What a great quote!

Below I am quoting (from Hemmingson's "Here Come the Navel Gazers") a quote (from Poulos 2008), one that strikes me as profound for us out there ethnography-ing, as well as a deeply accurate assessment of "liberal" bashing in the U.S. at the moment by idiots like Limbaugh and Coulter:

...the 'self-indulgent navel-gazing' charge is a straw man argument, combined with a simple ad hominem attack. It is usually intended to belittle and bully. As such, it may carry emotional weight, but it has no merit. It is a bit like the U.S. conservatives of the Rush Limbaugh/Anne Coulter stripe who throw the word 'liberal' around as though it were unequivocally and naturally a pejorative term. Of course, as I glance back at my 50 years on this planet, I can honestly say that I have met very few 'self-indulgent navel-gazers' (most people, in my experience are, in fact, less than satisfied with their navels), and most of them were people who either smoked too much highoctane weed or who suffered from narcissistic personality disorder. The prognosis was not good, and none of them were writers. If, by this charge, the critics mean that introspection or reflection are bad per se, I have nothing to say other than 'Try it sometime.' But I think what most of them are saying is that we should not 'indulge' our emotional lives because emotions can lead us astray. Indeed, they can. On the other hand, most of the great literature, art, music, writing, poetry, etc. in the history of humanity has tapped into the great and deep energy of pathos to move the human soul to new highs and lows.

Virtual Ethnography?

Had anyone heard of this Second Life community online?

It would be interesting to do an ethnography of "virtual" communities! How strange!!!

Terry Irwin's talk on McDonaldization

I tend to think in similar though more Marxist terms (as a result of my undergraduate exposure to sociology) such as "alienation" and "division of labor" and how these things lead to the "mindlessness" that Terry was talking about. The division of labor creates a society in which there is so much stuff, TOO much stuff, that we are not able to be masters of everything, and in fact we end up masters of very little. For example, I don't have a clue how a microwave works, but I use it every day. I don't know how the pen I use was made. I don't know where my food comes from or how it is grown, yet I know I can buy it at Tesco. I am "alienated" from nearly everything that surrounds me. Terry mentioned that learning to grow one's own food might be an antidote to some of the problems of unsustainable living/design. I think this is because it assuages some of the alienation we have toward the very things we put in our bodies.

What happens when we are alienated?

Firstly, we have none of the pride that comes from doing a job well - a crucial thing, I think! If we all cared deeply about doing our jobs well (i.e. creating for a greater purpose, a greater good), our world would be sustainable, peaceful, etc., in short a more spiritually minded place. But when Adam Smith wrote about the division of labor (The Wealth of Nations), he gave the example of the pin factory in which people who had once supervised the production of the pin from start to finish, an entire pin, were now in charge of specifics of the pin production assembly line: one would create the top, one would create the pointy end, one would glue the two together, one would paint the pins... each person becoming an expert in a very specific task and losing sight of the greater picture, i.e. becoming alienated from products of their labor. This has become one of the main tenets of the Western worldview: divide and conquer. The result is that people have become experts in smaller and smaller fields because it is all that one brain is able to process (because of how complex the world is now, we simply cannot be experts in everything... we would have to know everything there is to know about agriculture, education, industrial production, rocket science, nuclear fission... etc, etc.). And just as this worldview has affected design and production, it has also affected education (something Smith pointed out, too, I believe). We are expected to confine our education to specific, pre-approved disciplines in order to make ourselves marketable in the job world. My feeling is we need interdisciplinary thinking (and education) in order to learn to make sense of our world to counteract the problems brought about by the myopic thinking that the division of labor not only facilitates but requires.

Secondly, this feeling of alienation is, I believe, the root of our pathological need for control. What happens when we are alienated from the things we consume is that we are filled with a sense of fear and thus willingly give up control to those we feel know more than ourselves. So we buy into advertisements (and purchase products) that help us feel more in control. Terry talked a lot about this need for control and how it has allowed unsustainable, myopic design solutions to dominate the marketplace. We seek fast, reliable solutions to the tangible problems we see in the world (or are told by advertisers exist in the world) because we are so afraid of all the things we don't understand.

This is essentially why my work since 2005 has sought an interdisciplinary way of thinking. We need to be masters in the world, not idiot-savants. I think that what McDonaldization has allowed to happen is that it has produced a culture of robots. This is a perfect example of how the technology or systems we produce end up producing us (Terry talked about the Alchemistic principle that the act of bringing forth actually changes us, and this is another way of describing the same phenomenon): the division of labor that brought about factory production and assembly lines has in turn produced fleets of robotic humans (Smith, again, talks about this). One of the things I am interested in exploring is how the computer age has changed the way in which we think. A book I intend to read (I bought it and everything!) is called The Big Switch: Rewiring the World from Edison to Google, and it is about how the very fact that we give up so much responsibility to the computer (it does our spellchecking for us, our taxes, it calculates for us, we communicate with it, it stores our phone numbers and remembers email addresses we use frequently... in short we rely on it to do many of things we formerly had to be experts in ourselves) means that we are now dis-empowered. As comedienne Ellen Degeneres put it: "We have buttons to do everything. I can't remember anything anymore because of the buttons that are remembering things for me!" So what I would like to explore in my Design Ethnography work is how systems design can function to re-empower humanity, rather than to continue to lessen our burden to the point of stupefaction.

Response to Caesar (2000)

In and Out of Elevators in Japan
Terry Caesar in The Journal of Mundane Behavior, 2000

Caesar argues that while in the Westerners are fairly outgoing in their behavior toward one another out in public though are awkward and reserved in the small space of an elevator, the reverse is nearer true in Japan. In Japan, where customs prohibit effusive friendliness or displays of emotion or opinion (and especially touching), the space of the elevator is considered separate from public space and thus the normal rules of conduct no longer apply. Caesar writes, "In the more restricted space of the elevator, however, questions are often ventured, opinions expressed, or even greetings exchanged that have a more expansive character."

Firstly, this proves that space in itself (e.g. "elevator space") has no inherent prescriptive function for conduct or activities. Instead, the activities that take place "within" these spaces are completely interwoven into existing cultural practices and behavioral scripts. Secondly, it implies that different "rules" apply to "transit space" than to non-transit space, raising the question What is it about transit space that changes our the way we conduct ourselves in such spaces? Caesar proposes that one factor is that these spaces are occupied/engaged in for shorter periods of time, giving them a feeling of being a "break" from normal life and customs, and even a chance to express oneself more freely without being self-conscious, since it will be over soon and people will return to their normal lives. And further, elevators remain one of the few non-monitored spaces in Japan, so it automatically implies a freedom from normal social codes. And thirdly, it shows how people categorize and segregate space, such as "inside space" vs "outside space" in Japan, and dependent upon the ways in which these spaces might be distributed in society, there are varying sensitivities to the distinction between them.

He concludes with this: "But then the study of the mundane, I think, reveals that public space is never limited to what it forbids. Otherwise, none of us would have anything to bring to our relationships there, and social life may as well consist of empty action, going up and down like an elevator, with no inside and nobody to occupy it." The lesson to be taken from this seems to be, again, that space needs to be considered as an ecology within and interconnected with a greater ecology, not as distinct and objective reality in itself.