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Rural Technology

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Technology and the Economics of a South Indian Farming Village: Ariapalayam Welcomes You.

This 20 minute video is drawn from roughly 20 hours of footage shot by our Indian crew. The research began with a collaborative design session in India when Erickson and Ramanathan set out the expectations and trained the three-person field crew. Despite a car wreck on the way to the village and the challenges imposed by unexpectedly early client visits, the video was able to express some of the village's reality.

At the end of the fieldwork, Erickson re-visited the team for a week-long debriefing. We outlined our findings and formed a strategy to edit the video. The editing took almost as long as the fieldwork, primarily because of the time it takes to create trustworthy subtitles. Doing the craft-work of understanding and sequencing footage helped inform the final written report, a good reminder that video editing is a kind of ethnographic analysis.

A summary of the written report is available in our Articles section.

Technology and Youth in Rural Chinese Middle Schools
For a global semiconductor manufacturer, we met with a team of engineers and social scientists and set out to learn how rural Chinese middle school students learned about Internet technology.

Our team visited schools among the Yi minority people in the "snow-mountain" country of southern Sichuan, in the relatively wealthy towns in hilly, western Fujian, and in the dusty agricultural villages at Shandong's eastern border with Henan. We met with school administrators, students, and parents.

We interviewed kids in their dorm rooms, participated in the school day, and followed some of them outside the walls of the school and into the school's host community. There, some students were using the wangba, the Internet cafes that appear in even the smallest village and where kids, mostly boys, play CS, counter-strike, and other games for hours on end.