I'd like to make the case that Tuesday is clearly the worst day of the week, as opposed to the more popularly accepted Wednesday.

It's simple, really: Every day has a comfortable label that you can use to shape your day.

Monday: The start of the week. Hellish, maybe, but at least categorized.
Wednesday: Humpday. After Wednesday it's all downhill. The end of the day on Wednesday can be particularly euphoric.
Thursday: The real start of the weekend, and only one day 'til Friday.
Friday: Clearly, it's awesome.
Saturday and Sunday: Weekends rule.

What's Tuesday? It's wedged in there, nameless, formless, and generally craptastic.

The new issue of Receiver is out, complete with a number of interesting contributions, including:

1. Amparo Lasen: Affective Technologies – emotions and mobile phones
2. Barry Wellman: The mobile-ized society – communication modes and social networks
3. Adam Greenfield: Along the fault lines – designing for deception, dishonesty, and other happy facts of human nature

In thinking about what culture means and how to apply it practically, I've been fascinated by how general conceptions of knowledge bear on the definition of culture. In anthropology there are generally two sides to the great debate: the Positivists and the Post-modernists.

The Positivist position, in general, is that 'reality' is out there, and we can measure it. Positivists feel comfortable with words like fact, objective, and empirical. Post-modernists, on the other hand, believe that 'truth is in the eye of the beholder' – that reality is produced, and we cannot separate opinion and perception from it. (I fully acknowledge the gross generalizations I've just made for the sake of concise description.)

The choice, of course, is not so stark. Along the continuum between positivist and post-modernist are most of what I consider the reasonable and tenable positions. I feel more often inclined to defend the post-modern point of view, though I'm scared by the extremists who turn post-modernism into nihilism. For me post-modernism is a call to take everything with a grain of salt. Communicated information, I think, cannot help but be endowed with the purposes and preconceptions of the communicator. I don't question that 2 + 2 = 4, but rather I question why we chose to make that calculation in the first place, and to what purpose it is put.

Advocating the post-modern perspective is as much a response to positivists' abuses as anything else. Too many throw around words like 'empirical' and 'factual.' It gives me the willies. I think especially in 'hard' science, engineering, business, and professional communities, there is too much of a willingness to take reality on faith. I think it's often as much a matter of convenience as anything else: there is a pervasive cultural perception that a statistic is much more practical and useful than something more qualitative. (I can think of a dozen situations where that doesn't hold true.) This doesn't bother me, as long as we all remember, as I mentioned, to take 'truth' and 'reality' with a grain of salt, and to examine where generalizations are appropriate and where they are simply convenient. Fundamentally, 'reality' is a culturally produced, emergent phenomenon, and we should give it due respect!

Next: How to make post-modernism practical in the study of technology and information…

Globalization, Informatization, and Intercultural Communication – Randy Kluver

This article is a bit simplistic, but I like how clearly it lays out the questions facing us in an information world. It also takes few of the assumptions for granted that many do (e.g. #5 below).

Today we discussed the general lack of theory which accounts for similarities and differences cross-culturally. Anthropologists have been making stabs at this for a while, but I think there are some major strides in the field of Intercultural Communications. Kluver dodges the bullet by asking a lot of questions and proposing few answers, but I think he's heading down the right path:

This issue could significantly affect how intercultural communication is taught. Some of the key concepts associated with intercultural communication, such as the distinction between high and low context cultures, are problematic when applied to new communication contexts. Since high context cultures are those where there is a greater social knowledge, and communication is typically less explicit, can persons from a high context background rely on the same subtle nonverbal cues and situational variables when using the internet or email, for example? How is high context culture messaging transformed when there is an absence of nonverbal cues, environmental and situational variables, and at best imprecise manifestations of status and hierarchy? Does this force high-context communication to become low context? Is communication across cultures made easier across technological channels, since the ever troublesome nonverbal cues that complicate much interpersonal intercultural communication lose their importance? What new nonverbal cues arise in electronic communication? What constitutes communication competence in the new context?

I intend to root around in the ICC literature a bit more. Kluver wrote in 2000 (and in a marginal journal), so I suspect there's a great deal more to find!

The challenge of the interdisciplinary environment, I think, is in figuring out the right angle from which to address any problem. Especially at SIMS, full as it is of such expert and diversely talented people, it's hard to know where to fit in – what to offer. At least that's been my feeling lately.

But I have come back around finally to the reason I came to SIMS in the first place: a belief that the tools and perspectives of anthropology are useful and needed. In the face of all the new technologies and applications today it's easy to forget that behavior drives technology. If culture drives behavior, at least to some degree, then it ought to be essential, not only to the way we understand the uses and contexts of technology, but to its design.

And so, synthesizing a few thoughts from the last few weeks, I want to make a few statements.

1. Let's not throw around the word culture. Anthropologists have been studying it full-time for more than 100 years, and there is still no clear consensus on what it means.

2. The distinctions between social and cultural seem mostly rhetorical – in reality they are inextricably linked. We shouldn't use social because it is more widely understood and less problematic, or stand for the use of culture to refer exclusively to art or language. A better choice might be sociocultural, or better yet, sociural. (see below entry)

3. Wherever there are people, whether it be 2, 200, or 2 million, there is culture. Whatever culture is, it is shared – but it's just as valid and useful to talk about the culture of a family as the culture of New Zealand. I've used the term 'micro-culture' because it is more descriptive, but I'm now thinking it's redundant. Every culture is at least micro, and at best macro.

4.Our goal should be to make technologies culturally appropriate – and since cultural exists in vast tapestries too complex and emergent to map, what we really need to do is focus on adaptive technologies.

5. It's not useful to take for granted that there is something fundamentally new about the informational, technical world in which we live. Both apocalyptic and utopian rhetoric too often argues the merits or faults of our 'new' environment, without ever convincingly making the case that it's new. I have a sneaking suspicion that a great deal more is the same than is different. I don't believe that technology turns culture on its head at the drop of a hat. Culture is too important – too pervasive and immutable – to respond on a whim to the development of new technologies, even if they fundamentally change the way we live. Rather I'd say new understandings seep slowly and belatedly into our collective culture, 10, 20, or 50 years after we started proclaiming that everything was suddenly different.

6. Every scientist, every researcher, every human needs to be thinking about the Digital Divide. We have to address the fundamentally technocentric and Western-centric ways that we conceive of technology. Adopting the views of the Microsofts, Intels, and Dells of the world – companies which make money by paying special attention to a very small percentage of the population (well educated, skilled professionals) – will do nothing to bridge the Divide. We should spend less time trying to put our technology in the hands of people who don't have it, and spend a great deal more time trying to learn how we can create new technologies that are suited to the needs of diverse people.

Dangerous though it is to get involved in debate analysis, I think this one is particularly simple, elegant, and telling. Check out this list of the most common phrases uttered by both Edwards and Cheney last night:

Vice Presidential Debate Analysis

Courtesy of overstated.net

Oh Boy!

Courtesy of: unmediated