5 facts, 3 lessons, and 2 rules

A whirlwind tour of all I learned during a year-long ethnography of mobile phones and computer use in the Chinese countryside: the facts (ICT devices are often gifted, not bought; ICT is for entertainment, and that’s a good thing; people go online without knowing it; farmers enjoy playing Farmville; old people know a lot about the Internet even if they have never used it); the lessons (do manual labor, trust grandmothers, enjoy widely discrepant versions people give of the same facts); the rules (stay still, but never procrastinate on doing interviews).