ethnography
Mobile internet users, Hyderabad slums
still in fashion to study, be it a rarefied religious space, a cultural artifact shaping teen identity or a viral piece of social media behavior? Let us rephrase this question: why do ethnographic researchers seem timelessly poised to study human intentions, emotions, responses and their outcomes? Possibly, because they are able to bring you into the lives of people they study ‘as if they shared their everyday hangouts with you’! Be it an account of the banker’s world in Wall Street or how the Chinese learn to be capitalist, the insider view of the world, that of the banker and the Chinese, is privileged over any other. This inevitably includes translations: of culture, of language and of behaviors, which are the mainstay of an ethnographer’s journey towards understanding the ‘other’. This evolves from a growing immersion in the mundane, the prosaic, the ordinary, in short the everyday of our subject world. E stands for both ‘ethnography’ and ‘everyday’, a sort of twinning that complements, strengthens and enriches the world of the researcher and the researched. They never go out of fashion! (Nimmi Rangaswamy is a Researcher at Microsoft Research India, where her primary interests are the adoption and dissemination of information and communication technologies in emerging market spaces. Her current project focuses on Facebook behaviors among mobile internet users in urban slums.) www.poolmagazine.in 19