Space & Culture

Expectations Out of Sync: “Wandering around UB and chance up [sic] disciples playing football in a temple complex. They invite me into the warmth for a reason - to mine the memory of my phone of all its value. Half a dozen files transferred from my device - particularly interested in obtaining photos of women from Japan.”

Nokia researcher Jan Chipchase keeps an interesting blog: part fieldnotes, part performance. After I got over being weirded-out by Mongolian novices interested in Japanese women (we’ll just skip over what that says about my assumptions) I was struck by how Jan writes himself into these ethnographic accounts.

He’s careful to distinguish the content on his blog as separate from work: “because the participants from my work studies have the legal, moral and ethical right to privacy, I never post photo material related to Nokia user studies…Because I like my job I won’t ever cover confidential work stuff, so don’t expect to find glimpses of new products designs, or a heads-up on cool new stuff.” At the same time, I think it’s fair to assume that the travel required to witness these objects and events is work-related, and that the blog content mostly overlaps with his research interests both inside and outside Nokia.

But it’s the narrative style of the blog that most intrigues me, and keeps me coming back. In the post above, I’m asked to believe that the mobile phone was the catalyst for this getting together of strangers, but I’m also left to imagine how the researcher’s device actually devised the meeting. I’m given a glimpse of the unexpected, even exotic, desires of Buddhist monks but am left to imagine the details of content and context. (And what about the transferred files that escaped the narrative?)

In other words, I’m fascinated by how he chooses to tell material culture: his blog reminds me of a kind of twisted theatre/archaeology where the reader is encouraged to bring places and objects to life - as if they were outside it until then - and where the narrator functions not unlike a Greek chorus performing the ideal audience reaction.

(The earlier post on the telephone kiosk in Ulan Bataar was also from Jan’s blog.)

This entry was posted Tuesday, December 13th, 2005 at 8:56 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.