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Microsoft anthropologist: Let people be online at work or risk losing staff!

Published on August 27, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, applied anthropology, corporate & business anthropology, cyberanthropology, internet, technology

Anne Kirah, a senior Microsoft anthropologist, says IT staff believe they’re supporting workplace productivity by limiting private use of the Net. But they may be doing the opposite. Companies that filter Internet access or block IM communications are going to find it harder to hang on to staff, she told at a recent conference.

In an interview with the APC Magazine, Kirah talks about how this new generation of employees is turning the traditional notion of productivity on its head. They’re using the Net to stay in touch with their social circle and do personal tasks during work hours, but also logging on and working from home after hours. For them, the 9-5 work day no longer applies and IT managers may be dealing with nothing short of a revolution that’s based on universal availability of Net access:

The conflict arises because the employers’ benchmarks of productivity are based on something that doesn’t exist anymore. In the old world we measured productivity by just sitting your butt down 9 to 5. We were coming to work 9 to 5, what else would you do at work except work? (…)
I think the whole point is that there’s a cultural change going on. We’ve really moved from this 9-5 world to ‘just give me the deadlines and I’ll decide when I want to do it’…

This is especially true for the younger generation, she says:

What’s happening is that society has placed a lot of limits on children today. We don’t have free play any more, it’s gone. So free play has gone onto the Net. (…) What’s happened in the world today is that activities after school are all orchestrated by adults. There’s always an adult in there somewhere. (…) In terms of the social, in terms of the child-to-child, the internet is Mecca; this is the place where they can be.

>> read the whole interview in the APC Magazine

>> Anne Kirah: Unlock work internet or risk losing staff

E-mail has become the new snail mail – Text Messaging on Rise

How written language and technology are changing work place culture between two generations of people (Anthropology.net)

E-mail has become the new snail mail – Text Messaging on Rise

Published on July 19, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, corporate & business anthropology, cyberanthropology, internet, youth

E-mail is so last millennium. Young people see it as a good way to reach an elder – a parent, teacher or a boss – or to receive an attached file. But email is increasingly losing favor to instant and text messaging, according to an ap-article:

Much like home postal boxes have become receptacles for junk mail, bills and the occasional greeting card, electronic mailboxes have become cluttered with spam. That makes them a pain to weed through, and the problem is only expected to worsen as some e-mail providers allow online marketers to bypass spam filters for a fee. Beyond that, e-mail has become most associated with school and work.

“It used to be just fun,” says Danah Boyd, a doctoral candidate who studies social media at the University of California, Berkeley [and blogger]. “Now it’s about parents and authority.”

(…)

When immediacy is a factor – as it often is – most young people much prefer the telephone or instant messaging for everything from casual to heart-to-heart conversations, according to research from the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Boyd says, young people have developped skills for chatting with “a bazillion people at once”. They understand how to negotiate the interruptions a lot better than adults.

Anne Kirah, design anthropologist at Microsoft, even thinks young people’s brains work differently because they’ve grown up with IM, making them more adept at it.

Companies really need to respond to the way people work and communicate. The focus, she says, should be the outcome:

“Nine to 5 has been replaced with ‘Give me a deadline and I will meet your deadline,'” Kirah says of young people’s work habits. “They’re saying ‘I might work until 2 a.m. that night. But I will do it all on my terms.'”

>> read the whole story in the Washington Post

Ethnographic Study on “Digital Kids”

An interview with Anne Kirah: Lead design anthropologist

E-mail is so last millennium. Young people see it as a good way to reach an elder - a parent, teacher or a boss - or to receive an attached file. But email is increasingly losing favor to instant and…

New blog: Sarapen. Online anthropology on Filipino bloggers

Published on July 8, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, cyberanthropology, fieldwork / methods, globalisation, internet, migration, Northern America, Us and Them, websites

(via Livejournal Anthropology Community) Jesse de Leon, Master’s student in Social Anthropology, has started blogging on his research on Filipino bloggers – a very interesting blog about migration, transnationalism, identity and internet research. In his second post he explains:

I’m what’s known as a 1.5 generation immigrant: someone who immigrated as a child old enough to remember the country they were born in. In my case, I immigrated to Canada from the Philippines when I was ten years old. I consider myself as having grown up in both countries. I know that if I had grown up entirely in the Philippines, I would be a different person than what I am today.

It’s therefore understandable that I’m interested in issues of migration, transnationalism, and identity. I’m particularly interested in what identity is like for other Filipinos who have migrated. Do they consider themselves as being completely Filipino? Or do they see themselves as being Canadians now (or American, or Australian, or so on)?

(…)

Now, this is all well and good, but lots of other people have examined these issues. What am I doing that’s new? Well, I’m investigating Filipino migration and identity, but I’m investigating them through blogs. Specifically, I’m looking at how Filipino bloggers talk about these issues. I’m also looking at how Filipino bloggers don’t talk about these issues.

>> visit Sarapen. Online anthropology on Filipino bloggers

His blog is hosted at edublogs.org – a free blog host that he recommends.

(via Livejournal Anthropology Community) Jesse de Leon, Master’s student in Social Anthropology, has started blogging on his research on Filipino bloggers - a very interesting blog about migration, transnationalism, identity and internet research. In his second post he explains:

I’m…

Laughing in Cyberspace…or should I say LOL?

Published on June 14, 2006 by Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, cyberanthropology, GUEST BLOGGING

Apologies for the delay since my last post but I have started a new job at the Cyberspace Research Unit at the University of Central Lancashire and that has been a bit hectic – I am now living in Lincolnshire, working in Preston and Lodging in Liverpool.

When I first began my research all I knew was that there were people ‘out there’ on the Internet and that I wanted to talk to them. I didn’t know how to do that, who was there, why they were there, or even where to find them. I simply had an unshakeable belief that cyberspace was a real place populated by real people. I remember discussing the problem of trying to find people with my then supervisor, Prof Allison James (now at the University of Sheffield). She told me a similar story regarding her own experience – of walking through the streets of a UK mining town watching the children playing and wondering how she could establish contact.

Much of my experience as a cyberanthropologist has been like that – a voyage of discovery – learning that anthropology as a practice is very similar in every field, not only as a discipline, but also in the minutiae of research… for example, learning a new language: for my friend Michaela it was French, for Julia it was Russian, for myself it was a new interactive text-based language.

I have come to realise that the Internet presents a unique challenge to ethnographers in that the written word is the key means of communication, and presented me with a key epistemological problem – how can I make sense of a culture that does not use verbal communication?

Unsurprisingly, written words are often seen to be either lacking in emotion, or lacking the ability to convey emotion without being supported by sight or sound. For example if someone says they are sad, it is a much more believable performance if their words are accompanied by the sight of tears and the sound of sobbing. Yet in cyberspace these physical modalities of speech are to all extents and purposes absent. As a result, in cyberspace, words have had to be transformed. They also express larger meanings in cyberspace. Words have become emotive and descriptive, active and performative. Thus my earlier question – how can I make sense of a culture that does not use verbal communication was largely irrelevant: instead the problem was one of showing that this is communication like in any other ‘real’ place.

Of course much more work has been done in the study of language and the Internet since I first began. But what I really want to share are the similarities with my colleagues who come back from the field to find their speech peppered with language from the field until they had fully integrated back into academic life. I was taking a walk with my beloved one evening when he said something amusing. To my chagrin I didn’t laugh, instead I said ‘LOL’.

This was the moment when I realised how difficult it was to leave the field behind.

“Play on sterotypical understandings of Africa” – Anthropologist analyses Nigerian scam emails

Published on June 3, 2006 by lorenz Posted in Africa, anthropology in the news, cyberanthropology, internet, journal articles / papers, Us and Them

Email scams constitute the third largest industry in Nigeria, after oil and drugs. These email-scammers succeed because they play on stereotypical understandings of Africa, anthropologist Elina Hartikainen concludes in paper, that she presented at a conference few weeks ago.

Most of us have received emails from African chiefs and businessmen, or relatives of them, with pleas for assistance in retrieving large sums of money that for some reason is inaccessible for them. As compensation we are promised a sizeable percentage of it. In 2001 alone, “Nigerian scammers” have earned around 500 million dollar from victims all over the world.

The spam filters at Hartikainens university are not that good, so she received lots of these scam-emails and started collecting them. There is no thing on earth that cannot be of interest for an anthropologist! When she finally read through one of the emails, she was totally fascinated by the ways in which it played on stereotypical understandings of Africa.

She writes:

The power of these e-mails to engage their recipients in further interaction is centrally founded on the senders’ artful calibration of both the content and form of the e-mails to Western stereotypes of Africa and African cultural practices. It is by representing themselves as embedded in webs of corruption, oil wealth, religious piety and traditional inheritance customs that the senders of the requests for assistance construct themselves as imaginable characters to their Western audience.

She provides this example. “Mrs.Princess Mawa” writes to her, telling about the death of her father, a wealthy businessman:

Following his death, his family members insisted that I am not entitled to his property (Assets and money) since I am a woman and my offspring is all girl as I do not have a male child for my late husband claiming that it is what our tradition entails. Well, because of this barbaric traditional law here in COTE D’IVOIRE which doesn’t permit a woman to inherit her Husbands property incase of death if she has no male child, the relatives of my late Husband are expected by tradition to take over the management of his business and other properties including myself who automatically becomes a wife to one of his immediate brothers.

Hartikainen comments:

This description of Princess Mawa’s situation in terms of traditional, barbaric kin and inheritance customs plays a dual role in enticing the recipient of the request into responding to it. On the one hand it serves to reinforce stereotypical understandings of African tradition that circulate in the popular media. (…) On the other hand, Princess Mawa’s condemnation of her own society’s “barbaric traditions” and particularly her claim to invest her share of her money in her daughter’s education (…) create the possibility for the recipient of the letter to claim that in the final run their decision to cooperate in the scheme is not motivated by financial profits alone, but it is also morally justified.

One can expect that no one takes these mails seriously. But those who do, respond on the basis of impressions of the senders’ intellectual inferiority, Hartikainen supposes. Many of the victims, she writes, consider themselves to be scamming the scammers only to realize that it was not they who were playing the scammer for the fool, but the opposite.

>> read her entry: Writing on Nigerian Scams

The paper is not yet available online. But she has an interesting blog called becoming an anthropologist – about me and my life somewhere between bahia, chicago and helsinki where she will publish the paper when she has “cleaned up the paper”, since it is “still in more of a presentation format”.

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