InfoTechSpace

are roots really just a metaphor?

2007-03-01T07:34:56Z

good readings this week -- i have a particular interest in transnationalism and am currently buried neck deep in interview data that I collected over the summer from some Thai people who are living out their retirements transnationally. it is a lot to digest, so i may not be at my sharpest right now, since i'm still trying to make sense of things.

Though i liked some things in the Malkki article, I was consistently bothered by her characterization of the expression of national/ethnic identity in terms of roots and soil as a *metaphor*. This is not just some random metaphor that everyone has cooked up because it sounds pretty, and to put it bluntly only someone who gets their food off of supermarket shelves would see it as such. The thing that comes up again and again in my data is the importance of food, of the trees that it grows on, and the soil and water that it comes from. How people living across the world pine for the fruit that they grew up eating. How sharing food with people is sharing a connection as important as blood. To the people that I talked with, to have grown up in Thailand, especially the rural portions, is to understand viscerally and as a background to all your practices that the substance of your body comes from that soil. (And they express a desire to return to it when they die.) With the growing and sharing of food, the substance of your body, connection to land and connection to other people can become awfully difficult to separate.

Nationality in this case is a sensual experience.

homelessness

2007-03-01T06:45:37Z

i've always felt detached from the question of nationalism due a saturation of the behavior it engenders in the core of quebec, where i am originally from. the divide between the notions of political nation bounded by its territorial definition and cultural nation, in the case of quebec, primarily based on language is an interesting example in complexity. not only because of quebec being a territorial nation within a larger one, but because of the wide cultural differences within its own borders.

aside from the frenchies, at the beginning and end of her paper, Malkki writes: 'Thus, what Said, for example, calls a "generalized condition of homelessness" is seen to characterize contemporary life everywhere.' without having taken a look at Said's paper (yet), we can criticize this statement considering the technological evolution of the last 15 years. the situations of individuals away from home are obviously due to a wide range of reasons, reasons which remains today. can we say now that with our increased mobility and the reach of the local product to a global market, really, we are never away from home? that is if you had a home in the first place.

how territorial is home when the the core of your friends and families all migrate? if most migrate to the same place, would you call it home? i believe i would.

Two more dimensions

2007-03-01T04:04:51Z

The interrelationship between culture, national identity and place fascinates me and is something I struggle with personally.

I think another possible dimension to add to our readings are "ethnic enclaves." Places like Chinatown, Little Italy, Little Tokyo, Little India etc are fascinating because they are physical representations of culture and national identity. In a sense they are a way in which people can bring cultural elements like food items, clothing to them wherever they live. Further ethnic enclaves create a psychological tie to the “motherland.”

Something I find interesting about ethnic enclaves is the way in which they can seem to stand still in time. A few months ago I passed through Solvang and discovered it was a Scandinavian enclave. I was thrilled because I thought I could get some Swedish food and Christmas decorations that I have been unable to find in California. When I arrived it happened to be “Danish Days.” I was a little stunned because people were dressed like Vikings and wearing very old traditional clothing. I was like is this really what they think Scandinavian culture is? But then it struck me that the people who settled there probably came in the 1800s. They have preserved and were celebrating the culture from that time. At first I thought they should all just go to Copenhagen, but then realized that because culture evolves over time and cultural preservation can represent multiple points in time. Ethnic enclaves can an interesting representation of this idea.

Another issue that I would like to address is that of choice. I don’t think Malkki makes a good case for the different types of “uprootedness” or “displacement.” In my mind it is really important to make the distinction about whether or not one makes a choice to "leave" and if they do make a choice under what circumstances is this done. There is displacement due to war, and there is displacement due to natural disater. Further there is uprootedness due to opportunity (like moving to the United States for education) and there is uprootedness due to the need to escape poverty. Of course there art many example, but my point is that I think the nature of the movement is an important dimension in terms of negotiating "rootedness."

I also look forward to hearing more about Sylvia and Marisa’s ideas regarding the role of technology in all this!

Local and global belonging

2007-02-28T19:19:00Z

I recently read Kallinikos’ critical stance on how ethnographic and social constructivist approaches of social science studies on technology take on user-centric and context-centric approaches, referring to the researcher’s bias and the influence of personal orientation on studied material. In his argument for macro-sociological and multi-sited ethnography I found the incorporation of the relevance of the local and its influence on global processes missing. Bestor for example reminds us that people experience global processes in particular locations, from which they derive their understanding and definition of the (global-yet-seemingly-local) processes themselves. Interactions with the global are outcomes of negotiations within the local. Both local and global activities are mutually defined processes that structure identities, associations with a specific locality are made available globally through commercially produced images of the “outside” world. Gupt on the other hand argues that in order to understand global and trans-national configurations we must understand how feelings of belonging to an imagined community bind identity to spatial locations. Instead of forming nations, border transgressing information technology, informs a process of belonging to a locality by its interrelation to the global. In this sense, it appears less crucial to investigate upon the term trans-national but rather to talk about interplay of global-local belonging and how information technology might reinforce or eliminate spatially or culturally perceived borders. While technology in everyday use in the home, in the office, in the grocery store, etc. has often been associated with only another tool for convenience and efficiency, it has been tactically applied for local, emotionally rich and culturally diverse situations, however transgressing spatial and temporal borders and simultaneously creating feelings of remote presence and connectedness, while re-defining belonging.
Which technological characteristics reinforce connectedness to a local, which ones to a global, and which ones to both? How are different technological implementation layers, such as hardware, visible and invisible infrastructure, software, or user interfaces applied for local idiosyncratic goals and how are these extended across imagined borders? The virtual space dependent on various physical implementation layers on the one hand ridicules as Bester termed it “fixity of a Western (or national) core as an illusion” and on the other hand contributes to the substantiation of another local that doesn’t consider national borders and extends upon what we might call global, but is constrained by and only existing through the various localities.

imagining community

2007-02-28T09:27:53Z

I find it interesting to think of the nation-state as infrastructural in the sense that it has built up, as Gupta describes, over other underlying power dynamics of colonialism, or the nationhood of other nation-states. That is, a nation-state cannot exist except in relation to other nation-states, that share the meaning of the border and the many other actions and behaviors Gupta describes. It seems as though it may be the borders themselves are infrastructural, and I am curious to think about the ways that technology might reinforce those borders.
In Gupta's piece I had the feeling that I still did not know "How" the nation-state is imagined. The examples of television, print, history books, anthems, etc, made sense but did not fully illustrate the how. I am especially confused about how it becomes spatial. I understand that the nation-state exists as inscribed upon the land, and is in fact a re-territorialization, but this to me has little connection with how it gets formed. Does it get formed spatially? Or does it rather get formed through people and the networks connecting them, which then run counter to the spatial inscription, but the spatial one is infrastructural and strategic? I guess to me there is a distinction between how the nation-state imagines itself, strategically, and how the "feeling" of nationalism actually arises in the citizens. Are these the same?
As an undergrad I studied a group of immigrants in the Boston area, because I had read Appadurai and was interested in transnationalism. I went looking for it, but did not find transnationalism in this community. There was some kind of tactical negotiation of nationalities, but not necessarily transnationalism. Two things that I found interesting were, first, that the current policies towards different countires bound members of those nationalities together locally, for example those who could obtain legal status through asylum, versus those who could not, and those who were included in Clinton's immigration act which made it easier to get legal status, and those who did not. There was tension, as I perceived it, because the community was supposedly bound together by the commonality of being Latino, but there were various definitions of Guatemalan, Honduran, and Columbian based on the current policies. A person could feel strongly tied to the community, but resent the amount of time the community spent on activism that didn't apply to them. Second, that the community saw its relationship to the US not in terms of nationality (to be desired or obtained) but in terms of home and basic needs. That is why I felt there was no transnationalism, the members of the community I met saw themselves in terms of a single nationality, one that was physically remote in terms of the land but very strong in terms of local community, and their struggle was to obtain a relationship with the US government that provided basic needs: education, housing, and work. However in order to obtain these things a person must also represent themself through documentation that establishes a kind of US nationalism. Deeds to homes, cars, letters of character assessment from neighbors, good report cards for your kids, and of course paying your taxes, all regardless of the illegal status. These are the artifacts that make up the strategic version of the nation-state which the person gathers for tactical reasons alone. And the nation-state that the person "imagines" and feels attached to, seems to be founded on people not these artifacts and not the ground or soil.
In comparison to Gupta's statement that we ought to look at "other forms of imagining community, other means of endowing significance to space in the production of location and 'home'," I found that people were doing just that, producing and imagining "home" but keeping a distinct nationality intact.
On the other hand this community I studied demonstrated another forms of imagining community in terms of the "grassroots" community. So it may be a bit of a stretch, but there is that arborescent metaphor again.

2007-02-28T07:17:59Z

I really enjoyed these 3 articles together, especially Malkki's investigation into the metaphor of "rootedness". One of my favorite parts was her quote from Anderson, "nationalism has to be understood by aligning it, not with self-consciously held political ideologies, but with the large cultural systems that preceded it, out of which... it came into being". Regardless of nationalism's good or bad rap (unity vs. hubris) I like to think that individual's national identities should not come from politics, but a collective feeling of what it means to be in the land together and a shared experience.

I also enjoyed the question in her consideration of the support for Indigenous Peoples, "Are people "rooted" in their native soil somehow more natural, their rights somehow more sacred, than those of other exploited and oppressed people?" I wonder how long it will be before we've completely lost the experience of being connected to the land at all. How long before nobody has cultivated their own vegetable garden, caught their own fish, etc? Why is it that we have to bring a food supply to near extincition before someone thinks "maybe we should just use what we need for sustenance"? With Bestor's analysis of the global sushi market it seems that capitalism wants to have its tuna and eat it, too.

I've tried to put some more thoughts down for about 30 minutes now and can't seem to put it together so I'll just say this: I think people should feel an affinity for the land that supports them and I feel like the majority of information and technology diminishes that feeling... and it bothers me.

Place and "Collective" Identity

2007-02-27T16:26:36Z

Malkki contrasts the town Hutu refugees and the refugee camp Hutus and demonstrates how different identities are created depending on the contextual circumstances that each group encountered. But her conclusion that the notion of homeland is a “moral destination” (not so much a geographical location) for the refugee camp Hutus and “simply a place” for the town Hutus is not supported by any data. How does Malkki reach such a conclusion?!

She goes on to say: “ Many among them (town Hutus) were unsure about whether they would ever return to Burundi, even if the political changes were to permit it in the future…..They had created lives in the present…not in the past.” This does not seem like a very counter intuitive finding. The town Hutu refugees, unlike those people in the refugee camp, were diffused and did not have to constantly live in the transience of a refugee camp. They were not surrounded by others like them. They did not have to see pain and suffering at every moment. The town refugees had the opportunity to seek and find some kind of ‘place’, a kind of permanence, a kind of ‘home away from home’. The refugee camp Hutus could not. It is possible that the town refugees do not wish to return to Burundi, not because they consider their homeland to be “just a place”, but because of fear, trauma, loss, and instability associated with that place. The refugee camp Hutus feel that way too but they but they have no other home away from home. Identity is not created by individual experiences only, as Malkki points out toward the end of the paper, it is created by others and with others around you as well—your proximal socio-physical environments. Why does the rest of her analysis lack this insight?

The Local Through the Lens of the Global Imaginary.

2007-02-26T14:52:12Z

Making electrical power at centralized generating stations on a large (at least city-wide) scale has become a global activity over the past several decades. Generally speaking, bulk generators of power design and build stationary power plants (this may change during the next seveal decades, BTW) which have an arborescent rootedness in the soil of the place, so to speak.

The rooted-ness that occurs confers an idigneous feel on the people who are associated directly with the operation and maintenance of a particular power station. This usually manifests itself within Corporate cultures as an us/them reinforced over years experience. Malkki rightly contrasts this with those who are nomadic, whose roots are in a profession, for example, that travels by its nature or simple wandering groups and individuals.

There is a clear set of people who roam through power stations across state and national boundaries, in my experience. They are craft/trades who peform extraordinary maintenance (speciality welders, large numbers of pipefitters and boilermakers, scaffolders and the like) as well as nomadic consultant groups who swoop in to effect a change in culture or perform some other transmformation of the asset/resource combination that forms the modern power plant. External regulators, especially those who reside at a plant, form a hybrid of these two groups.

As Malikki accurately observes, these inhabitants of the power plant diaspora keep histories and imaginations for the future intact; in fact their usefulness to the power plant asset and its people (now referred to as 'resources') inheres in this diaspora-ness, which appears in real time as an aggregate of rooted experiences. As you might expect, this receives a positive spin ("....we know all the best ways of doing business because we've seen all the ways to do things!") but brings with it both the good and bad of the various rooted experiences.

So, Malikki brings this into focus well; place and space appear to have roots, however transient, that inform the conciousness of each individual and carry on, whether 'at the scene' for the indigent or the transient. The frontier for research here may be a more complete understanding of how and why these relatonships form and produce rooted experiences that aggregate into global scale knowledge. A good read...

Best/Tom Herring

Software Infrastructure

2007-02-16T00:23:26Z

http://www.icaboston.org/exhibitions/exhibit/supervision/
I meant to publish this after our last discussion. The above link is an exhibit I saw in Boston which for some reason really resonated with our discussion about infrastructure. There were some pieces in the exhbit that focused on blurring boundaries in a way that confused the eye which looks for a boundary between two colors, for example, or between foreground and background, and which the artists made difficult to decipher.
I also wanted to briefly mention an anecdote from a job I had in NY where our objective was to build "infrastructure" for biomedical scientists in the academic institutions in the area. We received capital funding for a communications program, which should have been a piece of software. The city saw our infrastructural project in terms of "capital" funding and not "expense" funding simply because it was infrastructure. But it turned out that software had never been funded before through capital funding. It was not excluded from the language of the funding documents, but it was against the grain and we meet a lot of resistence. In the end I left the company when they still had not been able to access the funds. While I was there I had to reframe the software project. One framing was of a multi-sited infrastructure, limiting us to house the software in local computers and databases and seek other funding for making the software "web-accessible," the second reframing based on the funding agency's suggestion, was of a central database in a physical location with periphery components. It was interesting the different permutations that the software had to go through metaphorically in order to fit an idea of infrastructure that existed in the language of the funding agency. In the end I don't think it worked out. Software may be infrastructural, but in terms of city-planning there are still many ways that out-dated and rigid language controls what software can count as.

Embedded Embodied

2007-02-15T21:13:37Z

The McCollough article I found very difficult to read. Every sentence feels like an entire concept in itself, linked logically together but not carrying you along with the idea fluidly. I got stopped up on early pages with certain statements like "We have seen how embodiment shapes expectations." Have we? How does embodiment shape expectation? And "From architecture we have identified a latent need to map our emboidment onto the world. This pertains to the present discussion in that we feel a deep need to maintain technological constructs whose dimensions resemble those of the human body in architectural space." I think I understand the first sentence from our discussion last week, but the part of about resembling the human body in space I am not sure about. I think I like the idea, but what does it mean?
As for infrastructure in Star's paper as well as embeddedness, I don't quite conceive its invisibility, I think there is a difference between invisible and what we don't make conscious on a daily basis. Also, do these ideas of embeddedness and infrastructure differ from the idea of all those networks that make up the social? Somehow I am off balance from all these ideas that have discussed the environment as this heavy thing that I am within and part of in networked, embodied ways. I feel as though I am supposed to be jarred from my natural experience of places, when in fact I do have the ability to access and put my attention on all this embeddedness, infrastructure, and embodied sociality. It is not that I understand perfectly how it all works, the way a civil engineer would understand a part of it, or a software engineer would understand another part. But I can certainly think about how I am interconnected and dependent on so many people, machines, etc for the objects around me and my surroundings. It just seems like there is a hefty claim in all of our readings that certain people, designers, geographers, (especially people who create things in the world) ought to pay attention to a whole lot of stuff because it makes a whole lot of difference. Do the designers in the class feel an immense burden of responsibility in all of this? Why does it seem that architects are off the hook a bit, that we learn from them? Is this because of the lengthier history of their discipline (so they've covered more ground and are more responsible people already)?
I was thinking about locality and also all of these ideas of embeddedness and infrastructure, and it reminded me of the concept of commodity fetishism and the idea in some cultures that items that move out of their origins, move away from their locality, have tails that always point back to that origin and can get longer the further you move an object or person away from that origin. The tail can be harmful to the object as well, but can be severed by ritual if needed. (I don't remember where I read this.) One idea that came from this reading that I can't remember, was that we in Western culture have these tales as well, and they do us harm, but since we don't think about them, or have a way to think about them, we can't do anything about it.
Sorry for the late entry, don't know if this will make it into discussion at all.

Seams to me

2007-02-14T20:32:03Z

When I was first asked to create and draw products for an industrial design class, my classmates and I began by drawing the products as ideal objects, without any expression for the mechanisms holding the product together. It took us a while to realize that our drawings needed to include lines for molding separations, holes for screws, etc. The same idea is expressed in the CYSMN project in their idea of seamfulness. I'm sure the idea was conceived in its pure form, without GPS/WiFi blackouts, physical boundary conditions, etc. As a result, designs don't turn out the way you first envisioned.

The CYSMN team proposes some interesting solutions to the glitches in the system, although there is definitely something to using the system as-is. Like the one participant noted, there is an adrenaline rush in the chase. If the system was adapted to reveal the GPS shadows, that would both add and remove features of the game. There's a balance between removing frustrations and leaving opportunities for exploration, invention, or innovation.

I enjoyed the reading from Hertzian Tales; I've been wanting to read that for a while.

Come again?

2007-02-14T08:21:30Z

Among the many issues that came to my mind with these readings was the question that Silvia just mentioned: how systems that are not perfect can/should be dealt with in a different way (as opposed to just rectifying the bugs etc.). I think our(those associated with computer science) basis for terming a system imperfect is imperfect in itself. Although it might be reasonable to think of an imperfect system as one which does not perform as intended computationally/mathematically, the fact that it achieves a greater social(and more?) goal which could possibly have been its ultimate objective is undermined.
'Can You See Me Now?' talks of dealing with these systems differently; I wonder whether dealing with them is necessary at all. I'm not talking of entirely dysfunctional systems - I'm talking of the slight imprecision that results from the aspect of the situatedness of the system etc.
[Yes, Paul, the apostrophic investment in 'code' is beginning to make sense.]
On a slightly different note, the fact that we look forward to a system as more than a pillar to rest on also seems flawed. The essence of technology should be to help: to add to the existing world, not immediately form a backbone that if slightly bent can cripple our movement.(I'm not sure I put across exactly what I was thinking, sorry!)
A related issue is what Bruno mentioned but for me the issue is more of situatedness rather than embodiment. Working on a representational model of the world might not make the system achieve the intended purpose when situated in the actual physical world: I am beginning to believe this as I read more and more but why this is an issue(or if this is an issue at all as mentioned abov), is still not clear in my head. I'm probably thinking of two separate things which aren't immediately discernible to me.

The 'physicality of the virtual' that Paul's paper talks about is also an issue usually undermined. The fact that the virtual world is so 'out there', so present and increasingly so is one that has to be dealt with before we are so immersed we can't do anything about it. This seems to me THE time that any negotiation with this kind of virtual 'spaceness' is possible.

[?]

Some quick thoughts on uncertainty

2007-02-14T07:27:06Z

Benford et al. came up in my Ubicomp class today - in terms of how a non-functioning or not-fully functioning systems can be used beneficially, such as for fun and entertainment, to incorporate certain game strategies or make people belief that such exist. When does a system need to function and when should we strive for accuracy, precision, coverage,.. and when not? Many location-aware systems and ubiquitous computing "ideas" are tested through game-like applications in physical settings, where people equipped with mobile devices run through an environment their glance focused on the little screen in their hands. Here not everything needs to function and things are allowed to be uncertain. How does that impact applications that exist outside of game-like and more playful applications? How can we (purposefully) use uncertainty of positioning systems as fun or frustrating elements to reveal underlying structures in "serious" applications?... can the playful, non-working, confusing and uncertain actually lead to revelation?

Seamful pervasive computing

2007-02-14T04:46:23Z

Environmental designers are thinking of ways to design human environments that meet the changed needs of people with the increasing use of information and communication technologies and pervasive computing. They realize that the people no longer use the settings only for ‘traditional’ uses and that boundaries of places have been rearranged and they must design homes, work spaces, and public spaces for these changing uses and meanings. E.g. designing home-offices that provide visual and acoustic privacy to the teleworkers and family, cafes with symbolic or physical barriers so that cell phone and laptop users can work peacefully without disturbing and being disturbed others who are there to socialize, etc. At the same time, computer scientists are thinking of ‘seamful’ pervasive computing, so as to preserve these boundaries between settings and “allow the technology to make visible boundaries and seams visible.” I’d like to know what seamful pervasive computing is and what it involves. How would a seamful pervasive computing environment look and function?

Seaming

2007-02-14T04:12:02Z

I have read the articles and I'm not really sure that I get it. I understand the seamful computing thing in the context of a game, but thinking about Tom's post, I don't necessarily know if seamfulness and convenience are copasetic things in everyday life. Does everyone always have to be aware of the seams? There are people who tend to things like plumbing, electricity, roadways etc.

One of the articles that struck me negatively was The Ethnography of Infrastructure. I felt that the author started off very overbearing with “study the unstudied”, the idea that “study” valorizes “previously neglected people and things” begs the question “to whom?” That science must intervene for social justice to occur is really stretching what science can do. Science does not mobilize communities, leaders do, and a study in a drawer may earn scientist tenure, but for the people he studies it really means nothing. Second, Star’s discussed a system that biologists were not using where the difficulty was in the infrastructure. The thing that struck me is that there is an analyst for that, there are people who specialize in infrastructure, how many servers, type of cabling, desk tops, etc – a functional analyst, as opposed to a business analyst, who would have helped them design the specs for their system, interface and the like. I look at the failure of use to be a failure of hiring and budgeting, clearly the computer scientist was not an analyst which is likely why the infrastructure was over looked.

I really liked the Hertzian Space article because it had a lot of pictures in it. Critical technological practice is important; I wish it was important to me.