Ramesh Srinivasan

More Cognitive Dissonance

Ramesh Srinivasan is very economical. He did some ethnographic studies a few years ago and has managed to recycle and repurpose them repeatedly with new titles that are at best tenuous. He has parlayed them into a shelf of books and papers. In his Whose Global Village, which I also reviewed, he chose a title that misleads the reader into thinking the book was about something global, connective and innovative. But it was just his personal experience doing ethnographic work among the Zuni and in Tahrir Square, among others. In After The Internet, we find the same Zuni and Tahrir Square studies being used to portray some sort of future beyond the internet. But there is no such vision in the book. It is entirely backward looking, a remarkable feat for such a title. There is nothing on the horizon but more of the same, and worse, if you read what little he has to say about after the internet.

The big new thought in this book is his Theory of Assemblage, which simply says any complex effort draws on many components and services. When you resist government, the internet is just one service to employ. When you collect a culture, a database is one tool. You can apply this to absolutely anything: when you build a house, you need nails, an electricity vendor, and plumbers. You gather talent and the talent gathers tools to execute the vision. The impact of this theory is basically nothing. You decide nothing with it.

It all stems from the opening - the famous epigraph by JP Barlow, saying the internet is extralegal, independent and free. But of course it isn’t, and after the internet, it still won’t be. It has been co-opted by giant corporations and its main function is surveillance, which government has gleefully and gladly joined. The internet is no longer autonomous, detached or neutral as it was in infancy. Instead, we have the farce of the “sharing economy”, where you share all your personal data, and corporations and governments profit from it. Absolutely nothing new here. And no vision for it from Srinivasan.

It’s a fast summary of where we are, but it leads nowhere.

David Wineberg… (mais)

Mistitled

An ethnographer from UCLA looks at how the third world uses western e-technology. That is the stated foundation of Whose Global Village.

Srinivasan cites numerous examples where people use tech in ways other than intended. A child’s crank laptop becomes the sole light source in a family shack without electricity. A mobile phone becomes a flashlight to hunt crocodiles. Poor Indians call each other and hang up so the recipient will know to call back. Whatever the circumstances, people will find a way, a use and a workaround in their circumstances. But so has it always been. In an emergency, everything can become a hammer.

A somewhat better point he makes is that Facebook did not organize and run the Arab Spring, that almost no one there had internet service, and the arrogance of the Facebooks and Twitters is worrying. Word among “the last billion” does spread like wildfire, but the oldfashioned way.

He quickly shifts to describe various tech-assisted projects he has participated in around the world, and what he learned about himself and his own approach. The book is mostly about him, and the pitfalls for ethnographers. Like so many ethnography books, it fixates on the process of discovery the ethnographer underwent.

Srinivasan has developed a sort of flexible approach to cultural data he calls fluid ontology. There is a great deal of space devoted to it, and it is the only new idea Srinivasan posits. It seems to be a genuine and valuable innovation to preserve the uniqueness of a society. Basically, it rethinks databases to reflect the society’s own rankings, connections and valuations. One dramatic graphic shows how the Zuni see their society compared to how a museum populates a database, with a truly small area of overlap. But the connection to the book title is tenuous.

The concluding pages revert to the now ancient argument over the internet squeezing square pegs into rounds holes in one size fits all universal solutions from the Googles, Facebooks and Apples of the world. Despite their efforts, it is splintering. The internet has not created a global village.

I think what Srinivasan means to say is just as the thoughtless elimination of thousands of species cripples biodiversity worldwide, so the internet can cripple cultural diversity worldwide. We need to manage both, and not by using the trickle-down from big business. But keeping ethnographers from unintentionally adding bias is not what the concept of global village is about.

David Wineberg… (mais)