Satu keluarga, satu komputer (One home, one computer): Cultural accounts of ICTs in south and southeast asia

Design Issues

Volumn 22, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 35-55

  Bell, Genevieve ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

COMPUTER; DESIGN; INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY;

EID: 33646367423     PISSN: 07479360     EISSN: 15314790     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/desi.2006.22.2.35     Document Type: Review

References (59)

1. These ethnographic moments are taken from my field notes. This paper started as a conversation with Don Slater, and I am grateful for his interest and encouragement. The text was fleshed out in discussions with Nina Wakeford, Malene Skaeved, Michael O'Higgins, Joseph Kaye, Katrina Jungnickel, Eunyun Park, Debashis Chaudhuri, David Ashley Brown, Greg Welch, Christine Riley, David Tennenhouse, and my colleagues in Peoples and Practices Research; and I thank them all. My paper has benefited from the close readings of Adam Yuet Chau, Paul Silverstein, Ken Anderson, and Diane Bell; and I am grateful for their suggestions and patience. I also wish to thank the various organizations within Intel that continue to support this kind of research, and have found value in its results.
2. R. Silverstone and E. Hirsch, Consuming Technologies: Media and Information in Domestic Spaces (London: Routledge, 1992), 1.
3. As discussed in ibid.,
4. J. Sefton-Green, Digital Divisions: Youth Culture in the Age of Multimedia (London: UCL Press, 1998);
5. D. Miller and D. Slater, The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach (New York: New York University Press, 2000);
6. and Wireless World, B.R. Brown, R. Harper, and N. Green, eds. (London: Springer Verlag, 2001).
7. The New Rich in Asia: Mobile Phones, McDonald's and Middle-Class Revolution, R. Robison and D.S.G. Goodman, eds. (London: Routledge, 1996).
8. L. Nader, "Up the Anthropologist - Perspectives Gained from Studying Up" in Reinventing Anthropology, D. Hymes, ed. (New York: Pantheon Press, 1969).
9. M.M. Overbey and K.M.Dudley, Anthropology and Middle-Class Working Families (Arlington, VA: American Anthropological Association. 2000), I.
10. As discussed in Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World, Carol Breckenridge, ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995);
11. The New Rich in Asia: Mobile Phones, McDonald's, and Middle-Class Revolution, R. Robison and D.S.G. Goodman, eds. (London: Routledge, 1996);
12. Culture and Privilege in Capitalist Asia, M. Pinches, ed. (London: Routledge, 1999);
13. J. Farrer, Opening Up: Youth Sex Culture and Market Reform in Shanghai (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002);
14. and J. Farquahar, Appetites: Food and Sex in Post-Socialist China (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).
15. As discussed in P. Rengier, Singapore: City-State in South-East Asia (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1987);
16. Urban Spaces in Contemporary China, D.R. Davis, Kraus, B. Naughton, and E. Perry, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995);
17. B. Yeoh and L. Kong, Portraits of Places: History, Community, and Identity in Singapore (Singapore: Times Editions, 1995);
18. Emerging World Cities in Pacific Asia, F. Lo and Y. Yeyng, eds. (New York: United Nations University Press, 1999);
19. and Five Cities: Modeling Asian Urban Population-Environment Dynamics, G.D. Ness and M. Low, eds. (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 2000).
20. Although there have been attempts in popular literature [i.e., D. Sheff, China Dawn: The Story of a Technology and Business Revolution (New York: Harper Business, 2002)
21. and Stan Stalnaker, Hub Culture (New York: Wiley, 2002)].
22. As discussed in International Satellite Broadcasting in South Asia: Political, Economic, and Cultural Implications, S. Melkote, P. Shields, and B. Agrawal, eds. (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1998)
23. and D. Sheff, China Dawn: The Story of a Technology and Business Revolution, S. Melkote, P. Shields, and B. Agrawal, eds. (New York: Harper Business, 2002).
24. As discsussed in J. Hong, The Intemationalization of Television in China: The Evolution of Ideology, Society, and Media Since the Reform (New Haven, CT: Praeger, 1998);
25. J. Lull, Inside Family Viewing: Ethnographic Research on Television's Audiences in China (London: Routledge, 1990);
26. G. Mehta, Karma Cola: Marketing the Mystic East (New York: Fawcett Columbine,1990);
27. P. Manuel, Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993);
28. Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World, Carol Breckenridge, ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995);
29. The Secret Politics of Our Desires: Innocence, Culpability, and Indian Popular Culture, A. Nandy, ed. (London: Zed Books, 1998);
30. P.G.L Chew and A. Kramer-Dahl, Heading Culture: Textual Practices in Singapore (Singapore: Times Academic Press, 1999);
31. P. Kitley, Television, Nation, and Culture in Indonesia (Athens, OH: Ohio University Center for International Studies, 2000);
32. and P. Mankekar, Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of Television, Womanhood, and Nation in Post-Colonial India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000).
33. I work at Intel - a leading suppliers of semiconductors. I am a researcher, an anthropologist, in Peoples and Practices Research, an interdisciplinary team of researchers and designers that is part of Intel's Corporate Technology Group. Since it was established in 1995, Peoples and Practices Research has been charged with the task of understanding people and their daily practices, with the objective of finding new users and new uses for technology. We spend time in domestic and urban spaces, hanging out with people as they go about their daily lives in the United States, Western Europe, Latin American, and Asia. We attempt to translate insights about peoples' behavior into product concepts, technology innovations, and strategic long-range planning. In all of ourwork, I attempt to understand peoples' experiences holistically rather than just in relation to, and interactions with, technology. See T. Salvador, G. Bell, and K. Anderson, "Design Ethnography," Design Management Journal 10:4 (1999): 9-12;
34. G. Bell, "Looking Across the Atlantic: Using Ethnographic Methods to Make Sense of Europe," Intel Technical Journal online at: http://developer.intel.com/technology/itj/q32001/artides/art_1.htm;
35. G. Bell and Joseph Kaye, "Designing Technology for Domestic Spaces: A Kitchen Manifesto," Gastronomica 2 (2002): 46-62.
36. G. Marcus, "Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography," Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 117.
37. Households have been compensated for their participation, and have been guaranteed privacy. Thus, throughout this paper material drawn from interviews and household visits is disguised through pseudonyms.
38. As discussed in T. Salvador, G. Bell, and K. Anderson, "Design Ethnography";
39. G. Bell, "Looking Across the Atlantic: Using Ethnographic Methods to Make Sense of Europe";
40. and G. Bell and Joseph Kaye, "Designing Technology for Domestic Spaces: A Kitchen Manifesto:"2: 46-62.
41. I am grateful for the assistance of Debashis Chaudhuri (Oregon State University) and Adam Yuet Chau (Skidmore College) throughout this project.
42. As discussed in G. Bell, Making Sense of Museums: The Museum as Cultural Ecology
43. and G. Bell and Joseph Kaye, "Designing Technology for Domestic Spaces: A Kitchen Manifesto."
44. G. Murdock, P. Hartmann, and P. Gray, "Contextualizing Home Computing: Resources and Practices" in Consuming Technologies: Media and information in Domestic Spaces, R. Silverstone and E. Hirsch, eds. (London: Routledge, 1992), 146.
45. In China, it appears from earlier research I conducted that computers, themselves, might operate as a kind of status symbol, without or without a connection to the Internet.
46. This system recently has come under fire forfinancial mismanagement, and probably will be revoked.
47. K. Sen and D.T Hill, Media, Culture, and Politics in Indonesia (Australia: Oxford University Press, 2000), 195.
48. As discussed in C. Cockburn, "The Circuit of Technology: Gender, Identity, and Power" in Consuming Technologies: Media and Information in Domestic Spaces, R. Silverstone and E. Hirsch, eds. (London: Routledge, 1992);
49. S. Livingstone, "The Meaning of Domestic Technologies: A Personal Construct Analysis of Familial Gender Relations" in Consuming Technologies: Media and information in Domestic Spaces, R. Silverstone and E. Hirsch, eds. (London: Routledge, 1992):
50. Leslie Haddon, "Explaining ICT Consumption: The Case of the Home Computer" in Consuming Technologies: Media and Information in Domestic Spaces, R. Silverstone and E. Hirsch, eds. (London: Routledge, 1992); and S. Hawthorne, Wild Politics (Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 2002).
51. On April 1, 2002, the Indian government is set to again drastically reduce taxes on phone charges, following another significant reduction in 2001. As a result, long distance calling costs should be reduced by upwards of twenty-five percent.
52. Fiber optic cables are being laid by several companies in major Indian cities, including Hyderabad, and it is hoped that broadband will offer better and more reliable Internet access, although currently its high price is a major barrier.
53. Miller and Slater note a similar use of the Internet among members of the Trinidadian diaspora. See D. Miller and D. Slater, The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach (New York: New York University Press, 20001. In India, family members also are exchanging digital images. Although there are almost no digital cameras available in India due to their prohibitive cost, most photo processing stores will scan selected photos onto disc, or provide digital development, allowing Indian families to participate in the reciprocal exchange of family snapshots.
54. There are words in most Indian languages for this. In Hindi, the word is gapp is used to describe a certain kind of social event, or social interaction, where everyone just chats. In Telugu, it is gappa, which literally means story-telling, or story. In Bengali, the word is adda, which translates directly as a place where people congregate, but it is used to describe chitchat among friends.
55. Megawati's government recently imposed a hefty tax on domestic phone charges, and it is hard to calculate what impact this might have on these nascent chatting practices.
56. There are still other "cyber cafes" used for checking e-mail, but these are much smaller and off the beaten track. There also is a whole culture of smart diversions in the malls, including cyber-game arcades and photo and video booths. The most recent of these is called the "Video Club" (www.idi.com.ukl which, for ten Singapore dollars, allows you to produce a three-minute video which is burned on a CD disc that can be played on the computer and the DVD/VTR player. This machine is the latest version of the older Japanese photo-booth mall installations, where consumers paid for instant photos on stickers or strips.
57. There is an interesting tension here between the notion that a personal computer in Asia only has meaning when connected up to the Internet and the fact that there are cyber cafes that are not connected to the Internet. I think that, in part, the answer lies in a shifting definition of the "Internet," where it is not so much about what is connected, but that connectivity exists. So in the Penang cyber arcades, connectivity between machines at the site is a form of the Internet, albeit an unexpected one.
58. The Mumbai High Court has convened a special committee to make recommendations regarding access to Internet pornography at cyber cafes around Maharashtra. "The six-member committee wants the High Court to issue a binding 'direction' that would make all cafes in the State of Maharashtra (of which Mumbai is the capital) responsible for requiring customers to show photoidentity cards, recording their personal details, maintaining logs of all the sites the users have visited, and restricting minors to machines that do not have cubicles." (visit: http://www.wired.com/ news/politics/0,1283,50615,00.html).
59. P. Kitley, Television, Nation, and Culture in Indonesia (Athens, OH: Ohio University Center for International Studies, 2000).