Posts filed under 'Practices'
Last fall, Hiyam Hijazi-Omari and Rivka Ribak presented a paper called “Playing With Fire: On the domestication of the mobile phone among Palestinian teenage girls in Israel” at AOIR. They studied teen girls who received their mobile phones from their boyfriends and hid them from everyone else. Through this lens, they examine how the mobile phone alters social dynamics, relationships, and the construction of gender in Palestine. In short, they document how culturally specific gendered practices (not technological features) frame the meaning and value of technology.
All too often, we think of technology as empowering or restricting. We focus on the technology and its features rather than the ways in which it gets embedded in the lives of people. The phone has always been a gendered technology. (If you have any doubts, read Claude Fischer’s “America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940.”) While the story of the mobile is quite different, even the tensions between its use as a business tool and its use as a tool for family communications have been narrated through the lens of gender.
Palestinian boys give their girlfriends phones for the express purpose of being able to communicate with them in a semi-private manner without the physical proximity that would be frowned on. At the same time, girls know that parents do not approve of them having access to such private encounters with boys - they go to great lengths to hide their mobiles and suffer consequences when they are found out. While the boys offered these phones as a tool of freedom, they often came with a price. Girls were expected to only communicate with the boy and never use the phone for any other purpose. In the article, Hijazi-Omari and Ribak quote one girl as expressing frustration over this and saying “I did not escape prison only to find myself another prison.” These girls develop fascinating practices around using the phone, hiding from people, and acquiring calling cards.
For teens, the mobile phone is a key device for negotiating intimate relations throughout the world. Studies done in the U.S., Jamaica, Japan, the U.K. and elsewhere all point to the ways in which teens negotiate private relationships using their mobiles. Mobiles are a critical tool for being in a relationship. Yet, most of our studies focus on the ways in which offline intimacies are extended across space and time through the mobile. What Hijazi-Omari and Ribak are finding with Palestinian girls is that the mobile is allowing them to have private encounters and relationships when these would be otherwise impossible.
This article helps elucidate the ways in which youth from different cultures are navigating social relations through the mobile. It is well-written and filled to the brim with fascinating data that tickles the brain. A must read for anyone interested in cultural difference involving the mobile!
[More comments on this topic at Apophenia]
April 14th, 2008
The NYTimes ran a piece today called Text Generation Gap: U R 2 Old (JK). (Note: the article is very American-centric - in the States, older folks tend to be texting illiterate.) The article begins with an anecdote of a parent shuttling around his daughter and her friend. They are talking and dad butts in and they roll their eyes. And then there is silence. When dad comments to his daughter that she’s being rude for texting on her phone rather than talking to her friend, the daughter replies: “But, Dad, we’re texting each other. I don’t want you to hear what I’m saying.”
First and foremost, the notion of “privacy” is about having a sense of control over how and when information flows to who. Given the structures of their lives, teens have often had very little control over their social context. In school, at home, at church… there are always adults listening in. Forever more, there have been pressures to find interstitial spaces to assert control over communications. Note passing, whispering, putting notes in lockers, arranging simultaneous bathroom visits, pig latin, neighbor to neighbor string communication… all of these have been about trying to find ways to communicate outside of the watchful eyes of adults, an attempt to assert privacy while stuck in a fundamentally public context. The mobile phone is the next in line of a long line of efforts to communicate in the spaces between.
At the same time, the mobile phone changes the rules. Texting allows people to communicate even when they aren’t at arms length or can’t arrange simultaneous interactions. Because texting happens silently, it’s far more effective as a backchannel mechanism than whispering. Codes are not necessarily about hiding from adults as much as efficiency; deleting sent/received messages is far more effective than codes.
Over the years, parenting has become more and more about surveillance. In this mindset, good parents are those who stalk their kids. Parents complain that their children ignore them when they’re in the same space, preferring their friends. When was this not the case? What’s different now is that there are fewer siblings/cousins running around to team up with. There’s less free time to just “hang out.” There’s no openness to go out after school and “be home by dark” (a practice that used to start in early childhood). With activities and scheduling and this and that, I’m always amazed that children don’t demand more time for friend time.
There’s an arms race going on: parental surveillance vs. technology to assert privacy. We aren’t seeing the radical OMG technology ruins everything stage. We’re seeing the next in line of a long progression. And it’s just the beginning. The arms race is heating up. As parents implement keyboard tracking, kids go to texting. How long until parents demand that companies send them transcripts of everything? What will come next? We are in the midst of the privacy wars and it’s not so clean as “where’s my privacy” vs. “kids these days are so public.” The very nature of publicity and privacy are getting disrupted. As kids work to be invisible to people who hold direct power over them (parents, teachers, etc.), they happily expose themselves to audiences of peers. And they expose themselves to corporations. They know that the company can see everything they send through their servers/service, but who cares? Until these companies show clear allegiance with their parents, they’re happy to assume that the companies are on their side and can do them no harm.
Generation gap and technology ruining everything stories will be forever more. These do sell and they are fun to read. Yet, for parents and teachers and other concerned folks wanting to get a clear perspective of what’s going on, it’s important to remember that at the end of the day, the intentions and desires aren’t changing… it’s just the architecture that makes the practices possible that is. The refraction of light is changing because the medium through which it is channeled is changing, but the light itself stays the same and to guide our children, we need to remember to pay attention to the light, not the refraction or the medium that’s causing the refraction.
March 9th, 2008
Blyk had many pixels of trade press last week. Yet because of its softly, softly launch many people still don’t know about it. When I describe it to people who haven’t come across it I usually get two, polarised reactions (sometimes from the same individual):
‘Great, it’s about time someone tried a new approach to mobile phone charges.’
‘Eeuch, there’s enough advertising around already.’
However tentative Blyk members may feel about receiving advertising on their phones, it seems some are responding to the experience. Blyk has reported an average 29% response rate to its ads and last week revealed a 45% response rate to a campaign by Penguin Books, where members could click from the ad to download an audio chapter of Nick Hornby’s book, ‘Slam’. This kind of statistic is, of course, great news for Blyk. It may also surprise sceptics who might not have expected Blyk’s advertising to include book downloads (to be fair this is just one element of Blyk’s advertising mix). The success of this specific ad also suggests that when the content is right, and the process of accessing it is smooth, and free, people will begin to use phone functionality beyond texting and calling (although there’s no doubt these remain primary).
The response to the Penguin campaign is good news for book publishers, too. Statistics for book reading are depressingly low, and some, including Steve Jobs and Michael Hirschorn (not surprisingly, of the computing and TV industries, respectively) are saying reading’s a thing of the past. The web is a great place for committed readers to share their thoughts via book clubs and forums, but generally it competes, alongside TV, for potential readers’ attention.
So in order to build readership it makes sense to go where your readers might be. Paul Coelho, who seems to have a very shrewd understanding of his audience, has claimed that pirating his own books on the web increased sales of the books themselves. Not surprisingly, Coelho’s initiative generated far fewer column inches than Radiohead’s free album download: most book publishing lacks the scale and glamour of rock music; besides a book delivered by the web is a much less consumable item than music, so there is a more obvious path from web delivery to buying the book itself.
And it’s this path that Penguin are following. Last year they partnered with social networking site Piczo to promote six classics to a young teen audience. Now they have taken a punt on Blyk. So I say three cheers for Penguin (those who regret that this was an audio, rather than written, download will, perhaps, allow two and a half cheers). For the sake of authors, book publishers and, most importantly, potential readers, I hope the punt pays off.
February 4th, 2008
As everyone knows, Kenya has been in a state of unrest since the corrupt elections in December. Interestingly, a surge of homebrewed cyberactivism has emerged to aid in information flow and resource sharing (as well as political organizing). As an example, take a look at Afromusing’s Twitter stream which contains regular updates from Kenya.
Much of what is going on in Kenya centers around the mobile phone. In Kenya, the mobile is used for everything from communication to financial transactions. More and more of Kenyan society has relied on the phone as a critical part of everyday life. Unfortunately, this has all been disrupted since the election.
Kenyan phone users do not have monthly phone plans; they pay for prepaid credits (like most of the world). Prior to the election, getting credits was easy - they were available in kiosks, stores, bars, anywhere you could imagine. Yet, these venues all closed shop after the election because of the violence and looting. Credits have become a rare commodity and the price has skyrocketed. Credits have also turned into a currency and people are trading credits for food and medicine. Credits are worth more than the government’s currency. Because of difficulties in getting credits to citizens, a service called Pyramid of Peace has popped up to help people send credits to Kenyans.
Part of why people are so shocked about what is going on in Kenya right now is because Kenya was so stable. (I can’t help but wonder what would’ve happened if Gore supporters would’ve taken to the streets after my country’s corrupt election rather than be so complacent.) When people think about what is necessary when everything goes haywire, they normally talk about food, water, shelter, medicine. What does it mean that telephony has become a central player in people’s lives? What does it mean that access to communication technology is necessary for access to food, water, medicine?
Perhaps it would do all of us some good to consider what it would mean if mobile telephony suddenly became a rare commodity.
January 16th, 2008
I want to respond to danah’s post at some length, hence a separate posting. To understate the case, our relationship to advertising is a complex one. We can recoil when we read reports of advertisers’ manipulative practices, yet we can also enjoy advertising, and find it genuinely informative; while it’s often a delight to escape advertising in unspoilt landscapes, we have probably driven our branded car to get there, are sporting branded outdoor gear etc. etc. I suspect there are as many inconsistencies in our attitudes to new media advertising as to traditional media. So, for example, the same people who complain about pop ups and banner ads in web pages (and, yes, there is evidence that advertising on web sites disrupts processing of site content) may also be watching and sharing favourite ads on YouTube. We’re in it to the hilt.
So advertising is part of popular culture, much of which we may not particularly want to espouse, nor to see influence our children. There is conflicting data concerning children’s understanding of advertising, and its influence on their decision-making (always a good idea to look at who is publishing the data). Some suggest that children become sceptical about advertising pretty early on (we might question whether this a scepticism we want our children to develop; my understanding is that the French, who have light regulation on advertising to children, take the view that it’s part of growing up). Most European countries have some restrictions on TV advertising to children, with Sweden at the most stringent end of the scale and the UK among the more relaxed. And there may be downsides to these restrictions: the British advertisers’ association, the IPA, have claimed that in Greece, where there is a restriction on advertising toys during children’s TV, there has been a reduction in the quality of children’s programming, with cheap imports substituting for more expensive, locally-generated programmes (it’s their role to point to these kinds of consequences, of course). Recent UK restrictions on TV advertising of junk food to children have seen a migration of advertising to the net. I don’t think we yet know what influence it has there but it’s hardly likely that businesses would be investing in it if they didn’t think it would have some effect. Marketing takes the opportunities that are available and if we want the benefits advertising brings (e.g. sponsored events, broadcasting, on-line experiences, phone services etc.) we also have to be aware of its impact and vigilant for potential abuse.
And if the impact of advertising in our everyday lives is complex so, too, is our role in working for companies of all kinds that use advertising to promote their products or sponsor their activities. In the UK there was a ripple of press reports in 2003 when a collection of documents from advertising agencies working on campaigns for tobacco manufacturers revealed an agency’s derogatory classification of their market segments, including a description of some smokers (low income) as ‘slobs’. It’s not hard to see how these cynical attitudes can develop if, at best, a company’s only contact with its customers is to herd groups of them into a strange environment and observe them from behind a two-way mirror in the forced discussion of a focus group. Hardly a recipe for empathy. Short-hand labels for customer segments are efficient for internal communication, but they are only a key to the real people, with everyday lives, emotions, aspirations, behind the labels.
How can we mitigate the distanced cynicism that tempts companies into manipulative advertising practices or, for that matter, to ship untested goods, plan obsolescence into products, snare unwitting customers into providing personal data that can be traded, fail to deliver adequate customer support and so on? We have to recognise that business has its agenda and it’s not the same as its customers’, although some congruence is needed for a business to succeed. As researchers we have a role - albeit a relatively small one - in creating that congruence. The closer a business is to its customers, and the more it understands them, the more opportunities it has to choose not to be exploitative, to be humanely human-centred. The conventional research recipe of clusters of regional focus groups are not going to raise executives’ social consciousness. We have to push for imaginative approaches to doing and presenting research that keeps the internal team as close as possible to its external customers. That can mean working outside our own comfort zone sometimes, experimenting with new methods, learning new techniques. The subtleties of different research approaches may not be of interest to the people who use our research, but as researchers we’re guardians of the methods being used, and the conclusions that are drawn from them.
January 10th, 2008
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