"I thought you'd blog more in the field..."

Was what one of my friends quipped to me over lunch last week. This was regarding the level of blogging whilst doing my dissertation fieldwork in Korea. Believe you me, I was at times somewhat disconcerted that I wasn't revealing something interesting every day, or that I wasn't one of those journalistic sites for the 'latest and greatest from Korea' as it were.

Then I thought to myself, well that's not what I have been using this blog for, even before I left for the field. These issues have been bandied about by those in my circle but I will rehash them here: that the blog has transformed for its -purpose- in one's media ecology in light of recent innovations such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. The latter two I use more for stream-of-consciousness type-things... and those of you who followed me while I was actually there know that. Both require membership/authorization to some degree, while the blog is a very public site. This is going to change the dynamics of my use, and it did. So, that was the medium question.

As for other reasons, as anthropologists commonly talk about, "anthropologists were notoriously private when it came to talking about their field experience." Here is a great post, complete with lots of yummy links attesting to that from Rex at Savage Minds. I would add my own story to the entry, in that when you're in the field:

• There is simply too much going on in your head, the field, others, etc to really blog anything of worth. Certainly not every day. After all, is what you're observing in the culture really what you make of it? Enough to be confident in your re-presentation (that same day)? Probably not.
  
• The field is an emotional roller coaster. You are not at -home-, nor are you anywhere you can really escape so whatever is blogged would likely be pretty ugly or something you regret later. Honestly, there are moments of levity, and there are some dark, dark times. Ask anyone who has done this type of physically/intellectually/emotionally (not to mention financially!) invested ethnographic fieldwork. Things not fit for public consumption on a blog on the fly, imho. Perhaps twitter/fb where one is relatively sure of who may be reading it and relatively confident about context.
  
• Confidentiality concerns. There tends to be so much one does off the record that it takes time to form coherent narratives that do not violate the trust of one's informants. That is (and was) a high priority for me. So yes, the gems are being excavated... and they must be analyzed and polished to be anything one is proud of.

Anyboos, my surface parcel of worldly possessions just arrived for me in the mail from Korea. 4 weeks from Seoul to Vancouver. Not bad eh?

Facebook costing businesses?

In BBC a story titled, "Facebook 'costs businesses dear" a study done by an employment law firm estimated that companies could be losing at least 130 million pounds sterling (convert to your own currency, its a whopping amount). This estimation comes about as a result of the survey of 3500 companies in the UK.

The firm recommends that businesses need to take firm action on the "use of social networks at work."

Part of me wonders, however, how accurate this 'loss of productivity' may be. While I am by no means an apologist for Facebook, it is important to be critical of the constructs with which these studies are working. How is 'productivity' operationalized? How are they measuring the 'results' (professionally, socially, psychologically) from engagement in these sites that may allow people to nurture their social networks. Have they correlated this with expenses (avoided?) that may have arisen in pubs after work (as a result of interaction, or instead of)? Have they looked at commerce and knowledge flows resulting from people's social networks? There is a reason for the popular saying, "it's who you know."

Couple this with research on Facebook that states many relationships on huge lists of 'friends' are actually meaningless. Of course, there are 'friends' who 'friend' you who you don't really care about. Facebook, for me, has more been about keeping in touch with my friends I have met offline working in various industries that have diffused my social network all over the world. It is more a way people are negotiating relationships in current labour conditions that make us diasporic.

On a related note, I am working right now on interviewing firms on the social dynamics of innovation for the nationwide ISRN project. Specifically, what are local systems of innovation and how do we account for relationships fostered locally and globally--looking at the city as a porous social entity. It's a growing area of concern because purely economic explanations are inadequate when looking at human interaction, technology, and knowledge flows.

I bring these issues up because there is also a persistent trend in the villianizing of new media, citing lack of productivity (in Facebook, online games, etc). However, I think that notions of productivity as it relates to labour also need to change. Do these same firms expect employees to put in much of their otherwise 'free' time at work for salary? If so, 'information snacking' is, I believe part of the bargain as long as work on project bases get achieved. This implies changes in organizational structures, which some firms may have already accomodated, fully or partially.

That reminds me, I gotta go check my Facebook.
(Btw, I turn off all my 'email notifications' so I don't get sidetracked at work. Simple strategies.:)

See the full story here>>

OGDC Conference 2007

Today I'm on my way to construct some amusement at the Online Game Development Conference in Seattle, Washington. The Chair, Peter Freese, has been kind enough to invite me, and it looks like they've got an exciting program of speakers lined up. It's a mix of industry and academia dialogue in which I am looking forward to participating.

For those not on FB or Flickr (and have therefore have not seen some of what I've been up to), I'll be posting the coles notes of the previous week's nuttiness for the Vancouver conferences here soon. Being the host city for a conference means that you're mostly working on the back end/graciously hosting/still relatively attached to home obligations/not staying in a hotel in the middle of the action. Maybe being out of town will give me a much needed chance to reflect and catch up. One can hope!

Crackberries, Facebook, and Interpretive Flexibility

Come on, the title of the entry had to make you giggle... just a bit. Ok, it made me giggle and I'm blogging instead of working on my paper. Maybe it's the caffeine from the Vietnamese coffee rushing through my veins...

My Senior Supervisor, Richard Smith, was interviewed on Global TV about the 'addictive nature' of Blackberries in light of the recent outage of said devices... playfully referred to as "Crack berries." But while me sighs about that deterministic view of a technology framed in the news story, Keith Hampton, at UPenn's Annenberg School for Communication, who was interviewed by ABC also tempered the discussion quite well by helping to forward the view that people were really very much intertwined with the communication and social interaction afforded by these technologies (as opposed to just the technologies themselves).

And then there's Facebook.
Usually, new users are regaled with a message along the lines of "Welcome friend... glad to see you on here, but beware... it's addictive!"
From my own observations, I've had 'discussions' with colleagues of an ideological nature, and those exchanges happen by writing remarks on one another's walls. Everyone joins and quits various 'group' affiliations... for what ever reason. My blog entries are imported, as well as photos of my choosing. I get 'poked.' Repeatedly... by some yahoos I knew in high school, and some I don't even know. Many of these activities, I can choose/not to get email notifications of, and everyone else can do the same. Customization.
There's also what one of my friends calls the 'stalker-ability.' Before anyone panics about this terminology, it's only used lightly in this way to mean that once you have authorized friends to be your 'friend'.... you get almost EVERYTHING they did/changed about their profile, notes, events, etc... all in a neat little digest when you log on. So...one might be inclined to 'keep up' on the latest, because there are admittedly a lot of things going on here. One needs only to hit 'refresh.' Why is this compelling? I saw the same things happening in Korean online communites, where a lack of quick reply was perceived as disappointing, if not rude.

One of the terms one might invoke here is interpretive flexibility. Another one of my supervisors, Andrew Feenberg, has written about this as well. The concept talks about how technological artifacts are culturally constructed and interpreted, and that there is flexibility in how people think of or interpret artifacts and there is flexibility in how artifacts are designed.
I see this concept applying in an iterative way for the aforementioned technological systems as well as others like games.

Related to a book chapter I'm doing for the Applied Communication Lab, here's a brief summary of how I see it working:

1. Vision: There is a vision of a technological system and its usage in a given social context (country, nation, community... ). This vision is often informed by government, industry, or even academia through various initiatives, policies, etc. The case studies I'm taking up in this way are the French Videotex and Korean online games uses.
2. Implementation: The movement of resources to construct technological artifacts and systems according to the specifications of stakeholders (of which there are many, and political economy perspectives are useful for taking these into account).
3. Innovation: Once the technology has been introduced, the affected communities must then deal with it, and often, have used the technologies in creative, unanticipated ways. Interpretive flexibility is a useful concept in this stage, and indeed people vividly illustrate the interpretive flexibility of a technology.
4. Institutionalization: As stakeholders watch the vision and implementation of technology take its twists and turns, the positive/negative consequences then get appropriated and incorporated into everyday institutional structures responsible for education, governance... (read ISA's to some). Perhaps rationalization then takes place. It depends at this point.

I use ethnographic methods to look at various case studies in this way. But the tie-in here between crackberries, facebook, online games, and associated 'sticky' technologies is likely the presence of interpretive flexibility--the allowance of people to determine what a technology means for them, and where it becomes compelling is when they transform it into a way to communicate. If it then becomes a big part of a person's way of communicating with those around them, of course they'll be inclined to spend a lot of time on it.

Ok, back to this paper.