New Talk "Designing for Trust: How China's Free Lunch avoided The Curse of Kelvin" and Notes from Media Evolution's The Conference

Designing for Trust: How China's Free Lunch avoided The Curse of Kelvin by prioritizing the users's needs over the system's needs
Free Lunch is a non-profit in China that uses a crowd-sourced reporting and monitoring system to gain donor's trust. The system is filled with inefficiencies and redundancies, but it's very good at getting people to donate and participate. How did it accomplish this? Instead of designing for efficiency, Free Lunch was designing for trust. In a historical parallel, the measurement of electricity consumption in the 19th century reveals that accuracy in measurement was compromised to gain consumers' trust in devices. Both Free Lunch and and electricity measurement reveal that making products/services more usable may require us to prioritize the user's need. Several design principals should be considered when designing for trust. 

When I agreed to particpate in Media Evolution’s, The Conference, in Malmö, Sweden, I was still fresh out of my fieldwork in China. One of the biggest issues ethnographers encounter after spending years and years in the field is that they become myopic. They begin to think that their fieldsite is super special and that they are witnessing a phenomenon that has never happened in human history. 

I think my fieldsites are awesome - I love all the places I research. But the important thing when doing global fieldwork is to find the connections between places.  So I wanted to give a talk that would help me step into another place - a historical space. 

In psychology, it is said that we repeat the same trauma until we understand why we do it. I think history works the same way. We repeat the same processes until we understand why. One of these processes is our obsession for efficiency. I was led to a really amazing book by G.J.N. Gooday, The Morals of Measurement: Accuracy, Irony, and Trust in Late Victorian Electrical Practice. After reading it, I started to dig into the history of electricity and saw all these parallels with what I was witnessing in China - that what users need are systems that they can trust, not necessarily the most efficient systems. 

Principles to consider when designing for trust

During the last half of my talk, I discuss several core principals that need to be considered during the design process. These prcinciples are most relevant for those of us who create participatory and social media oriented platforms because these communities collapse and or unable to form without trust:

1. Lower the threshold for your users to establish trust. Make it easy for them to judge the veracity of information sources.
2. Conduct a thorough ethnographic study on how users conceive of information & trust. Because conceptions about what information is varies depending on cultural and social contexts and understanding this affects the design process. 
3. Ask what user-centered values you want to bring into the service and product design such as transparency or familiarity. 
4. Treat these values as healthy constraints for innovation,   not against innovation
5. But at the same be clear about what values are being comprised. Understand that some design compromises are only appropriate for certain contexts. Compromises in efficiency may make sense for one group of users but not another. 
6. Design minimally enough so that you can watch what user centered values emerge out of the interaction.
7. Avoid the Curse of Kelvin - just because something isn't quantifiable doesn't mean that it is value-less (

Click to read more ...

Fast Company feature: a slideshow and interview about my research

Every ethnographer needs a break from their fieldsite. When I came back to the US in July, I didn't want to think about China. I just wanted to sleep, play with my doggy, and eat fresh food. But when Fast Company reached out to do a profile on me for their Generation Flux series, I couldn't say no!

I had a great time chatting Adam Bluestein on skype. 

I was really happy with the interview and the slideshow that created with pictures from my fieldsite. Their sister site, Fast Co.Exist, re-ran the story with even more pictures!

Check out the interviews with other Generation Fluxers. And do look at the original Febuary issue of Fast Company that featured the original fluxers - especially the interviews with my friends, Baratunde and Danah Boyd!

Lift Talk Notes - Dancing with Handcuffs: The Changing Geography of Trust in China

When I moved to China to do a year of continuous fieldwork, I didn't want to leave the country to give any talks. But when I got an invite from Lift Conference to speak, I didn't want to turn it down. I have been a fan of Lift Conferences for a long time and it was an honor to be invited. So I skipped out to Geneva for a week to speak at LIFT12. 

 

I was very excited to have LIFT be the first place I share my analysis. I chose to talk about the changing geography of trust as people and institutions are re-negotiating power in the age of online sociality in China. An excerpt of my talk from LIFT:

In her talk at Lift 12, she focuses on a story you may have heard of, concerning a student who ended up making international headlines for throwing shoes at the architect of China's internet censorship infrastructure and then become the hero for information freedom worldwide. Tricia tells us what happened to the student and how the outcomes were dependent on a variety of factors that tells us a lot about how we socialize and build trust online."

I was really happy with how the talk went. (some notes from Stephanie Booth's live-blogg of my talk) There are so many other things I wanted to include so I want to elaborate on them here. But before I continue, there were many other speakers who had amazing talks that definitely are worth checking out.  I've listed my favorites at the bottom of this post!  

AHA MOMENT WITH CLAY SHIRKY in CHINA

I've been thinking about how communities form online for a long time. One of the best writers on this topic is Clay Shirky. When I read Here Comes Everybody, Clay summarized piles and piles of scholarly research all into a few pages without any academic jargon.  (Side note: the talent of conciseness and accessibility is sorely under-appreciated and under-developed in academia, and I would even go as far to say discouraged.)

 

Click to read more ...

Article in Wired UK: 'Building transparency in China, one lunch at a time'

After speaking at LIFT 2012 in Geneva, Switzerland, I got to spend some time with co-speaker, David Rowan, who is the editor of Wired UK. David has spent a lot of time researching how the internet is changing Africa. He gave a talk about at LIFT 2012 and wrote an article about it. 

After hanging out with Daivd, he asked me to write a piece for Wired's July issue.

It was hard to chose a topic becuase I witnessed so much in my fieldsite. I ended up writing about Free Lunch, a program that I've been researching for the last year. 

Here's the article! Building transparency in China, one lunch at a time

I've spent a lot of time with Deng Fei, the creator of Free Lunch. We traveled to participating schools in the country side and to his home. It'll take more than just one article to share what I saw, but this is a start! 

I want to thank my amazing research assisstant, Reginald Zhu. Without Reginald, I woudln't have known about Free Lunch. Reginald is also the one who tracked down Deng Fei when he gave a talk at Wuhan University. He was incredibley resourceful and resorted to spy tactics to track Deng Fei down!

Reginald has been at my side for several of our fieldwork trips out to the villages and to Free Lunch's office. Free Lunch was so impressed with Reginald that they invited him to be an intern during his summer break. 

My other research assistants, Iris Ruan, Pheona Chen, Allemande Niu, and Shayla Qiu, also provided invaluable support. 

Op-Ed with An Xiao Mina in Wired's Threat Level: Real-Name Registration Threatens the Lively World of China’s Microblogs

As researchers of the Chinese inter-webs, An Xiao Mina and I always get lots of questions about what happens on Weibo. People think that the only thing that happens on Weibo is censorship or resistance. In reality, it's somewhere in the middle. So we wanted to write an article that would capture what really is happening on Weibo. It's in English and Chinese below. Enjoy! 

Real Name Registration Threatens the Lively World of China's Microblogs - Wired - 4.2012 ［中文: 实名制威胁中国微博的活跃世界]

Dumplings for Sale: published in That's Shanghai & a note on what the censors didn't allow

I contributed the lead story in That's Shanghai's February issue, Dumplings for Sale. I was really pleased with how the piece turned out. They even included a section about my research, where I explain how Dumplings for Sale seems to be far from a case study of tech use, acually fits into my larger research project on trust and the internet in China.

Though, one thing that's missing from the story is an entire paragraph that I wrote on the relationship between the chengguan and the street vendors. The State Council Information Office censored this paragraph: 

"Officially know as City Urban Administrative and Law Enforcement Bureau (城市管理行政执法局), it is not really clear what the chengguan are supposed to do. But what they are known for doing is making migrants' live miserable in cities across China. There are many stories of chengguan beating vendors, smashing their products or food, and taking bribes. It is also common to hear about chengguan killing street vendors. A recent incident in Guizhou led to a riot when a chengguan killed a disabled migrant. Stories of chengguan exploitation of power are so pervasive that appeasing them with bribes becomes the key to a street vendor's success. Giving bribes is a matter of life or death. But for migrants who do not have enough money to bribe, they have to constantly be on the run. Constant running means that a street vendor cannot establish a business in the long term. So for a street vendor like this family I am with, finding a place to set up a cart in a chengguan-free site is a matter of survival and success.  A stable place to sell food would give them a stable income to expand their business or go into another line of work."

I am grateful that the censors only cut out that section, they were quite flexible on the other stuff I wrote. Another lesson learned about China, it's important to learn how to write between the lines; keeping it ambiguous is sometimes the best strategy. 

Here is the entire issue of That's Shanghai if you want to read the pdf version and the other articles in the issue. [download magazine]. 

That's Shanghai is really developing a wonderful voice.  I am impressed with the editors for featuring human-interest stories that touch the edges of society. Thanks to editor, Leslie Jones, for all your guidance! And I must also thanks Dominic Tan for referring me to Leslie during her visit to IDEO! It's a small world. 

And for the Chinese readers, Kate Jing, a wonderful blogger who writes in Chinese and English translated the first part of the aritlce! Thanks Jing!   [饺子：分享中文版，PDF 版；Chinese translation of article by Kate Jing, PDF] 

Presented paper that I co-wrote with Barrry Brown at Mobile HCI 2011

I got to spend a wonderful few days in Stockholm, Sweden for Mobile HCI 2011. I presented a paper that Barry Brown and I co-wrote about our research in mobile use in Mexico, Ethnography of the telephone: Changing uses of communication technology in village life. Here is the pdf and the abstract of our paper:

While mobile HCI has encompassed a range of devices and systems, telephone calls on cellphones remain the most prevalent contemporary form of mobile technology use. In this paper we document ethnographic work studying a remote Mexican village’s use of cellphones alongside conventional phones, satellite phones and the Internet. While few homes in the village we studied have running water, many children have iPods and the Internet cafe in the closest town is heavily used to access YouTube, Wikipedia, and MSN messenger. Alongside cost, the Internet fits into the communication patterns and daily routines in a way that cellphones do not. We document the variety of communication strategies that balance cost, availability and complexity. Instead of finding that new technologies replace old, we find that different technologies co-exist, with fixed phones co-existing with instant message, cellphones and shared community phones. The paper concludes by discussing how we can study mobile technology and design for settings defined by cost and infrastructure availability.

This paper is a shorter version of a paper that we presented at the International Communication Association (ICA) [pdf] in Chicago. I learned a lot through re-writing this paper with Barry (who publishes papers in his sleep).

For me, the new version was difficult to write because we had to cut so many details out from our original ICA paper, but it gave us an opportunity to tell a different story about our data. While we had to leave out a lot of data, it allowed us to highlight our data in different ways. I personally don't like writing academic papers, but if there is anyone I would do it with again, it would be Barry.

This was my first time at Mobile HCI, so it was super fun to meet new faces and see old friends. But best of all, I got to spend time with Barry, who is now moving from UC San Diego to Mobile Life in Stockholm to start a new research group. Sadness for me, but wonderful news for his colleagues in Sweden.

Speaking at Mobile Life in Stockholm, Sweden.

I had a great day speaking at Mobile Life VINN Excellence Center in Sweden.

The Mobile Life research centre at Stockholm University with SICS and Interactive Institute as strategically important research partners, is located in Kista outside Stockholm, Sweden. The Centre started in 2007 and has funding until 2017. After three years, the Mobile Life Centre has grown to be about 50 researchers, exploring experiential, leisure and playful mobile and ubiquitous interactions.

The research is interdisciplinary, involving researchers from computer science, interaction design, sociology, psychology but also game designers, artists, dancers, and fashion experts. The Centre’s competitive edge lies in making serious research on what we might normally portray as “unserious” activities in collaboration with our industry partners Ericsson, Nokia, Microsoft Research, TeliaSonera, Company P and Bambuser.

It was lovely to take a break from doing fieldwork in China. I got to talk about design in China with non-elite users and hear a bit about what the researchers were doing. 

I hope I get to visist again as my dear advisor, Barry Brown, is now joining the center and starting a new research group.

Thanks to Oskar Juhlin and Barry Brown for organizing the talk!

"Technology for Migrant Workers" Interview in Agenda Magazine

 I had a lovely time chatting with Abby McBride from Agenda Magazine.

Here's the article: Tracking Technology Among China's Non-Elite [pdf download].

I shared my thoughts on what Digital Urbanism 2.0 will look like when 3G smartphone use will be more pervasive and affordable. We also talked about the kinds of inequalities migrants face, what kind of dreams they have, and how they make do tough situations.

By the end of the interview, I admitted that the Chinese internet is absolutely overwhelming. There are so many new products, ideas, and practices emerging everyday that it's impossible to keep up. Luckily I have a great team of research assistants. If you're curious about what my research assistants are reading, check out our open tumblr blog. And for the latest info from my fieldwork, my reseach blog is Bytes of China.

The best part about chatting with Agenda Magazine was receiving the actual magazine and learning about all the other people who were interviewed and doing amazing work and creating really cool stuff.

• Ai Ching Goh from Piktochart tells us that we call can be info visualists!
• Fritz Demopolous, co-founder of the largest Chinese travel website, Qunar, talked about his experiences from the early days of the Chinese internet.
• Josh Ong talks about how his top agent role as an Apple Insider reporter.
• Frank Yu shares what inspired him to co-found Kwestr.

What struck me in all of these interviews were each of their undestanding of the "social."

*Thanks Jennifer Thome and Abby McBride! :)

The Atlantic covers my research on Weibo Instant Photo Phenomenon

Alexis Madrigal, senior editor of The Atlantic, wrote about how Weibo users are using it as a dating site based off of my research on Weibos' Instant Photo Singles Rescue Phenomenon. 

Madrigal makes a great point about this phenomenon:

...one excellent thing about the development of the Chinese Internet is that Americans get to look across the Pacific at something technically like our own tubes, but distinct along many vectors. Let it serve as a reminder that these systems are both contingent (i.e. stuff just happens) and influenced by the culture in which they're implanted.

I am in love with Madrigal's writing. I have a few favorite writers (e.g. Paul Ford, Anil Dash, James Gleick, Adam Gopnik, Tom Standage) who blend technology, everyday life, and big social issues into a warm blanket, and Madrigal is one of them. I just bought his newly released book Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology. I can't wait to dig into it. Another one of my favorite oldie Madrigal piece is his sensitive and insightful reply to Zadi Smith's claim that facebook was making us less social, Literary Writers and Social Media: A Response to Zadie Smith. I subscribe to his RSS feed and put in folder, "FAVE WRITERS."

An Xiao Mina's Article About my Research on Chinese Migrants living in Internet Cafes (Huffington Post)

Design strategist, new media artist, and digital community builder Anxiao Mina interviewed me for her latest article in Huffington Post on internet cafes in China, The 21st Century Saloon: A Peek Inside China's Wangba, or Internet Cafes. I really like the way Anxiao narrates our interview - she captured the essence of our trans-Atlantic conversation! (I have written more details about this talk in my post-SXSW notes here.) Here is the interview below, or you can read it on Huffungton Post. Thanks Anxiao!

It's 5 in the morning on a Monday, and California native Tricia Wang is waking up in a second-tier city in central China. An ethnographer and researcher in how disadvantaged groups like migrant and low-income communities use technology, she immerses herself in her research environment.

Today's office is a smoky wangba (网吧: Internet cafe), where she was lucky enough to snag a couch to crash on. Many of the patrons around her are sleeping upright, or sideways, at their desks. All around her are computers, computers, computers, and hundreds of individuals, almost all of them migrants from different parts of rural China.

Click to read more ...

My new blog about my research in China: Bytes of China!

I’ve just moved to China to fieldwork on how non-elite users, youth, and migrants are using cellphones and the internet. I’ve decided to keep a separate blog of all my ethnographic observations so that it doesn’t get mixed in with my general observations about culture and technology on Cultural Bytes.

I will still blog on Cultural Bytes, but just not as often as most of my brain for the next year will be focused on just China. If I have Bytes of China posts that are specifically about culture and technology, I will repost them to Cultural Bytes.

See you on Bytes of China! Here is the RSS feed.

More about Bytes of China and the themes that I will be writing about.

Fun interview about Chinese migrants and internet cafes with Benjamen Walker's radio show, Too Much Information

I love the way my interview turned out on Benjamen Walker's Too Much Information. We met in Austin, Texas at SXSW and he ended up super fun to work with.

Benjamen has traveled to China several times and the converstaions we had was so refreshing. He didn't ask the same old questions that reporters usually go with.

We had a lovely conversation about the topics I had brought up in my SXSW presentation on Chinese migrants. Here's the episode below, Too Much Internet.  My interview is the last one starting at 38:45 (easier to select time code with the soundcloud file).

And check out the amazing line up of people he has on his show from Paul Ford to Analee Newitz!

Click to read more ...

Slides/Notes for my SXSW talk on my research in China & some reflections about SXSW

En route to China, I stopped in Austin to give a talk at my first time at SXSW Interactive. What did I overhear the most at SXSW? 

Web 3.0 is here!  The reign of the virtual! Networked Sensors take over the world! This is all so new! Singularity man! Social media for good! The age of social media has dawned! Get online or perish! Gaming for good! Game to change the world!

These statements reflect the general level of techno-utopianism that I find at conferences on anything related to the internet. There usually is little room for critical analysis or social historicizing.

As Roy Christopher points out, we live in an age of information abundance but at times it seems like our abilities to historically contextualize current events is scarce. He's right and this particulary true for the SXSW audience who is so focused on the "new" that the "old" seems irrelevant. I have lots of qualms with technological uptopianism, but I think what's make it worse is historical amnesia. Many of the talks seem to think that the technology itself - or this year the focus was on social media or games themselves will solve our reality and make us "better."  An example of this is Simon Mainwaring's We First: How Social Media can Remake Capitalism and Build a Better World and Jane McDonigal's Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better.  The ideas promoted in these books aren't necessarily wrong, but I find the analysis in these books resting more on future talk than on grounded research.

So for my first SXSW, I decided to give a talk that would not only illustrate my analysis and research on internet users in China, but also provide historical context for what we're seeing in China.  I explored the idea of telling a story that would be an old one - a story that would historicize the internet so that we could see how human emotions can create powerful reactions that repeat itself in differnet mediums, processes, and outcomes. I did this by paralleling the contemporary panic around rural-urban migrants in Chinese internet cafes to the 20th century panic around Italian and Irish immigrant in American saloons.  

Click to read more ...

Moving to China to do research! Will be blogging my year on BytesofChina.com!

Good day world! it’s finally happening! I’m moving to China to do my research! wooohoo!

So I’m moving to China to do my research, and then coming back to write something that I hope to buddha doesn’t kill my soul to write creative non-fiction. (here’s some more details about my research). I have a post on my personal blog about all the things and people that I will miss so dearly.

So in addition to doing my research, I’ll be posting daily observations on Bytes of China. I’m making a committment to post a little thought every other day. One, this let’s friends know that I’m alive, and second when I’m writing up my fieldnotes every month I would love to see over time what observations I chose to make public. While I plan to keep 99% of notes just for my eyes, there’s something very lovely about posting a short blog post that will be immediately read. It keeps me connected to the real world - otherwise I would get lost in my thoughts and forget that I have a responsbility to carry out when I return from the field - a responsibilty to translate what I see into greater understanding.

New RSS Feeds!

And for people who use RSS readers - I’ve combined all my blogs into ONE feed (using yahoo pipes). I created one feed just for research blogs and another feed for all blogs. You can find all the rss feeds at the bottom of my website.

Click to read more ...

Speaking about the next 300 million Chinese internet users at SXSW in Austin, Texas on Future 15 Panel

(reposted from CulturalByt.es)

Just bought my tickets to Austin, Texas for SXSW - who else will be there? This will be my first SXSW! I get to play with the amazingly smart and playful Glenda Bautista, who invited me to join the Futures 15 line up.  Future 15’s are a SXSW curated panel of short talks on specific topics. Last year Baratunde was on the same panel and I heard that he killed it with his talk: How to be Black. This year, Glenda is moderating the panel again and giving her own talk on how to actually put together a kick ass panel that is diverse. Not as easy as it sounds so she’ll be breaking it down!

I’ll be on the Diversity and Social Justice panel on Saturday, starting at 3:30pm. My talk will be about the future of the internets from the perspective of 300 million Chinese migrants and the possibilities for social change. 

Sleeping at Internet Cafes: The Next 300 Million Chinese Users #300MM

Saturday, March 12th, 4pm

In China, over 300 million migrants reside in cities; these communities represent some of the most marginalized and poorest groups that are now actively incorporating new communication tools into their lives. These migrants are also the fastest adopters of digital tools and the quickest growing population of digital users. What do these coinciding cultural-technical processes mean for the people undergoing these shifts? Based on my fieldwork in China over the past three years, I focus on three areas that I think will point to the future of social change and innovation in China: gaming, entertainment, and consumption.

Click to read more ...

Spoke at “Creating Community Environments” at ITP, NYU

(resposted from CulturalByte.es)

I was a guest speaker at the wonderful Kristen Taylor’s seminar, Creating Community Environments, at New York University’s ITP program. 

I talked about my upcoming move to China to conduct one year of fieldwork. Here’s a short in-progress description of my research project and a link to my presentation. 

I also elaborated on the importance of understanding social ties as culturally embedded. Kristen had aleady assigned a piece that I wrote a few months ago as class reading, Privacy and The Anonymous user in China: Importance of understanding multiple cultural orientations towards guanxi/social connections. So we had a short discussion on why the meaning of a social ties are different China. 

I really enjoyed talking to a class of students from such diverse backgrounds. As I was leaving, Kristen started a discussion on potatoes as objects with agency based on their class assignment of Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire. Yes, that is how cool this class is - you too should consider going through a life transition, move to NYC,  and enroll at ITP just to take Kristen’s next course in the Fall of 2011. And companies - pay attention to these students if you want to hire people who really understand communities from a holistic point of view.

Click to read more ...

My interview about ethnography and community relevance with Market Sentinel’s Dhiren Shingadia

(re-posted from CulturalByt.es)

Somehow the internets connected Dhiren Shingadia and I, which then evolved into a skype convo and then his interview with me: Understanding communities through ethnography (I recommend reading it here on Future Lab - better formatting).

Here are some of the questions that Dhiren asked me

As a sociologist and ethnographer, what are the core outputs of your studies at the moment?

What are the types of questions that you are asked the most?

Corporations, advertising agencies and communications consultancies are all moving to deliver cultural relevance or a degree of value to real-world communities. What are your thoughts on this?

From your perspective, are these actions translating into a greater a demand for research and ethnographic skills?

Your work requires you to observe people and investigate what motivates their actions and behaviour. Is the “power of the peer” as strong outside of west as it is in?

And finally…your work takes you across the globe, from one place to place another, and this allows you to become familiar with societies from all walks of life. Outside of the US, which country or region has some of the most interesting digital practices? Do any activities surprise you?

What can we learn from this country?

So Dhiren and I chatted about our interests, the future of the internets, innovation, social media, Baidu, China, building communities, and cultural relevance. I explained to him the strategy I’ve been using since I started community organizing 8 years ago in NYC, which is that I focus on achieving community relevance, not cultural relevance.

Oh and yes we also addressed the gazillion dollar question - what will happen when China rules the world? 

Dhiren also has an amazing blog full of intellectual and silly goodies - I knew the moment that I went on his blog, Uba Contraversie, that I would love his energy! and I turned out to be right! Here’s Dhiren’s twitter, another twitter-trove of goodies. 

oh and through Dhiren I found his colleague, Eli Gothill’s post on the rise of financial activism - definitely something to keep an eye on for the future.

Gave a talk on ethnographic work and my own research at IT Univeristy in Copenhagen, Denmark

Professor Irina Shklovski invited me to give a talk to her seminar at IT University in Copenhagen, Denmark. I spoke about my research question has evolved over the years and tips on doing ethnographic research. The slides below are from the portion of my talk about ethnography. 

It was really cool to learn about the Danish education system. I found out that the government pays students  to get their masters! And professors cannot require that students attend classes, there is a strict word limit on how many reading a professor can assign, and students can delay their final exams or projects. 

Thanks Irina for inviting me! 

Irina class tips

View more presentations from triciawang

Presenting a paper that Morgan Ames and I wrote at Ubicomp 2010 in Copenhagen, Denmark

I'll be presenting a paper at Ubicomp 2010 that I co-wrote with Morgan Ames. We conceived of our paper, Global Discourses of Information: Questioning the Free Information Regime, when we were talking the common themes that we were both seeing in our fieldwork.

When we found out that our great friend (and my China researcher sidekick), Silvia Lindtner, was putting on a workshop (along with Irina Shklovski, Janet Vertesi, Paul Dourish) about the issues specific to technology design and research for transnational users or use contexts, we thought that would be a good place to begin thinking through some of our ideas that we had first discussed. Another cool thing that came out of this writing process was the launch of a new research blog that Morgan and I will be updating together, Info Peripeteia.

Here's the abstract from our paper (download paper here):

In three transnational case studies of ICT use, we unpack common social constructions of free information in the West: the market commoditization of information, the socially viral nature of information, the ethical role of information, and the physical (dis)embodiment of information. We connect these constructions under the ideology of “neo-informationalism” and explore sites of tension that this paradigm creates in global technosocial contexts. Finally, we discuss implications of this stance for ubiquitous computing and call for a reorientation on the contextualized, local, and sometimes messy present instead of an idealized global future.