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The Social Life of Cell Phones
"One of the challenges of being a cultural anthropologist at Intel is that I get to do all this interesting work, but very few people outside of Intel know about it," says Genevieve Bell, a member of an interdisciplinary team of social scientists and designers at Intel Research.
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Bell is currently the principal researcher in charge of a two-year project in Asia, looking at ways in which cultural patterns affect technology use. "It's a comparative ethnographic project in seven countries," she says, "that tests the assumption that early adopters of technology in urban Asia will look the same as in America or Western Europe. And of course we're finding that they are very different."
In India, for example, where long-distance phone calls are prohibitively expensive and mail is slow, Bell found that Indian families with computers use instant messaging to keep in touch with relatives all over the world.
"Interestingly, what the Indians share in these messages is the ephemera of daily life," says Bell. "What they had for dinner, what Aunty wore to the most recent wedding, how the cricket is going; all the daily conversations that are so important to personal relationships but are hard to maintain when people are geographically distributed around the world."
Bell, a frequent visitor to academia, taught anthropology and Native American Studies at Stanford University before coming to Intel in 1998.
"I often talk to engineering or computer science students who do not have a background in the social sciences," she says. "And although as an anthropologist it's quite easy for me to tell a lot of interesting stories about other people and other cultures, the real challenge is how to make my research intelligible and useful to people outside the social services."
Bell recently gave a lecture to undergraduates at the School of Engineering at Stanford on the subject of human-computer interaction. "I talked about how in Asia people use computers differently; where they place them in their homes, for example, and their different rules about who uses computers when. For many of these students, it was the first time they thought about what technology might look like when it goes into another culture."
"We ended up having a really interesting conversation," she says, "and I had some great e-mails from students afterwards wanting to incorporate some of the fieldwork I was talking about into their class projects."
For Bell, a visit to a campus often extends well beyond the hour-long lecture. "The last time I was at MIT, I ended up staying a week," Bell recalls. "I had lots of conversations with faculty members, and students who wanted to talk about their work, or show me demos of projects. I also gave a master class on field methods."
As the result of another visit to MIT, Bell became an industry mentor for a woman with an Intel graduate fellowship, and she coauthored a paper with an MIT student on design technology that supports domestic rituals.
Bell always enjoys a trip to campus. "I'm not only demonstrating that Intel does valuable research in unexpected areas, but I'm also looking for new projects and research from academia that might interest Intel. It's a sort of matchmaking," she says.
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