Google in China: A Bad Fit, Hubris, or What?

Lower-income Chinese people—perhaps one should say "lower-income students and their families"—care deeply about access to the Internet. (The photo is our research assistant, Ms. Hu, at the computer in a small Internet cafe in small-town Henan Province in February). 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 Q coin, 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 currenc, 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.

Finding the "Right People" for Exploratory Research

Recently, a number of design researchers have posted to the anthrodesign yahoo group with questions and comments about using recruiters. While we use recruiters when time is short or when the research topics are very well understood, exploratory ethnography usually does not use an outside recruiting agency.

Likewise, a tight screener is usually not the right tool to kick off exploratory field research. Here's why: finding the right people to talk to—that is, setting up the sampling parameters—is a complex task best accomplished while in the field, and it should be tweaked on the fly and not set in stone before the research.

This causes clients some consternation, so it might be helpful to review why and how ethnographers do their particular brand of field-based sampling. Ethnographic sampling is critical for exploratory research. It is especially important where cultural differences require significant bridging, as between a global consumer product company and Chinese consumers, like these folks outside my favorite Beijing hutong courtyard hotel, for example.

Finding people to talk to and be with is always part of the research process and thinking and working hard at discovering who to talk to is critical. But to be clear, using an outside recruiter takes important learnings out of the field research process and risks not going to the right places and not finding the right people. Just finding people is only one side of the research coin. There is another side.

The other side is finding the right contexts in which to interview and observe. Do recruiters identify contexts for us? Without knowing the range of contexts in which people do (or don't do) the things we are interested in, ethnographic research is epistemologically vapid and frankly uninterpretable. Meaning comes from context, not from words, after all. We have to sample contexts and people.

Sampling in exploratory work means being clear about the unit of analysis (Is it the person? The group? What kind of group?). And it means being clear about the Big N, the universe of units that comprise the domain from which we select a sample, the small n. In exploratory work (Mike Agar calls exploratory work the learning modality as opposed to the testing modality), we often don't know enough to decide just what the heck the unit of analysis should be; nor can we be sure about the boundaries of the sampled universe, the Big N. Both have to be understood in testing research; exploratory research is about bounding the universe and determining the appropriate unit of analysis, which by definition you don't quite know until you go into the field. Hence, my discomfort with recruiters within the exploratory mode.

Dominique Desjeux at U. Paris IV has a lot to say about this. He says that we get into discussions like this one precisely because our footing on what he calls the échelle d'observation, the scale of observation, determines what we can know and how we can know it. He says it in French—zut alors— but its pretty clear: ethnographers are standing on the small group échelle, market researchers are often properly interested in the individual échelle, as are most psychologists.

We all know that even the tightest pre-field screener can trip us up. A client may know with certainty that the right person buys only organic vegetables at Trader Moe's and listens only to Prairie Barn Companion on non-commercial radio. We screen for that, and make a home visit only to find Lady GaGa blaring from an MP3 player and a big bag of crispy-fried-fake-cheese-product-snax on the kitchen counter. Are we in the wrong house? Is this the wrong person? We don't know, yet. You get the idea. For exploratory work, your sample has to flex with the discovered contexts on the ground if you don't know the Big N and if you aren't yet clear on the unit of analysis. When you ARE clear, tighten up your screeners and get on the phone with your trusted recruter.

Don't take my word for it. Read Michael Maltz, the former editor of a quantitative journal of criminology, whose article on the declining significance of significance makes a strong case for working in both the inductive-learning mode and in the deductive-means-based-testing mode. He doesn't reject parametric sampling. He wants to expand the research tool kit. Its a great read, and worth the download:

It is my contention that we have been laboring, we business and design ethnographers, under a biz-research paradigm grown of the American MBA and an individual-psychometric toolkit. The biz paradigm too often seeks "efficiency" at the expense of well grounded exploratory work that might challenge received notions of the right person. This paradigm rarely worries about sampling contexts. The biz-psych paradigm has its place but it doesn't offer useful tools for exploratory field-based work.

So, we have to understand where we are coming from. Testing mode? Exploratory mode? On which échelle do we stand? I hope we fieldworkers are always challenging just who the right people (and contexts) are, thus challenging the testing-mode sampling parameters whose lucky failure so often leads to exploratory fieldwork. The wrong people, the outliers, the early adopters, the queers, the club kids, the differently-abled, the workers in the back of the fast-food shop and the folks who eat fake-cheese-product-snax often teach us a lot more than the putative right people, anyway. At least for me, but I'm usually stuck in the messy, hard-to-explain ethnographic exploratory modality. (Not that I don't dust off SPSS from time to time, its just not usually my échelle!)

The nature of ethnographic sampling challenges ethnographers like me to be clear about what we are doing, and thus to do a better job explaining what échelle we are trained to work from!

Zut alors!