Re: [Air-L] Technology as ideologically neutral?
This is indeed a fascinating discussion and I like the way that Jeremy has turned the question here. J: can you explain a bit more what you mean when you hold that objects themselves have politics in themselves but necessarily ideologies in themselves? Charles: at the end of the day, would you please post all the readings that people have suggested? And let us not forget Slack and Wise, Culture and Technology: A Primer. Andrew Herman, Ph. D. Associate Professor Department of Communication Studies Director, Graduate Program in Cultural Analysis and Social Theory Wilfrid Laurier University Waterloo, Ontario N2L 3C5 CANADA 519 884-1970 x3693
jeremy hunsinger <jhuns@vt.edu> 07/07/12 3:28 AM >>> I find this to be an interesting debate, though mostly the question is where the ideology actually exists. Does it exist in the object itself? relations to the object from other objects? relations to the object to semiotic systems around it? relations to socius or culture? or in the systems alone, cultures alone, socius, alone, etc.
basically there is a matrix here of ideologies, contexts, objects and their axiologies operating both ontologically ala mereological constructions and epistemologies. With many blurry middle grounds. I hold that artifacts have politics in themselves, but i'm not sure that all artefacts have ideologies in themselves. The question i tend to raise and ask people to write about is... what is the politics of the toaster, because the toaster has a whole political economics and a politics, but does it have an implied ideology. Now the design of a toaster can certainly have ideological components, but the idea of a toaster may perhaps not, though granted whether the idea exists outside of the set of objects is another debate for the Platonists to take up. however... I wonder about the neutrality of the internet because as I've argued here before, that while there is no real internet beyond reference to a conceptual idea that encompasses many technologies and systems that lack what i'd all think of as a unity beyond the concept. So does it as a whole have a neutrality or an ideology? there is a certain technocratic rationality to it, and that rationality certainly has a traditionally critiqued ideology, but is that in it, or in the design of it, or in the relations of it within historic contexts? and isn't neutrality and the claim to it, an ideological claim? I've always tended to argue that the claim toward neutrality and objectivity is almost always ideological. one of my favorite authors on this technology as ideology is Paul Virilio and my second favorite is Walter Benjamin in Arcades Project. _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
Here are some of the key dichotomies or spectra I face daily negotiating the inscribed ideologies (notably plural) of the text analytic technology that I manage: Transparent vs. Black Box Open vs. Closed Evolving vs. Static User-shaped vs. Inventor-shaped Collaborative vs. Individualistic Free vs. Fee-based Open Source Data vs. Proprietary Data General Purpose vs. Sole Purpose Mixed Method (pluralist) vs. Singularly Qual or Quant (purist or positivist) Inductive vs. Deductive Idiosyncratic Outlier-oriented vs. Central Tendency-oriented Measurement-focused vs. Discovery-focused Replication-friendly vs. Replication-hostile Scalable vs. Un-scalable Machine-centric vs. Human-centric System Lock-in vs. Interoperability There are probably many more. In each case there are debates, trade-offs, and ultimately choices that require software code and a wider architecture that does not easily fall to one side or the other of a particular instance of the listed spectra. The ideology of our code is all over this map as a result. One of the things I like most about being a technology inventor is talking at length with a huge ecosystem of very diverse, multi-cultural, multi-disciplinary, and multi-national users about what it is they think they want to do with text. Very often, we struggle to say no to a user with a good idea. A really good idea is usually repeated by successive users and becomes a trigger for a fork in later stages of technology development. Usually, these are utilitarian feature requests. However, they can also be deeper, almost seismic disruptions in my thinking that answer the basic question: "What the heck is this thing really good for?" This is an incredibly social process; a melting pot of assumptions, critiques, hopes, and dreams. The deeply plural nature of the ideologies reflects conscious selection, unconscious bias, accidents, and necessities like the stark reality of resource limits. Oh the things I would build with five more engineers just like the heroic one (Mark Hoy) who has been breathing hundreds of thousands of lines of code into my long dog walk-inspired visions since the summer of 2007. Some of the more scholarly sources of all these ideas are captured in an article Chi-Jung (Lucie) Lu and I wrote about 5 years ago while I was at Pitt just starting to develop the free, open-source kernal of what is now a sprawling mass of running commercial code tapped into the world's social media, survey data, public comments & email. You can read it online at: http://www.umass.edu/qdap/IJMRA.pdf "Rigor and flexibility in computer-based qualitative research: Introducing the Coding Analysis Toolkit" Volume 2, Issue 1, June 2008 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MULTIPLE RESEARCH APPROACHES ~Stu -- Dr. Stuart W. Shulmanhttp://people.umass.edu/stu Founder and CEO, Texifterhttp://texifter.com LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/stuart-shulman/10/351/899 Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/StuartWShulman Director, QDAP-UMasshttp://www.umass.edu/qdap Editor Emeritus, JITPwww.jitp.net
Interesting discussion... It rather parallels some thoughts I've been having following a great interactiom with staff and students at the Ghana-India Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence in ICT here in Accra, Ghana. I was giving them my capsulized "Intro to Community Informatics" presentation which in this context was focussed rather on how ICTs can support Economic and Social Development and particularly from the grassroots (which I guess for the purposes here argues that the the technology doesn't itself "have an ideology" but rather is a means for the implementation of whatever ideology is brought to it from the outside... At that point the conversation rather turned direction and we began to talk more specifically about mobiles and how they are impacting in Ghana--95%(coverage), 90% utilization vs. 5% or so fixed line, less for stationary access to the Internet and so on. What became clear (to me at least) as we were talking was that all of the mobile applications that we were discussing--access to market information, access to weather information, health notices to pregnant women--that sort of thing were all one to one (or in a pinch many to one) applications; but in fact, as came out in the discussion, rural villages (Ghana is still roughly 50% rural) don't function in this kind of individualized (one to one) information mode. (An example, in a recent excursion here I happened to notice that the local artisanal in-shore fishery consists largely of boats with up to a dozen fishermen and when it comes time to haul in the nets up to 30 or so villagers may be involved. These folks don't need to know as individuals what the local price of fish might be in a particular market, or what the prospect is of a storm and thus the need to haul in the nets, or even how to handle pre-natal information (since birthing is a village activity not solely a family one). What is needed are means for the most rapid and effective form of one-to-many communcation i.e. how to get the information to all those in the community who need to be able to use it as part of their collaborative activities. But one-to-many communicatiom for mobiles requires a fairly significant degree of financial and planning overhead -- certainly something beyond the interest of most commercial mobile operators. In this context the conventional(even technologically prescribed) mobile communications mode i.e. one to one (or many to one) is non-functional or even potentially destructive. So the message that I came away with and that I would contribute to this discussion is less that technology is (or is not) ideologically neutral (that depends I guess on how you define "ideology"). But rather that at least in some particular contexts, for some particular purposes, technology is deeply value laden concerning the nature of one's being in the world (e.g. individualistic or communal as one example) and that the forces of technology design combined with the forces of commerce, ideology and inertia (and in the absence of popular resistance and/or public policy) can be deeply (and ultimately irresponsibly) reconstitutive of the nature of our lived world and how we experience and act in this. (But I guess we, who have read our Harold Innis, and here we should include Marshall McLuhan, would already know that). And finally to observe that it seems to me that this form of technology imposed socio-cultural rerendering is perhaps the deepest "ideological" cut of all. Best to all, Mike Michael Gurstein, Ph.D. Executive Director: Centre for Community Informatics Research, Development and Training (CCIRDT) Vancouver, BC CANADA tel/fax: +1-604-602-0624 email: gurstein@gmail.com web: http://communityinformatics.net blog: http://gurstein.wordpress.com twitter: #michaelgurstein -----Original Message----- From: air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org [mailto:air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Andrew Herman Sent: Sunday, July 08, 2012 10:24 AM To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org; jhuns@vt.edu Subject: Re: [Air-L] Technology as ideologically neutral? This is indeed a fascinating discussion and I like the way that Jeremy has turned the question here. J: can you explain a bit more what you mean when you hold that objects themselves have politics in themselves but necessarily ideologies in themselves? Charles: at the end of the day, would you please post all the readings that people have suggested? And let us not forget Slack and Wise, Culture and Technology: A Primer. Andrew Herman, Ph. D. Associate Professor Department of Communication Studies Director, Graduate Program in Cultural Analysis and Social Theory Wilfrid Laurier University Waterloo, Ontario N2L 3C5 CANADA 519 884-1970 x3693
jeremy hunsinger <jhuns@vt.edu> 07/07/12 3:28 AM >>> I find this to be an interesting debate, though mostly the question is where the ideology actually exists. Does it exist in the object itself? relations to the object from other objects? relations to the object to semiotic systems around it? relations to socius or culture? or in the systems alone, cultures alone, socius, alone, etc.
basically there is a matrix here of ideologies, contexts, objects and their axiologies operating both ontologically ala mereological constructions and epistemologies. With many blurry middle grounds. I hold that artifacts have politics in themselves, but i'm not sure that all artefacts have ideologies in themselves. The question i tend to raise and ask people to write about is... what is the politics of the toaster, because the toaster has a whole political economics and a politics, but does it have an implied ideology. Now the design of a toaster can certainly have ideological components, but the idea of a toaster may perhaps not, though granted whether the idea exists outside of the set of objects is another debate for the Platonists to take up. however... I wonder about the neutrality of the internet because as I've argued here before, that while there is no real internet beyond reference to a conceptual idea that encompasses many technologies and systems that lack what i'd all think of as a unity beyond the concept. So does it as a whole have a neutrality or an ideology? there is a certain technocratic rationality to it, and that rationality certainly has a traditionally critiqued ideology, but is that in it, or in the design of it, or in the relations of it within historic contexts? and isn't neutrality and the claim to it, an ideological claim? I've always tended to argue that the claim toward neutrality and objectivity is almost always ideological. one of my favorite authors on this technology as ideology is Paul Virilio and my second favorite is Walter Benjamin in Arcades Project. _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/ _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
Interesting Mike: Maybe, if we change the word "ideology" for "representation, then we could be more comfortable. Technology as a thinking process that presents solutions to context problems is built on historic, geographic, cultural representations (economy and ideology included of course). Here I am quoting Mumford. Certain sources, materials, energies, processes and products are preferred by those views (or representations). These views, when made real by the tools and routines produced by technology, create habits. And habits conform in the end, the organizational behavior of a community, an enterprise, a society. Here is Nelson & Winter who I quote. So technology, with or without consciousness, impose an architecture, an order to action and thought as disciplined bodies create disciplines minds. Here I quote Foucault. In the case of ICT, mind discipline is more evident but it also intends to create a physical order in any society it reaches; a reproduction of its origin. As societies are complex, this reproduction is not perfect. It is part reproduction and part construction. We are in that spot in our work, trying to understand what is happening. The idea of “global” is embedded into ICT so when it reaches a "community", this clash against the sense of “local”. The small baker shop owner is not interested in selling to the continent, but to his neighborhood. Same clash we have between computer (written language) in communities that are basically oral: they prefer the cellular. I believe these are the tips that let we brake down the ICT myth, and begin to understand the ICT tool. -- *Cristian Berrío Zapata*
Cristian, Mike, et al: I've been lurking throughout this discussion but Cristian's point has encouraged me to chime in. I like that the ideas of ideology and representation are both now in the conversation. Consider, though, that one approach lets us present (rather than represent) what is understood within a cultural/historical/geographical context and representation while the other lets us view the same from the outside. I'm thinking here from the perspective of ethnographic participant-observation - in my world it becomes an absolute necessity to separate out what we think we see happening in a particular setting from what people within that setting think they are doing. We generally operate out of a philosophical grounding in phenomenological bracketing because it is far to easy for us to conflate these two things when we present our/their actions to others. This has been a great discussion, everyone - I can't wait to see where it goes next! Cheers, Meryl -- J. Meryl Krieger Ph.D., Folklore & Ethnomusicology Adjunct Lecturer, Sociology, Indiana University Purdue University at Indianapolis Adjunct Instructor, Communications and Life Skills/Humanities, Ivy Tech Community College Piano/Clarinet Teacher, Stafford Music Academy, Bloomington, IN http://www.linkedin.com/in/merylkrieger http://indiana.academia.edu/merylkrieger On Sun, Jul 8, 2012 at 1:08 PM, Cristian Berrio Zapata < cristian.berrio@gmail.com> wrote:
Interesting Mike:
Maybe, if we change the word "ideology" for "representation, then we could be more comfortable. Technology as a thinking process that presents solutions to context problems is built on historic, geographic, cultural representations (economy and ideology included of course). Here I am quoting Mumford.
Certain sources, materials, energies, processes and products are preferred by those views (or representations). These views, when made real by the tools and routines produced by technology, create habits. And habits conform in the end, the organizational behavior of a community, an enterprise, a society. Here is Nelson & Winter who I quote.
So technology, with or without consciousness, impose an architecture, an order to action and thought as disciplined bodies create disciplines minds. Here I quote Foucault. In the case of ICT, mind discipline is more evident but it also intends to create a physical order in any society it reaches; a reproduction of its origin.
As societies are complex, this reproduction is not perfect. It is part reproduction and part construction. We are in that spot in our work, trying to understand what is happening. The idea of “global” is embedded into ICT so when it reaches a "community", this clash against the sense of “local”. The small baker shop owner is not interested in selling to the continent, but to his neighborhood. Same clash we have between computer (written language) in communities that are basically oral: they prefer the cellular.
I believe these are the tips that let we brake down the ICT myth, and begin to understand the ICT tool.
-- *Cristian Berrío Zapata* _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
Hi Meryl: Very interesting reflexion. I believe we should not forget that we talk about technology in a globalization context that pressures more and more local cultures, which are not currently valued. My elder brother is also a sociologist-folklorist in the north of Colombia. He is being fighting for 30 year to introduce this "weird idea" that community tradition must be kept as a treasure. We all are more globalized. I am Colombian, studied at a school run by British, grown adult in Argentina and now, I live in Brazil. Sometimes I have the feeling I do not know where the hell I am from. We are more penetrated by global media. Someday, I was having breakfast with my children and suddenly I found, we talk more about what it is shown in Fox and Warner channels that what might be occurring in Bogotá. You raised a hard personal debate in this context: to what extend can we separate our view from the facts of those we see? I believe in the end what we do is to “negotiate meaning”. It concerns me that ICT, as machine, has a huge power of repetition and massiveness. Then, negotiate meaning with whom? This cannot deny all good that ICT have done and may do but, it raises again the problem of technology control. Berners-Lee book about the Web has interesting insights on this but, he leaves our hopes of a free web lasting on the idea that nobody can control it…(????) 2012/7/8 Meryl Krieger <meryl.krieger@gmail.com>
Cristian, Mike, et al:
I've been lurking throughout this discussion but Cristian's point has encouraged me to chime in. I like that the ideas of ideology and representation are both now in the conversation. Consider, though, that one approach lets us present (rather than represent) what is understood within a cultural/historical/geographical context and representation while the other lets us view the same from the outside.
I'm thinking here from the perspective of ethnographic participant-observation - in my world it becomes an absolute necessity to separate out what we think we see happening in a particular setting from what people within that setting think they are doing. We generally operate out of a philosophical grounding in phenomenological bracketing because it is far to easy for us to conflate these two things when we present our/their actions to others.
This has been a great discussion, everyone - I can't wait to see where it goes next!
Cheers, Meryl
-- J. Meryl Krieger Ph.D., Folklore & Ethnomusicology Adjunct Lecturer, Sociology, Indiana University Purdue University at Indianapolis Adjunct Instructor, Communications and Life Skills/Humanities, Ivy Tech Community College Piano/Clarinet Teacher, Stafford Music Academy, Bloomington, IN
http://www.linkedin.com/in/merylkrieger http://indiana.academia.edu/merylkrieger
On Sun, Jul 8, 2012 at 1:08 PM, Cristian Berrio Zapata < cristian.berrio@gmail.com> wrote:
Interesting Mike:
Maybe, if we change the word "ideology" for "representation, then we could be more comfortable. Technology as a thinking process that presents solutions to context problems is built on historic, geographic, cultural representations (economy and ideology included of course). Here I am quoting Mumford.
Certain sources, materials, energies, processes and products are preferred by those views (or representations). These views, when made real by the tools and routines produced by technology, create habits. And habits conform in the end, the organizational behavior of a community, an enterprise, a society. Here is Nelson & Winter who I quote.
So technology, with or without consciousness, impose an architecture, an order to action and thought as disciplined bodies create disciplines minds. Here I quote Foucault. In the case of ICT, mind discipline is more evident but it also intends to create a physical order in any society it reaches; a reproduction of its origin.
As societies are complex, this reproduction is not perfect. It is part reproduction and part construction. We are in that spot in our work, trying to understand what is happening. The idea of “global” is embedded into ICT so when it reaches a "community", this clash against the sense of “local”. The small baker shop owner is not interested in selling to the continent, but to his neighborhood. Same clash we have between computer (written language) in communities that are basically oral: they prefer the cellular.
I believe these are the tips that let we brake down the ICT myth, and begin to understand the ICT tool.
-- *Cristian Berrío Zapata* _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
-- *Cristian Berrío Zapata*
participants (5)
-
Andrew Herman -
Cristian Berrio Zapata -
Meryl Krieger -
michael gurstein -
Shulman, Stuart