About me

I research the communicative technology practices of under-served populations. My work focuses on how migrants and youth use communication tools, such as cellphones, internet cafes, or traditional landlines, to manage their social networks. I expand research on new technologies by situating everyday communication practices among the socio-political intersection of digital architectures, urban policies, technology protocols, cultural landscapes and spatial orientations. My goal is to engage with technology policy makers, designers, and leaders so that they are better informed about the everyday lives of low-income users. My research sites are China, Mexico and the US.

My experiences in technology consulting, teaching, and organizing in low-income communities enable me to bring a strong inter-disciplinary approach to my academic work. Before joining the sociology doctoral program at the University of California-San Diego; I worked to develop digital literacy programs for the institutions like of the United Nations, National Aeronautics Space Agency, and the NYC public school system. My work has covered national and international locales such as New York City, San Francisco, San Diego, India, Mexico and China. I have received funding from several agencies and I have presented at conferences in England, Sweden, and the United States. I hold a B.A. in Communications from the University of California -San Diego (UCSD), an M.A. in Sociology from UCSD and am currently finishing my Ph.D. in Sociology at UCSD. I blog about culture and technology at Cultural Bytes, Chinese youth and technology at YouMeiTI, and my favorite quotes at Dichos y Vida. Read about my research here.

A Brief Biography of Tricia Wang and My Odd History with the 1996 Telecommunications Act. 

I was born part monkey, wolf, and bear in San Francisco, California, United States and raised in Taipei, Taiwan for the first fours of my life by my grandparents. We returned to the United States when I was four years old. Around 10 years old, my family moved to Roseville, California, a very homogeneous community: suburban, upper-middle class, gated sub-divisions. Instead of living in Chinatown or a city with lots of Chinese people, we moved to the most heterogenous part of California! I didn't realize I was "Chinese" until we moved to Roseville; I am pretty sure we were the first Chinese family the community by the way people acted. I remember my first trip to a Roseville Supermarket--a little girl looked at me and screamed her mother, "She's Chinese!" It's hard to imagine that in California such levels of racism could exist. This continued through high school, where my teenage classmates would tell me to go back to China and hang out with Mao. The few things that preserved my sanity were my loving grandparents, a few great teachers at my public high school, the local public library, and the arts.

I have always loved the arts. I have played piano since I was young. I joined the marching band in high school where I played the drums and any percussion instrument I could get my hands on. I pride myself on my advanced abilities to crash the cymbals while marching in formation. I started to train in modern dance in college. I love modern dance because it allows me to explore movement through space. Since dancing is such a spatially-involved activity, I find that it complements my academic interests in spatial theory. I feel as though I am meditating in motion when I am dancing.

College years and the circle back to the 1996 Telecommunications Act

My love for the arts led me to study modern dance and train as a video editor in college. I started taking production classes during my senior year of college and had the opportunity to meet two inspiring video artists, Tania Kamal-Eldin and Adriene Hughes. They taught me the aesthetics of video editing and it was Adriene Hughes who made me understand that a good editor treats her timeline as if it were a dance. I went on to produce a documentary for NASA about their Earthkam program, which helped me secure a fellowship to work on their Communications Team.

In a odd way, I have always been fascinated with communications. I am a child of the 1996 Telecommunications Act. I am not kidding! The passing of the act broke up AT&T's monopoly on long-distance service. As a result, new players were allowed on the market. I left home as a teenager and at 16 years old I started working for one of these new phone companies, Excel Telecommunication, a reseller of long-distance land-line phone services. I quickly rose to the level of Executive Regional Director by the age of 18 years old. By that time, I was also reselling Excel's cellphone and pager services. I targeted low-income markets because it was very easy to show people how they were being over-charged by the larger phone companies and that switching to Excel would lower their monthly phone bills. At 19 years old, I began to question the legitmacy of Excel's business model because it was a multi-level-marketing (MLM) pyramid marketing scheme, much like the controversial Amway, convincing people that they could leave and replace their day jobs by working with an MLM model. While I believed in the service we were selling, I didn't believe in the practice of telling people that they should get into MLM as a career choice.

Knowing that Excel could not sustain itself with MLM as a business model, I left the company in 1998 and eventually it went bankrupt in 2006. I learned a lot by quickly rising to the top of a pyramid scheme. For exmple, I can convince you that you can become rich if you were to quit your job and recruit 10 people to give you $100. I can also analyze any phone bill and explain to you each surcharge at the federal, state and local level. In all seriousness, I appreciate my time with Excel because the experience has taught me invaluable management skills. More importantly, it has given me an insider's point of view of the underworld of communication services in America and has allowed me to witness how a policy change can radically reshape the communication landscape. How many researchers of telecommunications can say that they worked in a telecommunications multi-level marketing company and experienced the initial changes post-1996 Telecommunications Act? This experience explains a lot of my interest in the role of technology policy-making.

I believe that my tempered approach to technology is a result of having grown up without any internet or cellphones. I find that it gives me the perspective to understand how new users react to new technologies in a more balanced way. Only a short time ago, I went through high school with no online social networking tools!  How was it that without any technology tools (other than a landline), teenagers could keep up their social connections back in the days? This question makes me wonder about how people now maintain social connections with social networking tools. Are we really connecting anymore than we used to? And what happens to the quality of our connections? If we are more accessible online, than are we less accessible in other ways? A lot of these questions actually fall into the realm of psychology, a field I considered going into. But a lot these questions I think are difficult to answer on the individual level. Rather, these questions are about groups, neighborhoods, and communities. When the unit of analysis is larger than an individual, this where the social sciences plays a larger role.

Off to New York City!

After college, I decided that I wanted to live somewhere radically different from California. The only place I could think of in the US was New York City. Even though I had never been to New York and had no friends on the east coast, I decided that it was exactly where I needed to be. I prepared myself by renting movies that took place in the city. Sadly, the only one that sticks out in my mind to this day is Coyote Ugly. A lot of people tried to discourage me from moving because not only had I never visited NYC, but 9/11 had just happened and people were moving out of NYC. But I couldn't ignore the urge to go east. It was the best decision I ever made. I was reborn in Sunset Park, Brooklyn! Since then, I have lived in Park Slope, Clinton Hill and Bedford-Stuyvesant.

While in New York, I was technology educator. I provided technology consulting, created the youth programs, and initiated strategic partnerships with organizations across the city. My first job in New York as the Associate Director of Manhattan Neighborhood Network's The Youth Channel. From there, I started Hip-Hop Education (H2Ed), the first organization in NYC to formally link hip-hop to public education dialogue and standards. I worked with local institutions, community leaders, and hip-hop pioneers to create the first national summit on hip-hop and education. By the time we held our second conference at the Bronx Museum of Arts, over 1000 attendees came from around the country. After H2Ed, I started consulting institutions on how to incorporate pop-culture and technology into their programs. At the same time, I was teaching media production and story-telling in after-school programs. I worked closely with organizations to build experimental education programs that were more relevant to low-income students.

My outreach in New York was broad. I was involved with the HIV/AIDS community, serving as a grant manager for Living Beyond Belief, an non-profit that provide scholarships for students engaged in HIV/AIDs awareness. I sat on advisory boards that did coalition building across Asian Pacific-Islander organizations throughout NYC. Before I left for graduate school, I teamed up with Todd Lester from freeDimensional, a community organization in Brooklyn that connects and artists in political danger with artist-in-residence programs. Todd and I also consulted for the United Nation's bureau, IRIN (Integrated Regional Information Networks) when they showed interest in embracing new media tools. (I don't think think they liked our plan because it involved words such as RSS...yikes!)

Quarter-Life Crisis!

After four years of consulting, I realized that to better serve low-income communities I needed to improve my analytical skills. I never imagined that graduate school would be the answer. I never saw Asians in the social sciences and I think that this unconsciously affected me. My friend and mentor, Richard Madsen, enabled a twist in my life story. When I expressed to Richard my desire to spend more time learning about the history and the complexity of technology usage in low-income communities, he suggsted that I pursue a Ph.D. in sociology . I almost laughed because I never imagined myself pursuing a PhD, much less in sociology, a field that seemed foreign to me. So with no post-graduate degrees or sociology classes, I dove into graduate school. Richard is one of many of my amazing friends and mentors who have and continue to support me through the isolating process of graduate school and to keep me connected to the everyday practices of the communities I care about/

Informal yet Critical Tidbits.

I am a wolf who eats humans.  I jump... a lot. I love to eat. I arrow. I love to jump. I document street art.  I police fashion titicacas and titillations. I love to bike.