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!
Just returned from NSF meeting in DC with Bill-squared
In preparation for my summer research project, “China’s Internet Policy and Digital Network Architecture: Information Communication Technology (ICT) Practices among Youths and Migrant” at China Internet Network Information Center 中国互联网络信息中心 (CNNIC), I went to DC for an NSF-sponsored meeting for the EAPSI program through the Office of International Science and Engineering (OISE).
I was finally able to meet up with two Bill’s who made this oppotunity possible, Bill Blanpied on the left and Bill Chang on the right. I am grateful for their introductions to Dr. Mao Wei, who I will be working with this summer at CNNIC along with his amazing office of reseachers, including Wan En Hai! This is so exciting to work with Dr .Mao Wei - the person who started CNNIC and established many of the early efforts in China that has allowed it to grow so quickly and efficiently.
I met Bill Blanpied in India during the summer of 2008 for the China-India-US Workshop on Science, Technology and Innovation Policy in Bangalore, India. After the informative conference I was heading off to China for fieldwork from India, so Bill suggested that I meet up with Bill Chang, the Director of NSF’s Beijing office at that time.
I am so grateful for the guidance from Bill-Squared - thank you for all your encouragement on my project!
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 1 of 4: I touched the stomach of a pregnant Donkey!
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)
-post-4-of-4-eating-live-insect”>Post 4)
I felt the heartbeat of a baby donkey inside the mother’s tummy!
I haven’t even felt the heartbeat of a human baby inside a mother’s tummy before! It was totally crazy! We were hiking back to the village after we spent a morning learning about how the pueblo is reforesting its land to capture water and how it currently receives water from the mountains without any pumps - just through pure gravity - and on our way back we saw two donkey’s tied up to a tree. This donkey is pregnant. Can you see it’s big tummy?
It was such a beautiful moment - the air was so clean and all you could hear were the birds and crunching of the earth from the donkey moving around. I really happy to be so connected to everything around me at that moment - the air, the clouds, the blue sky, the animal, the grass, the earth, and the water. I breathed in the smell of fresh trees and sometimes whiffs of donkey poo - even that was lovely.
Leonardo taught us so much that morning about water supply, management, and distribution. I am amazed at the knowledge that each pueblo to maintain themselves.
I think that a lot of times in urban areas, we are so removed from our daily resources - we don’t really understand how seeds become the food on our plate, who picks the fruit so that we can afford vegetables without running a farm, how water arrives in the house and etc. Massive infrastructure is highly capitalist societies automates and centralizes many functions so that larger populations can be organized in more concentrated or spread out areas. But the flip side is that we lose so much knowledge about our basic necessities.
I don’t mean to say that I felt that life in a rural area is more “simple” - I don’t like that connotation - that urban areas are more complex and rural areas are more simple. Everything that I was learning while I lived in the village was super complex.
For example, there was an immense amount of complexity involved in the village’s water system - but what was most interesting was that the level of complexity was most relevant for the village and it was one that the chose for themselves, it was not something that was decided by the government or some water company. The current water system relies on pure gravity. The water is from the ground and it is delivered through pipes that were built 20 years ago. Since it is from the ground and they do not use massive fertilizers, the ground water is clean. The village has plans to build a electro water pump but they are trying to figure out the best way to do it sustainably without negatively impacting the land. Therefore, they’ve started a reforestation project to capture water in several parts of the mountains before they proceed with the electro water pump. To me, this is really complex thinking because it’s strategic. They are thinking through the consequences of over-digging a hole to suck out ground water with an electric pump - they are thinking about the future of the village. That is just beautiful.
Anyways - I ended that morning with touching a baby donkey inside its mommy! What a great morning to start a day of fieldwork. I got some great interviews so far.
Post 2 of 4: spending New Year’s Eve Dancing til 5am
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
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.
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.
