Open Access or Silent Culture (part 2)

TedxBradford ...to review part 1... go here.

5) UNIVERSAL  If we can build any kind of ICT, why do we keep pushing out the same stuff?








Engineers change design to suit context all the time.  When traveling across land, I can go by motorcycle or train.  When traveling across water, I can go by kayak or submarine.  Each has a different power source and a different way travelers are treated from a design perspective.  Why does ICT in conflict applications treat users as if they have the same information management needs?

Problem: We can't have each culture designing its own type of web products and ICTs... how would they all understand each other?  All this great interoperability we've been accruing would be diminished.  Well, there are 2 answers to that fear...

First, if other ICTs were developed on alternate cognitive models, alternate cultural communication patterns, any challenges in understanding would mirror what happens face-to-face, and we seem to have been doing that ok (not perfectly) since the existence of different cultures among humans.  If the communication and information management tech approximated the cognitive and communicative patterns of other cultures it would be an extension of how we already operate.  We redesign to permit diversity all the time.  I am left-handed.  There are lots of things that have been designed to facilitate co-existence of right and left-handed users.  This is a basic spatial and cognitive problem which we have navigated.  Let's try a harder one.

What does this interoperability serve at the moment?  The head of the International Union of Telecommunications (the UN's are of Telecom regulation) has said in a 2011 interview:   

'The best defense is, apparently, not to speak English, as the language barrier can give local content providers the vital advantage they need before Google et al take over.' 

Developers in other countries are following the model, the standard, the play-doh factory mold, to be commercially viable in a global market.  Many design with external users in mind rather than domestic ones according to an interview on Al Jazeera's The Stream about African innovations.  How does this kind of designing help domestic users of ICT for conflict resolution applications? 


6) US/WESTERN COGNITIVE MODEL

This design follows the shape of a paragraph in English and many other European languages.  New and material information, just like the conclusion sentence, will be found at the bottom right.  This is the Twitter feed.  Given information, such as the premise statements in a paragraph, are at the top left.  The overall idea of the space is both 'given' and 'ideal' so it can be found at the top left.  For brands that want to be earthier, they can be found in the 'real/given' placement of the bottom left.  There is evidence of a linear timeline, and giving preference to future events which are both features of US/Western culture.  Now this is just a webpage not an interactive ICT space, but many of the same rules apply which govern our notion of how space makes sense or what an object means by where it is and what it looks like.  Some of these are conscious design choices while others may not be.  The underlying structure which links to other pages and databases reinforces design features which have dichotomies such as ticked/unticked boxes to categorize or turn things 'on/off.' 






7) OTHER OPTIONS???
In this picture from Digital Democracy project in South Africa, kids created a loop of information and communication tech which was organizing and managed without text... through phone and radio, a cycle of ICT in which the data remained as speech.  Why does information have to be written down to be a record?  To be used for conflict resolution?  To be leverage in changing this situation, it needed to be heard by the community, remain accessible, and prove trustworthy, transparent.  There could be a mobile or web application which built from this model... watching conflict resolution strategies and communication preferences in-culture will yield more useful, trusted and successful ICT tools.  

The Digital Battlefield

The Atlantic had an article this month which described Tunisia's image as an emerging Silicon Valley of North Africa.  David Rohde had assumed, like I had when I started researching this topic for a paper I gave in February, that the post-revolutionary rebuilding would follow post-colonial partnerships.  I was trying to find out what the tech sector would look like in North Africa and the Middle East when it began rebuilding with the hypothesis that controlling the tech in the region was the new battlefield, a focus of US foreign policy.

The Digital Battlefield: Controlling the Technology of Revolution

The dramatic changes across the MENA region have been linked to a similarly dramatic rise in the use of information and communication technology ICT.  Europe is quickly seeking to determine its role in relation to major actors in these movements by encouraging participatory democracy and building partnerships which bring stability for the populations and enterprises of the area.  Technology is increasingly used as a tool in defining and implementing strategies aimed at achieving these goals.  While the traditional battlefields remain in upheaval, maneuvers on the digital terrain do not progress in parallel.  This paper will examine the foreign policy implications of the pervasive cultural bias of the ICTs connected to revolution and stabilization efforts describing how this bias shifts power away from the populations using the technology and toward the actors in control of the programs and codes focusing on specific examples from EU actors in the MENA region.  The ICTs being deployed for the purposes of conflict management and democratization are plagued by cultural bias which disenfranchises users.  It diminishes the technology’s potential for use in participatory actions by removing authorship and contributes to information gatekeeping by the creators of the technology which tend to be European or American.  It is through this gatekeeping, this controlling of information and communication data, that European and American actors seek to determine the boundaries of the next battlefield.  By applying a neo-colonial strategy to information gathering, these actors are not simply positioning themselves on the field to the best advantage, they are determining the shape of the field by commanding the programs and codes through which the information flows.  

While I assumed the US would have a significant presence, I was looking for the EU to play a major role resuming former ties to build infrastructure, telecoms, and provide technical expertise.  Several of these countries would want to reject old state owned telecoms and internet plus expand to meet a surging demand for these services.  (Between Jan 2011 and Jan 2012 mobile web browsing increased by more than 3X in Africa... bigger increase than in Asia which includes China!)  However, what I found surprised me.  Just like Rohde found, tech development has been almost entirely American.  What he didn't explain was why the deviation from the previous and expected pattern.  Why was there a vaccum, a moment of potential for tech development that European partners didn't meet?

My research has led me to hypothesize three things:
1) Policies of Interoperability: The presence of NATO, a fan of interoperability for secure, real-time communications makes a good case for cohesive software.  Once this standard was set, other on-the-ground programs spread American tech in the region and tipped the balance toward operating under this framework.  This was a blow for European style policies toward intellectual property and an expansion of US style systems and regulations.  (see earlier post for policy moves by US to encourage EU to adopt certain measures)

2)Responsiveness: The US gov had the capital for aid and American businesses saw opportunities to investment whereas the EU could not react in time.  The EU budget is determined years in advance.  The 'stability instruments' at its disposal which could be applied are not set-up for crisis-response and are poorly funded.  European business investment continued along previous lines, some projects were in place, they were stalled briefly and then continued such as solar energy or trade.  But the tech sector was new, it was wide open, and the potential was seized upon by the US rather than the EU.

3) Supply and Demand: Countries in the region were in a moment of redefining themselves and chose to include American style tech as a facet of this image.  In some places like Libya, there were reports of English replacing Italian as the foreign language of choice.  The US was already on the ground and more agile with aid/investment to provide the tech while the EU was focused on domestic recovery.

What does it mean for US foreign policy to install US tech?  How is this a battlefield maneuver?  I'll put it another way, how would it affect US intelligence gathering or US security if the region chose another tech... if they bought Chinese? or if they stagnated, didn't begin contributing heaps of data for marketing research or intelligence gathering?  If they remained silent or connected to the internet in a less accessible manner, this would be disadvantageous to US interests.

US: Delighted to support the Silicon Valley of North Africa.

Seem/せま/Seam/سيم

A new 'species of speech' emerging in China was described in an interesting post from LanguageLog. Called 'stream of consciousness blather,' it is associated with the vacant, vain spoutings of politicians.  It is being satirized by poets. 

I am considering how to integrate poetic analysis into an open data (re)modeling paper.  I heard once that lawyers should study poetry to develop their sense of nuance, complexity, layering.  Why aren't poets part of polisci analysis when more and more of the data comes in the form of communication streams like tweets and blog musings from across cultures?  Poets may have better insight at deciphering the ethos of online chatter than a traditionally trained analyst.  

In Persian, 'seem' means wire\In Japanese, a close homophone means narrow.

The amount of associations and connotations with these words in English makes them difficult to translate correctly.  You need to know the context, the culture. 

Filmmakers and novelists from Persian culture have a remarkable facility to weave metaphors and shade context through allusion. This narrative style is present throughout more everyday transactions.  However, analysis of data filtered through ICT frequently ignores the invisible variable of cultural translation or context.  Research begins with the false assumption that data transmitted via ICT has a universality because a perceived quality of the technology has been collapsed with that of the data transmitted across it.  When considering communication data from other cultures (in my paper I will look at Farsi and Russian), why does American analysis take words at face value?  The semantic analysis tools are set to consider equivalent inputs.  Words and phrases are given equal weight in each language when there are many examples of 'hot button' words in one culture which don't translate.  They don't translate because you need context.  The contextual markers for understanding the intentions behind a phrase like a metaphor are significantly more complex. For those who think there's no place for poetry in data analysis, here's the concept as an equation.

If f(a)=c and f(b)=c then a=b.  Except it isn't when c is not a constant....

This is the false premise on which current research on ICT is moving forward and which continues to limit the communication capacities of language communities.  

Let f be the function of any familiar technology such as facebook, blogging, etc. which transmits communication. Let (a) and (b) be any languages which are transmitted. And let c be the communication data we see at the end.  c is not a constant; it is a function of culture. There are two problems which seem to arise from misinterpreting the nature of f.  But perhaps these suggest an alternative formula in which any language may be transmitted via a new type of ICT which does not homogenize and sanitize the cultural markers, nor limit users in terms of culturally prescribed formats and architectures for transmission.  Ideally, an ICT would provide as fluid a space for communication as currently possible in the state of our technology. 

 

I will expand on these two problems in successive posts.  The first focuses on input architecture, and the second deals with models based on data collected through ICTs.  And the milk metaphor ends here.