Sociological Examination of a Cultural Artifact

Personal Artifact Analysis

Part One—Data Gathering

My friend’s artifact is a cell phone. it is gray, measuring about 5 inches by 2 inches. It is gray with an uncluttered screen. It has one app for trading stocks, which is Robinhood; one app for checking email, which is Gmail; and a photo button on the home page. It is manufactured, made of plastic, glass, and electronic equipment. It is heavy, smooth, and relatively new but it is slim and will fit in a pocket.

Connections that can be made between my friend and the artifact are that it reveals that my friend likes to trade stocks on his phone. He also has a lot of pictures in his photos album that he allowed me to see. He is also connected to messaging via his email account. The phone is important to him, in other words, because it keeps him connected to others and to trading.

My hypothesis regarding this artifact and what it means to my friend’s life is that he relies upon it a great deal every day because it is how he interacts with others in the digital age and how he stores important memories.

Part Two—Explanations of Artifacts

My friend bought the artifact at Cricket because it was a cheap but quality cell phone. He does not like to clutter up his phone with lots of apps as he only uses it for basics—trading on Robinhood, sending email, and taking and storing pictures. He hates social media and does not have any social media apps.

Part Three—The Interview

My friend declined to give his name but said he grew up in Cincinnati and speaks only English. He said he has a mother and a father and a sister and that he began trading stocks when he was 18. He said he reads Reddit and various other stock forums to get information on meme stocks and he said he wants to be an investment manager at some point because he feels he is very good at trading. He does not have any other hobbies, but he does like to watch movies. His favorite movies are by Quentin Tarantino, and he also likes Asian cinema. He says that in the future we will all be speaking Chinese since the Chinese own everything. He takes photos of landscapes that he admires because he says that when he is rich he wants to landscape his yard himself and he likes to take photos of other yards he sees so that he has good ideas to draw on.

Part Four—Assessment and Wrap-Up

My big idea about the artifact is that it is very much a tool of my friend, just like in ancient times a spear might have been a tool of a primitive man. My friend’s phone is how he makes money (by trading) and where he stores ideas (photos) for what he would like to do in the future. He does not have any time-wasting apps on his phone like others do, which indicates he is fairly serious-minded. From talking to him it is clear that he does take himself seriously. The biggest surprise for me in conducting this exercise was how much you can learn about a person just from investigating a single artifact—for example I had no idea about any of this regarding my friend. Some things I have learned from this activity that I will help me in the future will be asking questions about an artifact to learn more about it.