Boingy Boingy Boingy Means Gelato

I understand that the Italian economy is doing fine already, but I can't help but wonder: would it do better if they charged money for things? I'm sitting right now in the lovely Bar Fiorentina, where I have just ordered an espresso with a dollop of milk for .85 Euros. In Paris this same would cost $3.50 E and a pound of flesh from nearest the heart.

The same is true of Italian clothing stores. In Paris, I could not find even a thrift store where I could bring myself to exchange money for fabric. Parisian thrift store racks are organized by designer (really). For two weeks I searched Paris for a t-shirt that I could wear on our upcoming bike trip. I could not find one for less than 30 Euros ($45), on sale. (Note my sunburned shoulders.)

In Trento, on the other hand, where we are stationed for two weeks, clothes are free. This is in part because they are all fabricated out of pixie tears and unicorn secrets. Italy is the first country that I am aware of to speculate into the unicorn-secret-based textile industry, and while I think there is real potential in it (D, as a control group, seems to respond favorably to clothes made of lycra-bonded starlight as modeled by the lazy ranks of tawny, long-legged, black-haired, sweat-misted, bouncing Italian co-eds), I can't help but think that it would be more successful if they charged money.

Here are some other observations I have drawn, in the last four days, about Italians:

• Italians don't know what breakfast is. Ask an Italian for breakfast, and s/he will give you coffee and a gelato.
• Italians eat gelato three meals a day.
• Italian old men look and move exactly like you think they do, even if you have only ever seen cartoons. Also, they really do that thing where they turn their palm up, touch all four fingers to their thumb, and brandish it while arguing.
• Italian buildings do have insides, but no one uses them. The entire population of Italy is visible 24 hours a day at sidewalk tables, stoops and balconies. You could pour concrete into the insides of all Italian cafes and restaurants tomorrow and no Italians would notice.
• It is physically impossible to overexaggerate an Italian accent. I will teach you. Put a smoky, slightly wanton tone in your voice, and then say: "BOinGY, BOinGY, BOinGY?!" You are speaking perfect Italian. That is how you say: "I would like to order a free espresso and a gelato."

Also, the heat-induced laziness is contagious. I wake up in the morning, stretch, knock back another two stories from Gaiman's Fragile Things (highly recommended), go to a café, write on my book for four hours, wander off to: gape at the painted murals on the outsides of all the buildings, buy a tablespoon of flattering Italian clothing, wander ruins/castles, hike in the vineyard-raked mountain villages (left) , or take photographs of unsuspecting Italians ("I know it's wrong! But every single Scottish person does it!").

Once I peeked through a gate and saw a young Italian woman in white scrubs repainting the frescoes on the cathedral reliquary floor. Once I stepped out of our apartment here and found a 1920s movie being filmed right there, with a huge film crew of Italian cameramen all squinting and holding their hands out like goal-posts in random directions. Wandering between them, like the half-tame American Zoo Peacocks of yesteryear, were half a dozen tweed-wearing actors and red-lipsticked actresses with shellacked hair, chatting with their heads inclined together.

Sooner or later, I have enough of this tableau and I go write some more. D eventually comes home, all hyperactive with new info-vis ideas, and we wander around imitating the locals' nightly game of café-roulette. Sometime nights there are thunderstorms and heat lightning.

I feel like I could spend the rest of my life here. I've loved this whole trip-- I've seen so much in these last four weeks, I can barely sort it all in my head-- but I love Italy. There are no cars allowed  in the middle of most Italian cities, so there is this central core to them where rushing is all but impossible. These centers are characterized by cobblestones and the old, broken-down ramparts symbolizing how long it has been since these people really worried about anything. (Zoom in to this pic on the left-- these broken-down stairs just kill me.) In this favorite café of mine, I have an electrical outlet stationed right by the door, and while I write, I get to stare out at the hoopy, oversized bicycles swooshing by and the inevitable patio-side café arguments. I want to learn Italian. I want to come back here.

This weekend, we are going to bike out to the modern museum and the huge castle ruins in the nearby town. Last weekend, I went to the Geiger café & nearby castle in Switzerland. You won't believe the pictures.

Till next time, Gadget. 

I'm in Paris

Yeah, so I haven't written to this blog in a while. That's because I:

1. Finished my former contract with Microsoft (Odyssey project).
2. Moved.
3. Interviewed for and accepted my next position (Research Analyst with MSNBC.com).
4. Left for 6 weeks in Europe.

When I decided to create this blog, I made a resolve to keep it impersonal and intellectual. In part, I wanted to avoid the self-centrism that I see in a lot of younger blogs; I want to see this practice as collaborative, communicative, rather than some digital form of public mirror. In part, too, I wanted to create a  space for conversations about technology and sociology that people who didn't know me personally would be comfortable interacting with. I knew I was going on the market, and I wanted something I could have sitting on my resume.

It is an ethical, well-reasoned and well-intentioned plan, the kind of plan that is designed aerodynamically to make a satisfying 'whuf' sound when chucked unceremoniously out the window of one's 6th floor Parisian flat.

With that friendly preface, allow me to say: I am in Paris (!!!!!!!!!!). It has been a cautious union, leading inexorably towards the same fate that befalls all international travelers. When I first met Paris, 9 days ago, I found it loud and pushy. After a few days in its company, I liked Paris as a friend, but I did not like it like it. Four days in, I met London on a brief 24-hour sojourn, and suddenly Paris seemed twice as witty and good looking. And, finally, last Saturday morning, I woke up intoxicated on the floor of Paris' bedroom, covered in butter and oil paint, in love.

I have no illusions about this fling. Paris is a player. I know I'm not the first tourist it's bedded. Everyone's emotional experience of Paris seems deceptively similar: drugged, euophoric. My sense is that the streets of Paris run with a fjord-deep fantasy about a life based in art, presence, sensuality and sex. You can choose to adopt the fantasy or not. If you adopt, you fall in love.

Living here would be like living inside a deeply indulgent, idyllic VR game. Both metaphorically and literally, I can't imagine that years of imbibing this much fresh creamery butter could really be genuinely nutritive. But as a month-long spa-- as a rehabilitative, neck-deep butter skin soak followed by a full-body modern art massage (picture a crisp French waiter pummeling you gently with oblong red ceramic statues)-- it's phenomenal.

Also: I got a camera.

More later. 

The Boundary that Became a Telephone Wire

This blog entry is the second part of a short series about my interview with Gina Neff, a professor in Communications, who specializes in social structures and technology. It will make a lot more sense if you read the first one.

The Boundary

I talked last time about homophily (groups composed of individuals which are very similar, and communicate well, but have little new to add to each other) and heterophily (groups composed of individuals who are very different, can't communicate at all, but have lots to add).

So, the middle between the two extremes, as always, is where the good stuff happens: where groups with remarkably different perspectives become able to come up with ideas and solve problems together. (Yes, you probably can't get the Bolivian witch woman to communicate with the American economist, but if they could, holy Toledo, the essay they could write.) If your goal is to give an organization the power to get valuable stuff done, then you want to build a bridge -- but not a very thick one -- between heterophilious groups, getting them talking, but keeping them different.

Gina explains that sometimes this bridge is made out of boundary objects; these are objects that mean different things to each group, but which create a shared place where dialogue can begin. I think of them as hinges, like in the image to the left, creating the bare minimum connection between two different and isolated social networks. In the case of her current study, the former boundary object of the blueprint is being replaced by collaborative software, which is actually facilitating (instead of just necessitating) conversations; the thin connections are growing thicker, and it closes the gap between the two heterophilious groups.

The Telephone Wire

Closing that gap means changing everything about the process of building buildings. A lot of formal work processes, as well as personal biases and rituals, have evolved around the interaction of these two culturally-isolated groups. If you deepen that interaction, those processes and biases will change, too. There will be unintended consequences, not only subjectively for the participants, but with the products they create.

In Gina's current study, in this particular case of contractors collaborating with architects, those side effects might wind up being very good: the improved collaboration may be making it much easier to build environmentally efficient buildings. Gina explains:

The building industry is one of the most environmentally wasteful of all the industries. Something like 35% of landfill is from the building industry, either by torn-down houses or waste from construction projects. The built environment in America consumes 65-70% of our energy. We tend to think it's cars, but mostly it's heating our buildings.

[…] I believe that if we improve collaboration, and if we have better use of these new technologies, this building information modeling, that buildings can be built greener, better decisions can be made, less waste produced. And the icing (which isn't "icing" for me, but which is "icing" for the industry), is that: people get along better! They're happier! They're less stressed out. They don't burn out. They don't scream at each other. They don't sue each other.

The (Metaphorical) Phone Bill

I don't want to mislead anybody, though (least of all me); unintended consequences of technological innovations are not reliably good. In this case, they were (so far, anyway): brining in the technical tool is redistributing the power in a way that is more egalitarian, and more good stuff is getting done. But ritualized power disparities are everywhere, just like the organizational or social mandates that dictate them, and they are not always bad.

Power is complicated; take for example this fascinating blog entry called "Privacy and Power" by Bruce Schneier on the nature of information disclosure in power balances (amusing example from the entry: "When your doctor says 'Take off your clothes,' it makes no sense for you to say, 'You first, doc.' The two of you are not engaging in an interaction of equals."). Do you want to be able to ask your doctor to drop trou? Do you want your kids to be able to send their teachers home in the middle of the day? If you could leverage a technology to even those playing fields, what would happen?

One lesson that I am learning over and over again about using technology to intervene in social systems: the social structures, cycles, rituals, and needs are bigger and smarter than you. You cannot get a comprehensive view of them before you act, and thus your actions will always have unintended consequences... No matter how smart you are, or how wholly good the technology seems to be. Thus, Rule #1 of using technology to intervene in social systems: Remember: you don't know what you're doing.

For more on how none of us know what we're doing, see my next blog entry, of the same name. :)

Ruthbert

Note: If you are looking at this blog because you are considering employing me, and only want to see the non-silly entries, filter for the keyword consummate_vs. For more Ruthbert, filter for same.

Welcome to the next episode of Ruthbert, wherein two non-colocated sardonic female information workers search for life, love, meaning, and opportunities to make cute puns about bears.

Kimberly: I spelled "for example" as "for exmaple"
this particular field goes out to all of you ex maples out there
don't ever go back, man
Ruth: snort
Kimberly: Oh god, I'm sorry for this:
"I know you're pining away.... but don't fall off the wagon"
Ruth: NO
Kimberly: "I'm not ON the wagon, man. I AM the wagon"
Ruth: NO Kim that's a BAD Kim
Kimberly: HA
HA HA
Ruth: now you go to your room and THINK about what you did

Ruth's statuses for April 08:

• One two three o'clock four o'clock BARACK
• Solid as Barack
• Barack-a-bye baby, in the treetop, when the wind blows the cradle will Barack
• We built this city on Barack and roll
• Hush little baby don't say a word, Obama's gonna buy you a Barackingbird
• Walk this way, Barack this way
• Barack me Amadeus

Kimberly: His travel doctor ALSO suggested he get the same blood test I suggested he get.
Ruth: travel doctor? is that like a miniature version of a doctor, that comes in a plastic carrying case?
Kimberly: it's nice because he's magnetic on the bottom and doesn't tip over
Ruth: makes it harder to lose him under the seat, too
Kimberly: sometimes you drop him and find him sticking perpendicular out of the gearshift

Ruth status: "whipped topping" is a phrase disturbing in its vagueness
Kimberly status: Officemate: What would you do without me? Me: I don’t know! Probably become a Pollyanna optimist with nothing but hope for the future and respect for Microsoft products. Officemate: I doubt that.
Kimberly: crashed
Ruth: oh, that's no good
Kimberly: I would like to drive a requirement into today's Ruth Release
it's a pry 2, but will support many other releases
it's called: More Talking
you'll note if you take a look at the process workflows that we would like at least 15 Funny Jokes included in this piece of functionality
Ruth: I don't know if 15 Funny Jokes is a realistic expectation of deliverables this late in the Release
what are your KPIs for the jokes?
Kimberly: well
we're measuring them by funny sounds
like "ingers" and "oogle"
that's going to have the greatest customer satisfaction impact
"eezle"
also references to bears
Ruth: Those success metrics sound reasonable
here is my counter-proposal:
I should be able to get you 10 Funny Jokes by EOD
Ruth: we can push the remaining 5 out to tomorrow's release
Kimberly: hmm
Ruth: and supplement in the meantime with Talking About Boys
Kimberly: iiiinteresting
Ruth: my research has shown that customers respond almost as well to Talking About Boys
but admittedly, the sample size is small
Kimberly: that may be bad news to our Future Humor Writers of America division, but the 13 Year Old Girl stakeholder group has been trying to push that change request through forever
I think we can ship this one
I crashed again

Kimberly: my midday lonesomes are hitting
Ruth: you are not alone
you are at Microsoft
Steve Ballmer is probably spying on you right now

Kimberly: it's going to be cloudy all weekend
but warm
Ruth: it better not hail
Kimberly: I screwed up and scheduled a bunch of meetings for Memorial Day because nobody had blocked it off
including me
Ruth: oopsie
Kimberly: this is how I covered my tracks: "On second thought, I'm going to declare Monday Memorial Day and give all of you guys the day off. No need to thank me. "
I have godlike powers
this is why it's valid and useful for you to bring your concerns about hail straight to me

Ruth: cows
I am wearing jeans yay!
Kimberly: ME TOO
Ruth: yay
Kimberly: that's why we're friends
Ruth: does that mean we're only friends on fridays?
Kimberly: yes
UNLESS
you are ALSO usually wearing something that I also am usually wearing
like shoes
we could base our friendship on shoes
Ruth: or a bra
or an air of superiority

Gina Neff: Work and Power

Note: I have resolved to: (1) make my posts shorter so they stop eating my life, and (2) swerve, with a deft flick of the steering wheel, from my former outline of stuff that I was going to cover, to concentrating on my "Technology as Social Intervention: Discuss" topic, where I hope to learn more and rant less. It's all the same basic subject, though, so you may not even notice the difference.

That said, I went out a few weeks ago and interviewed Gina Neff, who is faculty at the UW Department of Communication. Gina is very taken with the concept of "work and power," and I wanted to ask her: what's the connection between the two? How do organizational structures dictate how power gets allocated to its members? And what happens to those power structures-- or to the communication dynamics of the org as a whole-- when you introduce new problem-solving technologies? If you are also geeky enough to find these topics interesting, you will find some of Gina's answers to those questions in the following few blog entries.

Information, Power and Tools

Gina has been studying these type of questions for years, and she has seen organizations' implicit power structures change radically with the addition of new technological tools, "magnifying existing power disparities," she says, "or breaking them down." The power-holders in an org may try to restrict how a tool is distributed or employed, or might even rally against it, if it seems like it has the potential to redistribute the power to make things happen. Alternatively (as in the following example), it might level the playing field, causing an initial chaos that leads to large changes to the org's workflows and the way its members define their own roles.

Gina is currently undertaking a study about the adoption of building information modeling tools in the construction industry. She explains:

Historically, contractors (the folks who build the buildings) and architects have lived on opposite sides of the organizational divide. They spoke different languages and had different goal sets; they communicated via blueprints. This mutual organizational isolation allowed each group a lot of control over their spheres, but frequently made collaboration a painful, contentious mess. Each group guards its information and works at cross-purposes to the other, with miscommunications leading to mutual stereotyping, which itself helps reinforce the divide.

Gina is studying a transition that's taking place right now, before her eyes as she studies it: Today, builders and architects are beginning to share their visions via 3-D computer graphic tools and databases that represent the building being built. In other words, these groups are adopting a communications- and design- based technological innovation, and it is creating dramatic changes in the way they work together. The stereotypes are being put to the test as the groups are forced into proximity with one another, and each silo's private language is being opened up to the other. As Gina describes: "Their entire communications infrastructure has been channeled into different visual symbols, and is hardwired through different network pathways." Each group is also, in the process, losing some of the autonomy that came with that defended isolation.

Heterophily: Difference and Group Intelligence

It's not far-fetched to imagine that switching the wiring in an organization's communication structure could lead to huge changes. Cultures large and small, since the civilization of man, have kept themselves alive by employing one or another form of isolation: a mountain range, a separate language, secrecy, stereotyping, a forbidding initiation rite; Jews, for example, have kept Jewish culture alive, despite the diaspora, with the aid of lengthy and complex conversion processes, services conducted entirely in Hebrew, and dietary restrictions that can help limit who Jews eat with. If you move a culture's boundary devices, you change the way the culture lives. Build a highway, raise children bilingual, install a phone system, the internet: suddenly you find cultures blending, changing, and questioning the way they do things.


The contractors and architects in the system Gina is studying have historically been heterophilious. "Heterophily" is an amusingly polysyallabic term for "different in a way that makes communication between them hard." The words heterophily and homophily describe two ends of a spectrum: on the one side, you have two groups (or individuals) who are different to the point where they can't communicate at all (an American economist and a Bolivian witch woman); on the other side, you have groups who are so similar that communication between them is easy, but totally uninteresting (an American economist and an American economist ;) ). They have nothing to say to one another that they don't already know.

Want More of This Stuff? Check out:

• The next blog entry and maybe the one after it, where we talk about the consequences of these sorts of changes
• The stuff coming out of the The Center for Work, Technology and Organization at Stanford.

And four "easily accessible" books Gina suggests everyone read:

• Sorting things out: Classification and its Consequences (Bawker and Star)
• Talking about Machines (Julian Orr)
• Human Machine Configurations: Plans and Situated Actions (Suchman)
• Cognition in the Wild (Hutchins)

... Gina recommends all of the above except, technically, the following blog entry. :)

Image pulled from here.

1.2 No I in Meme: Culture and Cognitive Dissonance

There is a wonderful scene in Douglas Adam's Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency where our hero (Dirk) hypnotizes his client (Bill?) and instructs him to, when asked if he'd like some ice cream, jump into the Thames. The scene plays out; on a mid-day walk, Dirk asks his client if he'd like some ice cream; Bill promptly jumps into the Thames with all of his clothes on, climbs back out, and resumes talking. Some version of the ensuing conversation takes place:

Dirk: "Why did you just do that?"

Bill: "Oh, it just seemed like a nice day for a dip."

Dirk: "With all of your clothes on? Why not at least take off your jacket and shoes?"

Bill: "It's one of those 'sieze life by the throat' things. Youv'e got to be spontaneous. And anyway, I needed a quick pick-me-up."

These justifcations are of course total inventions by the client. Dirk stages the scene to show Bill that, given sufficiently subtle and convincing instruction, human beings can be influenced to do all manner of things that aren't necessarily in our best interests, and, when prompted, will provide reams of plausible fiction to make our actions sound congruent with how we look at ourselves.

This strange and fascinating coping mechanism shields us from the unpleasant feeling of cognitive dissonance (the distress that accompanies believing one thing and experiencing another). We are complicated creatures, filled with coping mechanisms like these upon which we rely to plausibly mislead ourselves away from discomfort. Students of cognitive psychology have undertaken the spooky process of enumerating dozens and dozens of these intellectual flaws for us in the form of cognitive biases, like the following:

• Choice-supportive bias: Inventing reasons to support a decision that's inconsistent with your desires or character. Example: "I prefer not to swim in my clothes, but today I jumped into the Thames with my 3-piece suit on. Why? .... Because I was being spontaneous / my suit was dirty! It was a good idea."


• Irrational escalation: Making more irrational choices to justify choices made in the past. Example: "I think I'll jump into the Thames with all my clothes on again on Tuesday. I'm the kind of person who does that."


• Exposure effect: The tendency to feel preference for things simply because you are familiar with them (one of the foundations of corporate or political advertising). Example: "Do you like jumping into the Thames?" "Well, I've never walked down this boardwalk without doing it. So... yes! It's better this way."

Hypothesis: What if, before Dirk triggered the hypnotic suggestion in Bill, someone had walked up to Bill and said: "Hey, what would you think about jumping into that polluted river over there in a few minutes for no reason? With all your clothes on and then being cold all day?"

To test this thesis on one of the greatest implicit American hypotic suggestions of them all (ok, also to have a cultural-miscreant laugh), I participated in a street-theatre-cum-sociological-exercise on Black Friday of 07, the biggest shopping day of the year: Buy More Stuff. I and about 15 other burning man people (burners)* stood, well-dressed, friendly and formal, in the middle of the shopping district holding signs saying "Buy More Stuff" and "Hurry!" When given the opportunity, we engaged shoppers in deadpan and sincere dialogues, advising them: "Don't forget to buy more stuff! Remember, if you don't hurry, they might run out of stuff… or you'll run out of time!"

Aside from being extrardinarily funny for me personally, this was a fascinating exercise in cognitive dissonance and cultural adherence. Some folks laughed at us and cheered us on; many were quite confused and asked us (no kidding) if we were with the local business commission. The great majority, though, avoided our gaze as though we had some kind of deadly laser vision. And a few, about 5% of the passing shoppers, became fiercely angry and verbally attacked us.

Why should it be so scary to look at those four little words? Why would you rain ambiguous-yet-desperate verbal vitriol down upon a polite fellow in a suit holding a "Buy More Stuff" sign? Because reducing the cultural message to its most blunt form makes it really difficult to fib your way around it. If you are not pointlessly rushing and hoarding, the message isn't bothersome (just weird). If you are, though, you are suddenly faced with an instruction that is stupid and objectionable, but that you somehow find yourself right in the middle of executing. It hurts. You can't just stop, but you need to believe that what you are doing is what you want to be doing. So you need that message to go away.

So if it hurt some folks to look at the signs, why didn't it hurt us performers to hold them? Was it because we didn't hurry or buy stuff? Hardly (In fact I remember laughing at myself all the way there because I was an hour late and in a panic). We made it clear to the folks who spoke to us that we ourselves had bought plenty of stuff: our nice clothes, coffees, fancy signs, etc., and that we all planned to buy lots more stuff later. Nobody's immune to their culture, no matter how smart they think they are. We didn't have that horrible sinking feeling of cognitive dissonance, though, because we could laugh at our own actions. We humans are not always acting in our best interests. We do dumb stuff because we are Americans or women or Microsofties or what have you. Structure influences behavior. It's not your fault. But it's a lot easier to change it if you can admit it's going on.

Before I close out this topic, I'll revisit a statement I've made in the last few entries: the USA hosts what is perhaps the most individualistic culture in the world. Individualism is baked into our economy, our media, our housing design, our grocery options. See the following quote from American Cultural Patterns for a tip-of-the-iceberg about what that means:

Self-Reliance and Mythic Individualism
Of all the cultural norms associated with individualism, probably none is stronger than the idea of self-reliance. Americans talk fondly of "pulling themselves up by their own boostraps" or becoming "self-made men" (and women). Many of these ideas are based on myths of the Old West, where brave settlers carved out a new life without outside aid and lonely cowboys who shot straight imposed justice on equally lonely outlaws.

[…] The social norm persists, however, as an avoidance of dependence. Since Americans can envisage few fates worse than dependence, they continue to stress self-reliance as a guard against desirable socialization becoming dreaded conformity. Although rugged self-reliance lives on mainly in movies, Americans abroad are often quick to fall back on mythic individualism and fault the foreigner who shows no desire to be self-reliant.

The meaning of this social norm is neither translatable into other languages nor is it self-evident in many cultures. [… In Latin America] the idea of the self as the source and sole limiting factor in action is missing. Indeed, the whole concept of self-reliance itself is not particularly congenial to Latin Americans, who have a strong attachment to their families and immediate groups. They do not deplore dependence as Americans do. Among the Chinese, dependence on others is desirable, for it strengthens the relationship among people and affirms a broad definition of self. Chinese parents, for instance, take pride in being dependent on their children and being supported by them. In Japan, to be self-reliant in the way that is meant by Americans is to be without an identity. [p.136 - 137]

It is probably ironic, or painful, or even perhaps really funny, that our highly individualistic American culture tells us so convincingly that we don't have or even need one: that each person is totally free to make his or her own choices, irrespective of what other people or our society expects us to do; that we are standalone units who think and make choices primarily by ourselves. It so clearly ain't the case.

I am an individualistic person; I also buy stuff and hurry. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying (necessiarly) that we shouldn't be individualistic or look at things in those terms. I am saying, though, that the next time we jump into our American Thames, we not make up a reason about how it's the best way to do things (and folks who don't do it are dumb or criminal), or how it's human nature and inescapable, or how 'we actually don't jump into the Thames, sorry, you must be mistaken' (as we stand there squelching wetly in our Oxfords).

What does it mean to be the most individualistic culture int he world? How does it make us feel? Is there anything we'd like to change about it, anything we're sure we want to keep? What cultural structures give rise to our behavior? How could those structures be changed, and what makes them difficult to change? Why should we care? What are some interesting parts of life that non-individualistic cultures are good at that we haven't figured out yet?

----

Last but not least in Structure Determines Behavior: Work and Power (Interview with Gina Neff; how technology changes structural dynamics)

** Note: I am not really a "burning man people." They do some kickin street theatre, though.

Image thanks to Michael Holden, to whom Buy More Stuff is credited.

1.2 No I in Meme: Culture (White People are White)

Though it is a step further away from my basic focus on social systems and technology, I would be remiss in my duties as a lister-of-social-structures if I did not list the most pervasive and unconscious structure of all: culture.

I write this entry with a mild, throbbing pain in my left Heresy Lobe, an old sports injury incurred from climbing too many times up onto my old soapbox about individualism in American culture. I threw a tarp over it when I graduated from grad school, but I am formally breaking out my carnie barker voice and bowtie as we speak.

What, you ask, is my hangup about individualism and American culture? (Watch my friends dive into bushes and roll off screen as I respond.) Recall that my basic point here is that structure determines behavior: it affects our actions, belief systems, perception of ourselves, and our conception of our options in the world. If you know about the structure, you have a little more free will; if you don't, you run a high risk of unthinkingly incorporating its mandates.

We Americans are particularly susceptible to this, and particularly blind to that susceptibility. Perhaps you have heard the joke:

Q: What do you call someone who speaks three languages?
A: Trilingual.
Q: What do you call someone who speaks two languages?
A: Bilingual.
Q: What do you call someone who speaks one language?
A: American!

The USA hosts one of the most geographically and linguistically isolated urban cultures in the world. That makes us Americans very different than (for example) European, Latin American or Asian cultures when it comes down to knowing that we have a culture at all. Even when we do travel, we rarely stay long or become fluent in the local language, and thus we miss volumes about what culture really is: arbitrary, powerful, silly or objectionable. We are convinced that everything we do as Americans is "just human nature" or "the same all over the world."

Living overseas for a year is a great way to recognize that what you are, and how you do things, is not "the default way." Most of us, though, can discover this bias in ourselves from our desk chairs. Give it a shot: if you are Black, say out loud "I am Black." If you're Chinese, Japanese or Korean, say so. If you are White, say "I am White."

So, the first two may come easily. But most White people will become very uncomfortable openly stating we are White. To us, we are not White: we are normal. We do not behave like White people; we behave normally, while Black people behave like black people and Japanese people behave like Asians.

I, the writer of this blog, am a White American person, and mostly I behave just like one. I am a consumer, I'm highly innovative, very individualistic, stuffy about sex, outgoing; I wait patiently in lines; I have a large "personal space" envelope, and get antsy when all but specific people touch me at all but agreed-upon times; I am more standoffish and disingenuous than the most uptight Latin American, and my friendships are usually shallower and more transient than the most cynical European (though I am working hard to shake those two).

Are you a White American? In what ways do you behave just like a White American, and in what ways do you behave differently? Does this whole section make you wince and hold your breath? If so, why?

We Americans have, by and large, "drunk the Kool-Aid" of American culture, and so we take the nourishment and the carcinogens together and call them "humanity." We are highly susceptible to the negative societal and psychological side-effects of our quirks. Where we are individualistic by culture, we fall prey to loneliness or rudeness; where we are materialistic, we fall prey to the existential vacuum. Etc etc.

The question of "what is human nature" vs "what is American culture" has always fascinated me, and so I learned some foreign languages, spent a non-small portion of my life living in third-world countries, and focused my undergraduate thesis on social-cultural constructs and how they affect self-perception and relationships.** I only suggest you also do this if you, too, want to contract the Tourette's Syndrome-esque tendency to rant uncontrollably. If you would instead prefer a more moderate and salmonella-free immersion in the topic of the great spectrum of cultural structures, I strongly recommend the book American Cultural Patterns. It was written some 20 years ago to prepare first-time Peace Corps workers for culture shock. It is short and highly readable and will completely mess up your mind. It is one of the best nonfiction books I have ever read; I can't go five pages without bolting up from my chair to discuss it with someone.

Allowing yourself to question your own deep, foundational assumptions about human beings, relationships, success, time, reason and language can be a seriously unsettling experience. It can lead to cognitive dissonance, the discomfort that arises from a stark contradiction between what one believes to be so and what appears to be true; human beings are typically so extremely averse to that discomfort that they will usually become angry, or contstruct elaborate and transparent untruths, to avoid feeling it (a fascinating cognitive bias which I'll talk about sometime later).

This cognitive dissonance is sometimes fun for insensitve counterculturalists like to me to play with...

Next: >> I thought I could rant about this in one entry, but I was oh so very wrong. >>

**My web page is really really outdated. It's going to stay like that for a while.