{"id":13436,"date":"2015-03-19T22:18:49","date_gmt":"2015-03-19T22:18:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/mapping-the-sneakernet\/"},"modified":"2015-03-19T22:18:49","modified_gmt":"2015-03-19T22:18:49","slug":"mapping-the-sneakernet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/mapping-the-sneakernet\/","title":{"rendered":"Mapping the Sneakernet"},"content":{"rendered":"

thenewinquiry<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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By AN XIAO MINA<\/a><\/p>\n

Digital media travels hand to hand, phone to phone across vast cartographies invisible to Big Data<\/b><\/p>\n

<\/a>I stood at the corner of Market Street and 4th Avenue, at the edge of San Francisco\u2019s technology-startup neighborhood. An older Chinese woman\u2014let\u2019s call her Fei\u2014approached my friend and me, asking for directions in her extremely limited English. In her hands was a piece of paper with directions from Google Maps, to a location somewhere much further south in the city.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne second,\u201d I said. \u201cWe\u2019ll check the address.\u201d My friend pulled out his phone and punched in the English language address of her destination into a maps app and received a few public-transit options for how to get there.<\/p>\n

I asked Fei if she had a phone so I could send her the information, but she said, \u201cI just have a pen.\u201d I ended up writing down the directions on the back of her printout and wished her luck, pointing her in the direction of the bus she needed and double-checking my orientation with my phone\u2019s compass app.<\/p>\n

In traditional tech parlance, a phoneless woman like Fei would be considered one of the 4.3 billion who are said to be unconnected to the Internet. The International Telecommunications Union, a branch of the United Nations, measures connectivity via fixed landline, mobile, or broadband subscriptions. Cisco\u2019s Visual Networking Indexmeasures<\/a> global mobile data traffic to gauge growth in usage. McKinsey and Co.\u2019s research<\/a> defines the offline population as those who haven\u2019t gone online in the past 12 months.<\/p>\n

Following the implicit logic of such statistics, it can be easy to assume that being unconnected means having no exposure to the Internet at all. Phrases like \u201cconnecting the unconnected,\u201d \u201cthe next billion,\u201d and \u201cthe digital divide\u201d all suggest this binary: One either has access to the Internet or doesn\u2019t; one lives on the wired side of the tracks or one doesn\u2019t. But as tech ethnographer Jan Chipchase wrote<\/a> recently, \u201cConnectivity is not binary. The network is never neutral.\u201d Between those who\u2019ve never touched a computer and those who get a feed of data directly into their Google Glass sits a vast array of modes and methods of connectivity.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

thenewinquiry: By AN XIAO MINA Digital media travels hand to hand, phone to phone across vast cartographies invisible to Big Data I stood at the corner of Market Street and 4th Avenue, at the edge of San Francisco\u2019s technology-startup neighborhood. An older Chinese woman\u2014let\u2019s call her Fei\u2014approached my friend and me, asking for directions in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10],"tags":[484,483,485],"class_list":["post-13436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-words","tag-anthropology","tag-ethnography","tag-the-street-finds-its-own-uses-for-technology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-3uI","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13436"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13436\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}