About Cultural Bytes!
Cultural Bytes engages with research on information communication technology (ICT) users of low-income communities. This is run by Tricia Wang - me! My motivation is to better understand how low-income/under-served populations manage their social connections with a variety of practices. I bring attention to the ways that low-income users challenge, change, and innovate ICT usage patterns. I focus on mobile populations, such as migrants and youth in Mexico, China and US.
The term “mobile” is beginning to take on new meaning. Conventionally, a “mobile lifestyle” is associated with jet-setting corporate workers; however, a “mobile lifestyle” is also a way of life for migrants all around the world. Instead of taking airplanes, they walk. Instead of holding passports, they have no papers. Instead of staying in five star hotels, they stay anywhere they can. But for the first time, these new mobile workers, migrants, have access to the same digital networks and tools as elite mobile workers.
ICT tools enable people to create coherence between seemingly fragmented networks spread over greater distances. In a more mobile society, we are seeing a new kind of mass movement of people—telecommuters to seasonal workers—in non-wartime conditions. The reach of everyday life encompasses management of space.
These changes prompt new kinds of questions that allow us to grasp what mechanisms and ways of thinking make-up these new forms of mobility and connection. What social conditions may emerge? What practices become visible from the adaptation to older and how power and control is exerted. Conversely, what does immobility look like in a world that seems to be increasingly mobile? What are the various tiers of mobility and immobility? How do things stick, how do people capture moments, and how do places stay meaningful for communities?
These are the questions that I care about. Read about me here and about my research here. I would love to talk to you about your work so contact me!
Cultural Fractals: The Recursiveness of Practice
I have been thinking a lot about fractals lately. I first discovered fractals 10 years ago when Kenyatta Cheese introduced me to godel, Escher, Bach (the book I dream of finishing and comprehending). Well just recently on some Friday night at 2am I was watching Nova’s special on fractal love, Hunting the Hidden Dimension. As I was falling asleep to Mendelbrot’s soothing voice, I started thinking about fractals and culture - how we could use fractals to think about cultural practices, communities and groups.
The organizing principle of fractals is similarity in forms. When something appears dissimilar, many of times the recursive logic of fractals reveals that the more you look, the more similarities you will see in the form. So the lines in a leaf may look disorganized, but really they are organized in form, hence recursive.
Using fractal logic to look at cultures around the world can reveal that there are more similarities in practices than we think!
Since a lot of my research is multi-sited and in totally different parts of the world, I find that I look for commonalities in what I observe between the various sites. I try to look beyond the physical and obvious differences. For example, I try to look at how new users are engaging or reacting to technology in similar ways even when people live in totally different countries or even geographies. But at the same time I try to not devalue the specificities that make each community unique. I find this to be something I have to be aware of when I think about commonalities across different regions.
So what would a fractal mindset to ethnography look like? How would recursiveness be used in ethnographic analysis? How can we think of culture as an iterative process?
1.) can’t be culturally reductive - It becomes more difficult to make culturally reductive statements about a group of people if we think in terms of cultural fractals. The most common one I hear about China is that Chinese culture is all about guanxi, therefore everything that happens in China, from success to failure, is attributed to the resilience of traditional guanxi culture. I often read that the culture of guanxi encourages networking, therefore this explains why Chinese people are so good at networking when starting new businesses. In terms of cellphone usage guanxi is used to explain why the Chinese have adopted texting so quickly. But what groups or society not have social networks? If we go with the “Chinese love texting because they have guanxi,” argument, then how do you then explain why regions in Nigeria or Mexico with horrible cellphone signal still have taken up texting so readily? My point is that Nigerians and Mexicans also have a culture based on strong social ties. Not that the way Chinese guanxi is practiced is not a unique and complex tradition in it of itself, but attributing guanxi to mobile phone usage also dumbs down actual practices of guanxi. Perhaps the answer isn’t a simple culturally reductive explanation, rather one that is tied to existing cultural practices, policy efforts and geographical context. So a fractal logic would encourage us to see the similarities between the ways the Chinese or the Mexicans text - and to come up with an explanation that do not rest on simplorifitized cultural statements.
2.) fractal logic encourages a more relativistic way of thinking about cultures. Instead of thinking in linear models with clear independent and dependent variables, fractals gives us a mental break to look at practices more cyclically and over greater amounts of time. In terms of cross-cultural comparisons - instead of thinking about two different regions as two distinct places, how about thinking of as two separate nodes on one large multi-dimensional net? “Christena Turner refers to cross-cultural comparisons as working with two nodes on the same piece of woven cloth - each node of thread with different colors coming together with different layerings so that it appears to be two separate knots, but actually two parts of the same quilt. Cross-cultural comparisons i think are most beautiful when they honor this “net” metaphor as reality - this reminds me of Richard Feynman’s quote about science and life,
“Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.”
Feynman’s quote entangles with the fractal notion - that you can look at one part of society/object and abstract out properties of other parts of the world/universe. absolutely beautiful.
3.) expanded temporalities - since fractals have this sense of infinite-less levels of fractalness, there is sense that we are working in a different temporality, one that is not bound to the strict temporalities of the project timeline or stated anount of time in the field.
4.) fractal logic is useful for technology designers. For communication technologies to have market reach beyond Europe, USA and middle- to upper-class Chinese, there are aspects of the communication tool that need to be more or less useful in different cultural settings. Fractal logic encourages designers to look for common denominators in usage. For example, the concept of a text message is a common denominator, but how it is used in various contexts is what makes its use setting different from each other.
5.) cultures are non-deterministic - how a nation or group is going to act, believe and value is very hard to determine! but there are certain feature we know all cultures have. A key feature of fractals is that they are usually stochastically self-similar, meaning they are approximately similar to itself. While groups of people may be very self-similar across the board- for example take the nuclear family - it too is also subject to stochasticity because the way each nuclear family develops in each community and across communities is non-deterministic. A family’s current emotional, psychological or financial state is subject to its prior circumstances and also some random element - such as being a nuclear family in rural India or in suburban UK. Applied stochastic processes tend to describe complex systems that are difficult to determine- like warfare, diplomacy. So why not apply this concept to communities? I like the idea of thinking as cultural practices as non-deterministic. I don’t believe that causal models do much else than serve as an analytical exercise for the researcher - real life is stochastic - because how groups of people live are hard to predict because there are always elements that are unpredictable.
6.) ok going totally metaphysical here - stop reading if you feel the twilight</a>- we can think of all groups of people or nations or communities as a reduced-size copy of the whole -the wholeness of humanity! so instead of looking for differences in each reduction, what happens we look for similarities in form? Entropy as organanized chaos - capillaries in orderly run-offs - rivers meandering in systematic carvings - textile hypnosis - where’s waldo find you. Looking for similarities in form doesn’t mean that we still can’t celebrate differences. Alan Watts, a buddhist teacher, has a great quote that totally operates with fractal logic - and I like using it as an approach to ethnography,
Differences, borders, lines, surfaces and boundaries do not really divide things from each other at all, they join them together. All boundaries are held in common.
Alan Watt’s quote is an excellent way to prepare one’s mindset for doing fieldwork and post fieldwork analysis. Especially when doing fieldwork in another culture, it is too easy to treat them as “the other.” This quotes speaks to a way thinking that discourages distancing of the researcher from the fieldsite.
In another metaphysical turn, the organization logic of fractals is based on replication of form based on his quote also reminds of Lao Tzu’s quote on Taoism that also operates with fractal love:
“The Tao is in all things, in their divisions and their fullness. What I dislike about divisions is that they multiply, and what i dislike about multiplication is that it makes people want to hold fast to it. So people go out and forget to return, seeing little more than ghosts.”
At the heart of fractals is that with each division is a multiplication into more similar forms! So Lao Tzu is heeding us to find balance between division and fullness. Alan Watt’s and Lao Tzu’s quote make me think of one of my favorite fractal artworks, Implied. Implied is a fractal of “messy human droplets and straight machine cuts dance[ing] together.”
I end this long winded post with a something yummy to eat from my fave food blog , serious eats (run by the fabulous alaina brown) - cuz you gotta tie everything in life back to food! Well all this talk about fractals makes me want to eat a fractal cupcake!
*for a cool discussion that isn’t about fractals per se - more about trees, design, repesentation and a point about stochastic processes - check out Fred’s blog post on tree drawings
Interpretive Magic!: Ethnoconsumerism with Prof. Alladi Venkatesh
I must admit that although I say that technology usage is grounded in a cultural context, I struggle to operationalize “culture” for the fear of reducing it to some causal variable or some vague concept that dilutes what I am arguing. I haven’t found much solace in sociology’s linear models that isolate “culture’s” effects - as it repeats the whole divide of structure versus agency. Neither have I found much clarity in the interpretive tradition of culture, not because I don’t agree with it, but because am confused at how to methodologically move forward with an interpretive approach.
Well then came my meeting with Prof. Alladi Venkatesh, Assoc. Director of UC Irvine’s Center for Research on Information Technology and Organizations (CRITO) (thanks for gloria mark for the introduction!).
Prof. Venkatesh has created methodology magic!
Ethno-consumerism is a methodology for doing cross-cultural research. It encourages the researcher to “study culture not merely as providing the context for the study of consumer behavior but study consumption itself as culturally constituted behavior. “In principle, the ethnoconsumerist perspective goes beyond the distinction of emic and etic research approaches.” The etic approach encourages the researcher to interpret from her/his point of view. On the other hand, the emic approach tells the researcher to look at the subject’s point of view. But ethnoconsumerism advocates for the next critical step, which is to then develop knowledge from subject’s point of view. “The research becomes more than an etic interpretation (researcher’s point of view) of the culture, but a view of the culture informed by the culture itself as demonstrated by the above” (Venkatesh and Meamber, 1997).
Venkatesh makes clear that this is methodology, not a method. It does not seek to promote any data collection methods.
Of course I think that qualitative methods (or a mixed-method approach of qual + quant) is the best way to arrive at what he is saying is the crux of ethnoconsumerism - developing a cultural framework of analysis from the consumer’s point of view.
Read his paper and other writings here.
I highly encourage you to read his 1995 paper below on Ethnoconsumerism (citation below). It’s a beautifully written paper that feels intellectually and spiritually moving at the same time. When I read it I felt as if the words has fallen out of the sky onto self-organizing fractals of joy. After 3 years of sociology coursework, I’ve become averse at times to theories by sociologists because the words just don’t stick in my brain or they just don’t inspire me anymore. There was something this 1995 piece that helped me deconstruct 3 years of wonderful and hellish sociological self-discovery to even learn about the cultural divide within the field of sociology (culture vs structure or culture as interpretive model). Dr. Venkatesh, coming from a business/economics background, beautifully reconstructs all the various authors of the interpretive tradition who I have come to love. He has inspired me to think of these authors - such as Geertz, in a new way for my own work on new technology users.
I will be thinking about this methodology for a while as I try to figure out if this framework makes sense for my dissertation. So I will be writing more about this model. In the meantime, two things come to my mind: how I can apply this for my research and how this intersects with Stuart Halls, et. al. 1997 book on Sony Walkmans.
How do I apply this this my research?
- study how new users use their technology as culturally constituted behavior.
- look at tech usage as set of practices
- Do not treat new tech users as objects.
- Do not treat their practices as economically motivated.
- People use techology to get things done. It is my job to understand as an outsider what is being “done” in their context.
- Don’t be culturally reductive by picking one feature of the culture and anchoring all analysis around the feature.
- If I want to compare two different regions with a cultural framework - this takes a realllllly long time because I have to understand the cultural categories and experiences of all the sites.
Circuit of Culture
In 1997, Stuart Hall, Paul Du Gray, and Linda James published Doing cultural studies: the story of the Sony Walkman. They created a model for the analysis of cultural objects called the circuit of culture. On page 3, they show this graph below. The book walks one through on how to deconstruct the Sony walkman as a cultural object.
In an upcoming post, I would like to discuss ways I could combine Ethnoconsumerism and the Circuit of Culture to work for my research. What’s interesting is that while both authors are talking about objects and the people who use the, these are two slightly different approaches. I want to think about to spatialize these approaches. I need to give this some more thought so until the next post on this!
Suggested Reading:
Gay PD, Hall S, Janes L. Doing cultural studies: the story of the Sony Walkman. SAGE; 1997.
Easterly W. The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good. Penguin Press; 2006.
“Ethnoconsumerism: A New Paradigm to Study Cultural and Cross-cultural Consumer Behavior,” Alladi Venkatesh. Marketing in a Multicultural World, J.A. Costa and G. Bamossy (eds.), SAGE Publications, 1995, 26-67.
(Rant Alert) Spatial geographies of the World Wide Web: China is NOT the Wild Wild West
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been at a technology conference when a white male asks me what I research, and when I say something like “technology use in China,” they will at some point say, “oh man China is like the Wild Wild West.” I usually respond by saying, “no, it’s not.” And then often they proudly respond with, “ya you’re right, China is the wild wild east!” By then I try to get out of the conversation as quickly as possible.
So here is a more well thought out response that I would like to give the next time I hear this.
No, China isn’t like the West nor is China wild. During the Wild Wild West era in 18th and 19th century US, expansionists justified the take over of the western part of the US with the belief of Manifest Destiny - that it was America’s mission to bring democracy to the rest of the unconquered west. This is a misleading and pernicious metaphor to employ because it perpetuates a colonial view that those who are not like us and places that we have yet to conquer are unruly. It’s a metaphor simile thats says we are tame, they are wild.
The western part of America back then wasn’t so wild - it actually was filled with hundreds of thousands of Native Indians. It was filled with a complexity of knowledge systems, colonial histories with Spain and Mexico, and ongoing movement of people.
This space was the “West” for the colonizers with a capital W - a place with its own myths and a place for to carry out Manifest Destiny. But for the people already living there, it was their place, not the West. It confuses me when we (Americans) glorify the Wild Wild West Era without honoring the people who died during this period. Sure tons of technological feats were achieved. But it was an era of imported indentured slaves (Chinese) and a full slave production in the South that financed the companies that pushed for the fulfillment of Manifest Destiny through the massive genocide of Native Indians (Trail of Tears). American became rich, dirty rich during the Wild Wild West period. And as an America, I’m not proud of how we made our riches in the early years of our empire.
Employing such a deprecating metaphor simile of the Wild Wild West renders China a place to be conquered, civilized, and remade. It reveals the underlying myths and stories we tell about China - an unruly land of wild, lawless, people who will benefit from order, rules, and culture, just like how we once envisioned the West as a land full of animals, property, and uncivilized natives. It also frames China as a place frozen in time as people often draw upon China as the oldest and and continuous civilization on earth. The metaphor simile also culls up a way of thinking that not only says this place needs order, but is a worth our time for us to be the arbitrars of order.
There is a reason why we don’t call Nigeria, Antarica, or Figi the wild wild west - it’s because we don’t see these places as worthwhile markets of investment.
One of my favorite theorists, Doreen Massey, says that Westerners have a tendency to see space as a smooth flat surface from our own vantage point— a smooth space in which to roll out our ideas, technologies, and policies.
It sometimes seems that in the garadene rush to abandon the singularity of the modernist grand narrative (the singular universal story) what has been adopted in its place is a vision of an instantaneity of interconnections. But this is to replace a single history with no history…deathlessness.” ( 2005, pg 14 in For Space.)
So by saying that China is the “Wild Wild West,” we are assigning it one narrative—ours. Massey proposes that we see space as a production of relations, as the co-temporal existence of multiple people, competing histories, and contesting forms of knowledge. Space is a process that is continually being remade.
What is at stake here if we don’t stop thinking of China as the Wild Wild West? Many things - but the most important thing for me is that how we think about space actually influences how we interact with others who occupy the space. So thinking of China as the Wild Wild West will influence how you interact with Chinese people and institutions and I’m arguing it’s an undesirable way to interact if you really want to create understanding to accomplish whatever your project.
Ultimately what’s at stake is power and domination is understanding because if we imagine the world as places with singular narratives waiting for our discovery, then this serves a colonial project and legitimizes policies that end up harming the people in these places.
Massey says that all space is regulated. So with that being the case, I see that it’s up to us how this happens. And in a globalized world of networked digital technologies, it’s inevitable for dialogues about how a space is regulated to become more public as more of these conversations take place online. As American companies, IP lawyers, entrepeneurs, marketers, technologists make their way to China, I ask you to see China as part of the World Wide Web as opposed to the Wild Wild Web. It’s a very simple re-orientation in the mind, but it can be very difficult when Americans grown up in a country that believes that democracy is best delivered through free-market mechanisms and is the best way of life.
update June 9, 2010: Kenyatta Cheese and I were discussing the techcrunch article on how Web 2.0 companies are learning from their past failed attempts in China. Kenyatta made a point that it would’ve been even better if the article said something about the existing, exciting, and thriving web 2.0 culture in China and
“to at least mention that it isn’t unchartered territory — that there are thousands of Chinese web 2.0 companies already competing in the space.”
I totally agree.
update June 14, 2010 - I just Mike Hudack’s blog post - very relevant:
“Ultimately, the entire universe will become saturated with our intelligence,” he continues. “This is the destiny of the universe.” — Merely Human? That’s so yesterday. NYT (via idlaurenn)
This quote pissed me off more than anything else in that article. What hubris! I can imagine a European explorer saying the same of the New World centuries ago. “Ultimately, the entire planet will become saturated with Western European intelligence and culture and religion. This is the destiny of the planet.”
Yes mike I totallllllly agreeee! pisses me off to to read this quote from Raymond Kurzweil of Singularity at this Google funded talk. This kind of thinking will be the topic of my upcoming talk that I’ve giving at The Humanities conference.
GOOGLIST REALISM: The Google-China saga and the free-information regimes as a new site of cultural imperialism and moral tensions
When Google left China in early 2010, many attributed Google’s move as a valiant and moral response to the Chinese government’s strict information filtering rules. I disagreed with this point of view and wrote a post on Cultural Bytes on what I thought were the real reasons for Google’s quick departure from China.
A few months later, I was asked to keynote the New Directions in the Humanities Conference at UCLA on June 29, 2010. This gave me the chance to rethink some of the original comments I made back in early 2010. In my original post, I argued that Google failed to create successful brand recognition in the Chinese market, to launch a recognizable marketing campaign that stood out against Baidu (the reigning search engine in China), and to understand the values of non-elite users in China. I then suggested that Google should’ve put more time in understanding the cultural orientations of Chinese users before expecting services that they had originally developed for Western users to just be readily embraced by Chinese consumers.
As I started preparing for my talk, I began thinking more about why the world’s largest search engine left the largest online market. I realized that my original post only barely scraped the surface of the Google-China saga. The bigger issue was more than a matter of Google failing to conduct proper ethnography and user tests on the Chinese market. The real issue is that China and Google see the world in different ways and this informs their outlook on how access to information should be mediated. And ultimately Google assumed that their world view would eventually trump China’s.
For my keynote, I make the case that Google failed in China for two reasons. First, drawing upon the ideas that I made in my original post, I discuss how Google never created useful services for non-elite digital users based off of my ethnographic work in China.
Second, I argue that the Google-China saga is an example of a contemporary clash in moral orders centered around information politics. Google exemplifies a hacker ethic that can be traced back to Enlightenment ideals of individual achievement while China reflects Confucian cultural norms of social harmony that emerged 2,400 years ago during the early Han dynasty. A moral order rooted in Enlightenment ideals rewards rebels, while a moral order rooted in Confucian ideals rewards followers.
Access to information has become a battle site of cultural imperialism. Information politics is ultimately a struggle over meaning and symbols. Google, one of the main players, has successfully linked the commodification of information to an ethical system of social change which I call “neo-informationalism,” a retooling of neo-liberal ideals and a re-envisioning of imperialism based on information as a primary means to wealth expansion in the digital age.
My talk is split into 3 parts. I explain the history of the Google-China saga and my disclaimers in the introduction. Part 1 is about why Google failed in China due to a lack of deep cultural understanding of the market. Part 2 is about how Google and China ascribe to differing moral orders. Part 3 is about Google’s unintentional engagement in imperialism. And in my conclusion I provide directions for technologists, academics, and businesses for how to move forward with lessons from the Google-China saga.
Here’s an excerpt from Part 3 and the conclusion. Pease take a look at my talk here (pdf download here). My assertions will make much more sense when the talk is read in its entirety. I’ve also included footnotes for follow up readings in the full version. The slides that go along with my talk can be viewed/downloaded here. And some pics from the conference here, and lastly the audio from the conference talk is here.
So let’s go directly into Part 3!
*I look forward to your thoughts on this topic. Plus, this is only the beginning of the Google-China saga!
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PART 3
From doing business with guns, germs, and steel to computers, code, and clouds
Some business analysts, politicians, and the Western media cheered Google on for standing up to China and relocating to Hong Kong which, mind you, is still a part of China. Others thought that the sheer size of the Chinese market would sway Google to stay in China, much like Microsoft, Yahoo, and others. But I want to highlight one particular analysis.
Umair Haque, an economist and Director of the Havas Media Lab, claimed on the Harvard Business Review blog that by leaving China Google had taken an ethically motivated, not an economically motivated stance. He argued that Google’s decision gives them an
“ethical edge…that’s always been at the heart of Google’s disruptive success.” “…a Google that doesn’t play by China’s rules is a better business, which creates more thicker [sic], sustainable, meaningful value.”
In his Awesomeness Manifesto, he asserted that corporations engaged in “ethical production” are more financially successful and meaningful than those that don’t because they innovate in the name of a “higher calling” not in the name of profits.
Let’s consider Umair’s proposal on Google’s ethical edge.
I agree that Google believes that they have an “ethical edge.” They believe that they draw upon the qualities that stand opposite from evil— benevolence, compassion, and kindness— to serve their higher-calling of introducing the world to information.
But I absolutely disagree with Umair that this “ethical edge” is anything new. This is a common moral trope of colonialism, imperialism, globalization, and neo-liberalism: ethical beliefs that justify expansionary practices of extracting commodities and creating new markets in the name of a “higher calling.”
But instead of extracting spices, opium, gold, bodies, labor or oil, Google was trying to extract information from the Chinese market and then commodify that information as it provided it back to Chinese consumers — ostensibly in the name of “freedom”. The weapon of choice is no longer guns, germs, and steel, but free-information, open platforms, and distributed architectures.
Tropes of colonialism
To be fair, this “ethical edge” isn’t just being practiced by Google. It’s also practiced by countless other technology companies that make their way from the West to other continents. It’s also the very rhetoric employed by many proponents of the free and open-source software movement, the ICT4D field (Information Communication Technology for Development), and OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) community.
So I ask us, why are we so invested in the idea of Google being in mainland China? I suspect that one of the reasons is that Google’s relocation of its servers to Hong Kong opened up an existing set of anxieties among ourselves about America’s place in the global order.
But what Americans don’t get is that this openness is contingent upon America’s vision of keeping markets open, tearing down national borders, and creating an open ICT network that preserves America’s interest in being the world’s police, superpower and economic leader.
We thought that we could bring the internet to the world and the architecture would remain open. What we didn’t expect was for countries to use the internet to advance their own agendas in the same way that the US was already doing: using their own culture, policies, and system of ethics.
Algorithms of social change: new technologies, same old games
And here’s the kicker - in leaving China because the Chinese government wouldn’t conform to their rules, Google reproduced the very imperialistic behavior that have characterized the greatest imperial powers: leaving a country or region when they couldn’t get the natives to abandon their own way of thinking or adopt a new way of behaving.
What’s emerging is a new rhetoric of development and globalization in what I am calling neo-informationalism: the belief that information should function like currency in free-market capitalism - border-less, free from regulation, and mobile. The logic of neo-informationalism rests on an moral framework that is tied to what Morgan Ames calls “information determinism,” the belief that free and open access to information can create social change. This moral framework of neo-informationalism is so naturalized that Google and like-minded companies work their way around the world unquestioned for their position on open information. Phrases such as “information wants to be free” reflect the techno-anthropomorphizing of information, a necessary step in naturalizing any neo-informationalist agenda.
Neo-informationalism is a re-visioning of a non-redistributive laissez-faire ideology of modernization theory transplanted into Western technologies that assumes surely people cannot be self-sufficient without unlimited access to the tools that connect them to the world wide web. Underlying this ideology is the notion that information openness and market openness are inseparable and non-mutually exclusive. Information openness can only be achieved through free-market conditions.
This is a model of social change that puts faith in objects, not in governance processes. Neo-informationalism and neo-liberalism work symbiotically to create what Wendy Brown calls the governed citizen who seeks solutions in products as opposed to the political process. While Wendy wasn’t speaking of technological objects per se, I make the case that this is indeed a variant of the hacker ethic; social change is made through direct programming of software code and interaction with technological devices while maintaining distance from the state.
What I want to point out is that while this is a very reasonable process being accomplished by very reasonable people — Westerners creating products and policies for Westerners - I am not comfortable with pushing this belief on others in the name of a “higher calling.” This is a simply a redux of cultural imperialism that says “we know better than you, and if you don’t believe us, too bad you have no choice, because we’re offering you emancipation by giving you access to our Internets.”
We should question any ethical system that reproduces a familiar trope of colonialism. Whereas past waves of imperialism used Religion, Science, or Globalization as a rhetoric of development, the new rhetoric of neo-informationalism is used as a guiding principle for entering new regions—ethical principles that can be used as proxies for pushing our belief system onto other people. As a result, the work can be less about free information and unlimited compassion and more about desires for free-access to new markets and new commodities.
CONCLUSION
Create understanding
So does this mean that we have to give up on Google? No, the world doesn’t work in binaries and neither should you nor I. I depend on Google for most of on my online communication. I’m known among my friends as a Google evangelist. I force my friends onto gmail and its amazing filtering capabilities. I heart Google and could talk about its services ad naseum. But while I love the technical aspects of Google’s products, I am at the same time critical of the limits and affordances of its technologies. Technologies are never just technologies. They are machines laden with cultural expectations imbued by their creators.
But herein lies my fear: What if we start thinking that there is no alternative to the institution of Google? What if the “Google model” starts to become what we think of as the most natural way to do things? We need to question any ”reality that presents itself as natural”and that includes something as apparently innocuous as Google.
We need to make sure that we don’t succumb to Googlist Realism. Much like Capitalist Realism, the belief that there is no alternative to the reality of capitalism as a way of life, Googlist Realism is the belief that there is no alternative to Google as our search engine and as our gatekeeper of information. The belief that capitalism can improve life is now supplanted by the free-information regimes of neo-informationalism - the belief that unfettered information access is life.
Google has successfully linked the commodification of information to an ethical system of social change. This rhetoric is so strong that I worry that we could lose our imagination for any other form of information reality or social change outside of a Google-like model. I also worry that those who question this model will be framed as enemies of freedom, information, and social change.
Google and China have their own visions for the social life of information and for the role of information in society. We should be equally critical of a corporation with algorithms that create a consensual consumer culture based on advertising clicks as we are of a country with policies that create a consensual citizenry based on obedience through a paternalistic form of governance.
But we should also be equally hopeful of a corporation with digital applications that create access to information that was reserved for the privileged as we are of a country with social policies that empower people to explore their talents and scale their services through government-supported, free-market entrepreneurship.
Summarizing the five main points that I’ve made today
1. As countries create their own internet policies, information politics will become a key site of contestation in a globally networked society.
As corporations and governments use the ethics of neo-informationalism to look for new markets and cheap labor, some countries will also counter these efforts with their own ethics. Capitalist growth depends not only on the physical architecture of ICTs, but also on the reach of an ethical system to support the open use of ICTs. Ethics do matter. In the absence of religious or governmental heroes, the digital economy also needs its own goddesses.
Just as we’ve created public institutions to regulate, debate, and check transnational corporations in times of excess neo-liberalism, we’ve got to create similar institutions for information in times of excess neo-informationalism. As Theodore Porter demonstrated in his insightful work on accounting as a system of information and a site of ethical battles, “the history of information is almost synonymous with the history of large enterprises.”
2. Information disjunctures will increasingly fall along moral and ethical disagreements between institutions, reflecting tensions in regional values and beliefs.
Institutions that mediate information will increasingly have to deal with a diversity of moral orders that are regionally specific, originally proposed in the the “Górniak hypothesis” in 1996. We have to realize that just like any other institution, the internet will be implemented and used in such a way that it maps onto existing social forces, institutions, and values.
That is why understanding regional internet culture is important.
Here I draw upon institutional theory and in particular Philip Agre’s amplification model of how new institutions don’t necessarily create new social behaviors, rather they amplify existing ones. This theory explains why Google has not “changed” China to become a nation modeled in the image of the US. Even something as open as the internet will be localized. This is because 1.) not all people/countries are the same and 2.) not all sovereign nations will welcome neo-informationalism as envisioned by the West. Many countries and individuals are suspicious of how “The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, alongside the U.S. Trade Representative, the Federal Communications Commission, and other apostles of neo-liberalism, used multiple levers to pry open global networking to corporate-commercial investment” argues Dan Schiller.
3. I also argue that what’s at stake in the clashes of moral orders is the determination of meaning. Google isn’t just an information processing entity, it is a meaning-making entity.
As a meaning-making institution, Google is in the business of standardizing and universalizing the domination of “autonomous [and public] information” as attached to democracy, liberation, and excellence (Porter 228). Whoever controls information and the means of dissemination, controls meaning and the symbols associated with it—hence culture.
For nation-states, culture becomes an even more powerful instrument of social control which will increasingly be mediated through digital means.
For corporations, culture becomes an an ever more powerful instrument of profit and this will increasingly be mediated over digital information spaces where our desires and preferences can be sorted and indexed.
4. There is a diversity in cultural orientations and they matter in how technologies are used, received, and created.
As companies start designing more software for a diversity of communities and conditions around the world, there is a greater need to understand how culture is exhibited in emotive and tangible ways. We can no longer ascribe to traditional binaries that place culture on a local level and money on a global scale. However geographically stationary some groups may be, ideas and energies are mobile. But this does not necessarily mean that mobility leads to greater flows in cooperation, rather it can also lead to greater fluxes in stability. A nuanced understanding of cultural orientations as an ongoing narrative will be required to navigate this space.
5. Institutions will continue to make attempts to bound the internet. But in a digitally-mediated network society where communication streams and physical contact are more frequent than ever, it becomes harder to maintain silos of communication. The digital mobility of ideas, people, and images means that moral orders are coming into contact with each other.
As information, culture, symbols, and ideas become more mobile, it will become harder for any entity to unilaterally enforce their own moral orders. Because of this, we’re going to see more collisions in moral orders as information becomes destabilized and detached from its geographic point of origin.
The internet is a host to amazing forms of participatory culture and will continue to be so precisely because its network architecture allows a diversity of interactions to take place - from gated communities to open spaces. Nation-states can try to create a bounded internet, but with some people and ideas more mobile than ever before, it becomes harder to enforce global digital walls.
In a digitally mediated world, the logics of replication do not function according to a mechanical order. A la Gilles Deleuze, Manual de Landa, and Felix Guattari, I think of Lucretius’s quote on atoms:
“When atoms are traveling straight down through empty space by their own weight, at quite indeterminate times and places, they swerve every so little from their course, just so much that you would call it a change of direction. If it were not for this swerve, everything would fall downwards through the abyss of space. No collision would take place and no impact of atom on atom would be created. Thus nature would never have created anything.”
As the moral orders of nations collide, some will clash and some will cohere. But the guarantee is that something is going to happen. It’s already started and we’re going to need people to deconstruct this and place what’s happening in context amid all the noise.
Values in our technologies
Let us be attentive to the values that shape the way we interact with information and the architectures that mediate it.
Today I’ve talked about how beliefs and values are layered onto our technologies and inform our expectations for how they are used. These technologies are never just technical, but they are social and luckily for us they are observable.
A few week ago, Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple said, ”We’re not just a tech company, even though we invent some of the highest technology products in the world,” he said. ”It’s the marriage of that plus the humanities and the liberal arts that distinguishes Apple.”
Let us be in dialogue with Steve Jobs and Google with some liberal arts magic. Kant, Bentham, and Descartes drew up a new ethical order at the turn of the Industrial Revolution that was a response to the social transformation from the printing age. This is happening now for the interneting age. The liberal arts is positioned with the analytical tools to be part of this dialogue. We should be doing all that we can to make our work public.
We cannot just leave this agenda to the technologists. We cannot let the new myths about freedom and information to pass without question. We must use critical theory, ethnographic methods, and common-sense to question how cultural values play out, in and around technology. Values not only reproduce contemporary tensions, but they are also sites of contestation.
*UPDATE: here are some articles published after my talk (June 29, 2010) that I think are worth the read
- July 23, 2010. Paul Denlinger. Google China Is Struggling To Rebuild Its Business
- July 15, 2010. Paul Denlinger. Who Won in Google’s Showdown with China?
- July 10, 2010. Kai Pan. Henry Blodget Doesn’t Know Crap About the Google China Drama.
- July 11, 2010. Paul Denlinger China: Google backed Down Over Censorship Laws
