culture
In 1997, Stuart Hall, Paul Du Gray, and Linda James published Doing cultural studies: the story of the Sony Walkman. They created a model for the analysis of cultural objects called the circuit of culture. On page 3, they show this graph below. The book walks one through on how to deconstruct the Sony walkman as a cultural object.
In an upcoming post, I would like to discuss ways I could combine Ethnoconsumerism and the Circuit of Culture to work for my research. What’s interesting is that while both authors are talking about objects and the people who use the, these are two slightly different approaches. I want to think about to spatialize these approaches. I need to give this some more thought so until the next post on this!
Suggested Reading:
Gay PD, Hall S, Janes L. Doing cultural studies: the story of the Sony Walkman. SAGE; 1997.
Easterly W. The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good. Penguin Press; 2006.
“Ethnoconsumerism: A New Paradigm to Study Cultural and Cross-cultural Consumer Behavior,” Alladi Venkatesh. Marketing in a Multicultural World, J.A. Costa and G. Bamossy (eds.), SAGE Publications, 1995, 26-67.
