There is a great future in ethnography. Indeed, this interdisciplinary approach to studying social and cultural nuances of small groups of people in natural, day-to-day settings could hold the key to discovery-and commercial exploitation-of new wireless, Internet and other digital applications heretofore limited to the kind of build-it-and-they-will-come model made infamous in the 2000 dot-com meltdown.
Ethnography, said to bridge the gap between sociology and anthropology, is an especially valuable tool in the age of globalization, where growth tends to be fueled by the creation of new useful applications in emerging and developed markets alike.
For the most part, technology is plenty sophisticated today for applications across a wide and diverse spectrum from education to health care to transportation to public safety to business to entertainment to home living to communications. Ethnography has shown technologies as a means to more effectively accomplishing a vast panoply of everyday tasks. That is what technology historically has been about, easing the human burden. Of course, there is consequence in all this: worker dislocation, something U.S. and other countries have struggled with in recent years. On the other hand, technological advances and innovative applications can create new jobs.
Intel Corp., the computer chip giant that’s so big on Wi-Fi, and other high-tech firms, are making greater use of employees whose education and knowledge bases are so far removed from that of engineers and system designers so as to make them actually useful to companies-at least those desiring to know what people need as opposed to what turns on technologists.
Last week, Intel offered journalists here a peek at what’s on the drawing board. One demonstration showed how a radio-frequency identification network in a house or assisted-living facility can help families and health-care providers monitor and care for the elderly, as well as those living with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases.
Intel’s pursuit of ethnography played a role in some of the demonstrations, whose hallmark was not technological innovation per se, but rather in the creation of digital solutions for analog challenges.
On an unrelated front, Richard Kuzma, upset by a larger-than-normal mobile-phone bill upon returning from military police duty in a Louisiana city beset with larger-than-normal rain and wind gusts, reports Cingular Wireless L.L.C. has straightened out the matter. Well done, both of you.
