Village Technologies: Remote Fertilizer Monitoring
i’ve started doing preliminary interviews with youth who are from villages and are now residing in Beijing. I’m trying to get a better understanding of the different ways that youth use ICTs in their village before coming to the city.
Ultimately my research in Wuhan will focus on ICT usage in the city, but I think it’s important that I am able to situate urban ICT usage in a larger context and one that includes rural ICT usage since the migrants I speak to will all be from the countryside.
I’ve been speaking to Beimeng (named changed), an 18 year female who is now studying in Beijing. We were hanging out on the subway talking about her home, a village with a population of 3,000 in Dongei. Her family is financially stable and considered to be me more well off than others. Her mother is a school teacher and her father is a truck driver.
Their family just installed broadband at the beginning of this year. I asked her what it was like to have internet at home. She told me that it was “nice” but no one is really home that often. She is now living in the city, her mom is always at work, and her dad is usually gone for weeks at a time driving his truck.
Since people aren’t home very often, I asked if they were still going to keep paying for the service. Beimeng said that they definitely plan on keeping it because they plan on surveillancing their fertilizer through the internet. I thought that I had misheard or mis-translated some word - but indeed Beimeng was talking about fertilizer.
Like many other villages, the introduction of fertilizers has changed life in Xiheyuancun Village (pseudonym). The village is now considered prosperous with great crop yields. Beimeng’s family is able to purchase high-end fertilizer. Their family is known for having some of the best fertilizer in the village so people often steal their fertilizer. A few years ago, they installed a camera surveillance system where they could monitor the fertilizer from inside their home.
But none of their family members are home that often. As a result, they will stream the surveillance of their fertilizer over the Internet so that they can keep an eye on it from anywhere they can get online. I asked her where and with with her and her family would most likely use to check the video stream. She said that she would most likely take a look from the internet cafes or her cellphone. Her father would only check in on the fertilizer through his cellphone because he is usually on the road. As for her mom, she would most likely be the person who will consistently keep an eye on the camera feed from her work computer at school.
i find this story fascinating for many reasons.
1.) it’s an example of how rural-urban migrant populations keep ties to their village. For Beimeng, she still felt very involved in the family process of monitoring the fertilizer.
2. ) use of technology in a context specific this village. Streaming video as a form of surveillancing is an old idea. Security guard firms to doggy day care centers do it. Yet here we have an individual farming family using the internet to monitor their fertilizer, which is a very contextually specific idea.
3.) this story is indicative of the level of trust and intimacy in the village. Beimeng was telling me that as a child, the village was more poor but her mom said that robbery was not a problem.
4.) I find it interesting that they installed the internet, realized that no one really used it, yet still found a way to make it useful for their mobile lives.5.) Beimeng said that her father (truck driver) would check in through his cellphone (using the mobile internet) and her mother would check in through her work computer. This point illustrates the increasing differences that we will see in how people use the internet versus mobile internet. Beimeng’s father is a truck driver, so relies on his mobile. But her mother has a stationary job with constant access to her work computer.
6.) we tend to think of the only entity that uses the internet to monitor activities is the government (esp. in China), but in this case we have an individual household who has decided to use it as a monitoring device
7..) This is a story very specific to China’s countryside as land reforms in the late 70’s the give every individual household a plot of land. With parceled plots, this means that families can make choices about what and how to plant the land. Families who can afford high-grade fertilizer, like Beimeng’s, can keep making more money. Within one village, there can be a lot of class distinctions—with fertilizer being one of the markers of class in this story.
I plan on visiting Beimeng’s village next year after they’ve installed the streaming fertilizer surveillance monitoring systems. It will be exciting to talk to her parents about how they check in online.
Now off on a totally different track - Fertilizer is a critical part of modern China’s history. China’s and US’s modern history starts with fertilizer - one of the agreements that came out of the famous 1972 Nixon visit is that China placed an order for 13 fertilzer factories from Cargill.
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,
