I registered late for the class, couldn’t set up a blog, and wasn’t really clear on what our assignments and expectations were for our first assignment…so I took some notes on what we discussed about the cell phone reading and thought after the ingestion of the many reponses to the article, I would spit back some of my thoughts.

I don’t really have a problem with the way the research was conducted, nor do I have an issue with the fact that this study may not “help” the people there. I think that researching for the sake of researching is invaluable enough to the person doing it. In the medical field, there is always a purpose, the hope that some cure will be found or we can graduate to a new way of approaching how to find a cure or producing better vaccines or instruments. My background is in communication studies, so while I didn’t find the way this article was written particularly stimulating, I did think that the content itself was interesting, and I admire that someone conducted this research.

I also appreciated the vernacular. I thought it was a smart way of organizing the information. If the purpose of ethnography is to live the experience of the people or culture you are researching, then that should be applies to the study. As much as solid factual information helps a more “scientific” way of researching to be more credible, using what has been learned in the social sciences should be backed up with evidence of cultural influence over the researcher. I think it helps disguise the fact that personal opinion can get in the way of research.

Apart from the actual research approach, the most fascinating part of this article I think was the personification of begging. To say that sharing credits and asking for money for cell phone credits is like “begging”, something that is accepted, was an alarming suggestion at first. I find the word to be extremely judgmental and crude, something that I felt was demeaning to the culture. I wondered if someone from the culture read this, would they think that the word begging was appropriate?

I had to remind myself of what a cell phone represents–family, wealth and popularity to name a few. I thought about the “digital divide” and how it only pertains to certain media. It’s easy to get a hand on a cell phone, hard to reach a computer. The need for communication has become so strong and immediate, that we have devised these cell phones to make it happen, here and now. I agree with the claim that we are creating technology that is basically demanded by society, not that society’s technology is taking over. Putting into perspective the difference of how we all live across societies and integrate technologies, specially cell phones, is difficult, but I respect this research and it helped me come out of my egocentric tendency for a moment. I think that;s the most important thing for cross-cultural ethnographic research.