Art, Cultural Assumptions and Technology article -programming and culture

[Mia Kalish]

Hi, Mona, 

I read this article with interest, and I have to say it is Not Fair in an
interesting sort of way. 

As a life-long developer, I have noticed an uncritical expectation on the
part of people who are less technologically skilled that those who they
perceive as being more skilled are morally obligated to produce materials
that work just the way they think they should. 

This is a theme that runs through the paper. Western developers build from
their own worldviews. Well, yes. Only recently are people starting to write
about Other Worldviews, Other Ways of Seeing and Knowing. As the awareness
increases, changes are made in technology, as for example the new Maori
interface. If people don't make a sound and say, This is what we want. . .
and then, do something that shows what "we want" looks like, how will other
people ever know? People can't make stuff for you if you're not there to
participate in the development. 

The second theme in Not Fair is precisely this uncritical assessment. Humans
"assume" that others see things from their perspective but reject it in
favor of their own perspective. Lasa assumes that western developers see
that others see things differently, but because of capitalistic greed, just
persist in doing things their own way. I will grant you that there are a lot
of lazy, uncreative people in technology who are there just for the job, but
the people on the forefront are very creative, and love to do new, different
things. It is unreasonable (Not Fair) to lump all technologists into a
single, undifferentiated lump. This is just as bad as lumping "All Indians"
together. 

A third Not Fair theme is her use of Greene's description as a theoretical
framework. Choosing is not particular to technology or to tool designers. It
is a characteristic of living, regardless of the creature. When my chicks
eat, they choose one piece of grain or apple or lettuce over another. They
cannot possibly eat all the grains and apple chunks and lettuce pieces.
Language choice is the same. There is an infinite number of ways I could be
saying this. Choices range from macro (which language) to micro (word
choice) and have infinite variety in the middle level: which perspective do
I take, who is my audience, what is my goal, and so on. So all things which
we perceive on this earth will always be limited by choice. 

She says that "the visual aesthetics of tools tend toward binary, linear,
rectangular aesthetics." I suppose this is true. People tend to use what
they have to make new things, and one of the early things people who were
developing computers had were paper and typewriters. Typewriters were
modified to become early teletypes, and these changed and changed and
changed, moving to portable devices, then to having monitors and eventually
to the sophisticated visual technologies we have today. 

Things are "binary" partly because of the western, dichotomous form of
argument, and also because clearly on and clearly off are very important
when decisions are made in hardware. The Maybe Gate is extremely NOT to be
desired. 

As for whether it is rectangular. . . I don't know that I agree. The
2-dimensional foci are perspectives - windows if you will - on huge
"worlds". Operating systems, for example, are huge, dynamic, interacting
communities. Different little parts have different responsibilities, and
they do their jobs and send information around to others who need it,
collecting what they need in the process. These communities reside in
complex structures that are defined not by length and width and depth, but
in terms of processes, which are themselves defined by time, intensity,
frequency, priority, and more understandably, by their physical and logical
characteristics and the kinds of things they can do. The things they do are
of several kinds: things only the process or object can do; things that are
shared with all comers; things that are shared with previously authorized
comers; and, things that are shared via dynamical authorization systems. 

Yes it is true that to change the world you need a language. It is
unfortunate that Lasa sees the requirement to be able to communicate with
the tool as a deficiency. I don't know if this really counts as a "Not Fair"
or whether it is part of the uncritical expectation that others will make it
happen. Part of what you are hearing here is the result of my experience,
what my sister Linda calls "The Do-Me Attitude", where people expect more
experienced, more skilled, or better positioned people to "do [if for] me". 

Finally, Lasa talked about access to different kinds of knowledge. This has
always been a double-edged sword. As long as there have been communities,
there have been sacred knowledges. Israel revitalized its language from the
sacred dialect held for many centuries by the Orthodox. What characterized
(and still characterizes) the Orthodox is that their rituals and procedures
restrict access to influences that might change them. Whatever we say about
the Orthodox (Orthodox Jews stoned female soldiers during the 7 day war),
without their way of being, we would not have Hebrew as a living language.
It's true that every once in a while, we see conversions to Judaism, but in
general, access to the sacred remains with the rebbis. It seems that focus
on the sacred may be an old anthropological focus. What we need more today
is focus on the kinds of extension that would make it possible to talk about
secular things in Indigenous languages. 

For example, a year or two ago, I sent out an email to this list asking what
people knew about Indigenous words for different kinds of science. There
weren't many responses, and of those, few were actually able to address the
extension question. That started me thinking, and I went back to Powell's
original document on word collection. No where in that document is any
suggestion that words for concepts of science, math, engineering and
technology could be collected. This condition is more a fact (I think,
because I really dislike Powell) of Powell's bias and sense of personal and
ethnic superiority rather than a reflection of the cultural knowledge of the
people. 

I guess I run on. . . it's a soapbox issue for me. 

Mia  

-----Original Message-----
From: Indigenous Languages and Technology [mailto:ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU]
On Behalf Of Smith
Sent: Friday, December 30, 2005 9:39 AM
To: ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU
Subject: [ILAT] Art, Cultural Assumptions and Technology article
-programming and culture

To add an artful point of view to the discussion. Written by the former 
director of the Banff New Media Institute (now head of an art college 
in the east of Canada), Sara Diamond.