I am now in Wuhan, China, setting up fieldwork site. I’ve been talking to Wuhan University and some local schools about my dissertation research on analyzing how migrants’ use of technology is reshaping the urban space and how internet policies affect migrants’ communication patterns. Before I head to Beijing on June 14th to work with the CNNIC (China Internet Network Information Center) to look at how their policies affect migrants use of internet cafes and mobile phones - I thought it would be a good idea to travel to other parts of China to talk to youth and families about their use of internet cafes.
I am so glad I did this for 2 reasons. 1) because I now understand the extent of internet addiction as a serious problem among youth in China.
2.) and I have a better sense of the social context of the addiction problem among migrant youth in urban China.
There are critiques coming from the West about China’s “heavy handed” internet policies, such as the stopping of internet cafe permits. But many of these critiques don’t understand the social context of this policy. Internet addiction among under-served urban youth is a serious problem in China. A policy such as a temporary halt in internet cafe permits is an example of an state attempt to deal with this social problem. In the West - we tend to see any attempts to regulate “information access” as a violation of rights - but we do it all the time with parental controls on televisions, internet browsers, search engines and etc - so why we not willing to understand it within a Chinese context?
From my brief talks with the principal of a local school for children of migrants - I found out that the principal is absolutely bewildered by how to deal with internet addiction among the teenage youth. The school serves 1st through 9th graders - and he says that starting at 5th grade they are going to internet cafes for hours and whole nights to just play games - they aren’t doing their homework.
With this new information - i am considering changing the focus of my dissertation to be about technology usage within the context of an urban migrant family unit. I would still look at how migrants’ use of technology is reshaping urban space - but i specifically would look at migrant families - so that i can understand how the youth, mother and/or father is using ICTs. So a new focus would be how technology is used across generations within one family. For example - is the mother primarily relying on her mobile to find work while the teenage youth is using the internet cafe as a form of entertainment and hanging out with friends? What are they using to contact their family in the villages? to what extent are parents aware of their child’s use of ICTs? How do parents use ICTs to secure social resources for themselves or their child? I have all these new questions after my visit to the school and new framework in which to place internet addiction as a social problem.
i told the principal that I wanted to suggest some sites for the youth to check out to improve their english and math - he absolutely forbade me to encourage them to spend time online - even if it was for educational purposes. he then explained China doesn’t have any free educational sites.
when I spoke to the parent’s of children who spend hours upon hours at internet cafes - all of them told me tht they were fully aware of their child’s pastime - however they said that at least we know they are in ONE place and the internet cafe is safer and cleaner than where we live. Migrants live on the edges of urban areas, many of which may not be as safe as these internet cafes.
I suspect that internet cafes are a form of an after-school program for the kids - the parents feel comfortable knowing that they are in one place. I also suspect that the youth do not know how to use the internet for educational purposes - or more so are their educational resources in China for students? Must find that out.
I also think that parents aren’t able to provide as much material resources for their children compared to middle-class parents - but at the same time they still feel guilty or as if they aren’t doing enough. Therefore, giving them 5 RMB a hour for internet access is the least they feel they can do. It’s kind of like the candy problem in the village where I do fieldwork at in Oaxaca - poorer mothers want to give their child a full meal but are unable to - so they give them a few pesos to buy candy to fill their tummy up - to give them a fake sense of fullness. They don’t know that they are contributing to a future in diabetes by doing this - and even if they did - what can they do? their child is hungry - but they don’t have enough money for food - candy holds off hunger - and the kids love eating it.
ok back to the internet and China- I wonder if in a way parents are showing their care through giving their children $ for internet cafes and mobile credit to send text messages.
another thought comes to my mind is to find out how the ICTs reshape urban familial relationships.
ok will write more later - I’m writing from an internet cafe with lots of smoke so gotta go!
pic below -me with Jin Ge, founder of the school and the principal 
I visited the school while the students were sleeping - i will be returning today to chat with some of the youth during non-nap hours. you can read more about the school and see more photos on my personal blog post about the school visit.
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,
I have been awarded a Fulbright! Off to China for 1 year of fieldwork!
I just found out that I have received a Fulbright!
My proposal, Chinese Migrants Families in the Information Age: Intensive Technology and Digital Urbanism. has been approved for funding by the Chinese and US government for research!
The Fulbright require that researchers remain in the host country for at least 10 months. So I’ll be moving to Wuhan, China next March to conduct fieldwork for 1 year. These long-term research grants are truly the research ethnographer’s dream; it’s a luxury to do really in-depth fieldwork and to be funded to do it. Surveys and brief visits can give you insight into daily life, but relying soley on those methods does not get at the depth of everyday life and the processes that people are dealing with.
So I’ll be looking at the socio-digital space for new ICT users in Wuhan. I’ll be asking how migrant families are appropriating new ICTs and how their ICT practices reflects the ways in which they are settling in to the city and making sense of the socio-economic changes in their lives. While most research on migrants have focused mostly on single or coupled migrants who intended to eventually return to their village, I see a new wave of human mobility within China that points to migrants who move to the city as a family and who intend to stay in the city as a family. This new wave of migration is taking place in 2nd and 3rd tier cities (like Wuhan) that aren’t just economically open to migrants, but also socially and politically. I believe these understudied 2nd and 3rd tier cities are important sites of observation because not only are these cities projected to contain 75% of the growth in wealthiest families, they are also going to be sites of social transformations in China.
I’ll write another more about my research in another post. I have some stuff up online on the research section of my website, but I’ve already been reformulating my research questions as I’ve learned so much more about what kinds of research is more valuable to industries and those outside of academia after these few months of researching at Nokia.
Are you going to be in China in 2011? If so, let’s hang out! I’m leaving in March 2011 for Wuhan and I am hoping to go to CSCW2011 in Hangzhou, China which also takes place in March.
THANK YOUS! I could not have gotten this grant without the support of my amazing dissertation committee (Jim Hollan, Richard Madsen, Barry Naughton, Christena Turner, April Linton, and Barry Brown). All my fieldwork experience and design technology workshop trials in Mexico with Barry Brown has prepared me to think about my work in China in a totally different light. Christena Turner worked with my grant and personal statement down to the last revisions, offering her brilliant insights and making sure that I included all the details about my own work that I had forgetten. Richard Madsen is the best dissertation chair any graduate student could have. Kenyatta Cheese provided so much help in making sure that I presented my work in non-academic terms. And Linda Vong, UCSD grant expert and Fulbright representative provided tons of insights into the selection process. Thanks Seiko for letting me read your Fulbright grant, and thanks to Melissa Rock and Marcella Szablewicz for giving me tips on the new abstract. Without Jinge as my research sidekick in China, I would’ve never ended up in Wuhan. Thanks for the grant support from Nokia Research Center so that I can hire a research assistant and increase my scope of analysis! Leah Muse-Orlinoff you rock for being a great friend and the best graduate school sidekick! And thanks to Manny de la Paz and the entire UCSD Sociology staff for their continued support!
WAITING HELL: Oh and I must say that this was one of the most excruciating grant wait times I have ever had to suffer! Even though most of the Fulbright application process has been administered online, the notification letter was sent out via regular mail through the USPS. The letter was sent from the UN building in NY. But I had forwarded my mail from NYC to Palo Alto because I moved here to work at Nokia. While everyone else was getting their rejection or acceptance letters I was trying not to obsess over the daily mail! I seriously was getting panic attacks as I was waiting everyday in limbo for what my next 2 years would look like while everyone else had already received their rejection or acceptance letters. I am so happy to not wake up with a 100 pound weight on my chest in the mornings. If you are considering to apply for the Fulbright, I’m more than happy to share my experiences about the application process, especially for putting in a proposal about technology usage. I found it really difficult to access info online and to talk with people who had been through this process, and that shouldn’t be the case. Sharing is excellent.
