project description of my upcoming year of fieldwork in China. research narrative here: http://bit.ly/pros13

1. Digital Urbanism on the Margins:
Chinese Migrants and Intensive
Technology
Tricia Wang | www.triciawang.com

2. what can we learn from 300 million rural-
urban migrants?
they can help us answer an important question

3. what the future of the
internet will look like
how will the next 2 billion users experience everyday digital life?

4. Migration is taking place in a new
technoscape

5. the cellphone is the lifeline for every migrant
moving to the city

6. migrants
come to the
city for a
better life

7. undergoing massive re-urbanization – laying the
infrastructure for the new digitally ubiquitous city
cities are the site of this new technoscape

9. decreasing rural population
increasing urban population

10. China’s increasing income per capita over last 200 years

11. China has largest internet community
384,000,000
(chart from 2008)

12. Convergence of processes unfolding in cities
re-urbanization
Digitization of information
Creation of largest middle-class
Tech infrastructure build out

13. we are digitally networking the consumption
desires of millions of people

14. But can the planet support the a networked
middle-class from China?

15. Will ICTs be the game changer?

16. do ICTs signal to a paradigm shift
for society?
someone has theorized about this a lot…

17. Society of Control
1950 - ?
Disciplinary Societies
1700-1950
WE ARE IN A PERIOD OF TRANSITION
Gilles DeleuzeMichel Foucault

18. Deleuze theorized this in 1992!
How are people
experiencing these
changes today?
so what now?

19. I offer some initial thoughts and
theories for how I’m thinking
about this in terms of China

20. I propose a new
urban assemblage
digital urbansim

21. an urban assemblage in which the
materiality of living in cities and its
digital infrastructures are
becoming mutually constituted
materiality of
living in cities
digital
infrastructures
everyday life of
digital urbanism
sites of tech access become the loci of
sociality
driven by the virtualization of urban
experiences and digitization of information

22. workings of digital urbanism
people
(subjectivity,
identity)
product
(hardware,
content)
tech &
economic
policy
(legislation)
protocol
(code/networks/st
andards)
software: social
media/gaming
widespread
infrastructure
Hardware: low-
cost tech tools
rural-urban
migration
digitization of
information
practice
(communication,
spatial)
state
managed
growth
open web
standards and
programming
languages
organization
workflow
non co-present
communication
desires
dreams

23. DIGITAL URBANISM
millions of rural-urban migrants are
becoming urbanized through low-
cost digital tools
on the margins

24. urban life on the margins
uneven rights
disruptive citizenship
widely available digital tools
publicly virtual
internet cafes- digital
“street corners”
immobile mobility (Wallis 2008)

25. SOME HYPOTHESES FOR A DIGITAL
URBANISM ON THE MARGINS
based on the preliminary fieldwork that I’ve
conducted over the last 3 years

26. 1
tools/mediums of information
matter less than
relations of information

27. tools/medium of
information vs relations of
information
• binary framework
• digital divide - haves or have-
nots, one either has or doesn’t
have access
• tech determinism
• linear reading, based on
progress
• captures a snapshot of social
relation
•ICT4D (information communication technologies
for development)
• relative framework
• socio-digital sieves- complex
interplay of social structures &
processes
• avoids tech determinism
• de-centered reading, based
on ruptures and possibilities
• captures change in process
I propose this
perspective

28. people will experience urban
space as a mix of cyberspace and
code/space
Dodge & Kitchen 2003: code/space is where code dominates the
production of space - it mediates socio-spatial processes
2
materiality of living in cities
and its digital infrastructures
are becoming mutually
constituted - produced through
one another
most prominent in sites of tech
access – internet cafes

29. change from the bottom up will take form in
disruptive citizenship
this happens when people on the margins
experience the limits of consumer citizenship3

30. modulationdividualizing
disruption self-healing
ubiquitous
4
structural characteristics of digital
urbanism

31. 5
commercial sites of internet access
become the loci of sociality – third
places (Oldenburg 1989)
necessary spaces to
build community
not work, not home
the new “street
corner”

32. several discursive regimes produce
the space of digital urbanism
we will see increasing tension around information and digital
politics, what I call neo-informationalism
6
artificiality is not superficiality
ubiquity and seamlessness is desired
normalization and stigmatization of
debt
discursive regimes
neo-informationalism

33. • information as site of wealth
expansion
• information determinism as
model of social change (Ames
2008)
“INFORMATION
• compliments neo-liberal
economic policies
• internet freedom myth
ideology of
WANTS TO BE FREE”

34. neo-informationalism
Information functions like currency:
borderless
unregulated
mobile

35. in an ideology that information
should flow freely between
institutions, governments, and
people to ensure democracy, free-
markets, and equality.
neo-informationalism
While no entity promoting this mechanism has used this word, it is a
concept that I have assigned to the practices of people and corporations
who promote the ideology cum theology of free-information.

36. what are the processes that shape people’s
everyday experiences in digital urbanism?
code/space (interwoven physical and
virtual space)
governing data, not bodies
mediated remembrance through the
archive
perpetual anxiety in credentials

37. how do we find some answers to
these questions?

38. ethnographic imagination &
grounded theory

39. living with migrants
hanging out in internet cafes
working in factoriesgoing to schools
I’m starting 1 year of
fieldwork in a 2nd tier urban
Chinese city
watching informal public spaces

40. research methods
mental mapping
deep ethnography
historical research
ICT mapping mobile diaries
photo elicitation

41. I’ll have some observations to
report in 2012!
In the meantime, I will be sharing fieldnotes on
www.culturalbytes.com

42. There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look
for new weapons. Deleuze, Postscript on the Societies of Control