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.
International Conference: The New Urban Question - Urbanism beyond Neo-Liberalism on Nov. 26th-28th in Amsterdam -
This looks like a great conference for those working on urban issues. I have sworn off conferences until I finish my fieldwork - so I must resist the force!
“The New Urban Question – Urbanism beyond Neo-liberalism” is the title of the 4th Conference of the International Forum on Urbanism (IFoU) that will take place from November 26th to 28th, 2009 at Zuiderkerk in Amsterdam and Delft University of Technology (TU Delft). The theme of the conference is about the recovery of the discipline of Urbanism under the conditions of urbanization and urban transformation, ecological threats and economical crises.
The conference will be organized in the framework of the International Forum on Urbanism (IFoU) by the Department of Urbanism, TU Delft and the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam in collaboration with the Dutch Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and the Environment (VROM) and the Municipality of Amsterdam as well as other participating universities of the IFoU-network.
City Street Conference: Nov. 18-20th in Lebanon, by Nortre Dame University Louaize-Lebanon’s Faculty of Architecture, Art and Design
“City streets are the places where more than half of the world’s population dwell,communicate, exchange and interact. At the turn of the millennium, the “City Street” conference issues the most vivid and established part of the wold’s cities, the street,and proposes a (re)reading and a (re)thinking about its people, physicality, image and virtuality and questions the street’s multi scalar dimensions, disciplines, textuality and structure.
The millennium’s culture, technology and manifestations (from political and economical to philosophical, artistic and media manifestations) become part of the street’s discussion.
Upon the request of many who would like to participate in the City Street Conference, the organizing committee has decided to extend the deadline for accepting abstracts until July 21, 2009. Please send you abstract, between 300-500 words, to Dina Baroud at citystreet09@ndu.edu.lb See Call for papers for abstract template.”
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.
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
Map-hole: Technologies of the Mundan and Inscriptions of Power
(reblogged on Digital Urbanims)
this is a great example of how there’s always room for exciting innovation in everyday objects- even the mostly seemingly mundane can become layered with meaning and knowledge. Maphole is a guide to pedestrians (invented by Jiae Kwon). I wonder if a cut will make these real!
IWhat I would love to observe is the use of these map-holes in a city and to see how power and narrative is reinforced through these map-holes.
Who are these map-holes for? Who controls these map-holes? Who makes decisions on what is being pointed to - what kind of information will these show - where will it lead a pedestrian? Will they be for tourists? Will they be for the urban citizen? Will the location specific map-holes, such as in an art district? Who benefits from the map-hope?
how do they maps-holes respatialize the city? How do map-hopes reconfigure pedestrian movement?
I think that these mapholes could work to reinforce existing class-drawn boundaries in city.
For example, when I spent a few weeks in Stockholm a few years ago - for a social welfare country known for its social equality - I had a difficult time finding the low-income parts of the city. When I arrived, with a little online research about the hip-hop and yummy international food scene - I found out that a lot of undergrounded artists were from Rinkeby, a area of Stockholm that has lots of new immigrants, newly accepted Iraqi refugges, and older immigrants from countries such as Turkey. But after trying to look up information on Rinkeby online, talking to local residents, researching local guide books - I still had a difficult time finding any info on Rinkeby other than people’s advice that “you don’t need to go there.” Which of COURSE anytime someone tells me that I always take as a great indicator for me to go there.
My point is that the absence of information on Rinkeby, or any neighborhood can render it an invisible place. I was being told the dominant narrative that local citizens gave to outsiders - here are beautiful parts of Stockholm that you should see and here are the parts that you don’t need to see. But that very narrative is laced with assumptions of what kind of outsider I was and what I valued. My moment illustrates how the dominance of one platial (yes I made that word up) narrative can render another place invisible. Could map-holes work in the same way? By only pointing out some places, other places get left out. Could map-holes become map-hopes - pointing people to a version of the city that you can’t find in tourists books? Or could these map-holes become wired with blue-tooth and tourists could beam the hole for information that they were interested in finding?
Well if I start seeing these pop up in NY, I will put up stickers that say “Bed-Stuy” over the arrow pointing towards “Soho” or stickers that say “yoga center” over “Macys” or a sticker that says “Fresh Food” over “McDonalds.
Here are some other bloggers who have commented on map-hopes, Yankodesign, GIS-Lounge, Inventor spot, and DoGizmo.
oh and I had a GREAT time in Rinkeby. I visited a local school, met residents, ate great turkish sweets, and hung out with some newly arrived iraqis. It was just as great as my day wandering around in Gamla Stan. My photos from a day in Rinkeby and photos from my time in STockholm.
zadi:
“Map Hole is a new road guidance tool designed to direct pedestrians and travelers to their final destination using existing elements in the urban landscape. It locates the pedestrian with a starting point and provides information on the exact distance or average walk time to the listed landmarks.”
- Yanko Design (h/t The Daily What)
