Lower-income Chinese people—perhaps one should say "lower-income students and their families"—care deeply about access to the Internet. (The photo is from a lower-income home of a student and her parents in a small town in the Southeast of China). But it seems Google is not a core part of the desire to be connected, to learn, and participate in the Internet. Google has not met its potential in China, and now, after an encounter with some security "problems" (to put it mildly) they are making noises about packing up and moving out.
The recent flap about Google's presence in China is, indeed, more than a flap. Google claims that their servers were violated, along with some others. The idea that some official entity got to mucking about not only with Google but with some US corporate property in cyberspace seems not to be part of the Chinese discussion, but news about Google's unhappiness with Chinese censorship certainly is. To be sure, the security issue is an important one, and censorship is, too. But another issue is the difference bewteen Internet use in China and in the US (and elsewhere).
Google is not, presently, a good fit for China. By now, most folks who are interested in Internet in China are aware of the power of MSN and QQ. Not everyone sees this as a basic difference in communication practice. It might be easy to pin the difference on "cultural difference," but this begs the question of where that difference comes from. Tricia Wang lays out the issues in a lengthy and important post on her blog. Her comments neatly summarize the experience of our research teams (and my personal experience living from time to time in Beijing and here and there) over the past ten or so years. Tyler Rooker at his 中关村 blog has some pithy remaks about Google's hubris that are worth a read, too). Chinese sites like Baidu (for search) and TuDou (for video) are simply more relevant in China.The differences among Google and other web tools in China extends to mobile phone use, too. It is is related to the pragmatic constraints of access, charges for phone and Internet use, and the services Google offers. Here are some of the issues (covered well by Tricia; I add a bit to her list, here): - Google doesn't provide access to the rich media content that other sites do.
- The name "Google" is not well understood people aren't sure how to spell it.
- Google has not tapped into the sense of national pride as other domestic IT products have done. Consider the line of peripherals and monitors made by the "aigo" company. Aigo sounds just like "aiguo," which means love of country or patriotism (爱国).
- Google is not a player in instant messaging. QQ, the biggest player in instant messaging in China (and, probably, in the world) is much more than an instant messaging system. Its a game platform, it is always integrated in Chinese mobile phones, and it has brand exensions into cute, cuddly products in QQ stores. It has lent its name to a small automobile, the QQ car, which is, by the way, very 可爱的, very "cute" (sounds like QQ). Nothing wrong with a little alliterative fun in IT.
- Google is not really a player in the mobile space in China, where asynchronous communication is cheaper and preferred. Mobile phones are nearly ubiquitous regardless of income. Few people talk much on their mobile phones. People get their business done quickly on the phone, unless they are rich. Ordinary people text plenty, but minutes are expensive. Text and QQ are not. Where is Google?
- The competition is working in another space in which Google is inactive: buying and selling little low-cost goodies related to games, identity, and just plain fun. QQ has developed Qcoin, a virtual currency that is so successful that the Chinese government is stepping in to regulate folks who trade in it. (QQ says Qcoin is a commodity, not a currency, btw).
- Google makes sense for richer, post-graduate people; there is enormous interest in the Internet as an educational resource but for lower-income people but Google is off the map. A decent desktop is certainly not off the map, even for folks of humble means (like the household in the photograph). IT matters to families who care about their children's future; Google is not seen as a partner in that regard. Why not?
Google has plenty of creative dreamers, but it seems they don't look into the deeper nexus of constraints and incentives that shape and direct practices in different national contexts. I'm sure there are plenty of people at Google who "get it," but it has been my experience that too few in the IT community have a clear understanding of the broadly cultural (and structural) differences in IT practices. A few years ago I met a
high-level executive of a very large IT firm who was completely unaware of QQ, of how MSN and QQ are the preferred way of communicating on the Internet in China. How many in Silicon Valley are similarly uninformed?
Tricia Wang is quite correct. It would be a pity if Google were to give up on China, and it would help neither China nor Google nor the future of the conversation about Internet freedom and privacy if they were to give up the ship in the Middle Kingdom.
Is immersion ethnography? The answer: "sort of." Does it matter? That depends, too.
Our pal and colleague, Hy Mirampolsky, has written quite a good book that introduces ethnography to marketers. He calls his book Ethnography for Marketers: A Guide to Consumer Immersion (Sage Publications, 2006). For Hy, immersion means ethnography. P&G, which uses ethnographic methods (as do most major globla players in the FMCG sector), gets their researchers to interact directly with their consumers, and it has helped. Nigel Hollis, at the mega-research shop, Milward Brown, offered this candid and thoughtful assessment from a market researcher's perspective:
An article in Strategy Magazine on the turnaround led by P&G CEO A.G. Lafley reports that as part of the “internal revolution” at P&G, research methodologies were re-examined along with operational structure and processes. Much of P&G’s traditional research, in which the marketer plays the role of objective witness, has been replaced with programs which bring marketers directly in touch with consumers and their everyday lives. Jim Stengel, global marketing officer at P&G, calls these programs “consumer immersion experiences.” In the name of consumer immersion, P&G marketers are spending time working in shops in Mexico and conducting in-home observations of U.S. pet owners.
He suggests that some think this approach threatens "traditional" research approaches, and he debunks that idea quite well. Furthermore, some of the folks at P&G, he says, don't like talking about consumers. They would rather talk about (and talk with) people. You count things consumers do, you conduct surveys about them, you observe them. But you don't interact with consumers. You interact with people. Immersion is people focused. That's great.
This discussion seems puzzling for cultural anthropologists, for whom people-centered research, participant observation, and being present in people's lives across a variety of contexts has always been at the core of their research methods, for more than 100 years already. An anthropologist would wonder what the fuss was all about. Then they'd wonder why anthropologists haven't gotten their methodological messages across to the business world as well as they might have.
Some folks—perhaps most—in the marketing world conduct immersion by starting with an agency. The agency does the recruiting. The agency finds the people to hang out with. They make the appointment and pay the respondent. The client shows up,hangs out for a day, interacts, and learns. But starting and stopping there limits the learning that could be had. It may limit the marketer's ability to generalize or to understand the wider context in which people live. And it is not the kind of thing that ethnographers (usually) do.
The limitations start with recruiting. No anthropologist would ever separate the recruiting process from the field research process, unless they are really under the gun for a rapid-assessment kind of field trip.
Anthropologists want the first-hand experience (and often, frustration) that comes from meeting new respondents in person, on the phone, or on the Internet. They visit the respondent's neighborhood, workplace, or school first. They make sure that people see them, ask them what they are doing, hanging around. They look for opportunities explain their research interest, and to find out what people think about it. Often, design ethnographers and applied anthropologists engage their respondents quite directly in the research process, as collaborators (see Stull and Schensule, 1987, Collaborative Research and Social Change, or any of the many articles on collaborative design).
The other limitation to watch out for is timing. Is the immersion on a weekday? During a long weekend? Does the pre-recruited sample allow the serendipitous participation in special times, when grandmother comes to visit, during a birthday or an anniversary? After all, special times bring things to the surface that are otherwise hidden. Screenwriters know this; just watch The Wedding Planner or Father of the Bride. So-called normal daily life is a great start but there should be a space for some interviewing during special, ritual times and some space for unexpected discoveries and unexpected meetings, comings, and goings, too.
Ethnographers hang out and interact in real contexts, but they seek natural contexts for ethnographic interviews, as well, just as Jo Yung is doing at a Chinese Starbucks, above.
The immersion that Hy talks about, and the immersion that design ethnographers and anthropologists conduct, do indeed follow from the same idea that drove P&G to (re)discover immersion as a way to understand consumers: get as close as you can to someone else's reality, stay experience-near, and don't rely only on data like surveys that are, as they say, experience-distant.
Being systematic about immersion in this way is what anthropologists do, and there is a hefty body of literature to guide researchers to a better understanding of the lives of people that we ordinarily don't get close to. Use immersion as a start. But follow up, take some time, and explore the possibilities of doing some of your own recruiting. The usual concerns of any researcher—questions about sampling people and contexts, the trustworthiness of the findings, and all the rest, matter a great deal. Just dropping in on a pre-selected respondent for a day is a great start but the research will matter more if the fieldworkers have a bit more time, can assess on their own their sampling needs as those emerge from the field encounter, and if the fieldworker includes some focused interviewing in the mix.
Lower-income Chinese people—perhaps one should say "lower-income students and their families"—care deeply about access to the Internet. (The photo is from a lower-income home of a student and her parents in a small town in the Southeast of China). But it seems Google is not a core part of the desire to be connected, to learn, and participate in the Internet. Google has not met its potential in China, and now, after an encounter with some security "problems" (to put it mildly) they are making noises about packing up and moving out.
