Bias Frontiers, Wonder Wastelands

This is a continuation of a recent post, The Mind Jell-O Problem, in which I delved into the sticky issue of the cognitive divide between literate and oral cultures.  To begin, literate, or more correctly chirographic cultures, are not polar opposites to oral cultures.  This is not an either or situation.


 
But this is the source of the most frequent criticism I have heard when I begin to discuss differences at a cognitive level.  There are very few purely oral cultures remaining because of the pervasive reach of technology and education.  Also, from time to time we find traces of an oral cultural past, a sort of vestigial limb, such as anachronistic aphorisms.   Do not, I repeat do not infer an evolutionary continuum from oral to chirographic.  While there may exist a spectrum of cultures exhibiting degrees of orality and chirographic qualities, there is not a progression toward a pinnacle, a perfection, an evolved mode of communication.  There merely exists a spectrum with all variations, all types of communication cultures out there together.

Describing the differences at a cognitive level is, at first, quite challenging.  (cognitive refers to mental activities we do such as think, remember, infer, categorize, reason, and use language.)
Overcoming my own literate-bias in how I articulate communication and thought processes begins to feel as thought I am walking on eggshells.  Even the idea of a spectrum of variation is a bit problematic.  It organizes by categories, more this or less that, slotting and pinning cultures to a concept wall.  A very chirographic way of describing the situation which fails to capture the dynamic qualities of communication and culture.
 
Walter Ong, in his book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word was similarly conscious of his own literate-bias.  He observes that most previous research takes the view of literate equals dominate/normal and oral equals other/outside normal.  It is clear that he takes great pains to remove this bias from his own writing.  But at times it becomes tedious or forced.  I begin to wonder, will there come a time (perhaps we are there already) that someone will read his careful scholarship on cognitive difference and react in the way we might react today to some early scholarship about gender, race, sex or any other study of dominate vs. other?


To use an example from feminism, there are some who find it offensive to take such care to avoid bias.  When there is a constant focus on bias, on difference, that focus serves to reinforce the concept of difference and inferiority.  By pointing it out all the time, we (society) seem to be saying women are fragile and must be protected, 'please don't forget they are different, they are other.'

But the aim in this exploration of cognitive differences is not to focus on the differences as scalar, as progressing  from elementary to evolved.  Primitive to perfection.  The aim is to remove the attachment of value to gradations along the spectrum, and to simply acknowledge that more than one variation exists. After which, the possibilities of how to address the preferences and patterns of sense-making fly wildly open for developing new technologies.

Tools for managing information and communication should mirror the methods or sense-making strategies for their cultures of use along this spectrum.  What is optimal for one culture might be a hindrance to another.  Commercial manufacturing already changes design for cultural specifications.  In ICT, we have seen variation from a chirographic perspective (keyboards and script), and we have not begun to consider how orality impacts other cognitive elements of design such as organization, recall, analysis, etc.  

So many avenues to create new designs for new markets coming online if we cross this frontier.

Adapt to Survive-- A response to irevolution.net

The following is a collection of my reactions to irevolution's post, "How People in Emergencies Use Communication to Survive" from the initial fleeting, to the crude visceral, and finally the rooted and reflective.  My conclusion is that survive refers to how aid agencies feel they can remain relevant in the ICT hierarchy and retain their role as information command centrals. The term has only a passing association to the health and well-being of disaster victims.

When I saw @PatrickMeier's post announced on Twitter, I imagined the world had unlocked a secret for how people could eat cell phones and drink bars of connectivity.  Technology to the rescue. Descriptions of the heroics of ngo innovation in crisis has often made such sugar plum fairies dance in my head.  It just sounds ridiculous. 

But Meier is sincere in his concentration on a narrow, immediate concept of survival.  Both for the victims of the crisis and for the humanitarian organizations who have been scrambling to marshal the data deluge. However, he begins to sound as though he is arguing that humanitarian aid organizations are in competition with victims on the ground for information. While free market competition might drive innovation, the possibility of remaining relevant (in the information loop) is presented as a reason for ngo's to design applications which perpetuate their role as information gatekeepers.

The BBC Trust issued a new report titled, "Still Left in the Dark? How People in Emergencies Use Communication to Survive — And How Humanitarian Agencies Can Help," which was a follow-up to a 2008 study called,  "Left in the Dark: The Unmet Need for Information in Humanitarian Emergencies."  Meier summarized the findings and offered some of his own expert insights.  The underlying perception in the aid world seems to be that there has been a tremendous leap in four years from not enough ICT in the field to saturation.  The tone is both self-congratulatory for meeting this staggering need so quickly, and at the same time measured, reminding readers of the integral, irreplaceable role aid agencies place in the crisis ecosystem. Notice the punctuation of  'dash' And How Humanitarian Agencies Can Help.  It's as though the ngo's are hanging on to the people who have just figured out how to survive on their own.  

Reading reports from humanitarian aid agencies can have a deja vu-ing effect.  Each organization regurgitates quotations, anecdotes, and "data."  It becomes the snake swallowing its tail as an information circle impossible to determine where original data was gathered or where policy began.

So how does the ngo remain relevant when ICTs are giving power to the people?  Contrary to earlier statements I've read by Meier, in this piece he is in favor of developing a nuanced feedback loop based on 2-way communication.  He writes that individuals on the ground, primed by the real-time speed of social media as well as its 2-way interaction, are increasingly unsatisfied or distrustful of traditional crisis communication.  Radio announcements even SMS blasts neglect another vital function of communication during a crisis-- feeling less alone, feeling heard, feeling like your experience is shared.  Drawing from the BBC Trust report, Meier quotes,

“while responders tend to see communication as a process either of delivering information (‘messaging’) or extracting it, disaster survivors seem to see the ability to communicate and the process of communication itself as every bit as important as the information delivered.”

The intangible quality of communication is something I write and speak about frequently, sharing my experience as a mediator and as a translator in one of these humanitarian hubs (captured here 4636 Haiti).

Here, Meier and I come together (although unintentionally).  He writes about aid agencies needing to change their way of providing service to their customers (disaster victims) if they want to stay in the relief game.

"I wonder whether these aid agencies realize that many private sector companies have feedback systems that engage millions of customers everyday. "

It is no secret that the aid world is a big business.  And the more groups/cultures/languages that are online or on mobile devices means any organization, for-profit or non, should be adapting ICTs to suit these users communication and information management preferences.