Search Results

Cold War social scientists frequently adopted special experimental situations where they could scientifically model and code many aspects of human behavior, aiming to unravel the mysteries and smooth out the irrationalities of social systems, cultures and the human personality. One particularly vibrant example of the situation at work was in the small group research Robert Freed Bales conducted at the “Special Room” in Harvard University's Department of Social Relations between 1949 and the 1970s. The distance between experimental design and possible political-material interventions was radically shortened in such situations, for they offered dual sets of methodological advantages: real-world immediacy on the one hand and laboratory-like artificial control of conditions on the other.

Certain epistemologies, politics, and metaphysics are built into mass produced technological offerings. Apparently neutral seeming tools carry normative principles, and are built on unexamined assumptions about social relations. This chapter argues for comprehending the situated-ness of design by attending to how these assumptions and interests are exposed by the use, and the repurposing, of technologies in differing social and historical situations. As many of the examples detailed in the volume refer to cross-cultural appropriations, subversions, or unexpected (re)-uses of technologies, we discuss the specific treatment of knowledge in different social and cultural contexts, and the effects of particular Euro-American assumptions about knowledge and communication on the design of ICTs. The chapter discusses the potential of anthropology and ethnography as modes of approaching and understanding the design and use of technologies, and makes a strong argument, through examples from Papua New Guinea and the US, for the specificity of technology and design as emergent in particular social relations and forms.

The use of digital technologies in reproducing texts has profoundly transformed attitudes towards books and to the production and format of literary texts. While it is often assumed that digitization will lead to universalization in literary production, this chapter argues that the ways in which digital technologies are used in relation to books is predicated on what a book represents in a particular context. By way of a range of ethnographic cases from Asia and South America, the chapter makes the case that a book is not a simple conveyor of a message. Rather, culture specific understandings of books and book related technological innovations and digital objects show that books and their digital derivatives are not just produced through social relations, but themselves have an impact on social relations, often in unforeseen ways. Importantly, understandings of literary artefacts, and the ways in which they relate to oral traditions, shape the ways in which they relate to digital technologies. This relationship may indicate why the life of conventional books may still be long and varied, alongside their multifarious digital incarnations that make texts of different traditions accessible across the globe in an unprecedented way.