Archive for Ethnography
by Imran Ali
June 10, 2008 at 11:40 am · Filed under Studies + Research, Ethnography, Research
We last visited the emerging discipline of Reality Mining towards the end of 2007, in an examination of the work of MIT’s Nathan Eagle’s analysis of the usage patterns and movements of mobile users.
In the last few days there have been a pair of interesting developments in the field. Firstly, a report from the BBC on a large scale study by Albert-László Barabási at Boston’s Northeastern University and secondly, the launch of Sense Network’s Citysense.
Barabási’s work is notable as the author of the seminal book Linked, exploring the science of human networks. Over the course of six months Barabási’s study followed 100′000 individuals randomly selected and anonymised European mobile users. Their calling and messaging habits were logged along with their location, revealing that most people tend to move within 5-10km ranges throughout the course of their day-to-day lives, generally between the same sets of several locations.
Understanding that clusters of people behave similarly has useful implications for analysing traffic and disease control as well as enabling a new generation of commuter information services and criminal intelligence.
Separately, the launch of Citysense is interesting in that it’s perhaps the highest profile, commercial reality mining service currently available. Currently, available only in San Francisco, the service assists users in discovering social hotspots around the city, answering the question - “Where is everybody?”.
Taking in realtime reality-mined data, Citysense utilises public data from Google and Yelp to surface vanues and events and render them on ‘heat-map’ of the city.
As more mobile usage data becomes available to developers and privacy models evolve to help users control their presence, the emerging field of reality mining is set to unlock the real value of mobility and ubiquitous connectivity.
by Imran Ali
March 29, 2008 at 1:57 pm · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, SMS, Ethnography, Events, Conferences, Visualisation
Earlier this month I dropped into the Emerging Arts Fest at O’Reilly’s seminal ETech 2008 conference; the arts fest brought together a number of projects at the ‘intersection between art, design and technology. One of the most striking pieces on show was MIT’s New York Talk Exchange, part of the school’s Sensable City lab.
The NYTE project is mining real-time communications data from AT&T and visualising IP traffic and telephony flows between New York and the rest of the world, handily expressing the relationships between New Yorkers and the globe, even down to various ethnically biased neighbourhoods mapping directly onto countries of origin and the temporal dynamics of calls across multiple time zones.
NYTE is nothing short of a breathtaking technical and aesthetic achievement, though it’d be interested to utilise these visualisations to explore a finer level of granularity, notably where mobility and messaging intersect with more general IP and telephony traffic.
Complex data visualisations are almost always pretty, but their real profundity is as ‘revelatory media’; what can we learn, what questions can be answered that previously could not; what is serendipitously revealed?
What would NYTE look like around 9/11? We’d expect to see blackspots around Lower Manhattan, but would we see a sudden switch from voice to SMS are networks were overwhelmed? Would we see a sudden uptick of calls between Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Boston prior to the attacks?
Though not the first MIT project to explore these themes, NYTE is certainly the most polished - what can such visualisation tell us about the motivation and ethnography of communication and messaging?
by Imran Ali
March 26, 2008 at 10:34 am · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, Ethnography, Mobile Payments, Micropayment, Asia
I’ve been following the ethnographic studies of Nokia’s Jan Chipchase for some time, notably his insights and primary research into the usage of messaging and mobility in the developing world.
One of Chipchase’s observations in Uganda was the notion of ’sente’, using prepay airtime as a form of cheap, secure and convenient banking as well a pooling prepay credit between customers when sufficiently small denominations are available.
Springwise recently reported on similar usage trends in the Philippines, this time as operator-supported services, using SMS as a medium for transferring credit between subscribers. Incidentally, the Philippines was the first market where SMS revenue overtook voice minutes.
Globe Telecom’s user experience is simple - texting a PIN, transaction amount and recipient number to the service number is all that’s necessary. This incurs a charge of a couple pennies, which coupled with the volume of texting in the country, indicates that there’s a lucrative post-voice revenue stream for telcos, displacing their time+distance voice billing with large volumes of incremental transactional revenue.
by Imran Ali
December 27, 2007 at 4:28 am · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, Devices, Studies + Research, On Blogs and Blogging, Ethnography, Communication, Convergence, Email
In the last couple of weeks, the various contributors to Mobile Messaging 2.0 have been holding an open debate on what the definition of a mobile message should be; with some insightful and thought provoking contributions from Debi, Darla, Ewan, Paul and Russell…almost the entire team!
From my own perspective as a user, cognitively, I don’t think I’ve ever made distinctions between mobile messaging or ‘fixed’ messaging. In fact the means of transmission is pretty much meaningless to me, with a focus on where I am, what I’m doing, what I’m talking about and with whom I’m communicating.
Every day I expect 100-150 incoming emails, around a 1000 blogposts at Bloglines, maybe 50-75 Twitters, an average of 5 voice calls, 5-10 Facebook messages and the odd notification from a blog comment, Facebook event, YouTube, Upcoming, Last.fm or eBay. Every now and again, I might even receive an MMS!
They’re all just messages - some land in my mailbox, others in various web application inboxes, some on my mobile phone. I might see a Facebook notification email arrive in my N95’s inbox and reply using the mobile web UI for Facebook. I may receive a direct Twitter on my phone as an SMS and reply using Twitterific on my Mac. Sometimes I wander around the house firing off replies from an iPod touch.
Conversations and communications start in one application, end in another and meander through various fixed and mobile networks…it’s all communication, driven by context and situation.
Perhaps there’s a meta-question we need to address collectively. Rather than exploring definition of mobile messaging, we perhaps need to understand why this definition is important. Are we more interested in the mobile portions of a conversation’s journey or in the multi-modal nature of that conversation?
I would argue that the latter question is perhaps more significant, simply because this is an area in which the industry lacks knowledge. Classifying messages by network or device is relatively easy to comprehend, but doesn’t reflect the reality of usage most of us now experience.
We can perhaps learn much more about the design and usage of communication by delving deep into the motivations we have when switching contexts between services, devices, location, time and relationship…
by Imran Ali
December 23, 2007 at 9:04 pm · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, Ethnography, Research
A couple of weeks ago I was introduced to Nathan Eagle’s research on Reality Mining at MIT by eComm’s Lee Dryburgh (Nathan will be speaking at eComm 2008 in March).
Though Eagle’s work is a couple years old, it represents one of the more comprehensive studies of mobile communication and ethnography.
Supported by Nokia, the Reality Mining project has collated and mined data from the mobile handsets of 100 users and modeled various social behaviours, including conversation context, activity, proximity, location, time and relationship networks - both for individuals and aggregate groups of people.
The project’s themes have included…
- Modelling complex social systems - with applications as diverse as disease control and the social lives of freshman MIT students!
- Behaviour modelling and prediction - including generation of an automatic ‘lifelog’ of events cross referenced with the various ‘encounters’ between participants in the research. Intriguingly,researchers have attempted to model the probability of where and when people will be against their actual behaviour to determine the accuracy of predictions.
- Relationship inference - trying to automate and understand the relationship between participants based on their pattern of communication, movements and encounters.
- Social Serendipity - in the light of Dopplr’s success, the research’s investigation of serendipity seems prescient, with suggested application areas including dating, conferences and (surprisingly)Â the enterprise arena.
With the study’s raw data and client applications freely available to the world, I would expect to see handsets and services which begin to exploit the learning from this work. By embedding intelligence about my relationships and inferring behavior, could mobile communication and messaging evolve to a mixed model of explicit and overt messages with underlying exchanges of social signals, locations, moods, behavior and preference?
(Coincidentally, RW/W and MIT’s own Technology Review covered this story last week…I wonder if that’s where Lee first came across it?)
by Imran Ali
November 5, 2007 at 11:27 am · Filed under SMS, Studies + Research, Ethnography, Communication, Thumbs, UK
The UK’s Mobile Data Association has just announced that Britons are sending around 1.2 billion messages a week…that’s 25% growth over the previous year! Bundling, ethnographics, B2C messaging and increased enterprise usage are noted as the underlying factors.
Let’s say at an average prices of 5p/message, UK mobile operators would be collectively hauling in just under a quarter of a billion pounds each month!
It’s a crude statistic, but also underlines the inertia in opening up mobility. Why worry about making decisions about developer programmes, open source, unlocked handsets and the like when you can essentially wait it out. Time favours the telcos…
To quote Rainier Wolfcastle…
Jay Sherman: how do you sleep at night?
Rainier: On top of a pile of money, with many beautiful women.
by Imran Ali
September 30, 2007 at 7:40 pm · Filed under Usage + Usability, News, Mobile Advertising, Ethnography, Radio, Convergence
Mobile operators, handset manufacturers and operating systems vendors have a tendency to become breathlessly excited by the possibility of all-in-one super phones such as the N95 and iPhone.
Yet, few take the time to critically understand the ethnographic reality of convergence. I spent many years pointing out to my former employers that convergence and digital TV was less about crude interactive and more about understanding what people were googling on their wifi laptops as they watched TV!
By the same token, a recent piece by Reuters on the use of text-messaging promotions by radio broadcasters is a indictment of the blinkered nature of convergence discourse in the industry.
Rather than pursuing the mirage of the One-True-Device, operators and handset builders need to sharpen their ethnographic understanding and open their innovation processes to a wider community of developers. There is more than one model of convergence chaps!
Interestingly, Reuters’ Radio stations keying in to text-message promotions, doesn’t mention anything about support from operators and vendors…
by Imran Ali
September 17, 2007 at 7:06 pm · Filed under Usage + Usability, Nokia, Ethnography, Communication
My former boss, Dr. Norman Lewis, related a few days ago that there was a ‘dearth of substantial qualitative research on telephony itself’. Odd for an industry that’s now straddled three centuries, but there are few landmark studies into the motivations of voice and messaging - why people send texts, make calls and how they measure their user experience.
Fortunately, there are individuals who are beginning to pay attention to qualitative ethnographic studies. Nokia’s Jan Chipchase has undertaken fascinating studies into the ‘Next Billion‘ consumers across the developing world and where people keep their mobile handsets.
Also, SS7 expert and UCL doctoral candidate, Lee Dryburgh, pointed out a pair of interesting texts which I haven’t had a chance to review, but look to be promising sources of research:
- Robert Hopper’s Telephone Conversation includes an interactional methodology for examining telephone conversations. Something that may be adaptable for mobile messaging contexts.
- Luke and Pavlidou’s Telephone Calls compares and contrasts conversational structure across different cultures and languages, looking for common conversational patterns.
As an industry, we breathlessly pursue progress in technologies, standards, business models and innovation - yet focus relatively little effort on ethnography. That’s why innocuous technologies such as text messaging escaped the attention of mobile operators. They were ill-placed to understand the motivations of mobile users and consequently couldn’t spot an emerging user trend.
