Studying Up: The Ethnography of Technologists

Nick Seaver

Editor’s Note: Nick Seaver (@npseaver) kicks off the March-April special edition of Ethnography Matters, which will feature a number of researchers at the Intel Science and Technology Center for Social Computing on the forefront of exploring the cultures of hackers, makers, and engineers.

Nick’s post makes the case for the importance of “studying up“: doing ethnographies not only of disempowered groups, but of groups who wield power in society, perhaps even more than the ethnographers themselves.

Nick’s own research explores how people imagine and negotiate the relationship between cultural and technical domains, particularly in the organization, reproduction, and dissemination of sonic materials. His current project focuses on the development of algorithmic music recommendation systems. Nick is a PhD candidate in sociocultural anthropology at UC Irvine. Before coming to UCI, Nick researched the history of the player piano at MIT. 

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When people in the tech industry hear “ethnography,” they tend to think “user research.” Whether we’re talking about broad, multinational explorations or narrowly targeted interviews, ethnography has proven to be a fantastic way to bring outside voices in to the making of technology. As a growing collection of writing on Ethnography Matters attests, ethnography can help us better understand how technology fits into people’s everyday lives, how “users” turn technologies to unexpected ends, and how across the world, technologies get taken up or rejected in a diverse range of cultural contexts. Ethnography takes “users” and shows how they are people — creative, cultural, and contextual, rarely fitting into the small boxes that the term “user” provides for them.

But ethnography doesn’t have to be limited to “users.”

Engineers in context. cc by-nc-nd 2.0 | http://www.flickr.com/somewhatfrank

My ethnographic research is focused on the developers of technologies — specifically, people who design and build systems for music recommendation. These systems, like Pandora, Spotify, Songza, or Beats Music, suggest listening material to users, drawing on a mix of data sources, algorithms, and human curation. The people who build them are the typical audience for ethnographic user studies: they’re producing technology that works in an explicitly cultural domain, trying to model and profile a diverse range of users. But for the engineers, product managers, and researchers I work with, ethnography takes a backseat to other ways of knowing people: data mining, machine learning, and personal experience as a music listener are far more common sources of information.

Ethnographers with an interest in big data have worked hard to define what they do in relation to these other methods. Ethnography, they argue, provides thick, specific, contextualized understanding, which can complement and sometimes correct the findings of the more quantitative, formalized methods that dominate in tech companies. However, our understandings of what big data researchers actually do tend to lack the specificity and thickness we bring to our descriptions of users.

Just as ethnography is an excellent tool for showing how “users” are more complicated than one might have thought, it is also useful for understanding the processes through which technologies get built. By turning an ethnographic eye to the designers of technology — to their social and cultural lives, and even to their understandings of users — we can get a more nuanced picture of what goes on under the labels “big data” or “algorithms.” For outsiders interested in the cultural ramifications of technologies like recommender systems, this perspective is crucial for making informed critiques. For developers themselves, being the subject of ethnographic research provides a unique opportunity for reflection and self-evaluation.

Starbucks Listeners and Savants

Among music tech companies, it is very common to think about users in terms of how avidly they consume music. Here is one popular typology, as printed in David Jennings’ book Net, Blogs, and Rock ‘n’ Roll:

March-April 2014: Studying Hackers, Makers, and Engineers

This month’s theme – ethnographies of hackers, makers, and engineers – is edited by Morgan G. Ames, who made the transition from being a hacker to studying them herself.

Stories abound of the translation work that ethnographers in industry do to make the experiences of those they observe – the ‘users’ – legible to engineers, designers, marketers, and others in the businesses that employ them. Lucy Suchman, one of the first and most inspiring critical ethnographers in industry, referred to the expectations she encountered for this translation-work in her own job at Xerox PARC as ‘throwing results over the wall.’ These results may take the form of the dreaded ‘implications for design’ that ethnographers are sometimes asked to generate, whether for employers or ACM conferences.

What happens, though, when the ethnographic gaze is turned back on those who are usually the beneficiaries of this translation-work? Lucy Suchman explored this in her groundbreaking book, Plans and Situated Actions, drawing on her experiences at Xerox PARC in the 1980s. Alongside Lucy, a growing number of ethnographers from both academia and industry have been exploring the cultures of scientists, analysts, and others like them in a bid to help the outside world better understand them – and for them to better understand themselves.

The March-April edition of Ethnography Matters will continue this ethnographic inversion by featuring guest authors who are exploring the cultures of hackers, makers, and engineers. The authors hail from the Intel Science and Technology Center for Social Computing, a five-university alliance advised by Intel’s Genevieve Bell (another inspiring industry ethnographer). This group is working on new ways of bridging the academy-industry divide, and many of its members are exploring various aspects of hacker, maker, and engineer cultures.

Caution: Hackers Thinking!

The first post, by Nick Seaver (@npseaver), makes the case for studying technologists as a form of ‘studying up’ – of putting those who wield power under the ethnographic lens. He relates this to his own research on music recommendation systems like Pandora and Spotify.

Second,  Austin Toombs (@altoombs) tells us how he “fell in” to doing ethnographic research on a local hackerspace, how he has navigated the line between ethnography, participation, and activism, and what ethnography has taught him about hackers and himself.

Katie Pine (@khpine) and Max Liboiron (@maxliboiron) then discuss their work in health informatics and civil engineering cultures to show how measurement itself is performative, and how ethnography is particularly well-suited to accounting for this performativity.

Lilly U. Nguyen (@deuxlits) tells us how in her own work on the ethnography of software in Vietnam, she both studies and embodies “diaspora” – and she shares the insights that diaspora has given her.

Marisa Leavitt Cohn then considers how NASA engineers approach concerns of legacy, inheritance, and survival of computational practices as they contemplate the end of life of the mission.

Silvia Lindtner (@yunnia) and Amelia Guimarin (@femhacktweets) round out the theme with a post that shares three stories of hackers and makers in China. Their observations complicate the celebratory story of hacking/making, giving us a richly detailed look at some of the real challenges and triumphs in this very active space.