Today I had my first actual connection with my mentor, Elia. As this will only be a short post I won’t be going too much into what we talked about even though it very much relates to the topic of this post and extends it to levels of great inspiration! I will be getting back to this (for instance her work on mobilising citizen journalists in Guinnea just now) very soon, I’m sure! However, instead I’ll get started on my first ‘mentor assignment’, which will be an ongoing project for (I think) the rest of my blogging on Global Change. The task is to always have a photo illustrate my post, however abstract it might be.
Todays photo:
(I’ll explain the choice of photo in the bottom)
This post will have be a reflection from the last week that should hopefully keep me from being subject to Runes hard and terrible sanctions, which are yet to be revealed to the world onto a scared, slacking blogger on the Global Change team.
It might not be a surprise to many readers here that I have been frustrated about how we discuss technology, but I’m not really sure that too many are actually sure what I say that we should all get to know the technologies before deciding on anything.
I’m going to start off with a definition:
Technological determinism:the view that the effects of any new technology on work and employment are simply defined (i.e. determined in a fixed way) by the inherent capabilities and functions of the technology itself. This is invariably criticized for ignoring factors in the context of work and the role of human agents. (Principles of Organisational Behaviour, 2005)
Why do I post this? Because I believe Twitter can not do anything, Facebook can not do anything, a hub can not do anything – people can. This is what Peter is saying on his comment on Ninas post today: “U can use new media to benefit you too. Dont worry about those others” – the media is a tool, not a determination.
So why do I say this? Because I think that technological determinism (or any other kind of determinism) is harmful and should be reflected and critized to death, handing the power back to the users. And I hope we can start doing this amongst ourselves on Global Change, also – technology is man-made and can be whatever we use it for and we should at least acknowledge this. Changing media use to the better is a difficult task, but as Michael Edwards pointed out with a quote from Ghandi: the change startes within. Love or hate should not righted at technology, but a particular ways to use it. If we do so we will have ways to change technology – if it’s all inherent in the medium, we don’t have a chance.
I hope this has made it more clear to the New Communicators, why I’m so keen on not discussing media, which we do not have a common experience of. If we haven’t tried it, the discussion will be based on prejudices and that kind of discussion is – in my experience – easily driven by determinist views. These being technofic or technophile.
I’m not really sure if I made myslef clear on this, but I’m not sure that it’s crucial either – I’d much rather have a dialogue on this, so being edgy and partially unclear isn’t all bad, I guess.
Endingly I promised to post the reason for my choice of photo – this will also be an ongoing thing starting from today.
Choice of photo: I took this picture in an empty, run-down machine hall in Aalborg, and I think this machine has been part of making kettles. Just like this machine won’t build kettles on it’s own, Twitter (or any other medium) won’t make a campaign. The machine might have some strenghts and som weaknesses, but it does not have an inherent will – only the users do (even though the nature of this is very much up for discussion).
“It was the sociologist Georg Simmel who pointed out that the stranger to a culture has the role/work/lifestyle of a trader, who buy and sell, and brings goods from one place to the other – owing goods, but no land, belonging to none of the cultures visited – living on borders. This form of life is close to that of the designer, and a designer can learn a lot from paying attention to the tricks of the trader.” (Ellen Christiansen)
This morning this blog reflection popped up in my Facebook-feed. It’s written on the blog of one of ‘my’ associate professors from Aalborg University working with participatory design (and interaction design – plus a lot of other stuff, too, I guess). If you want to find great articles on participatory design – her (and Anne Marie Kanstrups) work on the FEEDBACK-project is the place to start.
But okay – enough with the advertising. What I really wanted to do here was to pass on these thoughts on the stranger as a tradesman… even though Ellen relates it to design here, I think it just as well relates to us as campaigners taking off from participatory research – at least that’s what I get from few lines in this blog post.I haven’t done any reading on Simmel myself, but I was wondering if maybe some of us at Global Change – or maybe even someone from the outside – would have comment on this or maybe some further clarification?
At least the wording inspired my for thinking – and my hopes is that it will do the same to others.
_____
Added later:
After having read The Stranger by Simmel (Read it here), which the quote above refers to (I believe), I wanted to add some quotes from the rather short, but very good essay:
On the stranger and objectivity:
“He is not radically committed to the unique ingredients and peculiar tendencies of the group, and therefore approaches them with the specific attitude of “objectivity.” But objectivity does not simply involve passivity and
detachment; it is a particular structure composed of distance and nearness, indifference and involvement.”
“”With the objectivity of the stranger is connected, also, the phenomenon touched upon above, [9] although it is chiefly (but not exclusively) true of the stranger who moves on. This is the fact that he often receives the most surprising openness — confidences which sometimes have the character of a confessional and which would be carefully withheld from a more closely related person. Objectivity is by no means nonparticipation (which is altogether outside both subjective and objective interaction), but a positive and specific kind of participation — just as the objectivity of a theoretical observation does not refer to the mind as a passive tabula rasa on which things inscribe their qualities, but on the contrary, to its full activity that operates according to its own laws, and to the elimination, thereby, of accidental dislocations and emphases, whose individual and subjective differences would produce different pictures of the same object.”
“Objectivity may also be defined as freedom: the objective individual is bound by no commitments which could prejudice his perception, understanding, and evaluation of the given. The freedom, however, which allows the stranger to experience and treat even his close relationships as though from a bird’s-eye view, contains many dangerous possibilities. In uprisings of all sorts, the party attacked has claimed, from the beginning of things, that provocation has come from the outside, through emissaries and instigators. Insofar as this is true, it is an exaggeration of the specific role of the stranger: he is freer practically and theoretically; he surveys conditions with less prejudice; his criteria for them are more general and more objective ideals; he is not tied down in his action by habit, piety, and precedent.”
I just read a really interesting article in NY Post, which shows an example of how local lo-tech innovations can lead to major increases in local capacity. What struck me through the tweet “Question Box Answers Calls in Africa Where Web Can’t Reach – NYTimes.com http://bit.ly/16GSiL” was a story aboutQuestion Box: a free, nonprofit telephone hot line that is meant to get information to people in remote areas who lack access to computers. By letting people call and ask for information on for instance agriculture, it brings the web-based wisdom of crowds to the places where the web doesn’t reach.
“Instead of searching for information themselves, people in two rural agricultural communities in Uganda can turn to 40 Question Box workers who have cellphones.
The workers dial into the call center and ask questions on behalf of the locals, or they put the call on speakerphone so the locals can ask for themselves. The operators then look up the requested information in a database and convey it to the workers, who pass it along to the villagers. The workers are compensated with cellphone airtime.”
This reminded me a lot of what I saw, when I visited Grameen Phone in Bangladesh this spring. Even though Grameen Phone is a profit(able) company they focus on creating a sustainable local infrastructure through participation on local small-scale innovations – I think I should get back to some of these thoughts on the Bottom of the Pyramid (Inclusive Capitalism) business strategy in a later post…
I’ll just finish off with a quote from the owner of a cellphone-based business in Kenya (cited from the article):
“We can’t sit in our offices in America and decide what is useful to people and what is meaningful in their lives. (…) The services only add value if they are open-ended.”
I find this to be very true and intimately linked with the foundation of the participatory research paradigm, which we have been sniffing at…
This morning I got link to a really nice geomapping tool in my Twitter feed. The tool is called SourceMap and the idea is to create open supply chains: ” We believe that people have the right to know where things come from and what they are made of”, they say. Through the use of Google technology you can easily show the supply chain of a product. This is a great way of exposing the rather complex production process of most products – and what this means in terms of emission etc.
Really nice and inspiring initiative! Check it out at http://ow.ly/rgS0
Today during the blogging session I talked to a few people who had some different wishes for the layout of their blogs, which I suggested could be done by some basic HTML. So I just went and found a site, that posts some of these. There are a lot of different, so feel free to try it out – otherwise I’ll be more than ready to help out on friday (or any other day).
Just revisited this youtube-clip which has almost become a classic. It’s simplified, too simplified, but still his main point is right: action, in spite of in certainty, is less risky than not acting.
A Facebook-post from one of our mentors, Mohammed ElGohary, made me feel like posting this video of Belarus journalist Evgeny Morozov. He’s discussing whether the internet and information technology is actually the democratic revolution (in his words iPod Liberalism) it is being said to be. He makes an eyeopening point of a number of examples of repressive states using the internet and the social media to extend their rule of knowledge and public discourse.
Should be of interest to all of us trying to connect new media and social change:
” What then should be done? It’s almost certain that the required 80% reduction by 2050 will need transformative social and political – collective – change that in scale far exceeds the lifestyle-shifts envisaged by 10:10. The time for that to begin is the present. To that end, the celebrity authors, designers, artists and sportspeople who champion 10:10 might supplement their private pledges with some public ones:
* join and campaign for the party with the most progressive and coherent socio-environmental policies in the next general election (even if it’s a small party)
* argue for a more holistic measurement of the health of an economy than is suggested by its gross national product (GNP) – as in the reports of the French-government-sponsored “commission on the measurement of economic performance and social progress”
* oppose the privatisation of public spaces and public services.
This last pledge is fundamental. Climate change is a public bad, and there is an urgent need for citizens both to reimagine the public good and to relearn how to work together towards it. In current conditions, every new private solution to a public problem is a nail in the earth’s climate-coffin.
The fight against catastrophic climate change can succeed only if it forges a permanent link with social-justice campaigns; if it is prepared to commit to an absolute reduction in the material throughput of modern economies; and if it accomplishes a comprehensive shift in political conditions and social relationships. The poor and vulnerable, within societies and across the world, contribute least to climate change and suffer most from it. The 4:1 ratio – the optimum high-to-low wealth balance in an environmentally and socially healthy community – should be as important as aspiration as any other. Any serious climate-change project today must rise to these challenges, or risk wasting the good ideas, intentions and energies that inspire it.”
These are the ending words of the article “10:10 and the politics of climate change“, which is questioning the future of the individual approaches to decreasing our emission. It’s bringing up the point that even though giving people tools for change via individual imigation can be empowering, there is an – at least so I and the article fear – increasingly large risk that these tools will be blinding. This is meant in the sense that it is very easy to achieve the first 10% decrease by simply turning down the heat a bit, throwing out less food, flying less etc, but it will be increasingly difficult for every percent. That makes it difficult and painful – if not impossible – to make stunt of cutting another 10% the next year and the year after. To achieve the kind of change that is needed – the article states – we need a much more communal approach, which is why the campaigning should focus on mobilising people to influence the decisionmakers that can make the necessary structural changes. Even fighting the continuing privatisation going on at the moment (in the above), which I find to be a somewhat provocative idea, but something which I definitely agree upon.
In my eyes our focus on the rich countries acknowledging and paying off their climate debt should and could be mentioned to the list above – I even feel confident that the author (Andrew Dobson) wouldn’t mind the least bit. But.
Because there is quite a but to the this, which relates to the whole communal approach: how do we make a campaign with equally effective tools for social change (compared to the individual approach)? When people are given a simple tool to achieve instant change through turning down the heat etc, it is in fact mobilising people. The large amounts of people engaged in saving the personal consumption are amazing. The amount of people engaged in the question of climate politics seems less amazing. And I think the reason is the necessity of instant feedback – people (the face- and nameless mob, we all know so well) won’t take the time to actively support causes that doesn’t relate to them in a way, that gives a sense of instant feedback. The personal mitigation creates a nice feeling of contributing to a better environment, but supporting some long-term political decision, which in our case is even affecting people in other continents, whose conditions you have never experienced is more difficult to relate to.
I cam to think of this – again – during a workshop that we facilitated today at a Youth Climate Camp at the Open Gymnasium. Here we introduced the concepts of climate debt and adaptation as an important alternative to the mitigation discussion, and the student listened closely and interested. However, when we got to the last phase, which we had formed to be an ‘action phase’, where the students should brainstorm on how to influence decisionmakers to focus on climate debt, they mostly proposed mitigation-related suggestions (like turning off the lights). I’m not in an way critisizing the effort of the students, who did an amazing job of coming up with ideas, but I still take it to be a forewarning of the challenges that we are facing as we are taking off on our campaign. People simply don’t know and understand the concept of climate debt – so how do we make a campaign that cracks their skulls and pours in the necessity to take action? I’m not sure yet, but I am however confident that we will find a way within the next four months…
I felt like posting some possible approaches to creating awareness – one from both sides of the political correctness:
This is one approach (which the Global Change team attended):
