Switching focus from bits to humans. How technology affects people.

Quoting Don Norman from a recent article on CNET

“…We, as people, we should not care about the technology. We should care about the benefits it gives us…”[1]

It’s moments like these that I am reminded why I am a fan of Norman.[2]

Personally, I would like to see more cultural criticism of technology, and more philosophy of technology as it relates to culture in general.

There are plenty of gadget blogs and tech magazines out there – most of them feel like shopping catalogs.

As a culture we are focused too much on the bits of technology and we often forget to look at the big picture – how technology affects our cultures.

For example, how does the invention of a new browser affect our freedom of speech?  freedom of movement in digital-space?  freedom of communication with privacy?  etc.  These questions are a lot more interesting to me.

[1] CNET – Tech Design with Thought.

[2] Who the hell is Don Norman any way? – short answer, he is a design professional and cognitive science professor that promotes user-centered design. If you want to learn more about him – Here is his Wikipedia page
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-Daniel Montano

Teen Girls Weave the Web!

 ”…a study published in December by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that among Web users ages 12 to 17, significantly more girls than boys blog (35 percent of girls compared with 20 percent of boys) and create or work on their own Web pages (32 percent of girls compared with 22 percent of boys).”

Original Article in The New York Times

Survival of the selfless

The current issue of New Scientist Magazine has an interesting article that compares selfish behaviors with altruistic behaviors and produces a theory of how group-oriented collaboration has a track record of survival.

“ALTHOUGH a high standard of morality gives but a slight or no advantage to each individual man and his children over the other men of the same tribe… an advancement in the standard of morality will certainly give an immense advantage to one tribe over another.”In this famous passage from The Descent of Man, published in 1871, Charles Darwin perceived a fundamental problem of social life, and a possible solution. The problem is that for a society to function, its members must perform services for each other. Yet members who behave “for the good of the group” often put themselves at a disadvantage compared with more selfish members of the same group. If so, then how can altruism and other prosocial behaviours evolve?The solution, according to Darwin, is that groups containing mostly altruists have a decisive advantage over groups containing mostly selfish individuals, even if selfish individuals have …”

The link below links to a page that contains the same text as above. To read more a subscription is necessary. The print version of this issue is worth it’s price as it has a few other articles of interest.

Source:
Evolution: Survival of the selfless – being-human – 03 November 2007 – New Scientist

New Scientist Magazine: Current Issue contents >

Related in this blog:
Beyond Abraham Maslow’s Pyramid of (Individual) Needs >
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-Daniel Montano
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Keyword: Daniel Montano, Dan Montano, user experience design, information architect

Gregory Bateson’s Mind and Nature.

I’m reading Gregory Bateson’s book, Mind and Nature. Bateson was an anthropologist, sociologist, second order cyberneticist and philosopher. In this book Bateson wrote an accessible philosophy that acknowledges issues in science and in popular forms of thinking.

I would recommend this book to anyone that likes this blog. Mind and Nature proposes transdisciplinary studies as an effort to greater understanding. Mind and Nature also questions the lenses we use to interpret our world. It points out presuppositions built into some of those lenses. All of this is done in plain, accessible language.

Two full chapters of Mind and Nature, available free online >

Mind and Nature. A Necessary Unity on Worldcat.org >

Gregory Bateson in Wikipedia >

An independent review of Mind and Nature >

Bateson, G. (1980). Mind and nature a necessary unity. Toronto: Bantam Books.
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-Daniel Montano
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Keyword: Daniel Montano, Dan Montano, user experience design, information architect

Al Gore on Current.com

Quoting Al Gore from a blog post on the Identity unknown blog:

“Current, the media company I co-founded six years ago with my partner Joel Hyatt, just last week launched a new web site that integrates television and the Web in an unprecedented way. It provides, as never before, a platform for citizens to make the media their own.One of the features I’m most excited about on Current.com is called Viewpoints. Viewpoints is a virtual town hall where you can share your opinions, in video, about the issues that matter in the 2008 election: from global warming to government eavesdropping, and many more.This digital town hall is already bustling, and you can find viewpoints from me and from a lot of people, including the candidates running for President. Come and listen to their positions and, more importantly, tell them and the rest of the world what you think!”

Link
http://current.com/viewpoints

Source:
Identity Unknown (blog): “Al Gore: Announcement of Viewpoints…a new website from Current” >>

Related in this blog:
Reading List 10/11/2007 (includes The Assault On Reason, Companion to Philosophy and Social Intelligence.)

Green.TV >>

MicroPlace

An interesting tool that allows users to “invest” in poor individuals from across the world who have entrepreneurial dreams.

Link:

https://www.microplace.com/

Related in this blog:

Complex problems: Poverty > 

Inequality Rises in the U.S.

“Morning Edition, October 12, 2007 · The wealthiest 1 percent of Americans earned more than 20 percent of all income in 2005. That means the richest Americans have surpassed the highs of the booming 1990s, according to the latest data from the IRS.

The numbers provide more proof that inequality is rising in this country. And they help explain why many Americans report feeling economic distress despite overall economic growth. Scholars say that’s partly due to the switch to a service and technology-based economy. Now economic rewards go to skilled workers, and, of course, to those on Wall Street.”

Source:
NPR : Inequality Rises in the U.S. >>

The Wall Street Journal: “Income Inequality Widens” >>
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-Daniel Montano
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Keyword: Daniel Montano, Dan Montano, user experience design, information architect

Bratton Admits Skid Row Displacement

Pushing people around from one problem area to another does not solve any problems – it shifts them. Comprehensive solution systems are needed to solve problems like these:

“Los Angeles city leaders launched a campaign a year ago to reduce crime in downtown’s skid row by deploying 50 additional police officers and declaring they would step up prosecutions.On Wednesday, even as officials declared success, Los Angeles Police Chief William J. Bratton acknowledged that the Safer City Initiative essentially has shifted some of downtown’s homeless and mentally ill residents to other parts of Los Angeles.”Is there some displacement? Certainly,” Bratton said at a news conference where he, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and other officials touted the drop in skid row crime.”

Source:  Bratton Admits Skid Row Displacement
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-Daniel Montano
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Keyword: Daniel Montano, Dan Montano, user experience design, information architect

Social innovation

“Realizing that innovation driven solely by technology often failed to meet customer needs, many organizations turned to a consumer (marketing) oriented approach where consumer research and observation is handled by “experts”. Green believes that this approach is starting to reaching end of life. [Josephine Green's (of Philips Design)] main point is that we need to go beyond designing around individual consumer needs and start innovating around social needs. Her reasoning: We have reached a saturation point for technology and consumer goods. Continuing to consume the way we currently do is not healthy.”

“There is too much ‘stuff’ and a growing realization that filling the future with more and more consumer-driven technology and marketable goods does not necessarily guarantee higher growth, a better quality of life or even life itself, given the state of the planet.” (from NexUp)

Consumer research and observation are still important, the difference now is that these methods have to be integrated with a wider social purpose.

Source

NextUp: “Democratizing the Future” >>

Related

World Changing blog >>

Call for papers on Social Innovation >>

Customer World (blog): “Adding Social Innovation to Design” >>

Standford Center for Social Innovation >>

Another think coming

Wayne Hall over at the IdeaFestival blog posted an interesting post:

“According to the Financial Times some philosophers have set about mending the rift between experience and thought in order to make the discipline relevant again to a wider audience.”^[1]

The article details how one philosopher has merged philosophy and performance and goes to to mention about the underlying effort. Here is a bit from the Financial Times article:

“Now the mood seems to be shifting, slowly, mainly because high-profile academics working in the strongholds of English analytic philosophy want their discipline to become engaged again. ”Philosophy has become far too professionalised,” says Sir Anthony Kenny, a former Master of Balliol College, Oxford, and one of Britain’s most distinguished living philosophers.

He laments that much of the work done in philosophy departments today is inaccessible to other philosophers, let alone the public at large. In some subjects, such as physics, such complexity is unavoidable since the ”raw material” of the subject takes years to master. ”But philosophers don’t have information that is unavailable to others. In philosophy the best of it should be available to all.”

”Spending time contributing to the public conversation is a kind of duty. And philosophical ideas and perspectives become impoverished when there is a lack of it,” Professor Grayling observes. ”Ten years ago when I started writing for a popular audience, it was looked down upon. Now this does not happen. We are recovering a sense of philosophy as taking part in a popular debate.”^[2]

Thanks to Postmodernism

I think this is a delayed reaction to postmodernist proposals. Art, cultural studies, critical theory and postmodernists spent years calling philosophy to come out from the academia and interact with people in general. Some postmodernists attempted to flatten out the hierarchical systems. They attempted to remove the “official” and the “formal” out by creating official-unofficial hybridity across time, genres, class, race, language, ethnicity and other value-charged concepts.

The postmodernists “dirtied up” philosophy in order to bring it down from the academic pedestal and make it accessible to the people on general. They promoted the recognition of spoken philosophies and the philosophies in songs, comic books and popular culture in general. At the same time some of the postmodern philosophy was confusing and unacessible – but I also think that the philosophers that wrote those works were trying to prove a point by showing how language was full of dynamic fuzzyness and interplays in meaning that shifted back and forth like Escher drawings, like moebius strips, like paradoxes, like dialectical concepts.

But if we can move beyond either/or thinking perhaps we can understand philosophy as a possible dynamic phenomenon-concept that can move in and out of official boxes.

Food for thought

• Why is the Financial Times writing about philosophy?

Sources

[1] Hall, Wayne. 2007. IdeaFestival (blog). “Performance Philosophy“. May 24, 2007. >>

[2] Vernon, Mark. 2007. Financial Times. “Another Think Coming” May 11, 2007. >>

On Wikipedia

“List of Philosophies” >>

“List of Philosophy Topics” >>

Elsewhere

Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy >>

Relevant books

Blackburn, S. (2005). The Oxford dictionary of Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Iannone, A. P. (2001). Dictionary of world philosophy. New York: Routledge.

Osborne, R. (2005). Philosophy for beginners. London: Zidane. An illustrated comic book on philosophy.
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-Daniel Montano
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Keyword: Daniel Montano, Dan Montano, user experience design, information architect