I’m starting to think about how to visualize my data
I created this post on my other site, Digital Urbanisms (I just started it a few weeks ago). It’s about my current efforts to begin thinking about how to visualize my data - so it’s relevant for Cultural Bytes since this is where I talk about my research process.
Ever since I moved back to the US from China, I’ve been on a visualization craze - inspired by many of the architects and city planners that I met when I wasn’t doing fieldwork in Beijing.
What’s so great is that one of my advisors, Jim Hollan, actually teaches Information visualization!!! He introduced me to the world of Processing (visualization software). I think I should learn it - at least on some basic level in order to begin imaging how to visualize my data. Even though I want to work with a professional data visualizer, I still need to understand the depths of this software.
My reward for finishing my field exams in April is that I will be allowed to spend some time learning the program. I struggle EVERyday to not open the application. I don’t want to tell my committe that the reason why I dropped out of grad school is because I got stuck in processing world. hmmm I may have to uninstall it from my computer. yes good idea. going to do that……..now.
This post is not directly about Digital Urban Mapping - rather it’s a commentary about the state of data visualization in urban mapping. Mario Klingemann (Quasimondo), the creator of this image, made a statement that resonated with me. He notes that the current festish around data visualization may be more indicative of aesthetics being prioritized over data comprehension.
“The goals of data visualization as I understand them are to make complicated issues more understandable, to make obscured connections visible and to reveal hidden patterns in the data. After all these tasks have been solved ideally the result should be aesthetically pleasing as well.
But when I look around what is being done in data visualization today I have the suspicion that in many cases the design is more important than the actual information and that the use of data is more an excuse to justify the use of aesthetics.”
This makes me think about the world of visualization and digital mapping for visualizing urban processes. So far, my only experience with urban mapping has been with architects - professionals who tend to be great at visualizing cityscapes and not so great at observing and explaining human interaction. but hey more reasons for architects and sociologists to team up! One of the reasons why I want to work with architects is because I think sociologists are missing the imaginative, the scale, and the visual. A lot of our work gets stuck under so many theoretical barrels and methodological corners that to even begin to think about visualizing our data when we can’t even explain it in everyday language just seems overwhelming. And the very aspect that Mario brings up - about processing information - well I think that sociological studies overall (there are many exceptions) fail to really make the research understandable to a wider public.
I am afraid of my work falling into that trap as I feel that’s what graduate school has trained me to do - write in obscure language that doesn’t communicate with other disciplines or practitioners. So I’m realllly trying hard to make a commitment early on in my fieldwork to think about how to visually communicate my research.
The difficulties in visualization is that as visual objects they are excellent at showing the snapshot of situations, the state or the result or the change over time in X/Y variables. On the other foot, visuals are not as excellent at communicating processes or motivations - the cultural reasons for why X/Y happened or changed over time (more techniques are being developed to make this easier- that’s why processing is so awesome).
I wonder if all these trends towards data visualization is also a reflection of the information overload that we deal with in everyday life and a desire to just quickly get the facts and jump out before the nitty gritty details come in to overwhelm the moment. There are countless times when I’ve come across a looooooong article and I’m debating whether or not to read it and I then become really happy when I see a chart - even better when it’s a pretty chart! :) My brain just things - “get me the details - I don’t always need to know or have time to know why.”
Nothing bad can happen with trying to make data prettier right? Especially when it’s in the hands of people who care just as much about the data as the color palette.
You can read about his project here.
via @lennyjpg
Leaving for 3rd ethnographic fieldwork trip to Mexico in a migrant-sending Oaxacan village.
This will be the 3rd time over a period of 3 years that I’m going into the mountains of Oaxaca (Sierra Madre y La Madre del Sur) to do research on ICT usage in a rural Oaxacan migrant-sending village. This year is particularly exciting because I feel that after two years of building up my relationship with the village the families really have become my friends. And I get to spend New Year’s Eve in the village!
The Mixteca Baja is one of my favorite places in the world because the people and the place are so hospitable. I feel really at home here. As an urbanite, getting to know how people live in rural areas is such a great learning experience. It is amazing the amount of knowledge that is required to live off the land. Here are pictures below from the last trip in 2009. In the first few pics, I am riding Mocho, a one-eared donkey. I am playing with some of the kids and the last few pictures are of the village cemetery. The rest of my pics are here.
So this year I’m going with a research colleague, Tanya Menendez, who came as a research assistant 2 years ago. Tanya is now very involved in the currently funded project. She has also developed a close relationship with many of the families. I’m really excited to have her come with me this time. Plus, it’s always good to do fieldwork in teams of two when the language you are working in not your first. I am sure there will be many times that Tanya is going to correct me on my Spanish.
This time we are going to live with some of the families in the village. In the previous years we stayed in a hotel in a town 45 minutes away. This year we get to experience the village 24/7! This means that I can focus a lot of my ethnographic efforts on the social practices inside homes and really observe family interaction. It also means more home cooked yummy meals!
In terms of the fieldwork, I’m super interested in seeing what kind of social changes have taken place since last year and in comparison to two years ago. When I was there last year, there was a noticeable increase in the population of young males (from around 20 in the village to around 50) because many of them had been deported - not because they were criminals - simply because ICE (US immigration and customs enforcement) had picked them up while they were walking on the street looking for work.
With the economy as it is, I wonder how the families are doing economically and socially. In one family, the father had shown up in the village over night after having been deported. The family couldn’t get in touch with him for many weeks because he was held up in a detention center. When he appeared in the village 1 month later after no contact with his family, overnight they realized that they had lost their only source of income. Having to return back to a complete subsistence lifestyle, the mother had to make some tough decisions about the finances. They had to take their oldest son (15 years old) out of school even though he wanted wanted to finish high school. Their plan was to have being work or migrate to the US so that he could help with the fees of his two younger brothers staying in school. The mother also had to cut off cellphone usage for both sons. With no father working in the us, the kids’ social circle had shrunk down to their own village overnight. It became difficult for them to reach or even see their friends in other villages.
Another major change that we had noticed was that the youth were no longer treating their cellphones as a necessary object. Rather, many of them were using MSN Messenger as their primary communication tool with their friends. The novelty of a cellphone had worn off. This was a noticeable difference from the 1st year where the youth carried their cellphones with them everywhere in EVEN though the signal was horrible within the village. These cellphone carrying youth were the first cellphone adopter in the village and they made their cellphone ownership status very obvious. They never let it leave their hands and it was always visible. However, during the 2nd year, the youth rarely carried their cellphones on them. Many of them reported that they had forgotten it or that it wasn’t charged.
This year, I wonder how the youth will be using the cellphones and MSN. I’ve noticed that they sign on to MSN less often and I wonder if this is due to the economy tightening up.
I have a long fieldwork guide, but I would like share a quick glimpse into some of the topics that Tanya and I would like to find out from this year’s fieldwork trip:
understanding spatial perspectives: We will have people draw mental maps of their daily activities within the village and point out when and where they use their cellphones or make time to go to the internet cafe 45 minutes away. Some questions to ask: where they usually leave their cellphones, why do they carry it with them, what areas have good signals, how to they manage sharing a cellphone, when does their schedule change, where are all the places they visit in the surrounding area on a typical month?
Do more research on the caseta telefonica: when do they chose to make or receive calls at the caseta, who calls them, have they noticed any differences in calling patterns in the last 3 years, who initiates calls in the family, have they changed the way that they use the caseta?
private communication and inside the home: how to women manage the finances, how do they use the cellphone, what do they use it for, how do they communicate with other women, how to they manage their kid’s schedules, how often to they talk to their husbands and sons in the US, what is most important to them, how often to they leave the village, do they take a cellphone with them, when was the first time they used a cellphone, do they prefer to use the caseta, the telefono fijo, or the cellphone and why, and what made them decide that a cellphone was important for their child, who taught them how to use the cellphone?
undocumented migrants in detention centers: Talk to return migrants who have been held in federal detention centers: what phone #’s do they call, how often are they allowed a call, who tells them when they can make a call, do they have difficulty reaching their family in Mexico, how do they feel in the detention centers, do they hear of stories where people can’t reach their family in Mexico, what makes them want to stay longer or plead their case, did they try to look for a lawyer, and do their friends and relatives in the US know when they are picked up?
how families are dealing with the slow economy: are migrants getting or maintaining jobs, are they feeling the economic slowdown, how are families managing with less income, what kind of decisions have to be made with less money in the family, are documented versus undocumented migrants experiencing the economic slowdown in different ways, are migrants sending less money?
Changes in usage of communication tools: how do people decide when to use IM vs cellphone vs the caseta, has cellphone signal improved this year, how often are people using their cellphones, have prices changed for cellphone usage, are people on special plans and if so how did they find out about it, how much are people spending per month on cellphone usage
going to the cybercafe: I would like to go to do some mobile ethnography again and travel with the youth to the cybercafe in the town 45 minutes away. what kind of websites are they visiting, how have their internet viewing patterns changed, how often they go to the cafe, how do they negotiate getting money from their moms to pay for internet time, how often to they talk to their friends online, how have their viewing patterns changed over the last 3 years, what new things have they discovered about the internet, how often to they use email, who do they email with.
life histories: understand life changes among informants, what they plan to do, what kind of path they see for themselves, will they chose to migrate to the US, what are some difficulties they are dealing with, any stories from the previous year, what are they excited about, how they feel about their role in the village?
Cultural changes with the village and migration: how the village is doing with its resources, how the tree replanting project is going, status on water treatment, status on the library initiative, how do the older people feel about the younger people, are people moving back from the US, is there a population decline, how was the fiesta this year, why do people decide to not migrate, how do young people feel about migration, what does the village do with the return migrants and the deported migrants, how quickly do the deported migrants return to the US,
Why I Love Fieldwork - Post 4 of 4: Eating Live Insect
This is the 1st post of a 4-part post on my fieldwork experience in Oaxaca, Mexico. This are unedited field notes that show the moments that have nothing to do with technology during my fieldwork. Here is where I explain the context for why I’m sharing these notes. (Post 1,Post 2,Post 3,Post 4)
I am so sad to leave Sabinillo. Today was our last morning and everything would be much more meaningful as it would the “the last” of whatever. We got up and Esmeralda was still sleeping but everyone else had woken up. We sat at the breakfast table as Eusevia served all of us some yummy tortilla breakfast. We also had some of the chayote from Magdelena…
Joaquin at the very last minute said that he couldn’t join us on a hike because he had received a call about a job. I told him that I was very sad that he couldn’t come with us because this was the day we were going to eat the chinches! Someone had called him at his house and asked him to transport water so he had to take the last minute job.
As we were walking, we all kept an eye out for the chinche. I wasn’t sure what to expect. In my mind I was expecting for them to catch some kind of tiny bird.
Maria showed me the little basket weaving that she said the chiches would run into when we created the fire. So then again, I thought we’re going to find birds!
As we were walking, Leonel started screaming that he found some chinches. I looked at his hand and realized it was a freaking insect! it was a full on cockroach looking specimen with legs and wings. And before I could even scream Cristobol put the chinche in his mouth. Then Yuxi found one and put it in her mouth too. They both seemed to enjoy the insects. Then they told us that it was our turn. I said that they were way no way I could eat the insect - I have never even touched an insect before! I have extreme insectaphobia and scream at the site of a cockroach or spider. But Tanya then said that she could do it. I didn’t believe her, but then the kids just kept encouraging us. then I said I would eat it if they took the legs off it which would effectively kill the insect. So Tanya and I agreed to eat it. I tried not to flip it. I couldn’t touch it so I needed the kids to put it in my mouth. I flipped out. I thought the insect would come back alive in my mouth. The taste wasn’t too bad. I was waiting for the spicy taste because everyone said that Chinches were spicy. After some quick chewing I separated out the insects body onto my tongue and before I spit out I showed the camera (Tanya was shooting) the insect’s body on my tongue as proof that I ate an insect. But then everyone kept saying that we had to one “en vivo” - live. I was thinking that there was no way I could do that but I would just keep hiking.
We then continued on the trail to look for more chinches because Maria said that the chinches that we ate were too small. And the bigger ones were tastier, but we needed to attract them into the basket with fire.
We could see the entire village from where we were - it was so quiet - I guess this was perfect chiche gathering hour!
So I thought all week that were going to hunt for birds and roast them, but now I understood that it we were hunting for insects. the other word for insects is Beechos - which I didn’t know. I only knew the word “insecto” for insect. I feel like a dummy! Now I know why all the people had a surprised look on their face when I told them that I was going to eat a Chinche. Here I was thinking that they were impressed I was going to go bird hunting, but they were probably thinking this crazy Chinese girl is going to eat some insects!
We found open field and Maria started the fire to get the Chinches to come out of hiding. Then they captured them. I wasn’t brave enough to put the insect in my mouth. But Tanya and I decided that we both had to eat it live - and plus they said that was when the insect was most tasty.
They caught several large chinches. I couldn’t believe that I was going to eat them.
I tried to touch the insect but I panicked. When Yanette tried to put it in my hand I couldn’t rack up the nerves to actually grab the insect so Cristobol walked on over and put the insect in my hand and I started screaming and had a panic attack. I couldn’t control my screaming and I threw the chinche on the ground. Yuxi came over to hug me. I was hoping that Yanette wouldn’t find it. But she was too smart. She found it. EVeryone kept saying that it wouldn’t do anything to me (no hace nada) but I kept thinking that the insect would bite my lips off. So finally i thought ok I am going to do this and plus we are grabbing video of this moment - I told Jonny to put in my mouth - he put in my mouth and I flipped out a bit…but i did it! Esmeralda hugged me immediately and everyone was congratulating me.
I can’t believe that I ate a live insect. I have a complete fear of insects. I am so proud of myself.
When we came back from the hike, Jacinto still wasn’t there. We prepared our luggage and walked it out to the fields and put them on top of a large can so that the dogs wouldn’t pee on it.
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.
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The stadium was only 50% filled.
We drank some cafe de holla. I bought it from Esmeralda’s aunt. We talked about a bit.
I saw Esmeralda (Jacinto’s grandaughter). Esmeralda talked this year, but she whispered a lot inside my ear. It was hard to understand her. She sat on my lap while I was observing the crowd.
I would’ve liked to talked to Carlos about how he organized the event. He was too busy with running the event and he said that he could talk more when he done returning all the bulls but that would be after we were gone. I had the chance at least to chat with him a but when I was near the bullriders by the stage taking pictures. Octavio let me into the area and said I could take pictures.
I spent about an hour near the band and I saw the photographer/videographer of the event. He was about 40-50 years old. He was using an old handheld video camcorder. He walked like he owned the place. He had a humongous photography camera and he made sure that his hands were always on it. When he walked up, one of the bull rider assistants gave him a cigaratte. He sat down, put his feet on the table. He didn’t take any pictures of the band. I couldn’t hear what they were saying to each other because the stereo was right behind my ears. During the event, the photographer/videographer was walking around selling his dvd’s of the event for 100 pesos. He was the only the one who had the tools to record the event. other than the person with the hand-held cam, I didn’t see anyone with cameras or video cameras.
The jaripeo announcer was also treated with a lot of respect from the bull riding assistants. The bull riders were preparing themselves near the bulls. The photographer and the announcer acted like they were the most important people in the area.
When the announcer was resting in this area, there was an assistant announcer. The head announcer would shout out announcements and make lots of hand motions to the assistant. He seemed frustrated when the assistant wasn’t saying things on time or would forget to mention things. For example he was motioning like crazy to the band, and then the assistant mentioned the band.
When it was time for the announcer to enter the ring, he was puffing up his hands, shaking his limbs and took his vest off.
There were only men in the area. The only time a woman entered the area was when Esmeralda’s aunt came into sell beers to the Jaripeo riders. I was very aware that I was the only female in this space. But I didn’t feel unwelcomed.
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The announcer started the event by introducing each bullrider. He kept saying each bullrider was “la seleccion Poblana.” When each bull rider was introduced, he would come up and draw a sign in the dirt - maybe the bull rider was making a sign of a cross?
The bullrider (jinetes) wore colorful bullriding pants. They would kiss their hands and wave to the crowd.
Carlos owned two of the bulls. He was asked to come out and the announcer thanked him for organizing the event. He then asked the photographer/videographer to come out and he talked him up big time - like he’s the best photographer and he makes the best videos and you should all buy them. When he was finished with the introductions, the announcer said a prayer and asked the virgen mary to protect each rider.
The first novice rider to come out fell off his bull and then the bull stepped on his back. He crawled back out of the ring and barely made it. He needed people to pull him out. He lost conciousness for about 5 minutes. The clowns and Octavio were trying to wake him up. The bull had stepped on him several times. He didn’t look paralyzed at least. He woke up and then they put him in a chair. He look so young.
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We noticed that people weren’t using their cellphones at all to take pictures. I wonder if people had even brought their cellphones with them.
We saw one person with a handheld video-cam.
We saw someone taking out their phone for about 1 minute and then they put it back in their pockets.
A lot of people were complaining that the bulls weren’t good. That means that they weren’t going crazy.
Leonardo’s cousins kept walking by and trying to give him beers. Lots of youth were drinking beers. Lots of youth were also smoking. There were people from surrounding pueblos - not everyone was from the Sabinilo even though Carlos organzied the event.
When we left the event, a lot of men were drunk. They smelled so bad. Lots of alcohol in the air. As we were crowding around the exit to leave, there were several men lined up and trying to say hello.
There was a total of 9 bulls. Octavio paid 2000 pesos for 7 bulls and he owned 2 bulls.
Each jinete gets 4,000 pesos to come out and compete.
Leonardo mentioned that Carlos will end up losing money on this Jaripeo, and realized that after he summed up all the costs; but decided to go through with it anyway since he had already told people he was doing it — this is also why he raised the price last minute, so he wouldn’t lose as much money. It was supposed to originally cost 80 pesos, but it ended being 100 pesos to enter.
Post 1 of 4: I touched the stomach of a pregnant Donkey!
Post 2 of 4: spending New Year’s Eve Dancing til 5am
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: 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
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.
