Americans are different from the rest of the world
Or so... that is at least what Anthropologist Genevieve Bell has found out for Intel. She was hired by the company back in 1998 to study the daily life of families and individuals to find out how they use technology (appears to be a recent trend in our postings) and travelled around the world for two years, living in remote and central places in locations such as India, Australia, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, China or Korea (in short: I AM SICK) , to just find out about this. Ethnographers in the respective countries helped her to find a place in families in the different countries, where she could stay for a while.
What she says is that technology per se is not interesting and only becomes interesting if seen in a context - which is interesting:
"Ms. Bell found it very easy after that to explain that there are very few forms of universal human truth, but lots of forms of cultural logic and truths. The Malaysians, she says, worry that their children would be lonely if they weren't sharing a room with siblings. The Americans, she says, were reverting to their cultural model of everyone wanting to have their own stuff in their own place. ""I had a lovely moment with some guys in the States and some guys in Malaysia," she remembers. "I was explaining to them that one of the differences between Asia and the U.S. has to do with the physical size and configuration of people's homes. Intel is very interested in the digital home, and we have to be careful about the assumptions we're making about what that home looks like." When an American designer said that each of his kids had PCs in their rooms, "the guys in Malaysia said, 'Wow! Your kids have their own rooms? Aren't they lonely?'"
During her travels, Ms. Bell found people in China who take their mobile phones to a temple to be blessed, Muslims who used the GPS capabilities of their phones to locate Mecca for their prayers and Asian families who burned paper cell phone offerings for their ancestors to use in the next world."
Well, one thing that is misquoted or that she didn't really get correct is the word "kiasu".
The San Jose Business Journal writes: "While most of her field work could be done in English, she found that working in countries like Malaysia, where various Chinese dialects are spoken, could be just as productive. "I began to hear the term 'kiasu,' for which there was no English counterpart," she says. "They would use it in talking about the education of their kids, when they were concerned about their kids not being left behind." Kiasu refers generally to the parental effort to provide private tutoring and after-school educational experiences."
But overall, it surely is an exciting job that the lady has. To read more, follow the link above or this one: http://radio.weblogs.com/0105910/2004/08/16.html
What she says is that technology per se is not interesting and only becomes interesting if seen in a context - which is interesting:
"Ms. Bell found it very easy after that to explain that there are very few forms of universal human truth, but lots of forms of cultural logic and truths. The Malaysians, she says, worry that their children would be lonely if they weren't sharing a room with siblings. The Americans, she says, were reverting to their cultural model of everyone wanting to have their own stuff in their own place. ""I had a lovely moment with some guys in the States and some guys in Malaysia," she remembers. "I was explaining to them that one of the differences between Asia and the U.S. has to do with the physical size and configuration of people's homes. Intel is very interested in the digital home, and we have to be careful about the assumptions we're making about what that home looks like." When an American designer said that each of his kids had PCs in their rooms, "the guys in Malaysia said, 'Wow! Your kids have their own rooms? Aren't they lonely?'"
During her travels, Ms. Bell found people in China who take their mobile phones to a temple to be blessed, Muslims who used the GPS capabilities of their phones to locate Mecca for their prayers and Asian families who burned paper cell phone offerings for their ancestors to use in the next world."
Well, one thing that is misquoted or that she didn't really get correct is the word "kiasu".
The San Jose Business Journal writes: "While most of her field work could be done in English, she found that working in countries like Malaysia, where various Chinese dialects are spoken, could be just as productive. "I began to hear the term 'kiasu,' for which there was no English counterpart," she says. "They would use it in talking about the education of their kids, when they were concerned about their kids not being left behind." Kiasu refers generally to the parental effort to provide private tutoring and after-school educational experiences."
But overall, it surely is an exciting job that the lady has. To read more, follow the link above or this one: http://radio.weblogs.com/0105910/2004/08/16.html
posted by Andreas @ 6:26 pm
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