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!
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.
Erving Goffman, Cellphones, Social Cohesion
Andy Orum most recent post, What sociologist Erving Goffman could tell us about social networking and Internet identity on O’Reilly Radar, has brought back graduate course work memories of reading the works of our dear 73rd President of the American Sociological Association.
Goffman is most famous for his work on presentation of one’s identity in American culture. He studied micro-personal interpersonal interactions and argued that people’s actions could be seen as a type of performance, making active choices to display one’s self to an audience (friends, co-workers and etc).
Oram find’s Goffman’s work
” rather distasteful…I don’t see my entire life as a performance and everyone around me as an audience. That seems to be just what Goffman wants me to do. (He calls this attitude his “dramaturgical perspective.”)”
I had the similar thoughts when I first read Goffman. But Oram redeems Goffman’s work by saying that he does provide some useful ways for thinking online internet identity. Read Oram’s blog post - he makes great connections to Yang’s book on the internet in China, The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online.
I think that from an ethnographer’s point of view, the issue with Goffman is that his project was not to describe the world from an individual’s point of view, but rather to describe the social interaction that was taking place from his (Goffman’s) point of view. This means that fundamentally, his frameworks and theories will look from different from say Harold Garfinkel - an ethnomethodologist, who is concerned about understanding the world from the subject’s perspective. Goffman primarily relied on observation as his fieldwork method - that in itself should reveal his goals.
I wonder what would’ve happened if Goffman didn’t use the word “performance” to describe micro-interaction because that insinuates that we are all identity-making peons on a stage unengaged with our “real selves” (as if there was a real non-performing self), but rather just called it “gaming.” Games can take on a range of qualities from being collaborative to individualistic, from being playful to serious, and from being zero-sum to non-competitive. The stakes are always different depending on the game. Decisions are always being made. Perhaps “gaming” would’ve been a less condescending way to describe interpersonal interaction.
This is where Randall Collins comes in - another sociologist who is a Goffman’s fan - who takes Goffman’s work on interaction rituals and publishes a book that reframes GOffmans’ theory, Interaction Ritual Chains. What I like about Collin’s work is that it doesn’t make a judgement on the interaction - so a swinging SMS club to a bible study reading group can both be put on the same analytical plane - both are evidence of interactions that are attempting to increase social bonds.
Goffman’s and Collin’s work heavily informs Rich Ling’s work on the social uses of cellphones. His latest book was published in 2008. New Tech, New Ties: How Mobile Communication Is Reshaping Social Cohesion. His central argument is that cellphones increase social cohesion. I like how Ling draws on Goffman’s and Collin’s work for his analysis. Ling’s methods ranged from interviews to participant observation.
One of the luxuries of Ling’s studies is that he is working in countries with exceptional cellphone coverage, stable governments, and responsive cellphone companies. While we are hearing reports of increased adoption of cellphone usage outside of Europe and the US - I think we should be careful to make the jump to say that all around the world people are now becoming more connected with cellphones without any consideration of political and economic situations.
One thing that I am observing in my field site in rural Mexico is that while youth are now the first owners of cellphones in their village, they are no longer using it or relying on it after their first year of ownership because they’ve become frustrated with the poor coverage and expensive costs. Rather, youth have switched over to IM’ing as their primary technology tool for maintaining and/or increasing their social connections.
This just goes to speak that mobiles are not where ALL the connections are at - and that it’s important to consider a variety of ICT tools when examining social uses of technology.
