Be the character – followthethings.com

“iPod“
Undergraduate coursework written by Rebecca Payne, published in the Teaching Geography journal.
Full text below.

The students’ first task in the ‘Geographies of Material Culture’ module at the University of Birmingham is to make a personal connection between their lives and the lives of others elsewhere in the world who made the things they buy. These are the people who help you to be you, followthethings.com CEO Ian tells them. So choose a commodity that matters to you, that’s an important part of your identity, that you couldn’t do without. Think about its component parts, its materials, and the properties they give to that commodity and your experience of ‘consuming it’. And write a 500 word first person account that connects your lives. One student – Rebecca Payne – is sitting in the university library wondering what to write. To block out the noise, and to help her concentrate, she listens to music in her iPod. And this is what she starts to think about, and to research, for her coursework. She spends a lot of time with her ‘little white friend’. She charges his battery. Takes him for a run. And he helps her to create the sonic bubble she enjoys living in which connects her to the work of her favourite musicians. Here coursework wants her to pop the bubble, though. So she looks at the ‘made in’ information on her iPod, and they consults the internet for a iPod teardown, where tech nerds take things to pieces to see what their component parts are. Then she looks up news stories about their places of manufacture. She find some connections. And thinks about the factory workers who have also helped to create this bubble she enjoys so much. She finishes with catchy turn of phrase: ‘I can only feel separated because I’m so connected’ and, mimicking Apple’s advertising tagline at the time, ‘iPod therefore I am.’

Page reference: Rebecca Payne (2006) iPod. followthethings.com/ipod.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes.

Posted on December 19, 2024January 5, 2025 by Ian Cook

The Connectivitea Of Britain And Sri Lanka

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Grocery

“The Connectivitea Of Britain And Sri Lanka“
A dissertation by Sarah Wrathmell, submitted as part of their BA Geography degree at the University of Birmingham, UK.
Sample pages from its findings chapters are embedded in the slideshow above. Click them to read the dissertation.

Undergraduate Geography student Sarah Wrathmell has an ambitious idea for her dissertation research. She wants to travel to Sri Lanka to find the people who grow her morning cup of tea on a plantation in Kandy, Sri Lanka. She plans to ‘follow the thing’ and to undertake some multisited ethnographic fieldwork along the supply chain of ‘Tillings’ (a pseudonym) loose breakfast tea. She ends up writing about six places: the tea garden where the tea is grown, its collection spaces, its production factory (all in Sri Lanka), its blending factory, a specialist tea shop, and a tea garden where she shares a pot of tea with a group of friends (all in the UK). She talks to pickers, packers and drivers; visits factories and talks to people tasting, processing and packaging it to exacting standards; and finally drinks that tea with those drinkers. This is embodied, sensory work that she has to – somehow – get on the page. What she wants to understand is what, and who, are the ingredients in her tea? And how are the lives of the people involved in making and drinking it interrelated? As a reader, your job is to follow her on her travels as she tries to make sense of this. Its assessors say it’s a fantastic piece of work. So, it’s submitted for a national dissertation prize. It wins this unanimously. We have a grainy .pdf copy that you can download and read. It’s important to show that not only are there high profile films, publications, and other forms of trade justice research and activism to pay attention to. Students have been doing this work too, for much smaller audiences, for years. What can this work look like?

Dissertation reference: Sarah Wrathmell (2003) The Connectivitea of Britain & Sri Lanka. BA Geography Dissertation: University of Birmingham, UK (followthethings.com/the-connectivitea-of-Britain-and-sri-lanka.shtml last accessed <insert date here>)

Page reference: Sarah Wrathmell (2024) The Connectivitea of Britain & Sri Lanka. followthethings.com/the-connectivitea-of-Britain-and-sri-lanka.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 60 minutes.

Posted on December 17, 2024January 5, 2025 by Ian Cook

Sim*Sweatshop

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Sport & Fitness

2006

UNBRANDED

SPORTS SHOES

MADE IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH

SHOW CAPITALIST EVILS

REACH NEW AUDIENCES

CHANGE CONSUMER BEHAVIOUR

MAKE THE HIDDEN VISIBLE

ENCOURAGE EMPATHY

EMBODY EXPLOITATION

BRING MANAGERS INTO VIEW

“Sim*Sweatshop“
An online video game by Jonny Norridge (concept and game programming) & Gavin Courtney (back end development) for NOW Nottingham and The Arts Council UK.
Gameplay video by WahWahQueenMew embedded above. Available to play free of charge on the Sim*Sweatshop website here (Adobe Flash needed).

Designer Jonny Norridge creates a game to simulate the experience of the shoe factory work that he’s been reading about. You slide shoe panels into place with your mouse. It ‘pings’ when one’s made. Then you make the next one. The clock ticks. Your energy levels fall. Your pay is terrible. It’s not enough to buy the food that you and your family need. You are interrupted by your boss talking about targets. He doesn’t like it when you want to join a union. It’s a simple, repetitive game that you – as a factory worker – can’t win. The idea is to put gamers in the shoes of the people who make the things that they buy. For them, there’s a familiar task sequence and reward structure. But this is real. It’s kind of fun to play, but also sucks. It’s the kind of game that’s given to school students as a quick and vivid way to explain sweatshop production. If they hate it, the lesson has worked. For those who want to know more, its website suggests further reading. There are other examples of trade justice activism in which consumers go to work in the factories and farms where their things are made (see, for example, the TV series Blood, Sweat & Takeaways on our site here). With these, you’re invited to empathise with someone supposedly like you – the contestants are often pitched ‘as typical’ consumers – trying to do that work. In this game, you’re all doing it yourself. So how effectively can a game-based simulation of factory work can be? What can it convey of the poverty and working conditions of show factory workers? It turn out that the answer is ‘a lot’. Sim*Sweatshop catches on. German and Hungarian versions are created, and it becomes part of other mainstream anti-sweatshop campaigns. But are young consumers the ones responsible for these sweatshop conditions? Should company executives, investors and politicians be playing this game too?

Page reference: Declan Coakley, Jack Johnson, Josh Li, Georgie Mitchell, Jack Saxton & Tom Weake (2024) Pipe Trouble. followthethings.com/sim-sweatshop.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 25 minutes.

Posted on December 16, 2024January 8, 2025 by Ian Cook

The Nike Email Exchange (NEE)

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Sport & Fitness

2001

NIKE

PERSONALISED ‘ID’ SHOES

TARGET THE RIGHT BRAND

CHOOSE THE RIGHT THING

PLAY WITH BRANDING

RE-DESIGN THE COMMODITY

MAKE IT PROVOCATIVE

MAKE IT META

INCLUDE SUFFERING KIDS

BRING MANAGERS INTO VIEW

“The Nike Email Exchange (NEE)“
An email exchange between student Jonah Peretti and the Nike Corporation.
The full email exchange was posted online on shey.net. Screengrab above. Read the whole exchange here.

Student Jonah Peretti experiments with Nike’s offer to customise its shoes with words you type into its ID website. Most people would add their name or their team’s name but he wants to add the word ‘sweatshop’ to a pair of running shoes. He wants to do this so that he can ‘remember the toil and labor of the children that made my shoes’. Nike say no. Peretti replies, arguing it’s OK. They say no. He replies again, saying he hasn’t breached their ID guidelines. They say no again. They just won’t let him do it. So he forwards the conversation to friends by email. They forward it to friends, who forward it to their friends, who …. It’s posted on a website called shey.net (above) and, within six weeks, millions have read it. Next, he’s invited onto national US TV to debate sweatshops with a Nike executive. This is one of the most iconic examples of viral online trade justice activism that happens 3 years before facebook is founded. It’s also an iconic example of the activist tactic of ‘culture jamming’ – turning a brand’s values and identity against itself. Peretti didn’t consider himself (or what he did) to be ‘activist’, he was just messing around with the opportunity that Nike gave its customer to personalise their shoes. What he did became known as the ‘Nike Email Exchange’ (or NEE) and was a important part of a swarm of public criticisms of Nike’s record on labour rights – including Indonesian Nike factory worker Cicih Sukaesih’s North American speaking tour [see our page here] – that cemented its sweatshop reputation in the late 1990s and 2000s. It’s also an iconic example in trade justice activism research. Peretti gave researchers Dietlind Stolle and Michele Micheletti the email addresses of everyone to whom he sent the email string, and everyone who replied to it. They got in touch to ask them about the impacts that it had had on them as citizens and consumers. The publications that emerged from this helped establish a significant body of scholarship on what’s called ‘political consumerism’. After becoming a public figure through the NEE, Peretti continued to experiment with viral online media before setting up Buzzfeed in 2006.

Page reference: Edward Jennings, Alex Hargreaves, Matt Goddard, Amy Joslin, Millie Whittington & Charles Bell (2024) The Nike Email Exchange (NEE). followthethings.com/the-nike-email-exchange-nee.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 73 minutes.

Posted on December 13, 2024January 8, 2025 by Ian Cook

iPhone 3G – Already With Pictures! (aka ‘iPhone Girl’)

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Electronics

WORKERS TAKE THE MIC!

USE YOUR PRIVILEGE

BE THE CHARACTER

HUMANISE THINGS

PUT A MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE

ENCOURAGE DETECTIVE WORK

FIND A CHARACTER

ASK FOR HELP

“iPhone 3G – Already With Pictures! (aka ‘iPhone Girl’)“
Three photos of an anonymous iPhone factory worker found on a new iPhone and posted on the MacRumors forum by markm49uk.
MacRumors post screengrabbed and shown above. See the original post (and comments) here.

markm49uk has just bought a new iPhone 3G. He’s carefully unboxed and unwrapped it. He turns it on. Checks the photos. And find that it’s come pre-loaded with three images. It’s a young Chinese woman, seeming working on an iPhone production line. She’s smiling, making peace signs with her hands. She looks happy. markm49uk is curious. He posts the photos on MacRumors to see if anyone else has found fun photos like these on their new iPhones. Nobody else seems to have, but his post ignites an international ‘whodunnit?’ that starts in MacRumor comments and spreads far far beyond as forum members re-post the photos and markm49uk’s questions elsewhere. Who is this person? Where does she work? Will she get in trouble for this? Is she working in one of the Apple factories in China where workers have been committing suicide because of the working conditions? Why does she look so happy? Is she an Apple (or Foxconn – their manufacturer) plant? Is she just smiling because she’s having her photo taken? Why is someone taking her photograph with the phone that markm49uk bought? Are they testing its? Are all smartphones tested like this? Why weren’t these photos erased? What did markm49uk do with those photos? Did he keep them on his phone? Other people downloaded one to add to their phone’s home screen. To acknowledge the labour that went into their phone. They said it was partly her phone too because she helped to make it. So she should be visible. We, and so many others who came across these photos, love this example. It’s inspired other Apple activism because of its surprising warmth and humanity. Part of the reason it went viral is that it was a mystery for people to solve. There were so many unanswered questions! Another reason is because so many commenters thought this was an accident. All of the other worker ‘message in a bottle‘ examples on followthethings.com imagine a consumer receiving their message and hopefully doing what they ask them to do. But this example has no explicit message. Nobody seems to know what this young woman – and the person who took her photos – is trying to say. All of the tactics buttons we’ve chosen above are based on an assumption that the work we feature is a) activism and b) deliberate. But what if it’s just a few fun photos that one workmate took of another and forgot to delete? Why would such a simple accident cause such a stir? Why would it cause so many people to talk about trade injustice in Apple’s supply chains? We think it’s simple. Apple’s press at the time was all about worker suicides in its Chinese factories. But this worker seemed to be happy. How could that be possible, even in the few moments it takes to snap a few phone pictures? For many, these photos show something different. The discussions are fascinating.

Page reference: Ian Cook et al (2024) iPhone 3G – Already With Pictures! (aka ‘iPhone Girl’). followthethings.com/iphone-3g-already-with-pictures-aka-iphone-girl.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 71 minutes.

Posted on December 11, 2024January 5, 2025 by Ian Cook

Maquilapolis (City Of Factories)

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Home & Auto | Health & Beauty

MULTIPLE OTHER BRANDS

MANY OTHER COMMODITIES

SHOW CAPITALIST EVILS

TEACH ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY

EDUCATE WORKERS

START SOMEWHERE DIFFERENT

WORKERS TAKE THE MIC!

PLACE THINGS CAREFULLY

SHOW THE VIOLENCE

INCLUDE SUFFERING KIDS

BRING POLITICIANS INTO VIEW

SHOW HOW TO WIN

FIND & GIVE INSPIRATION

ENCOURAGE FEMINIST SOLIDARITIES

“Maquilapolis (City Of Factories)“
A participatory documentary film in Spanish with Spanish or English subtitles directed by Vicky Funari & Sergio de la Torre, with music by Pauline Oliveros with the Nortec Collective & John Blue for the Independent Television Service & CineMamás Film.
Trailer and pay-per-view stream embedded above. Search online for other streaming options here. Read the film transcript in English & Spanish here.

Carmen Duràn and Lourdes Lujàn work in Tijuana, the ‘city of factories’, on the Mexico-US border. They work in factories on the hill making televisions and other COMMODITIES for brands like Panasonic and Sony. These multinationals treat this city as a garbage can that their workers have to live in. How can they fight back, claim their rights, their humanity? They take part in a participatory filmmaking project with directors Vicky Funari and Sergio de la Torre. The directors have been working with a local collective of ‘promontoras’ including Carmen and Lourdes for years. They have planned this project together for years. There’s been some filmmaking training and the promontoras take camcorders into the places where they live and work. The films they make are full of personality and a close attachment to place. They document life from these factory workers’ perspective. They document the ways in which these multinationals treat them as workers – especially when they leave – and how they treat the place where they live – as a dump for industrial waste that ruins their environment and threatens their health. They document their campaigns to clean up toxic industrial waste. In the process audiences get to know Carmen and Lourdes, to empathise with them. But the film also contains some surprising and beautiful creative scenes – often made in place of the footage that’s impossible to take inside the factory – that look like performance art. They want to show the intimate, bodily connection between the labour they perform, the commodities you buy (or are treated with in hospital) and the brands that you may be familiar with. And there’s some specially commissioned film music, made with a local music collective and featuring sounds from the factories. This is a gem of a film for anyone interested in trade justice activism. This is the film – with caveats – that these Mexican factory workers wanted to make and to show to the world. It’s one of the most intimate place-based examples featured on our site. And it was shown, deliberately, to audiences of workers either side of the US-Mexico border. Seeing empowered women like themselves struggling, resisting was an inspiration to many other women. And when the film hit the film festival circle, and there were panel screenings, the promontoras were there, answering questions alongside the directors.

Page reference: Rosie Buller, Melanie Bonner, Rebecca Lyons, Georgie Little, Tilman Schulzklinger & Jennifer Hart (2020) Maquilapolis (City Of Factories). followthethings.com/maquilapolis-city-of-factories.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 86 minutes.

Posted on December 8, 2024January 5, 2025 by Ian Cook

The Pill (a.k.a. A Female Issue)

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Health & Beauty

“The Pill (a.k.a. A Female Issue)“
Undergraduate coursework created by Kate Ross.

The students’ first task in the ‘Geographies of Material Culture’ module at the University of Exeter is to make a personal connection between their lives and the lives of others elsewhere in the world who made the things they buy. These are the people who help you to be you, followthethings.com CEO Ian tells them. Because you’re a cyborg, your body cannot function without the people, animals, technologies, networks that makes its inputs like food and medicine. So choose a commodity that matters to you, that’s an important part of your identity, that you couldn’t do without. Think about its component parts, its materials, and the properties they give to that commodity and your experience of ‘consuming it’. See what you can find online and write a 500 word first person account that connects your lives. One student – Kate Ross – chooses a prescription drug that she takes every day called Co-cyprindiol. It’s a contraceptive pill that’s also prescribed for skin and other conditions. When searches online to find out more about it, she discovers women in China, Brazil and Taiwan who are forced to take contraceptive pills in order to work in the factories and on the farms which make the stuff she buys. Her argument is that her connection with them is not only through the goods they might produce than she might buy. Their connection is through their consumption – as women – of the same medicine, voluntarily or not. They have something in common. Their bodies. Their fertility. Their medication. Once she learns about their relationships with the drug she takes, she thinks about how she’s feeling every time she pops one out of the foil pack… and then I see that face. To make her coursework more visceral, she takes an empty Co-cyprindiol foil, sticks it to a piece of paper, and handwrites these thoughts around it, day by day. These are the same foils that the supply chain workers she’s read about will pop their pills out of every day. She writes her thoughts and footnotes these with academic and detective work readings that have helped her to think this way.

Page reference: Kate Ross (2004) The Pill (A.K.A. A Female Issue). followthethings.com/the-pill-leaflet-thyroxine-a-k-a-a-female-issue.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 14 minutes.

Posted on December 6, 2024January 10, 2025 by Ian Cook

Hydrocortisone Relatedness

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Health & Beauty

2005-7

MERCK, SHARPE & DOHME

HYDROCORTISONE TABLETS

REDUCE DISCRIMINATION

CHOOSE THE RIGHT THING

ENCOURAGE THANKFULNESS

END HAPPY

“Hydrocortisone Relatedness“
A talk by Ian Cook et al, edited and updated for publication here.
Available in full below.

Sometimes the thing you want to follow chooses you. It’s October 2004. followthethings.com CEO Ian is in considerable pain. He goes to hospital. He’s got kidney stones. Lots of them. The following summer he’s diagnosed with an illness called sarcoidosis. That’s what’s causing his body to make them. It’s also causing considerable weight loss. And lethargy. And extreme thirst. This is a serious illness. It’s in his lungs. But it could spread. He’s prescribed hydrocortisone steroid tablets. They calm the sarcoid inflammation that sets off the chemical reactions that cause his body to make those stones. And he gets better. He regains his sense of self, his working body. It’s a miracle. He wants to find out more about the drug. Who makes it for him, where, from what? He wants to say thanks. He’s inspired by a student taking his ‘Geographies of material culture’ module whose medicine-following coursework was original & surprising [it’s published on our site here]. Medicines are such a mystery. Hardly anyone seems to follow them. Choosing something to follow when you have absolutely no idea what you might find can be exciting. Choosing something that you couldn’t function without but doesn’t have an ethical, sustainable, or fair trade alternative can make you think differently. If you’re used to ‘follow the thing ‘studies about the genre’s most charismatic commodities – food, fashion and electronics – medicines don’t give you what you might normally expect. Prescription medicines are procured for their consumers by healthcare services. You get what they source for you. Medicines can be made from active pharmaceutical ingredients and other materials that come from the most surprising sources. They may have been discovered / invented under the most surprising circumstances by the most unexpected people. That’s 100% the case with hydrocortisone. Ian’s pills are made and consumed in the UK in the mid 2000s. But his talk starts and ends with civil rights activism in the US the 1960s. He loves what he finds. It forces him to think differently, more thankfully, about theorising and engaging others in the lives of things: through kinship and thingship. And because of what he finds – he concludes – he is a we.

Page reference: Ian Cook et al (2024) Hydrocortisone relatedness. followthethings.com/hydrocortisone-thingship.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 44 minutes.

Posted on November 29, 2024January 5, 2025 by Ian Cook

Door key

followthethings.com
Home & Auto

2006

UNBRANDED

DOOR KEY

MADE IN MANY COUNTRIES

CHOOSE THE RIGHT THING

“Door Key“
Undergraduate coursework written by Alice Williams published in the Primary Geographer.
Full text below.

The students’ first task in the ‘Geographies of Material Culture’ module at the University of Birmingham is to make a personal connection between their lives and the lives of others elsewhere in the world who made the things they buy. These are the people who help you to be you, followthethings.com CEO Ian tells them. So choose a commodity that matters to you, that’s an important part of your identity, that you couldn’t do without. Think about its component parts, its materials, and the properties they give to that commodity and your experience of ‘consuming it’. And write a 500 word first person account that connects your lives. Alice Williams writes about a recent experience. When she lost something and only then realised how important it was to her life. The key to her flat. Which gives her a sense of safety. Or at least she thinks so. Until she looks into its ingredients. Its metals. Like lead. Which is added to make it easier to cut. And its possible sources. Mines in South Africa and the USA. A smelter in Canada. A cutting plant in Italy… And the people who work with lead in these places. And the effects it has on their health. And their safety. They’re connected. Shouldn’t everyone feel safe?

Page reference: Alice Williams (2006) Door Key. followthethings.com/door-key.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 8 minutes.

Posted on November 15, 2024January 5, 2025 by Ian Cook

King Corn: Your Are What You Eat

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Grocery

APPLE & CRANBERRY JUICE

TEACH ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY

CHOOSE THE RIGHT THINGS

TAKE THEM TO PIECES

FLIP THE SCRIPT

MAKE THE HIDDEN VISIBLE

CULTIVATE RELATIONSHIPS

BRING PEOPLE TOGETHER

BRING MANAGERS INTO VIEW

PLACE THINGS CAREFULLY

MAKE IT FUNNY

STREISAND EFFECT

“King Corn: Your Are What You Eat“
A documentary directed and starring Ian Cheney & Curt Ellis for Mosaic Films (US)
Official trailer embedded above. Search online to watch the full movie here. Movie website here.

What better way to find out where your food comes from than growing it yourself and following where it goes? That’s what college friends Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis do by growing an acre of corn in the US state of Iowa. This isn’t the corn you’d eat on the cob, though. This corn tastes horrible. It’s inedible. It’s a starch crop that ends up as an ingredient in countless other industrial foods: like burgers, twinkies, apple juice. Corn is ‘the raw material for an overweight society’, a major cause of obesity diabetes. You can’t get away from it. Americans are all part corn (test your hair!). But who controls this trade? And who is if good for? The consumers who eat all that junk food? The corporations who dominate its growing and processing? The government who could (maybe should) change the nation’s farming policy? Ian and Curt’s ‘grow your own’ approach to supply chain activism is innovative. They present themselves as a couple of naive, funny ‘guys’, just out of college. They have no farming experience. They move from Boston to Iowa and buy some land. Plant some corn. Watch it grow (not much work is required). They ask for help from other farmers. They follow corn from production to consumption by producing and trying to sell it to processors. But they don’t want to help, so these two guys try to process it themselves, making High Fructose Corn Syrup (the sweetener in so much junk food) in their kitchen. The film is a hit. It exposes a truth about US agriculture which the ‘Corn Producers of America’ trade body does not appreciate. They hope it will inspire audiences to act politically to chabge the health of their society for the better. Its not about shopping for different products, because corn is in everything. To counter the film’s message, the CPA invest in an advertising campaign – including an iconic TV ad – about the harmlessness of corn. The filmmakers produce a parody ad about the harmlessness of tobacco. Then iconic satirical US TV show Saturday Night Live gets in on the act, making its own parody ad about the harmlessness of corn. So much sarcasm! This is another example we have found of an industry’s attempts to silence – in this case quite a mild – critique of how things are made. As we might expect, this critique draws so much attention to the original film, that it means more people know about it. For the filmmakers, it’s free publicity.

Page reference: Yahellah Best, Melanie Garunay, Melissa Logan & Andrea McWilliams (2024) King Corn: You Are What You Eat. followthethings.com/king-corn-you-are-what-you-eat.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 40 minutes.