design anthropology | antropologi.info

Call for research: How does digital surveillance change society?

Published on January 19, 2021 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, corporate & business anthropology, design anthropology, politics, technology, Us and Them

Not only when we are reading the news, but also when we are on Zoom-conferences, sending messages with Whatsapp, playing silly games on our mobile or [when we switch on our robot vacuum](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/25/technology/roomba-irobot-data-privacy.html) to clean the mess in our flat, we are tracked and analyzed by thousands of companies that would like to sell us something – be it a product or a message ([here you can check trackers in mobile apps](https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/)).

What does this constant surveillance do to us? Is it a threat as activists claim? And can something be done about it? What is the culture, ethos and worldview within these increasingly powerful corporations Google, Facebook and Microsoft that are developing these technologies of surveillance?

In the [recent issue of the journal Anthropology Now](https://anthronow.com/press-watch/what-to-do-with-surveillance-capitalism), anthropologist [Jennifer Huberman](https://cas.umkc.edu/directory/Huberman-Jennifer/) suggests several new areas of research for anthropologists.

New economic developments require detailed ethnographies!

In her article she reviews probably one of the most important recent books: [The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Surveillance_Capitalism) – of of those few books that, as she writes, “forces one to radically question the way the world works”:

> Surveillance Capitalism is both an analysis and critique. Zuboff’s main argument is that surveillance capitalism poses an existential threat to democracy and human nature as it subordinates people to ever more pervasive forms of social control and “instrumentarian power.”

> Zuboff does a masterful job laying bare the hidden laws of motion that structure the workings of surveillance capitalism. She has opened our eyes to what many of us perhaps already intuited but didn’t have a technical language to describe.

But her book is a general study, from a bird’s eye view, based on interviews and analyzing documents and texts. What we need now, she writes, are “detailed ethnographic accounts of the way that surveillance capitalism is lived, felt, experienced and, we hope, even resisted by those it seeks to dominate”.

This includes also studies of corporate culture in the Silicon Valley:

> What kind of ethos permeates institutions such as Singularity University or the MIT Media Lab, where according to Zuboff “some of surveillance capitalism’s most valuable capabilities and applications, from data mining to wearable technologies, were invented” (206)?

> To pursue such questions is not just to push the envelope of ethnographic curiosities. It is also to align oneself with a valuable theoretical perspective. For as anthropologists have long demonstrated, the (re)production of power, whether it be elite power or labor power, is very much a matter of culture.

> Even though the machinations of surveillance capitalism seem to suggest a world where people are increasingly subordinated to the workings of algorithms, computer science and big data, at the end of the day, as Zuboff herself emphasizes, what allows surveillance capitalism to achieve such dominance in society is not the technology per se but rather the people who decide toward what ends it should be used.

[>> continue reading her article in Anthropology Now: What to Do with Surveillance Capitalism?](https://anthronow.com/press-watch/what-to-do-with-surveillance-capitalism)

I suppose, she thinks of studies as the one I wrote about two weeks ago:

[Pregnancy and baby apps, smart home devices: Anthropologist shows how surveillance capitalism targets children](https://www.antropologi.info/blog/anthropology/2021/surveillance-capitalism-targets-children)

Personally, I would find following questions also interesting to study:

Why do people continue using products that are spying on them? What keeps people from using privacy friendly alternatives? Jitsi instead of Zoom for example? Linux instead of Windows? Signal instead of Whatsapp? Libre Office instead of Microsoft Word?

The problem with many privacy-friendly alternatives, in my experience, is that they tend to be viewed as “geeky” and not very user-friendly. Here it would be intersting to look at the process of software development itself and the relations between developers and users: [Design anthropology](https://www.mattartz.me/what-is-design-anthropology/) has made lots of products more user-friendly

**SEE ALSO:**

[Anthropologist examines influence of robots in Japan](https://www.antropologi.info/blog/anthropology/2007/anthropologist_examines_influence_of_rob)

[“Anthropological customer research has become popular for a good reason”](https://www.antropologi.info/blog/anthropology/2004/anthropological_customer_research_has_be)

[Why the head of IT should be an anthropologist](https://www.antropologi.info/blog/anthropology/2008/why_the_head_of_it_should_be_an_anthropo)

[Dissertation – Why kids embrace Facebook and MySpace](https://www.antropologi.info/blog/anthropology/2009/dissertation_why_kids_embrace_facebook_a)

[Online – New book on the cultural significance of Free Software](https://www.antropologi.info/blog/anthropology/2008/online_new_book_on_the_cultural_signific)

[Why were they doing this work just to give it away for free? Thesis on Ubuntu Linux hackers](https://www.antropologi.info/blog/anthropology/2007/why_were_they_doing_this_work_just_to_gi)

Not only when we are reading the news, but also when we are on Zoom-conferences, sending messages with Whatsapp, playing silly games on our mobile or when we switch on our robot vacuum to clean the mess in our…

Motorola anthropologists develop social TV

Published on June 28, 2008 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, applied anthropology, corporate & business anthropology, design anthropology, technology

Some years ago, the researchers observed how people talked on the phone while watching the same TV show. Now Motorola-anthropologist Crysta Metcalf and her team are designing a Social TV, the Chicago Tribune reports.

The researchers designed a prototype and recruited friends of friends for the first phase of testing. “It looked like a PC attached to a television with a big microphone on a coffee table,” Metcalf says.

>> read the whole story

There are several publications by her and her team online, among others Ambient social tv: drawing people into a shared experience. There is also a pdf of a presentation at a conference by the Society of Applied Anthropology Investigating the Sharing Practices of Family & Friends to Inform Communication Technology Innovations

Why cellular life in Japan is so different – Interview with anthropologist Mizuko Ito

Kosher cell phones, kosher bus routes and kosher clothing: Israel’s Ultra-Orthodox economy

“The science of ethnography is an ideal tool to designing mobile phones”

The researchers designed a prototype and recruited…

Why the head of IT should be an anthropologist

Published on April 13, 2008 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, applied anthropology, corporate & business anthropology, design anthropology, internet, media, technology, Us and Them

(via Bits and Bytes) The true value of IT will come not from information or technology per se but from the social side. Therefore anthropologists and other social scientists will become more important to Information Technology (IT) Departments than IT itself, says IT analyst Tom Austin in an interview by Fast Company.

The interview does not deal with user centered design but with shaping a climate of creativity in the workplace in the Web 2.0 era with Facebook, Twitter, blogs, wikis and other online social network tools:

A new species of Information Technologist is emerging from the primordial ooze of Web 2.0 — social scientists and humanists who focus on human behavior more than software code. (…) As computer systems become ever more automated and transparent, attention will shift to how to use these tools as social lubricants in the workplace.

MySpace or Facebook will become models for business interaction, Austin thinks:

Look at teenagers today. They’re teamagers. They work on projects as a group and think nothing of doing it that way. I expect to see that kind of thing percolate through the enterprise as an unstoppable force over the next two decades.

Austin tells about companies that are using websites like Facebook to help reinforce or build a social network inside the company to enhance collaboration and productivity:

They use a variety of tools where employees are encouraged to create a personal page where they share not only name, rank, and serial number but also information about prior jobs, interests, hobbies, other skills they may have, projects they’ve worked on, and so forth. That becomes a dynamic and important tool for navigating through the network of people inside the company to find others who may be able to help you.

In this world of the “ad hocracy” that we live in, where people get thrown into project after project, it helps to look at information and figure out, these three people I’m meeting with tomorrow who I’ve never met before. What are they like? Is there something we share in common — a hobby, a background, education, a boss we hated — that you can use to strike up a conversation?

(…)

The problem with IT today is there are too many engineers and not enough social scientists. Look at the numbers of features and controls we put on how things are done. That’s an engineer’s approach, versus some of the free form approach of Enterprise 2.0 and social networking.

>> read the whole interview at FastCompany.com

There is another business anthropology story in the news: In the article Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty?, New York Times author Sara Corbett writes about the work done by Nokia-researcher Jan Chipchase, a “human-behavior researcher” and “user-anthropologist” (but with a degree in design, not anthropology):

His mission, broadly defined, is to peer into the lives of other people, accumulating as much knowledge as possible about human behavior so that he can feed helpful bits of information back to the company — to the squads of designers and technologists and marketing people who may never have set foot in a Vietnamese barbershop but who would appreciate it greatly if that barber someday were to buy a Nokia.

He works in a similar way as many design anthropologists:

Rather than sending someone like Chipchase to Vietnam or India as an emissary for the company — loaded with products and pitch lines, as a marketer might be — the idea is to reverse it, to have Chipchase, a patently good listener, act as an emissary for people like the barber or the shoe-shop owner’s wife, enlightening the company through written reports and PowerPoint presentations on how they live and what they’re likely to need from a cellphone, allowing that to inform its design.

The whole article in The New York Times is interesting but quite long. For a summary including comments see the post over at Neuroanthropology Cellphones Save The World. For more information, see Jan Chipchase’s blog

For an earlier entry on Jan Chipchase, see Capitalism and the problems of “High speed ethnographies”

UPDATE (14.4.08) Anthropologists are part of a research team that wants to find out how mobile phones might be used to allow people to share content with each other >> more information at The Engineer

Plans to study anthropological online communities and Open Access movement

Office Culture – good overview about corporate anthropology in FinancialTimes

Timo Veikkola – The Anthropologist as Future Specialist at Nokia

“The science of ethnography is an ideal tool to designing mobile phones”

(via Bits and Bytes) The true value of IT will come not from information or technology per se but from the social side. Therefore anthropologists and other social scientists will become more important to Information Technology (IT) Departments than IT…

How anthropological research can reduce the paper usage in offices

Published on November 15, 2007 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, applied anthropology, corporate & business anthropology, design anthropology, technology

(Links updated 14.2.2025) Another example of anthropologists in product development: As a consequence of anthropological research, Xerox is developing a new kind of paper where the printed information simply disappears within about 16 hours, allowing the paper to be reused.

Why this? Xerox-anthropologist Brinda Dalal, an anthropologist at Xerox, found out that 21 percent of copier documents ed up in the recycling bin on the same day they are produced. In most offices, paper is used as a medium of display rather than storage. Paper is only only printed out or copied when needed for meetings, editing and annotating, or reading away from a computer. The result is, of course, an enormous quantity of waste paper and environmental problems.

>> read the whole story on ZDNet

Actually, the New York Times wrote about this self-erasable paper one year ago. They called anthropologist Brinda Dalal for “garbologist”. She told, she was surprised by the results: “Nobody looks at the ephemeral information going through people’s waste baskets.”

>> Some papers by Brinda Dalal

Timo Veikkola – The Anthropologist as Future Specialist at Nokia

“The science of ethnography is an ideal tool to designing mobile phones”

Anthropologists find out why we (don’t) buy organic food

Ethnography, cross cultural understanding and product design

(Links updated 14.2.2025) Another example of anthropologists in product development: As a consequence of anthropological research, Xerox is developing a new kind of paper where the printed information simply disappears within about 16 hours, allowing the paper to be reused.…

Timo Veikkola – The Anthropologist as Future Specialist

Published on July 2, 2007 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, corporate & business anthropology, design anthropology, technology

Things are changing: See how an anthropologist is introduced in this story: “As many anthropologists these days he holds a strategic position inside a global corporation.” Juliana Xavier writes about Timo Veikkola – anthropologist at Nokia. His jobtitle: “Senior Future Specialist”:

As Senior Future Specialist at Nokia Design, he looks at society to comprehend how there are going to be shifts in behavior and culture that can inspire their design team. Timo is a future teller.

Veikkola was one of the speakers at an innovation conference in London (by PSFK). Juliana Xavier has been there and writes that this was the second time in less than an year that an anthropologist came to speak at a planning/marketing/advertising conference:

Last year, Bob Deutsch from Brain Sell (…) talked about treating people as people rather than as consumers. Timo talked about that as well, but also about that as a crucial part of his work at Nokia, or better saying: about how to envision the future through trends, observation and – an expression that I liked a lot – informed intuition

(…)

Timo’s trend team is composed of a diversity of people from Brazil to India, from Chile to China – everyone sitting in the same room. It is a way to cultivate the atmosphere in the office, an atmosphere of global and cultural diversity. A good observer of the present wants to be close to people, is keen to get involved and has to seek stimulation through real experience.

>> read the whole article by Juliana Xavier

Veikkola’s presentation is available online

>> Watch Timo Veikkola, Future Strategist at Nokia, on a Vision of our Future at the PSFK Conference London

INTEL and Microsoft conference “a coming-out party” for ethnography

Ethnography, cross cultural understanding and product design

Anthropology Matters – New issue out on anthropology of science and technology

Things are changing: See how an anthropologist is introduced in this story: "As many anthropologists these days he holds a strategic position inside a global corporation." Juliana Xavier writes about Timo Veikkola - anthropologist at Nokia. His jobtitle: "Senior Future…