In most Western countries studying computing has long been seen as a male endeavor. However this is not the case across the world. Vivian Lagesen’s research in fact shows that in Malaysia computer science is populated by women. In her summary report for Women-nomics, she stresses that in Malaysia computing is not seen as masculine but instead a good employment for women. In fact, faculty in computing degrees is often female. There are perceived to be plenty of jobs in computing and the office environment of IT jobs is seen as safe.  Vivian’s research shows how flexible the social construction of computing can be. 

This weekend I have been very upset about Baby P. As a mum, I struggle to understand how anyone can fail to protect and cherish your own child. A child’s love of its mother is unconditional. A child is powerless. A child just wants to be loved, sheltered and protected. A lot of mums feel overwhelmed by the sadness of this story, it seemed to be the biggest topic on the social-networks last weekend.

One group on Facebook (with over 5000 members) used it’s collective investigative power to expose the identities of the mum and ‘carers’ of Baby P. Another group which was less investigativly inclined was entitled entitled “Death is too good for [the mother's name], torture the bitch that killed Baby P.”   Instinctively I felt that this was deserved retribution.  But then I wondered how this could be a good thing.

Do Facebook vigilantes or any other social network have the right or power to bring justice to those who ‘deserve’ it? Is it a case of mob rule or just desserts being served? Is this the downside to a democritisation of media?

Most Facebook groups focus on the benign and trivial: I was amused to see a group who want John Sergeant be their granddad. This is Britain at its eccentric best.  A disrespect for the rules of “Strictly Come Dancing” may be a bit of harmless fun, but what happens when Facebook communities start to openly challenge the rule of law?

The role of social networks has changed. No longer are they restricted to being a ‘social utility’ connecting friends for a big night out. Facebook’s users are a collection of single-issue political-parties, each akin to the gun or knife-control lobbying groups.

Once upon a time, you needed to be in position of power to make things happen. Now, you and me can make a change for better or worse simply by asserting opinions online – on anything we believe passionately about.  Whether its to bring back Laura back to the X Factor or or to send a virtual lynch-mob after the villain of the moment. Social networks are proving themselves as serious enabling tools that put power into groups who were once considered to disparate, too obscure or too apathetic to become involved with a political process.

But are we witnessing technology enabling democracy at its best?

According to the US polls, women are the most important and difficult voter to win over. Not only are they in the majority (53%), they are more likely to be undecided in the run up to the election. Recent events show that Obama has been successful with women, particularly young women (Senator Obama won 35 percent of women, while Senator Clinton won 30 percent).

Why is women are drawn to Obama in a way they are not drawn to McCain or Hilary Clinton? What is that Obama has that is appealing to women that McCain does not have?

Obama has already been voted marketer of the year by Time magazine. His “organising idea” is focused on a clear and consistent message: Change. And he delivers it in an inspirational way through the media women use (youtube, blogs, facebook etc). But more fundamentally, the reason Obama is successful is because he focuses on what women care about.

Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, states:

“Women see themselves as more economically vulnerable than men, more likely recipients of the social safety net at some point in their lives, and they see a larger role for government.”

As a working mum of two, I often find myself cooking the tea, washing up, shoving in some washing, on the phone paying a bill and doing the shopping online- all at the same time. Its me, not my husband, who thinks about the cost of food and energy going up. Its me who thinks about how to cut back this Christmas on presents. And its me who thinks that we should eat in rather than get a take out.

With women as the Chief Household Officer, Obama is making a relevant connection that brands could learn from. With Oprah behind him, Obama appears to be a ladies man.

 

 

I love taking my iPod to the gym because it gives me the freedom to listen to music that reflects my exercise mood. However when using the iPod on the cross trainer, one of my favourite cardiovascular machines, I often manage to almost strangle myself. I wear my iPod with an armband around my upper arm (the earphone cables are dangling around and can get caught easily in the cross trainer). The armband looks a bit like an oversized sticking plaster but is overall quite stylish and does the job – as long as I don’t do anything where I need the biceps. The cable issue remains annoying and I developed a rather complicated system of keeping the cable out of my way.

However I then came across a much nicer solution: the Arriva headphones. You basically wear the MP3 player at the back of your head and have small cables leading into your ears. This does solve the cable problem. The downside: it is only available for the iPod shuffle and not for other iPods. Other iPods might be too big to wear them at the back of the head. It might also be difficult to change tracks. But it is a nice idea. Apart from using these headphones for sports it might also come in handy when you don’t want other people to know that you are listening to music. Particularly if you have long hair. 

I have been invited by Sarah Blow to contribute to a Girl Geek Dinner alongside Julie Lerman who will talk about what it means to be a geekette. The Girl Geek Dinner will take place on Thursday, October 09, 2008 from 06:30 PM – 09:30 PM and is generously hosted by Microsoft, London. I hope to see many of you there.

I feel old. Ancient. Positively archaic. I am doing some ethnography research for a client in the area of technology. I am spending the day with Amy. Amy is 18, turning 19 and just received her A level results. Amy is confident and incredibly articulate for an 18 year old. I am asking Amy questions which she dutifully answers in a very text book way. She then mentions facebook and her whole face lights up. Amy comes alive at this point. She runs over to her Dell laptop and logs on to Facebook. She shows me she her 353 ‘friends’ on Facebook. She tells me that Facebook is as important to her as chocolate. Its an addiction. Its a craving. She wakes up in the middle of the night and thinks about what happened that day in Facebook. She asks me if I want to speak to any of her friends on Facebook.

This got me wondering, are social networks a much more effective and authentic way to research young people? Are online omnibus studies and traditional ways of researching teenagers less effective in an age where the currency of the ‘yoof’ is through the lens of Facebook?

Amy shows me today’s events. Jo has split up from Anthony (I am shocked that people put when their relationship ends on Facebook. Do people dump people by Facebook as well?). Emma has tagged her in her holiday photos. The guy she met in malia has written on her wall. Amy is organising a ‘results’ party for 200 people (she has just done her A-levels). She couldn’t organise a party without Facebook. I ask her if Facebook is a fad. She tells me undeniably its not. MySpace was a fad but now everyone has moved to Facebook. Facebook has the ‘durability’ factor. The ‘talkability’ factor. She has 33 friends online at this moment. I feed her questions to her friends. I get answers from her friends immediately. I then ask more questions. Its rich information. Its visceral. It is not pre-determined. Its authentic. Amazingly, its free.

I recently completed an online research study for the Future Foundation. Not only was it incredibly boring to complete (and I am a researcher by trade so god knows how boring it was for everyone else), if I am totally honest I felt compelled to write the ‘right thing.’ To write the ‘intelligent thing.’ Most importantly, to write ‘the expected thing.’ When I received the final report, many of the things I had said I actually disagreed with. To really go ‘one floor down’ as a pyschotherapist would say, surely we need to get that visceral instantaneous reaction which is not going to come from a online omnibus or a focus group? If you want to see how the tiger hunts, don’t go to the zoo. You need to go to the jungle. Or in this case, the jungle called Facebook.

It seems to be increasingly important for businesses to understand how people live their lives. I recently came across this video podcast featuring Karsten Jonsen. He talked eloquently about how social change is relevant for management. He referred to the blurring of the private and public sphere through new information communication technologies as an example. This blurring of boundaries was also the topic of a seminar on Humanizing Work hosted by the Lehman Brother Centre for Women in Business. The seminar was convened by Professor Judy Wajcman who invited Professor Richard Sennett and Professor Lord Anthony Giddens to give keynote speeches.

Both of are sociologists and Stefan Stern, columnist at the FT, wrote after the event that managers can learn a great deal from sociologists. Anthony Giddens talked about addiction. There is a clear technology angle to this because Giddens referred to that when people wake up at night, they are often so addicted to their BlackBerry that they check for new emails first before going to the toilet (Stefan Stern has written about this in his column too).

Email and the internet can become like a drug which Belinda has discussed. Dr Ivan Goldberg has coined the term Internet Addiction Disorder (IAD) for this phenomenon and psychologists classify IAD as a mental illness. There is of course always the danger of creating the mental illness one speaks about. What is central however is that the knowledge of how people live their lives is important to create insight into what kind of products and services people might be interested in and also in what kind of work environment they want to be.

Belinda and I were involved in a seminar a couple of weeks ago which looked at involved observational research in practitioner and academic settings. Here is a summary of the inspiring event.

The film Kitchen Stories portrays what many people think about observational research. In the film, the researcher tries to find out how kitchens should be designed and to do so he sits on a high chair and observers and takes notes of the object of his research, a single man in his kitchen. The researcher is as neutral, scientific and invisible as possible and is not allowed to talk to the researched. However the inevitable happens and the researcher develops a friendship with the researched.

An Economic and Social Research Council funded seminar, organized by the Lehman Brothers Centre for Women in Business, shows that ethnographic research, full of observations and interviews, has moved away from such clinical assumptions. The seminar, which took place at London Business School on 5 June 2008, is part of an ESRC seminar series on emotions and embodiment, and was the third seminar in the series, organised by Dr Elisabeth Kelan. The seminar was entitled ‘Gender, Power, Embodiment in Research’.

The seminar brought together academics and practitioners with an interest in ethnographic research. The rationale for which was to explore the differences and similarities in approach and to learn from one another.

The keynote speakers were Professor Catherine Cassell (Manchester Business School) who talked about how interviewees and interviewers co-construct one another and Professor Mats Alvesson (University of Lund) who addressed the issue of reflexive methodology and taking multiple perspectives to the material generated in research.

Dr. JK Tina Basi. Director of Mehfil Enterprise and freelance researcher with Intel’s Digital Health Group in Ireland, discussed the role of identity in shaping the research process and outcomes. Her talk, entitled, ‘Identity at Work and Play: Conducting Ethnography for Commercial Enterprise’, looked at the way in which research design could better include and make space for the co-construction of both the researcher and the research participants’ identities. Drawing upon a range of feminist academics (Haraway, 1991; Stanley and Wise, 1993; and Wolf, 1996), Dr. Basi pointed towards the feminist epistemological critique of positivism and ‘value free’ research, which argues that the subjective/objective dichotomy is false, and that objectivity is simply a name given to male subjectivity.

“Interviewing is the art of construction rather than excavation; thus the task is to organize the asking and listening so as to create the best conditions for constructing meaningful knowledge (Mason, 2002). Research cannot be ‘hygienic’, and knowledge is best created as a co-production between the interviewer and interviewee (Collins, 2000), as two intersecting dialogues: dialogue number one is the ethnographer’s interviews with informants or the observations of people’s lives; dialogue two is between the ethnographer’s written work and the readers (Smith, 2002: 20) or the clients. Such an approach paves the way for greater reflexivity, which isn’t just about presenting the self and being reflexive about the self, it is about exposing power relations and the way in which these relations shape knowledge – a much more authentic way to conduct research, yielding sharper insights and deeper meanings. ”

Dr Basi presented two examples from Intel’s research in the healthcare sector to show the strength of a dialogic approach to data collection. Intel’s research work on transport and mobility in rural Ireland was designed in part by the Rural Transport Programme and the research on social care services in England was heavily influenced by the experiences of elderly people using the services provided by Age Concern.

“Ethnography is just as much about the interview as it is about the setting, it is about building a rapport, yet you do more than just talking. You see things that people cannot articulate, what they don’t know they are trying to articulate. Ethnographic research provides a view of the rituals, practices, markers, and triggers in intimate settings and important environments – the situatedness of ethnography however, calls upon the researcher to become vulnerable in the process too.”

Belinda Parmar, a Planning Director of Saatchi & Saatchi and author of Lady Geek

http://ladygeek.org.uk, presented two case studies where Xploring, a Saatchi research tool, was used to discover insights that overturned stereotypes long upheld by traditional research techniques.

“I apply theories and methods of ethnography to the corporate realm. I take a unique participant-observation approach where I immerse myself in people’s lives to discover meaning about real people’s lives in the real world on their terms. I develop relationships based on mutual trust and move from an ‘outsider‘ looking in, to an ‘insider’ uncovering truths about human behaviour and gender differences. I am concerned with the wider aspects of people’s lives and their eco-systems”

The results: practical and actionable insights that have developed into award winning ideas for clients.

The product: stories, films, books that tell the stories in rich and colourful detail to stimulate brand ideas.

Overall, the seminar has shown how to take research into a real life context and depart from the view that the researcher is an impartial researcher by exploring this question from an academic and practitioner side. Please also see London Business Schools‘ news section and Putting People First blog for views on the event.

The Telegraph featured an article on 30 May 2008 entitled ‘Feminised gadgets: An eye for the ladylike’. The article claims that women become more and more interested in gadgets. Figures seem to support this. Sony Ericsson claims that women spend more money on gadgets than on shoes (£391 per year or £17 billion in total). Based on the article two-thirds of the Nintendo DS users are female.

The article assumes that feminised technology is something new in the West yet well established in Japan. DoCoMo asked women what they want in mobile phones and subsequently produced a hugely popular, small clamshell handset with an integrated camera. At that time few people understood the value of cameras in mobile phones but that has changed of course dramatically.

Women do seem to hold the key for many design innovations in the gadget market simply because they are often not asked what they want from technology. The article also quotes Ladygeek research saying that women do not want pink products but useful, easy to use products. They want phones that are also fashion accessories and beautifully designed.

The classic example is Jonathan Ive’s iMac design which showed that computers did not have to be beige or grey boring boxes but can be design features. My first generation iBook does indeed look stunning in my room and is regularly admired by visitors.

What appeals to women often does appeal to men too. The article claims that indeed ‘gender barriers are becoming blurred’ suggesting that men and women both want beautifully designed, easy to use technology. Rather than becoming feminised it appears that technology is finally being made fit for humans rather than just a certain group of technology savvy and nerdy men.