Librarians, other community intermediaries, and users themselves reported that many basic but critical services related to establishing a connection to the U.S. - such as immigration and citizenship applications - have moved online. In most cases this means that to successfully navigate such a service applicants are expected to have access to an internet connection and computing device, to be a skilled computer user, and to have the generally high level of English literacy required for official and legal documents. While some study participants had these skills, others reported turning to trusted community intermediaries such as librarians for help.

Over the past few months I have come to appreciate how difficult navigating the web in a second language can be. Living in Stockholm, with a decent but not fluent command of the language, I have gradually been learning to use the web in Swedish. I have encountered challenges in the following areas:

Work: While the websites of many business and institutions in Sweden are in English - catering to an international audience - the most up-to-date information, such as news or recent events can often only be found in Swedish. Less official, but equally useful sites, such as those of professional organizations exist only in Swedish, for example, Antropool - a group for anthropologists. In addition it is often difficult to determine what keywords will yield the most relevant search. Sometimes the direct translation of an English word to Swedish isn’t the one in common use. For instance: the word “research” is also used in Swedish, but the more common word for research is “forskning”. Finally, skimming through a list of search results is challenging because I must look at each result more slowly and carefully than I would in English to understand what it is: using the web becomes a much slower experience.

Getting to know a city: When I first arrived in Stockholm I used Google Maps - a tool I use constantly in New York - to look up unfamiliar addresses. Later, through conversation, I discovered that most people use the mapping website Eniro.se. While the interface is in Swedish (and therefore takes more time for me to navigate) I find that its results are more accurate and easier to interpret in terms of finding things in Stockholm. In addition, as in the US, user generated reviews - such as for restaurants - have become an important tool for navigating Swedish cities. Because they are written by local residents these reviews are typically in Swedish. While I can understand them it is difficult for me to make a judgment about the review’s quality. Is the quality of the reviewer’s writing good or bad? What kind of client is the restaurant or service catering towards?

Official matters: For activities like online banking, registering for courses, or determining whether one can drive in Sweden with a US license a whole different level of cultural, linguistic and internet fluency is required - often necessitating a detailed knowledge of the Swedish social system, which is something a dictionary is of little help with!

Online transactions: One might assume that purchasing things online - such as books - might be relatively similar from country to country. But, this process has some important basic differences in Sweden and the US. For example, in the US I would be very wary of any site that asked me for my social security number. But, in Sweden is not uncommon for a website to ask the user for their “personnummer” (the Swedish equivalent). That is, online safety can have a cultural component which is not immediately obvious, and potentially dangerous for users who are unfamiliar with local practices.

All in all my time in Sweden has shown me that experiences of the web - and one’s ability to navigate it - can vary significantly depending on linguistic and cultural knowledge. That is, although one might be a sophisticated internet user in one language and cultural context these skills do not necessarily translate to other contexts. For instance, although the U.S., England, India, Australia, Canada, etc. all have significant English-speaking populations an American might not be familiar with the most respected online news sites in India, something that would be obvious to an Indian-national. This challenges, or at least adds complexity to, the notion that the web is a global tool in the sense that anyone, anywhere can access any kind of information.

Mobility may be an important attribute for certain demographics and geographies. We observed, for example, that a relatively high number of respondents in New Mexico - where in some communities wireline connections aren’t available - had recently signed up for mobile broadband service (facilitated by plugging a USB stick into a laptop). According to the company’s website Cricket’s mobile internet service, for example, costs $40 per month with a $25 activation fee, but has no contract, cancellation fee, or security deposit requirements.

Though mobile broadband does require access to or ownership of a computing device the fact that this service isn’t tied to a physical address is likely a huge benefit for some consumers - college students who live part of the year at school and part with their parents, for instance, or others who may not have permanent housing.

The physical simplicity of the device may also be a benefit - requiring users to plug in an object about the size of one’s thumb rather than to connect a mangle of wires, modems and power plugs. A further development in mobile internet that may prove cost-effective for households is MiFi. MiFi is a palm-sized wireless router that creates a local WiFi hotspot, allowing up to five devices to connect at one time. This includes laptops, cameras, gaming devices, multimedia players, etc.

Both MiFi and mobile broadband services like Cricket rely on cellular data networks for connectivity. They currently provide relatively low connection speeds (5-8 Mb/s max) compared to what wireline fiber connections can provide (20Mb/s, 100Mb/s, 1GB/s, etc.) but are competitive with typical DSL and cable speeds. After years of enthusiasm in the tech community about WiMax - mobile broadband that can provide 40Mb/s + speeds - it is interesting to see the emergence of widespread mobile internet services which, while they may not meet our ideals, seem to fill a solid middle ground in the current market.

Here are a few excerpts on the topic:

“Goal No. 6 [of 6 of the National Broadband Plan is]: To ensure that America leads in the clean energy economy, every American should be able to use broadband to track and manage their real-time energy consumption.”

p. 265: “Consumers and businesses will need easy access to information about the type, amount and price of energy to make informed decisions about their consumption. The price of electricity will also have to better reflect the cost of providing power, which can skyrocket during critically hot days.”

p. 266: “The FCC should start a proceeding to improve the energy efficiency and environmental impact of the communications industry.“

p. 276: “The federal government should take a leadership role in improving the energy efficiency of its data centers. … The federal government owns and operates approximately 10% of the nation’s data centers and servers.”

We interviewed 170+ people in 4 states in a highly compressed time frame. Without the time to hang out and look as much as in traditional anthropology we made use of “camera eyes”. Outfitted with two digital photo cameras we snapped hundreds of images in our visits around the country and made use of images not only as a documentation tool, but as research and organizational tools. While processing the images later on it became clear that they fell into three highly useful categories:

1. Memory photos: We attempted to take at least one photograph of every person and place we visited. These images were helpful in the process of writing the report in terms of jogging our memories (what was that place like?) and helping the transcribers to imagine the speakers in interviews (who is talking?).

A library in Greene County, NY

A focus group

2. Infrastructure photos: We took frequent shots of computer terminals, old monitors, empty pay phone booths, cell phones and other evidence of today’s existing and changing communications infrastructure. As a research project about internet access and the reasons why people need it, the study took into account not only what people said about the internet or how many public computers there were in a given community center, but especially the relationship between the people and the technology. These photos help to illustrate how embedded information and communications devices are in our everyday lives and how are lives are affected when they are limited or broken.

A broken computer

300 residents at a homeless shelter share limited number of phones

3. Process photos: In focus groups we frequently used big pieces of note paper to record themes and keep track of topics as the conversation unfolded. This helped us to efficiently create an initial coding of the data, and also made our interpretations transparent to the group who could (and did) offer corrections and additions. Because we needed to move quickly from location to location, as well as from state to state it was sometimes difficult to take these papers with us. As a solution we photographed the notes after each focus group. The papers could then be recycled and the images could be shared among the research team - and used as a basis for writing up daily summaries, or later on as quick references for the topics discussed in different groups.

Notes from a focus group

Overall, part of what made photos a useful tool in this project was that they are digital. We needed quick representations of what we’d done and seen (especially in the case of the process photos), and it was helpful to be able to share them quickly. The images of course would have had less utility if we had needed to wait for them to be developed, printed, and mailed.

**For more on visual research methods check out these resources on visual research from a visual anthropology POV:

1. Books: A good theoretical book on the visual + research is anthropologist David MacDougall’s The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography and the Senses. He writes for example, “Visual Media allow us to construct knowledge not by description, but by a form of acquaintance…visual anthropology may offer different ways of understanding, but also different things to understand.” Flip to the last chapter for MacDougall’s new principles of visual anthropology, which point towards areas of understanding - the topographic; the temporal; the corporeal; the personal - which he suggests may be especially well understood not only via visual presentations but through visual methods. For a more practical treatment of the use of media in anthropology read Sarah Pink’s Home Truths, see especially the chapter in which Pink writes about using video ethnography to explore the sights and smells of people’s homes for Unilever product development.

2. Media: lost in a moment is a beautiful short observational film of a sushi train restaurant in Tokyo by Dennis Wheatley and Stefan McClean. Likewise, the project tea in china (and other places) documents everyday restaurant place settings around the world. Meanwhile the blog Unphotographable: a text account of photos missed is lovely and visual in the way it describes images that went unrecorded.

Broadband Adoption in Low-Income Communities
A Social Science Research Council report by

Dharma Dailey, Amelia Bryne, Alison Powell, Joe Karaganis, and Jaewon Chung

2 March 2010, Washington, D.C. – The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) unveiled the study findings of the SSRC in its report, Broadband Adoption in Low-Income Communities, at an event hosted by the American Library Association (ALA).

The SSRC was commissioned by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to analyze the factors shaping low rates of adoption of home broadband services in low-income and other marginalized communities. The resulting study is one of the only large-scale qualitative investigations of barriers to adoption in the US, and complements recent FCC survey research on adoption designed to inform the National Broadband Plan. The study draws on some 170 interviews of non-adopters, community access providers, and other intermediaries conducted across the US in late 2009 and early 2010. At the broadest level, it finds that:

• Broadband access is increasingly a requirement of socio-economic inclusion, not an outcome of it—and residents of low-income communities know this.
• Price is only one factor shaping the fragile equilibrium of home broadband adoption, and price pressures go beyond the obvious challenge of high monthly fees. Hardware costs, hidden fees, billing transparency, quality of service, and availability are major issues for low-income communities.
• Libraries and other community organizations fill the gap between low home adoption and high community demand, and provide a number of other critical services, such as training and support. These support organizations are under severe pressure to meet community connectivity needs, leading to widespread perceptions of a crisis in the provider community.

Related Press:

The FCC’s blog post about the study: Two Studies That Deepen Our Understanding of Barriers to Broadband Adoption by John Horrigan, Consumer Research Director.

The American Library Association’s blog post on the study release event in DC including videos of the presentation and Q&A.

Matt Lasar’s article about the study on Ars Technica: The poor don’t care about broadband? Of course they do.

A podcast from The Economist on the study: Lower-income broadband adoption

Information and communications technologies (ICTs) are widely believed to be key tools for minimizing human impact on the environment. For example, pollution sensors can make the relationship between humans, technology, and their impact on climate change more clear.

These technologies are part of the solution, but they are also part of the problem.

Electronics are produced with many toxic chemicals and non-renewable resources, including flame-retardants and heavy metals. Energy is required to make these electronics and to maintain the infrastructure to power them. And, with today’s typically short life cycles for things like computers and cell phones, e-waste – electronic trash – is a huge challenge.

We bring you four extended conversations on greening ICT:

Casey Harrell of Greenpeace believes that focusing on electronics manufacturers directly is a better strategy for greening the industry than fighting for regulatory reform.  He discusses the strategy employed by Greenpeace to work with the industry to green electronics in terms of the materials they are made with, the energy they use, and what we do with them after they stop working.

Can live data streams about our environment become a kind of media that changes our behavior?  Architects Soo-In Yang and David Benjamin use architecture as a media platform for public and participatory media on the environment.

Photographer Misty Keasler makes visible the impact of e-waste – “the most toxic consumer trash that exists” – on people across the globe. Keasler discusses the role of the still image in extending the “half-life of awareness” on social and environmental issues.

Smart Grid analyst David Leeds believes that the most significant reductions in greenhouse emissions are attainable by upgrading our electrical grid.  He talks us through his comprehensive report on the Smart Grid industry – what it is, what the big challenges are, and what’s in store for the future.

Empty phone booths in Penn Station, New York:

Last summer I was traveling in Sweden, where my U.S. phone doesn’t work. I needed to make a call and figured that I could find a public phone in Stockholm to do so. It took me two hours. I first looked for a telephone in a public library, “no,” the librarian told me, “there’s no phone here, and I’m not really sure where there is one, try walking up the street - unfortunately you can’t use ours.”

I wandered towards a busy commercial area popping into quiet shops here and there, asking politely if the shopkeeper could recommend a public phone (or would perhaps take pity on a tourist and let me make a short local call). No luck. I thought about stopping people in the street, as surely everyone must have a cell phone. But I couldn’t bring myself to do that. There seems to be some unspoken taboo that you can’t use a stranger’s mobile.

Then, to my delight, I finally spotted what seemed to be a phone booth. It was in the middle of a pleasant traffic roundabout. As I approached I realized that the booth was behind a construction fence. As the construction didn’t seem to be active, I squeezed through it only to realize that the first booth was missing its phone, and the second one didn’t take coins, only Swedish calling cards. By the time I finally located a phone to make the call - in a subway station - I had realized the hard way that making an on-the-go call today without a cell phone is pretty difficult.

Although pay phones may seem arcane, they are still used. This article in The New York Times, paints a picture of the continued and vibrant activity at a public phone in Queens, New York: “Everybody knows the public pay phone is dying, but nobody inclined to watch this one would believe it. … In seven days last week, more than 100 people deposited a total of $52 in the phone, at 25 cents per call. … The machine served not so much as a lifeline, but as a simple landline, with life.”

While a payphone may not be as convenient as a personal mobile phone it can be a cheaper option - a few bucks a month for pay phone calls vs. $30 to $100 a month for cell phone service. In addition, sharing a public phone is probably more environmentally friendly than each of us owning our own device. Cell phones, which typically have an 18 month use span, are one of the biggest contributors to e-waste.

I’m not about to get rid of my cell phone, but if pay phones were more plentiful I wouldn’t complain…

“Like an agrarian Sims, FarmVille allows you to tend a virtual plot of land. You harvest your crops, save coins and then use those coins to purchase farm implements, animals and seeds that will help increase the size and scale of your own virtual farming operation.”  Read more >>

What is it that’s intriguing about this game to its players? And, how does it relate (or not) to farming in the physical world?