Technology And Culture

GIS for Marginalization or Empowerment In Environmental Management: a South Indian Example

by Martin Bunch

Bunch, M. J. (2001). "GIS for Marginalization or Empowerment in Environmental Management: A South Indian Example." The Indian Geographical Journal 77(2): 1-17.

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) exist to transform data into knowledge and present this knowledge in various... more Geographic Information Systems (GIS) exist to transform data into knowledge and present this knowledge in various formats for the purpose of supporting decisions. In doing so, GIS are portrayed as knowledge-based systems that are free from bias. In fact, GIS is a socially constructed technology. The entire process of GIS production, from software development to data creation, analysis, visualization and interpretation of GIS output, is characterized by political, economic and social motivations. This paper presents a model of communication for GIS that illuminates the potential for GIS to both marginalise and empower vulnerable and excluded groups in environmental management and planning situations at each stage of the GIS production process. Inclusive and empowering uses of GIS in recent research in South India are discussed. In particular, GIS was central to a process of conceptual and environmental modelling intended to support rehabilitation and management of the Cooum River in Chennai. This process incorporated the perspectives of citizens and NGOs into expression of system relationships that were represented in a GIS-based Decision Support System and simulation model. The process led to identification of qualitatively different kinds of system interventions than were tried (and failed) in the past to rehabilitate this extremely stressed system.

Technologies of Mobility in the Americas: Introduction

by Phillip Vannini

Introductory chapter co-authored with Lucy Budd, Ole B. Jensen, Christian Fisker, and Paola Jiron

What do road infrastructures, media networks, ferry boats, cell phones, automobiles, and airplanes have in common? As... more What do road infrastructures, media networks, ferry boats, cell phones, automobiles, and airplanes have in common? As attempts to come to terms with the virtual and material distance separating people, objects, and information they are all technologies of mobility which deeply shape our ways of life, informing ideas, demanding new skills and practices, facilitating or impeding relationships, and restricting or enabling access to crucial resources.

Mobility studies concentrate on the intersecting movements of bodies, objects, capital, and signs across time-space, dissecting how practices, experiences, representations, and political dynamics shape new networks and lifeworlds. This book aims to reflect on the simultaneously technological and cultural (hence, technocultural) processes underpinning many of these forms of mobility, concentrating in particular in the North, Central, and South American social context.

Whereas in Europe the study of mobilities has begun to take a strong hold in academic units, professional research networks, and recognized publication outlets, the study of mobilities is still in its adolescence in the Americas. Yet, in contrast, mobility is very much part of the core of the social imaginary, geo-politics, and cultural life of the Americas. Indeed, to be "on the move" is among the most quintessential characteristics of what it means to be a citizen of the Americas. This book is the first to reflect on these dynamics within this large geo-cultural context.
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Haunting Technologies: Performing Memories of Place Through Effervescent Mobilities

by Phillip Vannini

Co-authored with Rhys Evans.

See accompanying multimedia essay here: See accompanying multimedia essay here: http://ferrytales.innovativeethnographies.net/content/ghosts-sailings-past

Pool Funai - PADM 9000 - Feminism in a Flat World paper

by Angela Pool Funai

The Perfect Solution: How Trans Fats Became the Healthy Replacement for Saturated Fats

by David Schleifer

David Schleifer. 2012 “The Perfect Solution: How Trans Fats Became the Healthy Replacement for Saturated Fats.” Technology and Culture 53(1): 94-119.

Trans fats became part of the American food system due to a complex interplay among activism, industrial technology,... more Trans fats became part of the American food system due to a complex interplay among activism, industrial technology, and nutritional science. Some manufacturers began using partially hydrogenated oils, which contain trans fats, in the early twentieth century. Medical authorities began framing saturated fats as unhealthy in the 1950s. In the 1980s, activist organizations, including the Center for Science in the Public Interest, condemned food corporations’ use of saturated fats and endorsed trans fats as an acceptable alternative. Nearly all targeted corporations responded by replacing saturated fats with trans fats, which fit easily into their existing products. Trans fats thus became the perfect solution to the political problem of saturated fats and to the technical problem of what to use in their place. Activists helped precipitate technological change, but by 1994, trans fats were no longer regarded as a solution. Instead, they became regarded as a new nutritional problem.

Material culture and symbolic interactionism

by Phillip Vannini

Published in the book Material Culture and Technology in Everyday Life: Ethnographic Approaches

Culture is what people do together (cf. Becker 1986; Ingold 2000).  Such a focus on collective doing, making, and... more Culture is what people do together (cf. Becker 1986; Ingold 2000).  Such a focus on collective doing, making, and the materiality and consequentiality of action-based cultural processes is what sensitizing concepts like “material culture” and “technoculture” are meant to highlight.  Conceptualizing culture as action and interaction is intended to downplay the importance of cognitive cultural dimensions such as values, beliefs, codes, and ideas and to emphasize instead bodily engagements, techniques, skills, habits, and the materiality of the world of interaction.  The scope of this chapter is to survey the ontological foundations of such ideas and therefore of perspectives that view material culture and technoculture as interaction.  By taking some license in blurring boundaries amongst theoretical traditions, in what follows I review four basic principles of pragmatism, symbolic interactionism, performance theory, and social semiotics.  The chapter is divided into four parts.  Each part reviews one of the four principles that distinguish this pan-theoretical perspective: diffused agency, semiotic power, ecology, and emergence.

Ifta 2.0: Negotiating Authority in the Public Sphere of Islam Online

by Steve Welsh

This was a final project for an Anthropology class with Brinckley Messick at Columbia misleadindgly entitled "Islamic Law". It needs some work, but it's a start.

Over the course of the last quarter century, a new paradigm has emerged in the construction of Islamic knowledge and... more Over the course of the last quarter century, a new paradigm has emerged in the construction of Islamic knowledge and authority with the maturing of the Internet as a medium for publication of Islamic legal discourse. The Internet has come to occupy a common middle space between the super-literate communities of conventional Islamic authority and less-literate communities of Muslim practice, creating what may be considered a new Islamic public sphere. The emergence of this sphere has yielded profound discursive shifts in Islamic learning, and spurred a reintellectualization of Islamic knowledge, thus enabling new strategies of engaging (and contesting) conventional religious authority.2 Imagined communities of interpretation and practice form and overlap in a new epistemic venue of multilateral cultural transmission. Islamic scholars and seekers communicate across cultural and territorial boundaries asynchronously, citing core texts while creating new discourses of Ijtihad in response to questions about ‘modern life.’

Opinions and attitudes toward humanoid robots in the Middle East

by Nikolaos Mavridis

Co-authored with: Nikolaos Mavridis, Marina-Selini Katsaiti, Silvia Naef, Abdullah Falasi, Abdulrahman Nuaimi, Hamdan Araifi & Ahmed Kitbi, published in Springer Journal "AI & Society", http://www.springerlink.com/content/c16684w802318xx8/

Robotics is expected to boom in the near future, moving massively beyond traditional application areas, and extending... more Robotics is expected to boom in the near future, moving massively beyond traditional application areas, and extending to all parts of the globe. Thus, in order to enable effective international customization of robot designs, and in order to facilitate their smoother harmonious introduction to everyday life, it is important to study the opinions and attitudes toward robots in different regions of the world. Although there exists a small body of research covering the US, EU, and Asia, there is almost no research regarding attitudes toward robots in the Middle East, a region with its own marked cultural idiosyncrasies. Therefore, we brought Ibn Sina, an Arabic-language conversational android robot to Dubai’s Gitex, one of the most important exhibitions in the region, and performed a questionnaire-based empirical study with 355 subjects from 38 countries, which had seen the robot interacting, and most of which had also interacted directly with it. Many interesting findings are presented: First, a statistically significant ordering of preferred application areas for robots overall was found, as well as strong effects of the region of origin on the preferred applications. Furthermore, strong religion, age, and education effects were observed. Overall, the results together with a theoretical discussion of possible causes provide interesting insights on cultural acceptance of robots in this richly complex region, which potentially have strong implications to their wider deployment in the future in specific settings.

Un rendez-vous parmi d’autres. Ce que le jeu sur internet nous apprend du travail contemporain

by Manuel Boutet

Manuel Boutet, 2011. « Un rendez-vous parmi d’autres. Ce que le jeu sur internet nous apprend du travail contemporain ». ethnographiques.org, Numéro 23 - décembre 2011 "Analyser les présences au travail : visibilités et invisibilités" [en ligne].
(http://www.ethnographiques.org/2011/ Boutet - consulté le 27.12.2011)

Abstract

What can we learn about contemporary work and its collective forms of sociability from the rise of... more Abstract

What can we learn about contemporary work and its collective forms of sociability from the rise of ‘rendez-vous' games on Internet ? Games can be useful tools for analyzing work on the condition that our understanding of the encounters between of these two types of activity is not limited to a common-sense interpretation in which games represent at worst a simple form of entertainment, at best, training for something more serious. On the basis of interviews with players of an online game, we show that forms of play vary with the work activity with which they are associated, and especially, on the presence or absencce of multi-activity, where interactions at a distance and heterogeneous solicitations occupy an important place. Examing gaming pratice during breaks enables us to see how employees manage to maintain the consistency of their activities in such professional contexts, and to understand the developing of new forms of sociability based mainly on shared life/work rhythms.

Résumé

Que peut nous apprendre l'essor des « jeux de rendez-vous » sur le travail contemporain et les collectifs qui s'y inventent ? Si le jeu peut constituer un bon analyseur du travail, c'est que l'intrication de ces deux activités ne se résume pas aux deux interprétations courantes, qui voient dans le jeu un divertissement ou un entraînement. En partant d'entretiens menés avec des joueurs d'un jeu en ligne sur internet, on montre que la forme prise par la pratique de jeu varie selon l'activité de travail où elle s'insère, en particulier selon la présence ou non d'une situation de multi-activité, où se multiplient les communications à distance et les sollicitations hétérogènes dans le cours de l'activité. Le jeu donne ainsi à voir le travail déployé pour maintenir une cohérence de l'activité dans les contextes professionnels, plus nombreux aujourd'hui, où les temps sont individualisés, les arrangements techniques, laissés à la responsabilité du travailleur, et les sollicitations hétérogènes. On comprend aussi que s'y développent des nouvelles formes de sociabilités essentiellement basées sur le partage de rythmes.

Corporate power and the market: Automotive performance and the automobile industry

by Alan Listiak

"The Center is the Loop: An Interview With John Stanier of Battles" (PopMatters)

by Jason Adams

PopMatters, September 2011

***

Excerpt:

"As is already clear in the dense, complex, yet deeply playful album opener “Africastle” (which both diverges and converges with the Mirrored aesthetic), Gloss Drop exemplifies the Nietzschean call for “another kind of art, a mocking, light, fleeting, divinely untroubled, divinely artificial art that, like a pure flame, licks into unclouded skies. Above all, an art for artists, artists only!” And yet, its reliance on digital production technologies results also in a decentering: not only of the group’s internal musical roles in relation to its technological context, but also of the listener’s role as a “passive consumer”. So much so in fact, that the potentially inegalitarian, undemocratic notion of an art for artists alone would itself seem to be challenged. As a result, Gloss Drop, even moreso than Mirrored, also upends the conventional relation of rhythm and melody, pop and rock, along with a host of other primary elements of popular music culture, taking up the Brechtian aesthetic imperative to “begin not from the good old things but the bad new ones”. After the digital revolution, as has often been noted, the separation between producer and consumer has largely broken down as listeners not only take in what has been produced, but become something more than mere listeners. Indeed, as detailed by Battles’ drummer John Stanier below, there is no longer a clear separation of rhythm and melody in their work: the role of the drummer for instance, is not the conventional provision of a rhythmic core, but rather that of introducing complexity and creative divergence onto an already-existing, digitally-produced "mother loop". In the following interview, Jason Adams discusses the relationship between the two albums with drummer John Stanier, touching on the significant insignificance of the band’s nomenclature, the zone of indistinction between rhythm and melody and the breakdown and recontextualization of the pop-rock relation."

Student Occupational Expectations: A Geolocative Study

by Jamie Smith

Smith, J., Straight, R., & Franklin, T. (2011). Student Occupational Expectations: A Geolocative Study. In Proceedings of World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare, and Higher Education 2011.

Expectation of future occupational achievement is a powerful determining factor of student self-perception. Likewise,... more Expectation of future occupational achievement is a powerful determining factor of student self-perception. Likewise, location and socio-economic status influence both expectations and self-perception. The current study seeks to use an innovative web technology as a means of exploring these concepts using geolocated, self-reported and recorded narratives from students in grades 6-8. This is compared to academic performance and socio-economical demographics by school under the theoretical grounding of social cognitive career theory. Future implications for study, the use of web technologies and crowdsourcing for this area of research are included.

Gluten, Pills and Talk

by Mario Veen

We spent a million bucks and then we had to do something: The unexpected implications of industry involvement in trans fat research

by David Schleifer

Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society, 2011, published online ahead of print.

Many scholars assume that industry meddles in scientific research in order to defend their products. But this article... more Many scholars assume that industry meddles in scientific research in order to defend their products. But this article shows that industry meddling in science can have a variety of consequences. American food manufacturers long denied that trans fats were associated with disease. Academic scientists, government scientists, and activists in fact endorsed trans fats as a healthier alternative to saturated fats. But in 1990, a high-profile study showed that trans fats increased risk factors for heart disease more than saturated fats did. Industry funded a U.S. Department of Agriculture study that they hoped would exonerate trans fats. But the industry-funded U.S. Department of Agriculture study also indicated that trans fats increased risk factors for heart disease more than saturated fats. Industry quickly began developing trans fat alternatives. This confirms that corporations get involved in science in order to defend their products. But involvement in science can be the very means by which corporations persuade themselves to change their products.

Key factors in the invention of marine conservation technology: A case study of TEDs.

by Lekelia "Kiki" Jenkins

see page 105 of Proceedings

To solve problems such as bycatch, policy-makers resort to conservation technologies, such as turtle excluder devices... more To solve problems such as bycatch, policy-makers resort to conservation technologies, such as turtle excluder devices (TEDs). Although substantial funding has been directed toward the invention and diffusion—the spread and adoption of an item by people—(I&D) of conservation technologies, little research has investigated the I&I process itself.  As a case study, I examined the use of TEDs for the U.S. shrimp trawl fisheries.  I identified key features for successful I&D by conducting on-site interviews with people involved in the process including National Marine Fisheries Service gear specialists, Sea Grant agents, and industry representatives. In addition, I analyzed records from management agencies using the grounded-theory approach, a method that allowed me to identify concepts that emerge from the text and to link these concepts to existing theories of invention and diffusion of innovations. The resulting data were used to (1) diagram the relationships among participants in the network and (2) construct a graphical depiction of how technology evolved, including encoded information about the I&D process.  I conclude that: (1) social and political pressures compel speedy action at the determent of adequate goal setting and research planning, (2) people with both mechanical and shrimping expertise have invented the most widely adopted TEDs but directed-recruitment and integration of these individuals into the invention network is poor, and (3) industry-sensitive adoption efforts are the most successful and include the use of videos, translation for non-English speakers, and community-based Sea Grant agents but translation is inadequate and community-based agents are too few.

The end game is diffusion: adoption of turtle excluder devices and the diffusion process

by Lekelia "Kiki" Jenkins

see page 45 of Proceedings

To solve problems such as bycatch, policy-makers resort to conservation technologies, such as turtle excluder devices... more To solve problems such as bycatch, policy-makers resort to conservation technologies, such as turtle excluder devices (TEDs). For conservation technologies to be useful management tools, they must be widely adopted by the intended users. In order to better understand the adoption process for conservation technologies and what influences the success of the process, I studied the adoption of TEDs by the U.S. shrimp fishery. I conducted on-site interviews with key informants including NMFS personnel, Sea Grant agents, state managers and fishers. In addition, I analyzed records from NMFS, Sea Grant, NGOs, and state governments using grounded theory.  This technique allowed me to identify categories and concepts that emerge from the text and to link these concepts to existing theories and models, specifically diffusion theory and technology transfer. Diffusion is the process by which an innovation is transmitted among members of a social system. Technology transfer is the movement of information or technology from one organizational setting to another. An important difference between these two models of adoption is that diffusion theory focuses on individual adoption decisions. By linking my data to these two theories I concluded that (1) some policy-makers and managers erroneously believed that a mandate negates the need for individual adoption decisions (2) both Sea Grant and NMFS used technology transfer methods that promoted TED awareness but not wide-spread adoption (3) diffusion theory would be a more appropriate model to encourage wide-spread adoption (4) enforcement is not a substitute for nor can it assure true adoption.

Bycatch: Interactional expertise, dolphins and the U.S. tuna fishery

by Lekelia "Kiki" Jenkins

published in 'Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science', 2007

The burgeoning field of studies in expertise and experience (SEE) is a useful theoretical approach to complex... more The burgeoning field of studies in expertise and experience (SEE) is a useful theoretical approach to complex problems. In light of SEE, examination of the controversial and well known case study of dolphin bycatch in the US tuna fishery, reveals that effective problem-solving was hindered by institutional tensions in respect of decision-making authority and difficulties with the integration of different expertises. Comparing the profiles of four individuals, who played distinct roles in the problem-solving process, I show that (1) to address a complex problem, a suite of contributory expertises—rarely found in one individual—may be required; (2) formal credentials are not a reliable indicator of who possesses these necessary expertises; (3) interactional expertise and interactive ability are useful tools in combining the contributory expertises of others to yield a desirable collective outcome; and (4) the concepts of contributory expertise and no expertise are useful tools for understanding the actual contribution of various parties to the problem-solving process.

An exploration of cheating in a virtual gaming world

by Delia Dumitrica

This article looks at the `culture of cheating' within a specific virtual gaming world, Neopets. It argues that this... more This article looks at the `culture of cheating' within a specific virtual gaming world, Neopets. It argues that this `culture of cheating', informed by a neo-liberal capitalist discourse, has been embedded in the structure of the world. Thus, Neopets promotes an image of wealth as accumulation and as an expression of individual will and effort. Cheating becomes an instrument for personal achievement in a world where access to resources has been designed as unequal. In the case discussed here, socialization within this world may be interpreted as offering users an experience of neo-liberal capitalism that renders inequality as a `natural' consequence of individual choices. What remains hidden is precisely the interweaving of social processes and technical design in constructing this neo-liberal capitalist experience of the world in the first place.

Knee-High Boots and Six-Pack Abs: Autoethnographic Reflections on Gender and Technology In Second Life

by Delia Dumitrica

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, 1(3), 2008, co-authored with Georgia Gaden

Leading Global IT-Enabled Change Across Cultures

by Einar Iveroth

European Management Journal (forthcoming)

This paper explores, from a practice-based departure, the question of how global companies lead IT-enabled... more This paper explores, from a practice-based departure, the question of how global companies lead IT-enabled transformation across cultures. The paper examines the change management practices incorporated by the leading telecommunications company Ericsson in the transformation of its finance and accounting (F&A) unit. The findings suggest that a practice-based culture can make global transformation projects easier to accomplish, and that IT can reinforce such a culture. However, the findings also shows how the intangible structure of practice-based culture and the tangible structure IT supplies a foundation to build on, but require additional resources that are more situated, social and human oriented to be successful. Overall this paper offers a new perspective of IT-enabled change across cultures by developing the analytical concepts of common ground, common meaning and common interest.