Ring Ring: Can You See Me Now?

I conducted my first interview with a 25-year-old male law/PhD student, “M.” He is currently in a joint JD/PhD program at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB).

There were a few captivating aspects of this interview.
* M uses connectivity and space to create social space that is “fun.”
* A glimpse into what one cafe offers for the socially inclined.
* The PDA: Out of sync?
* M’s sense of being “bounded by battery life” whenever he visits wireless cafes.
* Temporal space and transportation.

His enthusiasm was contagious.

Ring ring: Can You See Me Now?
M uses his cell phone, which has infrared and Bluetooth, to take pictures of friends and scenery and then uses these pictures for the caller ID function. He also changes the background of his phone using the pictures he’s taken. “I take pictures of all my friends and those photos turn out to be the caller ID. So in a sense that’s wireless.” M’s friends and family don’t get the usual caller ID number. Instead, the receiver gets a fun picture of him. For example, M likes to use pictures of his parents and friends on his cell phone rather than phone numbers. “This is fun,” M says with a smile. “When my boyfriend calls I get to see his picture and not just his phone number. Or if my parents call, their picture pops up on my screen. When my friend C called, he grew up on a phone in Minnesota, so he took a picture with a cow, sent it to me, and that’s his caller ID. . .. I receive a picture by email on my computer, and then I beam them to my phone.” M says this makes him smile in the middle of the day because the “pics” he gets and uses are usually funny ones.

He also uses his cell phone as a “gaming function.” He convinced some friends to get the same cell phone because he liked his so much; “It was adorable.” Using Bluetooth, they now share games on their phones. “This is fun,” he said.

Café Zeb
One café that M frequents 2-3x a week is Café Zeb. One side of the café has good food fare. Business students often come to Café Zeb because the food at the business school is apparently less enticing. On the right side of the café are tables, chairs, and a couch. Located on the 2nd floor of the law school, Café Zeb is M’s social hub at UCB. UCB is the “locust” of his “professional life.” Using his laptop and the wireless service, he checks email and the Internet for news and hopes to run into friends and people he knows by “pretending to study.” He reveals that out of two hours in the café, he more realistically studies for about 15 minutes. His primary interest is to socialize and to catch-up with his friends. One drawback of the café is that “there aren’t too many outlets” for his laptop. Students work, eat, study, hold study groups, and swap files by wirelessly emailing one another. Daily newspapers are provided on a stand, although some students like M get their news through the wireless service. Professors and teaching assistants may also hold office hours in the cafe.

Out of Sync?
M notes that the PDA for him has become less useful. When he was living with his parents after college, he would download daily news from websites like CNN and the NY Times onto his PDA and then share the news with his folks at supper. “This was kind of fun. But now that I have wireless access I can get news instantly.” In another instance, M took his PDA to class for note taking because his laptop was cumbersome to carry; students typically bring their laptop for note taking. While synchronizing the class notes with his laptop one day, a full day of class notes was completely lost. After this incident, he decided that using the PDA and losing the information was too risky. M now prefers to use his laptop. The laptop has the original program so he’s no longer interested in trying to synchronize the PDA and potentially losing information. The PDA has become a mere tool for addresses and calendaring.

Bounded by Battery Life
While wireless access is the reason for why M visits cafes, he is also “bounded by battery life.” M tells me that he takes his backpack, an AC adaptor, two batteries--one that has “extra capacity and runs about 3-1/2 to 4 hours,” books, and whatever else he needs for studying. So in a sense, he is always looking for an outlet in cafes. He has to be aware of things like battery life and who is sitting at a table that has an outlet nearby. In a neighborhood café called Jumping Java, M has a favorite table that is located in the middle of the café. This table is also a favorite of a number of patrons and it is almost always taken; it has an outlet and it’s near a window with natural lighting. In other words, M keeps an eye on the table and actively pursues moving to the table whenever the patron leaves to avert using his laptop battery or running out of battery time.

When I asked M how enabled technology would be more useful to him, he replied:
"I would like to see cards that we could carry around which would have our hard drives on them. Then we could plug them in to terminals everywhere, anywhere. Also it would be nice to see engineers work on batteries that could regenerate or charge themselves, without ever having to be plugged in (or, ideally, small <8ounce batteries with 15-20 hour life spans at least, for long flights and airports)."

Transportation and Temporal Space
While reflecting on our interview, M realized that he uses his cell phone to keep in touch with friends and family when he is riding on public transportation or taking the train. Because he doesn’t have a car, and has “dead time” in these transition spaces, he uses this time as social space. This is a useful he notes, because when he gets home after school, for example, he can make dinner, eat, and get back to work.

Black Star

This is slightly off-topic, but still worth noting: The Columbia University Center for Science Policy and Outcomes has just released Black Star: Ghana, Information Technology and Development in Africa, a CSPO White Paper by Affilliate Scholar Gregg Zachary. It is available as a PDF. A blurb:

This essay is meant to contribute to understanding how people in developing countries use technology, what they want from it, how they can and do form communities based on absorbing and mastering new technologies imported from rich countries, and how they might design their own technologies in ways that are potentially more suitable to the conditions in poor countries and thus more likely to raise living standards in these countries.

I've been following Gregg's work in Ghana for about a year now, and I think it is extremely interesting: he's found a community of technology users in a part of the world in which hackers just aren't supposed to exist.