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!

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."

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. 

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]

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] 

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.

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!

 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! :)

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."