The Art and Science of Everything

Reading the preface to Foucault’s “The Order of Things.”

In it, Foucault seems to describe culture as a grid that defines a shared set of categories, systems of perception, words — a framework a group of people hold in common that enables them to see, describe, and converse about things with others sharing that framework — the framework which allows us to assert sameness between things, introducing order to them.

The cultural grid that undergirds language, perception, and representation

He traces out a space between the presence of culture and the reflexive philosophy of why culture exists — the space of what cultural grids (allowing for definitions of identity and order) have formed the foundation of Western tradition from Classicism to Modernism.

And it is order that gives us an epistemological foundation. However, it seems that Foucault is taking Kuhn’s detailing of the discontinuities in the “progress” of knowledge orders (paradigms) and generalizing it as a history of knowing, rather than of the cultural activities denoted to be “science.” He undergirds the positivist tradition with a cultural grid that he hopes to discover as making such science and philosophy possible.

As I first read this, I interpreted Foucault’s writing to be pointing to the cultural possibilities of self-conscious culture mixers — those who see that there are things to be ordered, things whose orders are socially constructed, and things whose orders they themselves can socially construct. Examples are remix movements, irony, and reappropriation of words like “nigger” and “cunt.” Then I remembered that this was the 60s and that while Foucault’s ideas are part of the foundations of these possibilities, he is not writing descriptively about them. It is in my interpretation that I see these possibilities in his ideas’ futures.

Questions:

• If we are now modern, are the precipitates of Classicist thinking now irrelevant? Or are they a part of our lives, but with an added dimention of modernity? If the cultural grid is different, then language and representation must play a different role than they did in Classicist times. What is it?
• Is post-modernity the cultural self-consciousness catalyzed by those the likes of Foucault?
• Foucault states “all the familiar landmarks of my thought - our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography - breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things…” How is increasing mobility and instantaneous or rapid trans-global connectivity changing the importance of the geographical distinctions — place-based culture — taken for granted by even Foucault in this passage from 40 years ago? This is the question Dourish put to me. My sense is we cannot completely separate geography from culture, as geography constitutes a certain materiality that is part of the cultural gridwork. However, if we interpret geography as we can interpret text, then I suppose there is a space of interpretive freedom and construction in the possibilities of geography. Is geography base, superstructure, or something in between? Latour’s networks (post-Lab Life) mean that materiality is an actor in a network that enforces its own agency. Don’t know what Foucault does with this.

“Technology needs to support social and cultural practices rather than determining culture. Technology is architecture and, thus, the design of it is critical because the decisions made will have dramatic effects. Digital architecture is unburdened by atoms but it is not unburdened by human tendencies of control. … Let the technology … follow the desires and needs of people.“  - danah boyd (via Trebor Scholz)
Especially reading the whole talk surrounding this quote, I mostly agree with danah’s calls for creating infrastructures that allow people to build their own, highly situated tools and applications. My one kvetch is that underlying all these APIs and data services is still an architecture and set of decisions about is impossible, possible, and hard. It would be fascinate to follow an API design team and their reasoning and trace out the values that inform their tradeoffs and decisions.

I don’t mean to imply that I am a technological determinist. Even if we do try to create apps for cultures we don’t understand, in the case of voluntarily adopted tools/artifacts, we won’t force anyone to adopt. People will use the tools to perform their identities and support their cultural<->individual values as they wish, surely adapting the tool in ways we couldn’t imagine. It might be possible to fuck up web 2.0, but I don’t see it as that likely — I believe in technological underdeterminism and life hacking ingenuity where people have some freedom to make their own choices.

A post describing many strains of thought on collective action and cooperation, specifically thinking about sociable media
Collective Action on collectivate.net

I value this post more its references than its analysis.

• I like the distinction between collaboration and cooperation. It’s useful when you talk about people trying to get to a common goal, vs people supporting each other because it helps them achieve individual goals. The distinction has seemed muddied in my exposure to social software literature.
• Scholz argues that the internet is an incubator for the balkanization of society into plural monocultures - archipeloagos of cultures consisting of special-interest groups and subcultures, where those with dissenting points of view are branded non-expert or off-topic. I’m not convinced the internet increases this tendency, rather than provides another site of human organization like the suburbs, city neighborhoods, Orange County, Ave Maria, or San Francisco. In providing alternate, virtual spaces, surely the internet provides greater opportunity for affinity group to interact, but it could also has the potential to let individuals safely begin to explore alternate cultural groups and expressions. I don’t see how the internet uniquely affords homogenous affiliations and discourages heterogenous affiliations.
• Scholz argues that the web no longer disenfranchises users, citing usage numbers for services like Blogger and Youtube, as well as internet usage numbers in the US. This doesn’t prove much of anything. Looking at the PEW 2005 report on Digital Divisions, 22% of Americans say they do not live in internet connected households and have never used email or internet (not included are “net evaders” who have access at home but choose not to use it). Of these, 31% of those without internet access say they simply do not have access, 6% expect it to be difficult or frustrating, and 5% say it is too costly. The remaining city reasons like lack of interest, fear of addiction, or lack of time.I do agree that in all the divide of raw access is narrowing, but there’s a lot of complexity to disenfranchisement as Hargittai and Dimaggion point out in their literature review on digital divide issues. There many open questions as to whether a persistent knowledge gap exists by those who are connected to early adopter networks — those who will always have the first look at new technologies and the capabilities that become available. Autonomy of use (do you use the internet at work or in the privacy of your home?) is a predictor of online skill in finding information. Demographic information was more modestly predictive of online abilties (p. 34, Dimaggio et al.). While the digital divide of access is closing, it still isn’t closed.
• Even if the digital divide is closed, evidence that the internet improves the lives of those who have access is not conclusive. Hargittai and DiMaggio cite studies that find that computer-correlated wage increases can often be explained by higher-wage, higher-skill workers being first to be given digital tools when a workplace upgrades its equipment Using the internet for information is correlated with having a college education, while less educated Americans use the internet more for entertainment. Kids with internet in the house get better grades, but they don’t know if that’s only correlation for now.

John Mark was telling me about a Eudora plug in that places a waiting period on your emails so you can have a cooling off period during which you can take back some terrible mail retort you’ve composed. We talked about how it would be cool if it could actually detect when I’m angry, perhaps eavesdropping and using some voice processing. This is a very Lilly-centric solution since I curse my computer when I’m frustrated (well, mostly I get frustrated at my computer, not humans).

That spurred another idea. What about a computer program that eavesdrops on me and when I seem to cursing (or acting otherwise, detectably angry), flashes a picture from cuteoverload.com? I’m sure something so simple will have lots of rough edges and annoying interludes, but it would be an interesting probe into the sort of subtleties of attention and overture that Wendy Ju talks about in her paper on implicit interactions.

I went to a great show tonight for Division Day, a band fronted by Rohner Segnitz, illustrious former Kitchen Manager of Terra House. He was a good kitchen manager — never embezzled money for cigarettes, didn’t forget to order produce for the house — and he’s a great musician and lyricist too.One of the things I love about Division Day is their really intricate instrumentation — like if you took Pinback’s composition talents, got rid of the sarcastic quirkiness, and added earnest emotion. I keep coming back to emo to describe Division Day, but because Rohner has a voice that says “I love you, I care, and this is possibly fucked up right here, but I’ll work with you through it.”

I was really pleased with the show. Where the live venue makes pulling off intricate compositions harder than on an album, the bands emotional intensity really blew the roof of in the live performance. As I’m more familiar with their older stuff, I was also surprised at the range they’ve developed, playing songs ranging in emotional tenor from restrained, quiet pop to almost more punk vibe stuff that had me jumping.

Anyways, I’ll stop now. But neener neener to those of you who didn’t come. And if you have the chance to see or hear Division Day, please do.

————–

Lyrics to Bad Black Moon, here for community service to the internet since I couldn’t find them when I wanted them. I’d hate for someone to try to figure out who sings this rad song and not be able to google it.

It was a mean way in.

It was a bad way around.

96 ways to end.

Can’t even touch the ground.

You saw it too.

I know you did.

Oh, bad black moon.

Could you be true?

Caught all up in the blankets, the bed
Plant a a garden in front of the school

Could it be razed?

You raze?

You cut?

You scab?

Two times it started

And twice you shut it down

Two times the catamounts

They tore your throat apart

Two times

Show em up, cut them down, show em up

Show em up

Cut em down

Show em up

At the Microsoft Social Computing Conference, I listened to Clay Shirky describe the editorial policies of Slashdot. I had long assumed that Slashdot employed explicitly collaborative filtering, using reader ratings and reader visibility preferences to render the comments above the acceptability threshold — kind of anarcho-libertarian. However, Shirky explained that, in fact, the moderation system described in this CHI papergives some moderation power to many, but it gives relatively unconstrained moderation power to the paid editorial staff.

Is such unconstrained power explained by a anarcho-libertarian ideology? I believe it is consistent with some strains of anarcho-libertarianism to have limited government for the protection from bodily or property harm. But can offensive or low quality posts be considered such harm? No. Instead, a moderation design decision has been made because of expedience, solving a problem in the way that seems most obvious despite contradiction to an ideology.

My big assumption here is that anarcho-libertarian ideology is dominant in the Slashdot team. I have little evidence for this at the moment, but my assumption is based on books like Paulina Borsook’s Cyberselfish, documenting the libertarianism so common in Silicon Valley. I would love the opportunity to approach Slashdot as an ethnographer and unpack the ideologies that really influence the design.

I’m fascinated by this question of how ideologies influence design. My fascination was reengaged reading Lofland and Lofland’s “Analyzing Social Settings” tonight.

At the broader level are meaning “packages” that are life-encompassing, that lay claim to relevance for virtually any topic that might be discussed. Such packages are often called ideologies, worldviews… (p. 113)

And later:

Because the situations of living are constantly changing, new and often novel meanings are constantly being generated to cope with new contingencies. (p.116)

It’s this process of ideology negotiation, or ideology salience, or hypocrisy in the design of techno-social systems that I think is really interesting. What are the kinds of political or belief systems people try to reproduce through their technical systems? And how does it go? People reappropriate technologies all the time.

Projects that would be cool:

• ethnographic account of design processes at two different sites of technological creation, especially when the technology has the property of being distributable at very low cost to many, many people — bonus points for distributable across cultures.
• investigation of what a moderated community means to its members; how is that moderation interpreted or experienced, if at all consciously?

Implications for Design by Paul Dourish (CHI 2006 paper)

Central points:

• The requirements that ethnography provide an “implications for design” creates a relationship in which knowledge is produced for the benefit of the designers and administrators — those who wish to create some goal state in a system that happens to have people (”users”) in it. Instead, Suchman proposes ethnography as providing an account of the partnership in which producers and consumers co-constitute one another, in part through technological artifacts.
• A key part of ethnography often lost in the way ethnography gets thrown about as a design methodology is the self-consciousness of the observer as a part of the social relations richly described. The observer is not a positivist instrument for transmitting impressions of the observed. (However, a lot of SCOT could be construed as including this subjectivity in non-human observation instruments’ construction as well.)
• Ethnography can have empirical outcomes, which inform others of the simple facts observed, as framed and understood by the observer, but we should not overlook the analytical outcome — those that, when revealed, call into question or qualify assumptions tacit in the design, the specification, the technologist-consumer relationship…

I read this article because I was writing an email to PD and I wanted to make sure I didn’t misuse ethnography and ethnomethodology when I really meant interview. I got more than I bargained for, but that’s good.