Photo: Elisabetta Costa

Again the topic of privacy seems be central in my field-site that I call here “Dry Rock Town”. During the first few months in Dry Rock Town, I’ve already noticed a pattern that can bring me to make a simple generalization: people do not usually update their status on Facebook. And on the occasions when they do update their status, they quote the sentence of some famous writers, poets, singers or actors, or they write some famous proverbs. Comments on private or public life, observations about politics or about food, general thoughts on everyday life, expression of feelings and emotions are never publicly expressed on the Facebook wall. I met guys that were using Facebook many hours a day, sharing hundreds of posts and making thousands of “like” every month, buy they have never written a thing on their wall. It’s not because people don’t like to write on Facebook. Indeed the inhabitants of Dry Rock Town usually make a lot of comments on their friend’s posts or pictures. And it’s not even because people are not well educated and thus not able to write properly: many of my informants have high-school or university degrees. It is not because people do not want to give information about their private life: people love to post pictures portraying them on holiday or at dinner out with families or friends. And it’s not even because people are afraid to expose their ideas. People usually share a lot of political posts.

But the inhabitants of Dry Rock Town usually do not write on their wall what they think. How can we understand this data?  Defending one’s own reputation is the most important thing here and the public expression of personal thoughts can become a very dangerous practice. It exposes the person to the judgment and to the critics of others and consequently to the loss of reputation.  It’s more convenient to express personal opinions through the words of authoritative others that can not be so easily criticized.  People do not usually write comments on topic of public interests. They just share a quotation, news or pictures. And this point can be very interesting as it contradicts the conclusion of the main literature on the impact of new media in the Middle-East, that emphasize the role of digital and social media in promoting a greater role of the individual against established authorities (among others see Eickelman and Anderson 2003, Hofheins 2011, Lynch 2007). Indeed I believe that in a highly normative and conformist society, Facebook is having the opposite effect as it constitutes a continuous threat to the respectability of the people by making public, visible and permanent what does not necessarily adhere to the social norms. And as reaction people try to follow even more the established social norms and authorised discourses, wherever they come from, the government, the political parties, newspapers or Greek philosophers.  If nobody writes comments on topic of public interest, at the same time nobody writes comments about private life. Here the clear division between private and public sphere typical of Muslim societies is self-evident. Facebook makes the private public and thus it constitutes a continuous threat to the honour of families in a society where honour killings are frequent and alive.

I really believe that in the next months I will investigate more on the role of Facebook in promoting daily-life practices that adhere to instituted social norms and to established authorities, far from creating a sphere where individual are more free to openly discuss issues of public or private interest. But the most interesting thing is that this Facebook ‘s effect goes parallel with the opposite one: publicly the inhabitants of Rock Dry Town follow and reinforce established social norms, but privately and secretly they are involved in private communicative practices such as chatting and flirting between men and women, that are totally new, different and that subvert old social norms.

References:
Eickelman, D. and Anderson J. 2003. New media in the Muslim world. Indiana University Press.
Hofheinz A.,  2011 Nextopia? Beyond the revolution 2.0, International journal of communication.
Lynch, M. 2007. Blogging the new Arab public. Arab Media and Society.

The water tankered makes a delivery (Photo: Tom McDonald)

Fieldwork normally involves bearing some hardships, however I never thought that at the start of my research in China that water would have been an issue of concern here. Nor did I consider that it might be able to tell us something about social networking use.

I was surprised, then, when I found out that the urban town area of the fieldsite has not had a piped water supply for the past year.

This situation is slightly ridiculous when one considers that there is a large, well-stocked reservoir two kilometres distance from the town.

According to some local residents, the problems started last year when workmen dug up the pipe in order to lay the new, wide asphalt road that runs north-south through the town.

For the past year, the town’s government have been paying for two water bowsers and four people to collect water from the neighbouring town and deliver it here once every two days. The only perk to the current situation is that because the service is so poor, the government provides the water free of charge.

Not having a regular water service makes life really tough. Limitations in water supply provoke people to clearly prioritise the things that they must do against the things that they would perhaps like to do. People’s houses are awash with buckets and tankards for storing water. Water for cooking or for dinking tends to come before, say, washing clothes or having a shower. Similar coping mechanisms and prioritizing seem to exist for internet use.

I think the case of the limited water supply is also useful for thinking about the way some people experience social media and the internet seen here in China. I was really drawn to the paper Blanchette gave at the UCL Department of Anthropology a couple of years ago where he outlined A Material History of Bits, making very clear the physical limitations of the digital, in contradiciton to how we sometimes assume it to be a potentially ‘unlimited’ object. I would say this is made almost even more clear in the China North fieldsite where the actual amount of bandwidth available becomes patently obvious for people in the same way as water does.

The internet does have it’s specificities though: one of the clear things that is coming out of our surveys is the significance of different modes of access and I think there are analogies to be made between the ways villagers cope with limitations imposed upon them in terms of various resources and their often incredibly lofty aspirations of what they wish to achieve.

The vast majority of our informants (over three-quarters) were China Mobile customers. While those who travelled regularly with work and business tended to have packages that afforded larger bandwidth allowances, and roaming outside of the province, the remaining half of these customers had packages that severely limited the mobile access that they had to the internet. These were normally packages that varied in cost between 10–20 RMB per month, offering between 30–70 megabyte bandwidth allowance respectively.

How was this experienced in people’s everyday lives? Just like with water, people developed clear and intelligent strategies in order to prioritise which things they believed to be essential. One lady in a village, explained that she had the 30 megabyte bandwidth package for 5 RMB a month said that she tended to only use QQ on her phone, because if she used both QQ and WeChat she would go over her limit, and all her friends were on QQ.

Others sometimes failed to understand the concept that there were distinct limits to the amount of bandwidth and resources available. A young man working in the town explained that he once watched a streamed movie with his girlfriend using his phone, without realizing that doing that would push him over the bandwidth limit. He had to pay 200RMB for the single month’s bill. He explained to me that he didn’t know about it, and wondered why he hadn’t just paid for his girlfriend to go to the cinema with him, at least that way he wouldn’t have strained his neck, he joked.

For others, they developed ways to get around such restrictions using their existing connections. One of the town’s young male hairdressers, joked to his friend that he willing to allow his assistant to pay his own phone bill in order to remove the block on his phone. The manager of a photocopying shop in the town used his connections in China Unicom (he was an authorized reseller/top-up point) to get a very low-cost 2G phone card (around 10RMB per month) that allowed him virtually free nationwide calls, and then relied on the broadband internet connection in his shop, which he spent most of every day in anyway.

While readers in the west are typically used to very generous bandwidth allowances offered by telecoms companies, it is important to remember that here in China, economic constraints such as bandwidth remain a very real barrier to social networking use for many. In this sense, we can see links with Shriram’s previous blog post where he mention’s electricity cuts as a major challenge facing people in his fieldsite. These regimes of shortages create economies where peoople may have to make difficult decisions about who they will communicate with, and how they will communicate with them.

Photo: Elisabetta Costa

We knew that Mark Zuckerberg’s stance about identity was probably not entirely correct. But I couldn’t imagine that in South-East Turkey his expectations could have been so massively disappointed. Mark Zuckerberg expended quite a lot of effort to propose a model based on “radical transparency” that could encourage people to have only one identity in their life. In The Facebook Effect he said that “The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly.”

If we knew that people have been appropriating Facebook in different ways from those envisaged by the founder of the social media, I couldn’t imagine before that a same person would have and use simultaneously 12 different accounts.

A 35 year old man, married with two children, owner of a small shop in the neighbourhood where I live, appeared very anxious when doing an interview with me. He was impatient to tell me how often he was using Facebook, then he immediately confessed to me that he is simultaneously active on twelve different Facebook accounts:

• One for work friends
• One for online gaming
• One for “normal” friends
• One for female friends that are not lovers
• One for local lovers
• One for foreign girls
• One for business (under the name of his shop)
• One for the 4 year-old daughter (under the name of the daughter)
• One account for the 6 year-old son (under the name of the son)
• Two more accounts he couldn’t tell me about. (I imagine they are in somehow related to politics, as it looks common here to secretly use Facebook for political issues. However I am not completely sure about it.)

This man cared deeply about Facebook’s privacy settings. His main concern was to not let his mistresses and children to be informed about the existence of other women. He was not worried about his wife because she was completely illiterate, not able to read and write and thus to use social media and the internet. But it’s not only a matter of hidden lovers. The example of this man showed that in South-East Turkey the numbers of different social environments that need completely different appropriate behaviour is large, and overall it showed that it’s extremely important to keep these different social spheres divided from each other. Then this example gives us interesting insights about what privacy and public-ness means here and reveals the social normatively according to which people control social situations created by the social media. As Dana Boyd has repeatedly affirmed, privacy is not dead. And in the Muslim Middle-East, especially, privacy is one of the most interesting topics related to the diffusion of the social media.

Photo: Elisabetta Costa

Our seven ethnographies on the impact of social media are all going to be carried out in seven different towns, in seven different countries. These have different sizes and characteristics, but as written in the research proposal they are all towns with links with bigger and cosmopolitan cities, and at the same time with surrounding rural villages and areas. Furthermore, in order to have more comparable data we decided to carry on the core of our analysis in an area of the town around 25000 inhabitants.

What I would like to stress more in this blog post is the internal cultural heterogeneity that I am coming across in my field-site. In the first two months spent in the field what has drawn my attention more has been the heterogeneity of the people living here. I am trying to meet new people every week and I am finding out that the distinctiveness of their cultural traits is quite relevant. Differences in religion, politics, social class, level of education, gender, ethnicity and age contribute to the shaping of different internet related social and cultural practices. My field-site is also inhabited by teachers, civil servants, university students, engineers, architects, NGO workers, medical doctors, nurses, polices men that came to work here from other parts of West and East Turkey. These persons actively contribute to the life of the city and to the shaping of different processes of social and cultural change. At this point of the research heterogeneity in the cultural traits of this small city’s inhabitants is definitely more visible than any sort of imaginable homogeneity. And what is even more interesting is that different forms of appropriation of the internet and social media seem to be perpetuating cultural differences instead of reducing them. It seems that any generalization about the appropriation of the internet in this small city can be built up only on the assumptions of great diversity. Following the anthropological methodology we know that through the comparisons of these different internet-related habits we will find out why and how dissimilarities emerge. But how can we compare these diversified and heterogeneous practices?

When I started to consider the different locals’ reactions to the Gezi Park protests that have been going on in the last two weeks in many cities of Turkey, my first feeling was to think in terms of the different national and transnational networks my informants were part of. However I believe that categories of networks used to describe communication processes and internet usage brings scholars – and journalists – to think more and more in terms of connection and to not see the rest. As Marilyn Strathern (2002) pointed out “Its epistemological effect (making connections) makes thinkers lazy.” She also reminds us that the more we talk about connection the more divisions become visible. For this reason I believe that a comparison between different practices emerging in the field should be linked first of all to the work of political ideologies at a “micro-level” and only secondly to networks. Ideology and the articulation of hegemonic (and counter-hegemonic) positions within the nation are important. I believe that it is through the intersection between these two different perspectives (network/ ideologies and hegemony) that we can understand more in depth why, and how, distinct and contradictory internet-related practices emerge.

References:

Strathern Marilyn. 2002. “Not giving the game away”  In: Gingrich A. and Richard F. (eds.) Anthropology by comparison. London: Routledge

Photo by Muffet (Creative Commons)

Having described our project as the Global Social Media Impact Study, we realised there was just one little thing we hadn’t actually done. This was to define, at least for our purposes, what we mean by the words ‘social media’. Our studies are ethnographies, there is pretty much nothing we would not wish to include. This includes polymedia, the study of how all our various forms of communication interact with each other. But we also wanted to flag the degree to which we are concerned with new kinds of social communication. Our project talks about social networks or social network sites but sometimes these are hard to define. We don’t really focus on what sociologists mean by social networks since we may end up largely working on groups such as kinship while that tradition is more focused on ego-cantered networks that at least according to Rainie and Wellman may replace more traditional groups. While SNS includes Facebook and QQ (but does it include Twitter?) and is a bit too narrow and technical as a definition of social media.

So at least for present purposes let me suggest another meaning for the words ‘social media’. Our primary concern is with the development of communication media that goes beyond the dyadic, being open to a group of persons. Social media helps draw attention to the development of a series of practices of communication which lie between traditionally dyadic forms such as the phone call or indeed most webcam conversations, and on the other hand public broadcasting as in most traditional media. Social media could imply that the communication is social in the sense of going to a larger group, but social also in that it helps create and maintain relationships rather than the one-way communication of broadcast media. We don’t want to be pedantic or overly semantic. It doesn’t matter a whole lot that we can’t really find precise boundaries for such a definition. Take WhatsApp. This app includes both dyadic texting but also group texting. If we are focusing on social media then our prime concern is with the latter, but obviously we would also take note of the former as part of polymedia. In conclusion as long as we don’t worry too much about precise boundaries, it might be useful to have at least a rough idea of what the words social media might imply about the ways communications have changed over the last two decades. An orientation to the social as opposed to merely the personal seems to keep us close to the intuitive semantics of these words, and that is surely a good thing.

On a train, the Chinese woman watching a movie on her smartphone while cracking sunflower seeds. The man next to her has also been staring at his mobile phone screen for a while.

Now I am in China. Thanks to the taxi detour which sent me to a wrong train station I had to take a slow train rather than a high speed one to go to the fieldsite – which turned out to be coincidentally rewarding since the majority of the passengers on this slow train was Chinese rural migrant workers who exactly fit my research target population.

Let me first contextualize the trip. It was not in a peak period, the capacity of a train carriage is 112 persons, however there were 143 persons in the no.5 carriage when I left. Train staff closed all the windows to prevent people from buying cheaper food from local vendors at each station through an open window which would undercut the food sales on train. As a result the whole carriage smelt like a smoking area since people were allowed to smoke in the vestibules between two carriage’s theoretically with open windows. Although it is difficult to categorize neatly what people were doing; I still managed to do a bit of counting when walking around in my carriage.

Nobody was engaged with any paper-based media, neither with books or reading a newspaper.

About 5-7 people were walking around as well, looking for a seat or just without any clear purpose.

Three groups of people (around 15 people) were playing cards; at least 30 people were staring at the screens of their mobile phones (four – fifths of them used smartphones, and among the smartphones which I managed to see clearly, Lenovo seemed to dominate the market, very few Apple phones were found).

3 – 5 people were chatting on the phone for a long time (more than 15 mins) with ordinary volume, or a even louder volume to make themselves be heard.

15–18 people were cracking 瓜子 guazi (sunflower seeds which were sold with shell and people need to crack the shell with their teeth)

Roughly one quarter of the passengers were engaged in conversation with their neighbors, or just looking around; and another quarter managed to sleep in various positions. When I closed my eyes, all kinds of noises – from the train, the cracking sound of sunflower seeds, people talking, and the shouts of vendors, were mingled together, and became even more overwhelming.

Among all these passengers I was particularly interested a group of  ‘打工仔’ da gong zai (male young migrant workers) who crowed at the entrance to the carriage. There were seven of them, coming from Suzhou to Guangzhou. None of them got a seat ticket, so they needed to stand for almost 10 hours during the trip. When I met them, three of them were playing cards, sitting on the floor in the area between two carriages, and others were smoking. In my last 1-hour trip I gave up my seat in the carriage and moved to the smoking area, standing there, talking with them, passively smoking away. All of them came from the same village in Guangzhou (south China province), and worked in a low-market photography workshop in Suzhou. The oldest one was 24 years old, and the youngest one was only 15 years old. None of them had a high school certificate. All of them had smartphones but they couldn’t use them because they didn’t have enough money left in their phone and couldn’t top them up being outside the city where they bought the SIM card.  In China the majority of mobile services is “pay as you go”, which means no contract is needed and is very convenient for people who only stay in a place for a relatively short period.

It was shocking to find that all of them, even the 15 year old, consumed a lot of cigarettes – on average a package (12 cigarettes) per day, which accounted for one third of their daily expenses (700 RMB per month). When talking about the reason for smoking, one told me “see, we have nothing to do, smoking kills time!” Another added, “What we are smoking are not cigarettes,” and the rest continued “but  寂寞 jimo (loneliness)!” and everybody laughed. The joke about loneliness actually is an online meme – the most frequently quoted line is  我不寂寞，因为寂寞陪者我 wo bu ji mo, ji mo pei zhe wo. “I am not alone, loneliness is always with me”. A joke was definitely not evident enough to reflect how they felt bored or lonely in life, which however expressed itself through the way of the whole carriage of migrant workers doing all kinds of repeated and time-killing activities, such as cracking sunflower seeds, card playing and smoking. After 1 hour of chatting, all of them were more than happy to exchange QQ (the dominant social media in China) numbers with me, and urged me to accept their friend request. It also seemed that QQ in a way functions similar to smoking as one put it this way “it’s so easy to spend a whole night on QQ, gaming or just chatting!”

I am reluctant to jump to any conclusion of the relationship between boredom / loneliness and smoking or QQ usage among rural migrant workers, however after my first encounter with my migrant worker friends I think it would be very interesting to look at this issue in my research afterwards.

Photo by quinn anya (Creative Commons)

A debate sparkled recently after president Barack Obama said the internet was the result of a government project. Analysts from mainstream media shared their perspectives suggesting that corporations, some intelligent people, everyone or indeed the government should claim responsibility for starting this communication revolution and the topic became a series of posts at the anthropological blog Savage Minds. But amid these conflicting views there is room left for at least one more position: that no one invented the internet.

Yes, the US government paid for Arpanet, the “Eve” of computer networks, but it was not meant to be a communication device for people. As Kevin Kelly has argued earlier, nobody predicted the arrival of the internet and actually, he adds, until quite recently many people doubted that a form of entertainment based on typing would convince more than a handful of enthusiasts to give up TV.

One of the ways of conceiving the internet is as a tool for group communication. Shirky* explains that networked computer communication combines the interactivity of telephones and the reach of television or radio to provide a solution for many people to interact with each other. And this particular element – the possibility of group conversations – was brought to Arpanet by chance as one of the computer engineers installed extra officially a program for email.

The point is that, until then, this email-like program allowed people sharing the same computer to leave messages to one another (computers were quite expensive in the 1960s). As Arpanet connected various computers, this service opened unforeseen possibilities. Suddenly people living apart in different cities could communicate in an interesting fashion: not just it was possible to have more than two participants, they did not have to be simultaneously connected.

As the story about the internet is reviewed, one particular bit seems to always be present: after the installation of this first email program, email quickly became the primary reason for people using the network. It is said that in less than two years, ¾ of the data circulating through connected computers consisted of this kind of text messages meant for humans to use. I feel that what makes this minimal bit of historic data relevant is that it portrays our own surprise with this new communication tool. In other words, what is surprising here is that Arpanet ostensibly belonged to the military, but was quietly re-purposed to serve a different function without anybody even knowing about it.

This argument is similar but significantly different from Steven Johnson’s, who defended the internet as a product of a collective effort. The difference is that for him there is an intention attracting the multiple collaborators working together – as in projects like Linux – whereas through this new perspective, there wasn’t one or not the same kind of intention.

So maybe the argument here is that the internet, in similarity to cities, languages and cultures, resulted not from our abity to gaze at the future and forge new scientific miracles, but rather from something everyone has and is very parochial and simple: our drive for social interaction.