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
Is the cellphone a mundane non “technology” among the elite?: From Huffington Post to Rupaul’s Drag Race
When does something stop being a “technology”? The word technology is a loaded term that is full of futuristic newness— the information age, the network society, the post-industrial era—-all the hopes and fears of “modernity.” These thoughts swirled in my mind when my friend forwarded me Karen’s Leland’s column from The Huffington Post, Does Friendship Trump Technology?
In the article, she talks about how utility technicians accidentally cut the internet line to her house just as she was trying to get online to map directions to a meeting. She gets in her car and starts considering several options to get to an internet connection and then realizes that the quickest way to find directions was to actually use her cellphone to call her friend, who could then look up the direction online from her house. With her friend’s help, Leland gets to the meeting place early enough to even get a cup of coffee. Leland’s point is that friendship is more important than technology because in the end it was her friend who helped her, not the internet: “Technology is great, but a girl’s got to have friends.”
When I read this, i thought that it didn’t make any sense. Her friend fulfilled her role as a good “friend” through the use of technology. Her friend answered the phone call at an inconvienient hour, but nevertheless did so because Leland used her cellphone to wake up her good “friend.
Essentially Leland’s whole entire story could not have taken place without technology tools. To even get to her meeting, Leland is driving in a car that has an engine powered by an internal computer. To even reach her friend, Leland has to use the cellphone. For her friend to even process images, she has to find her glasses. For her friend to even give direction, she has to turn on her computer to get to mapquest (btw tell your girlfriend to use google maps - she can tell you traffic patterns and give you street view).
We can even look at it in another way - the stoplights that are programmed to direct the traffic that Leland is driving in, the coffee machine that makes her coffee, the cellphone towers that enables the calls through the electro-magnetic spectrum, the internet router her friend uses to get online - on and on. Anything and everything can be technological. The entire story is only possible with objects that create the space for the rich interaction that she has described.
Leland’s article points to one common way that technology is defined, as a new system or set of practices that are antithetical to human interaction, alienating people from friendship, love, and human touch. Technology (for Leland the unavailable internet) is seen as the anti-connector - but the ironic part is that Leland uses technology to connect to her friend who could then connects online to connect her to the directions she needed to connect to her meeting.
Technology and human interaction are not mutually exclusive - we use tools to get things done. What if the article was titled, Does Friendship Trump Tools? Or Does Friendship Trump Cars? Or Does Friendship Trump Pencils? It just sounds ludicrous because it points to the illogical boundaries on what we define as “technological.”
Leland’s point that technology does not trump friendship also reveals an underlying fear that technology would even be in a place to trump friendship. Her statement is an affirmation that her friend was there for her when her technology failed her. Is this a new way of defining friendship? Who do we turn to when our technologies fail us in critical moments?
What I think is interesting in this article, is that it actually points to a discursive cultural change in the way that elites or let’s middle- to upper-class people think about cellphones - that it has become so integrated into their lives that it’s taken for granted now as a mundane tool - just like a car or pencil or eyeglasses. NOW That’s interesting!
So at what point is an object not a “technology” and just a mundane object? Well one way is to see how it is incorporated it into discourse. In this article, the discourse of the cellphone is dis-associated from “technology” because it referred to as a non-technology.
Another way is to notice how images of technology are incorporated into our visual culture. Look at the way visual culture in music videos and movies reenact scenes of everyday life. Do you notice when your favorite TV shows incorporates a pencil into the story - no because it is just a mundane object (unless the specific topic is about the pencil). For example, movies and music videos often show characters using cellphones as part of the interaction. I know that from a more mainstream cultural studies point of view this is usually interpreted as the selling of “coolness” - the selling of the need to consume a cellphone as part of a modern consumer. ok - point taken and yes I agree.
However, another way to think about it is that many of the interactions cannot take place without the cellphone - and that speaks to the role of this technology as an everyday object that is assumed to be part of interaction - as if only with the cellphone such interaction could be accomplished. It’s hard to imagine how Leland could’ve reached her friend from her car without the cellphone unless she did it telepathically.
The first time I actually thought that the cellphone may be a mundane technology for Americans or Westerners or middle- to upper-class users was when I was watching Rupaul’s Drag Race (part 6 episode 6) where the drag queens had to compete for the best impersonation of a female executive.
When the queens took to the runway, each of them had a different outfit with various tools to support their look - such as a briefcase of files or glasses or purse. 3 out of the 4 contestants drag queens started their “Executive Realness” impersonation with a cellphone! They pretended to be on an important business call. The one who didn’t use the cellphone chose a briefcase as the stand in for “executiveness.” (oh and just in case you are curious, Phoebe, middle, was “excutive fabulousness.” A judge said that Rebecca Glasscock, far left, looked like “Donald’s Trump next ex-wife.”)
So what’s the connection between Leland’s Huffington Post article and Rupaul’s Drag Race? The cellphone is mundane! From Leland’s post to Rupual’s drag queens - it’s just a part of the everyday - and who better than drag queens to exaggerate the everyday - the queens of impersonations are best at pulling out the mundane ways we re-enact power in a gendered way.
Ok Tricia so why is it so important to understand that the cellphone could now be considered mundane? In terms of my research with new technology users, it just reminds me how careful I need to be in what kind of assumptions I bring to my research, such as my research questions, analysis and conclusions. I live in a country where a cellphone may mean one thing - which I am saying may have become a mundane everyday tool - but I do research in other countries where the cell means an entirely different thing - a non-mundane tool.
Even with technologies that are not mundane - the researcher still needs to be aware of what that the tool means to her/him - but my point is that one has to work even harder to be self-reflective about the taken for granted ideas that we bring to our fieldsites or to the design process with technology that have become ordinarialized (yes I made that word up).
I think one of the consequences of technologies becoming everyday, is that it’s hard to think about its usage in a context entirely different from our own experience. That then leads to certain assumptions and hope about the role of the technology. I find that this is most problematic in technology projects that are tried in “developing” areas of the world. You have all these “first world” or Western funded NGO’s going into these impoverished regions “bringing” or “introducing” technology with the hopes that it will jump-start economic development in the region. I find myself cringing at these projects because one, there is already lot of criticism over the failure of technology-based development projects, but also because these projects are run by people who come from the US or Europe - where technology is used in a very socially and culturally specific context. What happens then is that these people think, “well the internet is helpful for me, so it will be helpful for others who won’t have it. Life for these people will be better with internet access.” I don’t dispute that people have more choices with access to more information, but access to information is sooo socially contexual that how information is then used, processed, fulfilled, interpreted, recycled, managed and mashed - is specific to each region/community/country and I it is too often that this is not considered.
Instead, technology for development projects tend to take a linear approach where the goal is to bring the community “up” and out of poverty. There are assumptions that quality of life is a uni-directional march towards modernity and the tools that come with it.
One way to get out of this trap is that I think researchers of technology use need to spend more time understanding the mundane among new users. This takes time. This it one of the roles of ethnography. The mundane is the everyday - the take for granted. If we can better understand the everyday, then we can better understand the role and meaning of new technologies, which then leads to the greater possibility of more relevant designs for new users in new-to-us markets.
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.
7th Chinese Internet Research Conference: The Chinese Internet and Civil Society: Civic Engagement, Deliberation and Culture May 27-29, 2009
This was a conference that I am very upset that I couldn’t attend! It was help at U. of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of Communication’s Center for Global Communication Studies. I found out last minute while attending the 2009 International Communication Association Conference (May 22-26) in Chicago.
Hopefully I can go to the 8th CIRC wherever it will be held. Webcasts of the 2009 conference are available here.
CIRC 2009 “is designed to bring together scholars and professionals to examine the Chinese Internet from socioeconomic, political and cultural perspectives. While there has been significant research on the political implications of the Internet in China, we have yet to fully understand the changes the Internet is fostering in civil society, or on the intersection between the market and the state, as well as the Internet’s cultural implications for identity formation, emergent cultural phenomena and social networking. This conference seeks to explore these uncharted areas through sessions on Public Sphere and Deliberation; Censorship, Surveillance, and the State of the Chinese Internet; Civil Society in China - Challenges and Opportunities; Women and Minorities; Civic Engagement and Participation; Panics, Nationalism; and Grassroots Culture, among others. On May 29, a small post-conference workshop will concentrate on prominent academics, bloggers and policy analysts on Chinese Perspectives on Internet governance. “
Map-hole: Technologies of the Mundan and Inscriptions of Power
(reblogged on Digital Urbanims)
this is a great example of how there’s always room for exciting innovation in everyday objects- even the mostly seemingly mundane can become layered with meaning and knowledge. Maphole is a guide to pedestrians (invented by Jiae Kwon). I wonder if a cut will make these real!
IWhat I would love to observe is the use of these map-holes in a city and to see how power and narrative is reinforced through these map-holes.
Who are these map-holes for? Who controls these map-holes? Who makes decisions on what is being pointed to - what kind of information will these show - where will it lead a pedestrian? Will they be for tourists? Will they be for the urban citizen? Will the location specific map-holes, such as in an art district? Who benefits from the map-hope?
how do they maps-holes respatialize the city? How do map-hopes reconfigure pedestrian movement?
I think that these mapholes could work to reinforce existing class-drawn boundaries in city.
For example, when I spent a few weeks in Stockholm a few years ago - for a social welfare country known for its social equality - I had a difficult time finding the low-income parts of the city. When I arrived, with a little online research about the hip-hop and yummy international food scene - I found out that a lot of undergrounded artists were from Rinkeby, a area of Stockholm that has lots of new immigrants, newly accepted Iraqi refugges, and older immigrants from countries such as Turkey. But after trying to look up information on Rinkeby online, talking to local residents, researching local guide books - I still had a difficult time finding any info on Rinkeby other than people’s advice that “you don’t need to go there.” Which of COURSE anytime someone tells me that I always take as a great indicator for me to go there.
My point is that the absence of information on Rinkeby, or any neighborhood can render it an invisible place. I was being told the dominant narrative that local citizens gave to outsiders - here are beautiful parts of Stockholm that you should see and here are the parts that you don’t need to see. But that very narrative is laced with assumptions of what kind of outsider I was and what I valued. My moment illustrates how the dominance of one platial (yes I made that word up) narrative can render another place invisible. Could map-holes work in the same way? By only pointing out some places, other places get left out. Could map-holes become map-hopes - pointing people to a version of the city that you can’t find in tourists books? Or could these map-holes become wired with blue-tooth and tourists could beam the hole for information that they were interested in finding?
Well if I start seeing these pop up in NY, I will put up stickers that say “Bed-Stuy” over the arrow pointing towards “Soho” or stickers that say “yoga center” over “Macys” or a sticker that says “Fresh Food” over “McDonalds.
Here are some other bloggers who have commented on map-hopes, Yankodesign, GIS-Lounge, Inventor spot, and DoGizmo.
oh and I had a GREAT time in Rinkeby. I visited a local school, met residents, ate great turkish sweets, and hung out with some newly arrived iraqis. It was just as great as my day wandering around in Gamla Stan. My photos from a day in Rinkeby and photos from my time in STockholm.
zadi:
“Map Hole is a new road guidance tool designed to direct pedestrians and travelers to their final destination using existing elements in the urban landscape. It locates the pedestrian with a starting point and provides information on the exact distance or average walk time to the listed landmarks.”
- Yanko Design (h/t The Daily What)
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.
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In a country that is just beginning to create a rule of law based on individual rights and justice, the importance of maintaining anonymity in many contexts is critical because it means that one can put their idea(s) out there without the fear of personal retribution. So one of the most important priorities for online users in China is the ability to be anonymous.
A western approach of complete information openness wouldn’t work in China because the anonymous user has an important role in maintaining information openness in a Chinese context. Countless online and offline stories in China have succeeded because of the mass participation of millions of anonymous users in leaving comments, making posts, and participating in online discussions.* Privacy is critical for these individuals because it allows me them to have a voice—a voice they wouldn’t be able to have if they made their identity open. We have to recalibrate our expectations for places with different social-political contexts of information and privacy. I’m afraid that Western companies don’t have a nuanced understanding of the cultural intricacies surrounding privacy in China (and as many scholars have pointed out in the West also).
How can companies design technologies with the understanding that anonymity is a right, not a privilege? Or even more relevant is to ask, how do companies design the right to privacy/publicness into our technologies?
Google Buzz, a product recently launched by Google in the US ran into a lot of problems because Google misunderstood the importance of privacy for users and how users defined privacy. In her recent talk, danah boyd argued that Google understood privacy as a binary, private vs public, and failed to see privacy as a spectrum. After Danah’s talk, the Buzz team admitted that they had screwed up. So even Google had to learn that privacy isn’t always evil.
I think one of the interesting things to come out of this lesson that Google quickly learned from is that open-access to information cannot always be the default. This default works for some of their products because these services (such as search) tend to work best in an open-access free-information environment. Both searchers and search providers benefit from information non-scarcity. (There are unintended consequences to searching, but I’ll leave that alone for now.)
But social applications that serve to mediate personal ties do not operate in an open-access environment. No matter how much we design “openness” into our social technologies, social technologies operate under conditions of information scarcity because social ties are scarce. We value our ties because we have a limited of ties whether it is our 2 best friends from childhood or 60,893 Twitter followers or 300 facebook friends. Social ties - they take time to create and nuture, they can be fragile, unpredictable, meaningful and/or sensitive, and they are limited.
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GUANXI and SOCIAL CONNECTIONS - To really understand anonymity, we have to explore the meaning of guanxi in China. Guanxi is the Chinese equivalent to social connections. Just like one’s social connections in the US, a Chinese person’s guanxi consists of people they know on a personal, familial, or professional basis. Guanxi also means that social connections require a level of mutual obligation.
A lot of scholars and journalists have framed guanxi as a unique Chinese social phenomenon but I argue that they overemphasize practices of mutual obligation.
I just don’t buy the argument that Chinese people value their social network that much more than other people. This argument implies that others, such as Americans, care less about their social connections or place less value on social obligations than Chinese people. That’s simply not true. Look at our obsession with managing our social networks. If anything, Americans want to believe that success is purely based on the individual. But any sociologist can tell you that income, social networks, race, education, parent’s education and all that stuff that helps you meet other people does matter. A lot. And they also matter in China, but in different ways.
WHY CHINESE PEOPLE MIGHT HAVE DIFFERENT IDEAS ABOUT PRIVACY - So why might Chinese people have a different cultural orientation towards social connections? I need to explore this further, but my initial hypothesis is that Chinese ideas about privacy are connected to the recent historical period of repression, a different cultural historical experience, and different orientations towards social visibility.
1.) Chinese history is still rife with fresh memories of people who suffered by making their social connections explicit. This is still true in mixed-market Communist China; however it may change as the people will not be penalized for their social connections and as there is more temporal distance from the traumatizing events of the past. Social amnesia can present an opportunity for new practices to be born.
2.) Making social connections explicit can be seen as a form of bragging, which in general is not seen as a favorable trait in China. There is a cultural expectation that the more people you know, the more careful you are to not flaunt these social connections.
3.) People are much more judicious about making their social connections explicit. People don’t always invite someone else to be their contact on some social media site because they sometimes aren’t sure that the other person wants to be their contact or wants for their connection to be made explicit. They fear that the other person will feel obligated to become their social contact and from then on, the actual real-life social connection could be ruined due to this awkward dance in social media connections. In my research, adults and youth both expressed a lot of doubt, fear, and confusion about making someone a “contact.” Many of them preferred to just keep chatting with their private list of contacts over QQ because it was easier and more comfortable to manage their social connections privately than to engage in a platform that made their networks more visible to other people.
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PRIVACY AS CULTURAL - I find it more useful to think of privacy as a cultural practice than as an act of rational choice between private vs. public. As I state earlier, danahboyd insightfully makes the point that privacy is not a binary - it’s not just on or off - it’s a spectrum of contexts that are lot more complex than our online architectures are designed for right now. Following danah’s point, I am going to start thinking of privacy as a cultural practice. ‘Privacy as Cultural’ means that we have to start asking what are the multiple histories and narratives attached to various notions of privacy in any one place/region. There are multiple notions of privacy at any one time competing, conforming, complementing, and cohering. Framing privacy as a cultural act means that we can observe it and describe it. Privacy is a process, it’s negotiated, and it’s constantly in flux.
HOW TO UNDERSTAND CULTURAL ASPECTS of PRIVACY - Making the case that privacy is cultural all of sudden sounds kinda touchy feely. It can be difficult to get a handle on culture and it can be even more obscure to think about how companies could become more attuned to the nuances of privacy.
GUANXI, PRIVACY, and TECHNOLOGY - What technology companies designing for the Chinese market need to grasp is that cultural orientations towards privacy — especially around guanxi — matter. They matter because if the technologies that are designed for social networking in the US are simply re-launched in China, they will fail. They will fail because Chinese people do not share the same cultural orientation towards anonymity, privacy, and user preferences in online or offline social networks as Americans. Guanxi is something that one holds near and dear to them, so close that they don’t want to reveal it. Let me play with this analogy - Social connections in China are like underwear, whereas social connections in America are like a jacket. The difference is that Chinese people want to keep their social connections out of the public eye, while American people want to display their social connections. The difference here is that Americans and Chinese have different cultural orientations towards transparency, privacy, and anonymity.** In real life, social connections can defined on more implicit or explicit terms, depending on how social connections are made known in the specific context.
For example, we can learn so much from Chinese people who have tried to replicate successful American social networks and failed at it. One example is Linkedin. Linkedin is a US online social networking site where users list all the jobs they have ever had and all the people they know or have worked with in the form of “connections.” Around 2004-05, Lin Feng 林枫 copied Linkedin for the Chinese market. It was a total failure. Why? Because Chinese people didn’t want to show off their underwear. Chinese copy-cat of Linked in failed back then because Chinese people didn’t want to make their social connections explicit.
Take the Chinese equivalent to Facebook on Kaixin. If you talk to most people who use it, they will tell you that they use it to connect to friends. But, if you actually observe what they are doing, you will see that they use it to look for music. Yes, music. It’s kind of like myspace stripped of social connections. Underlying this supposed social media network that seems to be a copycat of myspace and of facebook is an extensive music exchange network. That’s definitely different from how we use social media here in the US. The music industry has instilled enough fear and guanxi throughout American-based social media companies to ensure that music sharing does not become an easily sharable commodity.
The story of the Linkedin copy-cat and Kaixin show how cultural orientations towards privacy and social connections matter in how a technology is used. What companies and scholars have to understand is that:
1.) it’s not that social connections matters more to Chinese people and less to American people, it’s that they matter in different ways that we might not notice at first glance2.) technologies are NOT neutral 3.) “free-information” narratives must be contextualized - free to what ends? what are the socio-political contexts for free? What do people expect of “openness”?4.) social media apps are not universal in the ways they are used
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SO WHAT’S NEXT? Understanding privacy as culture is an important lesson for tech companies that are increasingly focusing their design energy in the software business. Even companies, like Nokia, that were once hardware based companies, have to re-define material practices as linked to cultural understandings around social media applications. (I’ll write another post on Nokia)
Well there is so much more to understand and explain that I hope to contribute more to this dialogue. I would love to see more research that makes clear how the values of guanxi in China differ from the values of connections in the US and how this difference can be turned into an awareness that is designed into technologies for the Chinese market. So one of the questions that I will be answering in my fieldwork is how can services/apps be designed for communities with alternative orientations towards transparency.
So I’ve decided to dedicate a portion of my fieldwork in China to understanding the cultural aspects of privacy. I thought one way to really to get at local notions of privacy is to spend time with local venture capitalists and entrepreneurs of failed or ongoing Web 2.0 technologies.
Research on failure offers many cultural insights for understanding how innovation takes places and how values are mis-read or mis-build into technologies. I am really excited to spend some time in Beijing and Shanghai with people who have created all these failed twitter-lilke copycats that the government has shut down. There’s more to do the story thaat Chinese Web 2.0 land is a just a pure copy of US web 2.0 apps. A recent techcrunch article portrayed Westerners rushing into China and licking their wounds over US introduced technologies that have failed in China. The article doesn’t mention all the exciting experimentation happening on the ground with Chinese VCs and entrepreneurs. For example, Farmville is actually a game invented in China.
The majority of my fieldwork will still involve making sense of how new users, the rural to urban migrants in Wuhan, and interact with these new online technologies. I’m going to be moving to Wuhan, China and making frequent visits to Beijing and China for 1 year for ethnographic research starting March 2011. If you’re in China and am interested in these topics, let’s talk! Or if you are or know of any Chinese entrepreneurs or venture capitalists of the internets, I would love to chat with you!
(thanks Chun Xia for inspiring me to follow up on Chinese entrepreneurs!)
*Check out Min Jiang’s articles on online public deliberation in China. Her research suggests that the current limitations of speech online should also be examined alongside reforms being made on the ground in local citizen participation. Jiang, Min. 2009. “Exploring Online Structures on Chinese Government Portals: Citizen Political Participation and Government Legitimation.”Social Science Computer Review 27:174-195. Jiang, Min. 2010. “Running Head: Authoritarian Deliberation.”
**I realize that I’m generalizing here and that there are millions of Americans who don’t want to be online and have their social connections even documented, and that they are millions of Chinese people who would love to make all their connections public. But I do believe that social media technologies are designed for the greatest number of users and there is no doubt that facebook, twitter, myspace, linkedin, and other online apps wouldn’t be as successful in the US were it not for a larger social proclivity among users to make their social connections explicit.
