una de estas curiosidades que rara vez caen en las manos de uno. en intel no sólo trabajan ingenieros haciendo chips, flotando en el halo de las ciencias duras, sino que también tienen antropólogos y otros científicos sociales haciendo investigación cualitativa y descubriendo ejemplos de usos culturalmente diferenciados que difícilemente se pueden entender desde una perspectiva occidental:

malaysia is a quintessential example of a technology that we could never have invented from here. in malaysia, your mobile phone will find mecca for you. if you’re a good muslim, you pray to mecca five times a day. but if you’re on the road, you aren’t near a mosque, you don’t know where mecca is. your cell phone can find it for you. how would we even have framed that question from here? would we have written on a survey: “do you use your mobile technologies to find a religious site, institution, or major god?” as in, do you use your phone to find the pope, the archbishop of canterbury, or the vatican? that’s just not something we do with technology here, so even framing the question would have been almost impossible.

but it was immediately clear when i was there, watching people have their daily lives, that this was going on. when someone whipped out their phone, and i’d ask, “what are you doing?”, they’d say, “finding mecca.” and I’d say, “what?”

it was this wonderful thing that would only have become clear in situ, in place, right there, at that particular moment in time. it would have been impossible to work out how to add that onto a questionnaire. it also would have been very hard to create the space to let someone tell you about using his mobile phone to find mecca. you wouldn’t even know how to ask about it. that’s part of what you get by going somewhere else: you get to be surprised. that’s one of the other hallmarks of doing good ethnography.

la entrevista no está mal, aunque yo me resisto a poner todos los demonios en la metodología cuantitativa (de hecho suelo trabajar con los cuestionarios que el investigador tan burdamente critica), y más bien en la falta de pericia de un investigador que sin cambiar de mirada pretende entender a los que le rodean. sea entrevistando, o sea pasando un cuestionario y por lo demás, ya sabes, a partir de hoy ya no te puedes asustar si ves a alguien buscando la meca con su móvil, ni aun cuando le persiga un tipo con una camiseta de intel tomando notas de campo