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Q&A
Genevieve Bell
Ethnographer for Intel Corporation
Portland, Oregon
Genevieve Bell is a member of Intel Research, a small team of social scientists with backgrounds in anthropology, psychology, communication studies, and ethnography. For two years, Bell studied the role of technology in Eastern Asian schools, homes, workplaces, and public spaces. She returned to the United States with some intriguing insights.
Q: Genevieve, why has Intel sent you and your colleagues to other countries to study how people of other cultures use technology in their homes, schools, and work places? What have you learned?
Our charter for the last eight years has been to pay attention to people's cultural practices and try to understand what people care about and what motivates them—how they organize their lives and their physical spaces—and use that as a starting point for talking about new technologies. So rather than build it and try to make someone buy it, we set out to see what you learn when you pay attention to what people care about as a starting point for technology innovation.
Studying people's lives shifts the way the company talks about technology. When I joined the company in 1998, it was pretty clear from looking at people's daily lives that PCs had gone into our homes. And when they went into our homes, people did really different things with them than what they'd done with them at the office. But the way Intel talked about computers was still that they were for work. So there were a lot of business applications, and a lot of ideas about business things: work, work, work, and productivity and efficiency and all that kind of thing.
When you think about how these objects came home, they went into different rooms in a house, they supported really different activities, and what we thought about them was really different. But the company hadn't attended to that. We came back with so much material about what life was like at home and what people were doing in these homes—we were one of a number of groups saying it—we saw the company starting to talk about home as a very different site for technological consumption and innovation. So, now we have the whole Digital Home Initiative, which is companywide, crossing all of the business groups. People have to start thinking about the home as this separate site for innovation and consumption of technology. Our group was one of the groups that was pushing to pay attention to the fact that domestic life was going to be really different than business life.
The group also did a lot of work on mobile practices, being mobile in one's life. I did field work in Europe in 1999 and 2000 and discovered that although Western Europe is part of the Western paradigm, people were living very different kind of lives there. There was a lot more social activity outside of the home. There was a lot more socializing. There was a lot more of organizing things on the fly. There was a great use of public transport. People had smaller physical homes. They spent less time at work. There was this whole bundle of leisure activities tending to revolve around people being mobile and in public spaces: pubs, gardens, brasseries. People were using an enormous amount of mobile technology to make that possible—cell phones, public computing spaces. This was well ahead of the United States. When you look at cell phone usage in Europe, it's taken the U.S. really until this year to catch up to what their market adoption had been.
We came back and talked a lot about mobility, not as a technology, but as a constellation of social practices. There is a home life and a work life, and there's this set of mobile practices in between. What I've been saying pretty aggressively now for two years is that culture's going to play a part in this. What "home" means in the U.S. is going to be really different from what it means in India, or China, or Korea, or Malaysia, or Latin America, or Africa. What we have to do is pay attention to the fact that life outside the U.S. is going to look really different because it may provide us with insights about the critical differences that influence what you do with technologies. What the "visual home" is going to look like 10 years from now is rooted in what life looks like in China or Korea, not just what it looks like in the American experience, which is all about streaming broadband from room to room. In China, it's a much smaller house we're talking about; it's never going to be 2,500 square feet. It's never going to be freestanding. So we're talking about more technology in a single room. We're talking about very different kinds of social experiences being supported much less around entertainment and much more around family communication and education.
In fact, the China scenario has some online ancestor worshipping that people are doing—philiopiety activities online—which the Chinese government has been actively supporting for a couple of years now. There has always been a lot of Chinese cultural practices around philiopiety. In English, we translate it as ancestor worship, but it's not entirely the same thing at all. There are a lot of practices that focus on your ancestors as part of your family, and there are a series of ritual occasions throughout the Chinese year where you do things with your ancestors. You visit them, you bring them food, you sweep their shrines clean, you burn paper objects that are transformed by fire into real objects in the world that they inhabit, all those kind of activities. The Chinese city government in Shanghai and Beijing are really concerned not only about the amount of time and energy that people spend on this but the amount of space it takes up to do this. They've both been supporting online Web sites where you can, basically, cremate your ancestors rather than bury them and then build an online shrine to them. There are a couple of sites that actually let you do this, such as eV991.com, but they are all in Chinese so you can't get access to them. But visually it's kind of fabulous. What's really interesting about it is that they're actually building out these sites which, suddenly, relatives in other countries can visit in a way that they couldn't with the physical sites. It is with all the iconography, and it looks like what shrines would have looked like offline.
It also suggests—and this is not the world that Sherry Terkle and those guys are writing about—a fundamental reimagining of technology in a way that's almost unimaginable from a Western context. Because we think about technology as supporting cultural values like efficiency and rationality and the new science, and it's totally tied up with ideas about modernity and progress. But to say, "I'm using the technology to bury my ancestors online so that I can encourage all of my relatives to engage in philiopiety" is a really different weight to put on technology and suggests a fundamental reimagining of what technology does.
An online workshop on copyright for educational publishers raised the legal point that "trespassing" on a Web site almost as if the site is a physical place. It's interesting that, even in the legal domain, this metaphor of space is really taking hold. Is that taking hold even more so in other places around the world?
Differently. One of the most wonderful critiques of computers I ever heard was from a Chinese colleague of mine who proceeded to take apart the "desktop" on the screen. To say, basically, here is an interface that comes out of a Western sensibility. We call it a "desktop." It has an "inbox," it has a "trash can," it has "folders." It implies a set of structures that don't make any sense in my Chinese colleague's context. He kept saying, "We don't have folders in China. I tried to explain it to my grandmother, she didn't get it. She's like, 'What's a folder?' We have a rock. We have a drawer. We can stick them in a drawer. Why do we need a folder?"
Even the metaphors, we in the U.S. don't think of them as metaphors, but they are in fact metaphors. So I think some of the ways we in the U.S. think about "cyberspace" are grounded in a language that's all tied up with ideas about Manifest Destiny and the West and the Final Frontier and Cyberutopia. It's embedded in a lot of other deeply American sensibilities. In other places, it really isn't. So when people talk about burying their ancestors online, I think that takes on a physical space manifestation, but it looks very different. The spaces it is evoking, and the kind of practices in those spaces, are fundamentally different than the "desktop" metaphor.
One of the challenges for me, as an anthropologist working somewhere like Intel, is that even the categories we use for making sense of these things is sometimes so culturally loaded that we're actually missing out on what's really going on. Even education means different things in different contexts. Even the metaphors of space that we think of as so culturally neutral are in fact deeply embedded in particular ideas about progress and modernity and ideas about the space race. Even the "information superhighway" is a set of metaphors embedded in such a set of technological practices. It shapes the imagination going forward.
There's a really nice paper by a guy who talks about the ways in which the metaphors we use for technology in turn curtail what we can do with the technology. Because if you imagine "information superhighway," you're already imagining a certain notion about resource infrastructure, about metaphors of being "on and off the highway," of imagining disconnections. The metaphor then mobilizes the whole way that we think about it. Because you then start to think about, "Well speed becomes important because we're talking about 'highway,' it's very linear, it is an idea about getting from Point A to Point B in the shortest amount of time," so there are ideas about efficiency that are embedded in it. There are all of these things that "highways" imply that we don't even think about, but that may not make sense somewhere like rural Africa, Korea, and India. "Information superhighway" may not be the best mobilizing metaphor. It's not necessarily a peculiar American thing, but there's a real tendency to it here. We're not good at critically examining those metaphors, particularly the ones around technology because we think of those as being so neutral. We think, "They are just technology visions, how can they possibly be loaded in cultural practices?"
You've said in one of your lectures that education is not about being efficient. You also said that technology doesn't necessarily make our lives more efficient. Can you talk more about this?
There is a lot of literature in the study of domestic technologies in particular. People like Susan Strasser, who has a book called Never Done: A History of American Housework, did an analysis of women's labor in the home during a 50-year period. Things that should have saved our labor, like washing machines and dish washers, and refrigerators, dryers, microwaves, she actually discovered that the amount of labor women put in in the home has not changed in 50 years. In fact, if anything, we put in more labor now in the home than we did then, because those technologies, A) make the work invisible, so it's no longer visible in the ways in which it once was, and B) it's no longer implicating other people's labor. So, 50 years ago—not in this country but in my home country of Australia—if you wanted to wash clothes, you needed someone to chop wood to boil the water in the copper. And the person who was chopping the wood was your husband or the man in the house. So male labor was also necessary in order to get domestic tasks done, and they were seen as being complementary activities. But as soon as you make electricity and the washing machine, some of that goes away and the effort becomes less visible and, thus, in some ways less rewarded.
What also ends up happening is that your standards shift. We now have expectations about clothes being washed every time we wear them, as opposed to what would have been the case at some prior point in time when you would have washed them maybe once a week, maybe once every two weeks. So our standards shifted and got accelerated. In fact technology in many ways has not made women's lives any easier, in fact it's created a larger set of burdens on women's time. In that amount of time—not surprisingly in the West, at least—men's capacity for domestic labor has not increased. Who knew? So women's time has stayed constant but with more and more demands on their time. Plus in that time period, the number of women who've gone into full-time work has increased dramatically.
We're always tempted to think that technology makes us more efficient, but I think what you can say is that, many times, what technology does is mask certain forms of labor. We talk about mobile phones making us more efficient, but actually they probably make us more accessible. It's harder to get away from certain kinds of obligations now than it once might have been. There were once ways to resist being structured by your office: You went home. There's an expectation now that you will continue to do that work at home; you're expected to be accessible, but the work is increasingly made invisible.
Robert Kanigel wrote this lovely, loving biography of Frederick Winslow Taylor, The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency (Viking Books, 1997). For me, it was one of the best insights I've ever had into American culture, the notion of efficiency that comes into American culture in 1914. And the idea that time equals money, and that there are more efficient ways of doing things, and that we could regulate industry. That idea is less than 100 years old. It was a series of testimonies before Congress between 1911 and 1915 that gave rise to these bywords, and in turn for labor, and in turn for every other major process that we engage in where we think that efficiency is in fact the paradigm we ought to be operating in.
But it turns out that that notion about efficiency as saving time, saving labor, saving energy—the right way to do things, the limited number of steps—is profoundly cultural. That comes out of a particular mode in American industrialization, it comes out of demands of industry on labor, it comes out of a kind of crumbling of the labor movement. There are a lot of things that are going on at that moment that makes that a kind of dominant paradigm. But it turns out that efficiency is not a cultural value in other places. I grew up in a Western country, Australia, where efficiency was not a big cultural value. Not that we don't know how to get things done in a reasonable amount of time, but that kind of language about efficiency doesn't pervade. It doesn't pervade in most of Western Europe. It certainly doesn't pervade in Asia, I mean this is not a cultural logic that has any significance—except in Japan. Yet, what do we know about Japan? It was an American colony, and industry got remade there in American terms. So you can track why Japan has that sort of logic, but you don't see it in China, and you don't see it India.
And it's not that those are people who waste time—that's an interesting expression—or that they're lazy. It's that there are other social values that are more important. Ideas about sociality and sociability. When you look at what Koreans are doing with their mobile phones—I've never been anywhere where there's so many mobile phones, it's amazing—but they're not about making people more efficient. What do they do? They're all about social networking. I met people who had anywhere from 300 to 500 phone numbers programmed in their mobile phones, and the phone numbers are organized by category of social relatedness: family, clients, business peers, university colleagues. And for each one of those categories of contacts, the phone rang differently. The reason you need the phone to ring differently is that for different social contacts you use a different linguistic form of greeting. So, Korean—like French and German—is a form that has a formal and an informal form. You use the formal form for people who are senior to you, by generation or by career or by age. There's another form that you use with your cohort. There's another form that you use for people who are junior to you, and another one for your family.
So what the phone does is let people know, when they're answering it, how to answer it. Now we in the U.S. look at that and we think, "Oh that's so efficient." Koreans look at that and say, "Oh thank God, that helps me navigate social networks in such a way that I don't insult people." It looks like the same activity, and we would be tempted to read that as a form of cultural efficiency, but that's not the way they make sense of it. For them, the important goal is to maximize social networks over the longest period of time so that they, their children, their relatives can take advantage of their social contacts over the duration. So mobile phones become this extraordinary tool for social networking.
This is also true of the online space, too. It may not be true now, but two years ago most of the chatter that went on in online chat rooms in Korea were all in formal Korean, rather than informal because you never know if the person you're chatting with might be someone you need to network with later. So you don't want to insult them inadvertently before you even have had a conversation with them. So you always use the deferential form. That's hard to describe that as an activity around efficiency. The technology is definitely being used to support that, but it's not what we would think of as classic time, labor, energy saved.
I think that you can even make the case in the United States that people's notions about what constitutes good technology are often skewed remarkably by gender. There were some studies done in the late 1990s that asked men and women what they thought made for good Internet experiences and good computers. Men: Speed, speed, speed, speed, speed. Women: Safety, security, privacy, keeping my kids safe. I mean it was a completely different understanding of the same technology coming out of very different sensibilities of daily life.
In fact, what's deeply ironic is when you think about the first market research ever done in the United States. It was a study about cars that was done during World War I. At that time, cars had just become cheap enough that you could imagine owning them in this country, and the vast majority of car owners were women. The Suffragette movement had pushed cars to women as an emancipatory tool.
So they did this survey to figure out how they were going to get more men to buy cars. What do men like about cars; what do women like about cars? As it turned out, what did men like about cars? They wanted them to go faster. Surprise. Speed, speed, speed. What did women like? Safety, reliability, and style. Different technology, same kind of response as today's research about men's and women's computer preferences. Women wanted to know that every time they turned it on it would start. They wanted to know that if anything happened to them, would they be safe. They wanted it to not look quite so ugly. You had this really interesting demarcation, and every piece of technology that's come along since, I think, you can probably see that same differentiation.
Do you see any implications of this for education?
I think it's always been very tempting in the United States to take lessons from industry and apply them to the education domain. It becomes about "throughput" and "mass production" and "efficiency" and if we just streamline this process, we can get more kids through. It becomes all about the metrics and not about the experience. And that's the Frederick Winslow Taylor view: It's all about how many steps does it take, not about what you're producing.
When you look at the resistance on the part of organized labor, and even workers, about Winslow Taylor's approach, it was that it lost all the notion about craft and about care and about pride in your product and about the loving intention that was given to a person or product. This was happening at the same time that production lines were being invented. So you go from having individual people who know how to do a specialized thing, to anyone being able to replace anyone on the production line, where it stops being specialized labor. What you get from that are the benefits of mass production: It's cheaper, we can produce more, it takes up less resources. But you can make the case that that isn't always a good thing to transplant to other social arenas. I think you can argue that it hasn't worked terribly well in the medical arena in this country. I think it's probably not working terribly well in the education arena. Because those are fundamentally about forms of social relationships and social capital, not about making tools.
In the education arena, what have you observed about how technology influences relationships?
I just have anecdotal information about education in the United States, it's not been where I've been working. Elsewhere, it's been a mixed blessing for education. In many places, parents have bought PCs because they thought it would contribute to their children's education. But I think it often feels a bit like buying Encyclopedia Britannica back in our parents' day: You knew that it was kind of a stake in the future, but you weren't quite sure what exactly it was going to do for your children. I've certainly heard in some places some anxiety: "We've invested a lot of money in this thing, but we don't know what it's going to deliver to our kids."
There seem to be a number of things driving that. One is that the resources aren't always there in other parts of the world—or in the States—to make sure that computers are appropriately contextualized in classrooms. It's a real challenge to work out. How do you fit the technology into the curriculum so that it's not just skill-set acquisition, when it isn't teaching 10-year-olds how to use Power Point—one of the great tragedies. How do you use Microsoft Office? How do we do programming? Those are clearly useful skill sets around the computer, but there has not been such a good way of thinking about the computer as a library or another kind of resource. To integrate that kind of computer use into teaching practice requires retraining teachers. It's not something they're naturally going to come by. We sort of assume that they will, but it involves rethinking curriculum exercises.
Would you talk a bit more about why a 10-year-old probably shouldn't be taught Power Point?
I wouldn't say that it's pointless. I worry that that gets done at the expense of other things. Part of what we've seen as computers have come along is that they've been so valued as tools that we've taken to teaching kids how to use them as though that were an important part of the educational curriculum. Which, arguably, it ought to be, but not at the expense of other things. One of the hard things has been to think about what else is not getting done because there's been some notion that Power Point is a useful communication tool that everyone should know. What else is getting sacrificed? There's a seductive quality to technology and I think we're routinely seduced by it and by this promise that it holds for things like a job. It's not always helpful. I heard this the other day in a workshop: What we are doing is creating digital sweatshops. One of the ways you can think about the call centers in Bengal is as digital sweatshops. What's ended up happening, other parts of the world are being convinced to teach students certain technology skills that, essentially, limit them to always providing labor rather than innovative thinking—as was done to women 40 years ago.
Does using technology influence the way we think?
I know that MIT's Sherry Terkle and all have a lot to say about that in the West. I think that comes out of some very different imaginings of what technology does. I think that technology in the West and in the U.S. in particular is profoundly linked to ideas of progress and modernity and science and rational thinking and ideas about production and labor. It's tied up to all of those things. When you talk about technological progress in this country, it's all tied up with things that changed things: The car changed the American landscape. Telephones changed the way we communicate. There's this notion that airplanes collapse distance. The burden we put on technology is that if it's to be successful, it must fundamentally change the way we behave, rather than saying, as I think you could if we look at it slightly differently, the technologies that have been really successful are the technologies that have supported social practices people already cared about. They did not in fact create new practices out of whole cloth. They may have amplified existing social practices, exaggerated or heightened them, but they probably didn't make new ones out of nothing.
When catalogs came along, like the Sears and Roebuck catalog, people said this will destroy the main street, there will be no more shopping, no one will want to shop anymore, they will just want to stay at home and use catalogs. And you think to yourself, "Gosh, where have I heard that before?" The whole response to e-commerce: People will never want to shop anymore! But there will always be different forms of social practice.
It was once thought that TV would be the death of radio and computers will be the death of TV.
Or TV will be the death of the family. How could that possibly happen? One of the things I've been struck by is that I don't hear that same kind of language in some of the Asian countries I've been in. I don't hear people saying that technology is fundamentally changing the way we live. What I hear them saying is, "Things are different now." But I don't hearing them saying, "We're not the same people and we can't go back and it's all dreadful." There's not that same bizarre nostalgia for the time before the thing came along.
I think that that might be part of the cultural construction of technology in those places, it does not create social revolution, it allows social stability. I wonder if that's not a consequence of living in a 3,000- to 5,000-year-old culture. There has been a China for three and a half thousand years. There have been Indian principalities for 3,000 years. The West, what have we got, 500 years? We have this sense of anxiety about technology changing things, because in some ways that's the history that we know, and that's the history that we want to tell, because it distinguishes us from our past.
But if your cultural practices are about celebrating continuities rather than discontinuities, maybe the burden you put on technology is really different. Maybe it's about saying, "How do these technologies support social stability? In fact, we want technologies that promote harmony. And we'll embrace technologies that do, we'll embrace technologies that let us do the things that we like to do," which is a completely different framing of it than "It's destroying the American family."
I just got asked a question by the editor of The New Scientist: "What would it take to plan cities that would facilitate global phone calls." That's so amazingly wrongheaded! Oh god. No, no, no. The much better question is, "What is it in cities that already supports people's social communications, and how is technology mapped onto that, and why is it that people haven't demolished buildings in order to have phone calls," because clearly that's not what it's about. But I think it's really easy sitting in a place like Intel to engage in a kind of technological determinism. To think that we must have more technology, that more technology is the solution to things. Also, to imagine that all the innovations will come from the West.
One of the other kinds of Industrial Revolution, post-Enlightenment paradigms is that the West is the center of innovation because that's what distinguishes us from China or India, which are not post-Enlightenment, not Industrial Revolution countries. It's been very hard to let go of that. One of the things that was so interesting about the explosive growth of cell phones in the last five years was the great unwillingness on the part of Americans to believe that it was happening in Europe. You'd hear people saying things like, "Text messaging? That's just a phase they're going through. They'll get over it. Mobile phones? It's just a trend."
In classrooms, the work students may be doing using technology doesn't always look very "whiz-bang" to the outside observer, but it's obvious that the students and teacher are excited about it. Is using technology such a personal experience that it's difficult for an observer to perceive the experience?
There's this really interesting thing that goes on. Those of us who are in the technology industry, who write about the technology industry, have been seduced by technology. We really like the whizzes and the bangs. We're the leading edge, we're the Joneses here. We will buy it because it has whizzes and bangs; we think it should. But for everyone else, they just care that it works. One of the challenges for us at Intel is that we have to be really careful, as we think about new products and think about computing, that we're not being seduced by our own form of wonderment with what makes it technology.
I think what makes technology successful is when the technology part becomes almost invisible and what gets foregrounded is the experience. When we think about television, do you know how a television works? Do you even care? Do you even need to know to operate it? Hell no. You just press the remote control and the thing comes on. That's all you need to know. You probably only use five buttons on the thing. Do you need to know how your 'fridge works in order for you to reach in and get something cold out of it? No.
I'm not surprised that teachers think it's successful because the technology is invisible and the experience is what's important. It's real easy for us to forget that, because we expect that technology will make things look different. It reminds me of that bit in Monty Python's "The Meaning of Life," where it opens with the meaning of birth and there is a woman lying flat on her back in an operating room in Manchester giving birth. And the doctor comes in and looks at her and says, "Hm we need the machines... and there's the machine that goes BRRR, and the machine that does this, and the machine that does that." The woman is lying there screaming, "What do I do? What do I do?" and the doctor finally looks at her and says, "Nothing dear, you're not qualified."
So we tend to think about technology constituting the experience, rather than the other way around. Maybe experience constitutes the technology. What we should be aiming for is technology that's become invisible, where we don't have to think about what makes it work in order to do the thing that we're doing. One of the challenges has been that you can't make the technology invisible yet, and that makes them a hard sell in classrooms. It's no surprise that pens, papers, scissors, glue, sticky tape and colored pencils, have lasted such a long time. They are relatively indestructible. And they're user friendly. One of the challenges, even for companies like Intel, is we really like the whiz bang. But if you want it to be successful it has to have no whiz bang.
Has there been a backlash against consumer technology?
I've just been hearing, outside of the U.S., that people are frustrated: "We bought these objects because we thought it would be good for education and my kids are just playing games," or "There isn't any educational content," or "It's really expensive to get online and there's nothing on there that I want them to have," or "It's really important that they learn Mandarin right now, not play around online," or "It's big and ugly and where am I going to put it in my really small house?"
It's been this interesting failure to deliver on the promise of technology. I think it's a big challenge for companies like Intel to think about how you continue to support that activity, find the right people to partner with, find the right kind of other organizations to participate in helping to shape a better kind of ecology for that technology. Maybe that does mean partnering with government departments, and education departments, and all manner of other people.
Part of it is, you've got this ripe platform, in fact, a series of platforms. Television is another interesting platform in people's homes and they're much more pervasive than PCs are. How do we take advantage of that and do something interesting with it? That's actually a big challenge. In the states, we've had a greater tolerance for using technology for less educational purposes. The importance of education, outside the U.S. and probably in certain minority communities in this country, far eclipses what it is in the mainstream community. Kids just study more in China and Korea and Malaysia and Singapore.
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