The Facebook-Loving Farmers of Myanmar

[Jonathan Fairfield]

The Facebook-Loving Farmers of Myanmar

CRAIG MOD

A dispatch from an Internet revolution in progress.

For six weeks last October and November, just before Myanmar held its landmark elections, I joined a team of design ethnographers in the countryside interviewing forty farmers about smartphones.

A design ethnographer is someone who studies how culture and technology interact. A common mistake in building products is to base them on assumptions around how a technology might be adopted. The goal of in-field interviewing in design ethnography is to undermine these assumptions, to be able to design tools and products aligned with actual observed use cases and needs.

Myanmar is especially fertile ground for this kind of work. Until recently the military junta had imposed artificial caps on access to smartphones and SIM cards. Many of the farmers we spoke with had never owned a smartphone before. The villages were often without running water or electricity, but they buzzed with newly minted cell towers and strong 3G signals. For them, everything networked was new.

Full story: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/the-facebook-loving-farmers-of-myanmar/424812/

—- The Atlantic

[djlest]

Good for them.... although bad for society... Their work load is about to be sabotaged by addictive updates, and their live is about to be sucked from them into a 4 inch display.... Reality is over for the last few remaining people on earth....