outline-wk2.md

Critical Design 2016: Reading Outlines

Week 2: Interface

Eitan Wilf 2013 Toward an Anthropology of Computer-Mediated, Algorithmic Forms of Sociality. Current Anthropology 54(6): 716–739.

Algorithms mediate sociality by patterning user behavior: "Along with other computerized algorithms, they have enabled search engines such as Google and social media companies such as Facebook to statistically predict online users’ individual preferences, tastes, and distastes—in short, their individual styles of various kinds—based on their online behavior, and then provide and produce online content that mirrors and anticipates these styles."

• statistical patterns generate both aesthetic effects and profit: "computerized algorithms identify behavior as a statistical pattern that they can then anticipate and reproduce to achieve"

• online customization seen as atomizing, fragmenting: “this situation results in stifling self-referentiality, narcissism, atomism, and the fragmentation of the public sphere (Pariser 2011:112–113, 160)"

• possibilities for adapting algorithms to other effects, showing users a different mix 718

• theorizing algorithmic living: "theorizing the role played by computerized algorithms in various ethnographic sites (Downey 1998; Helmreich 1998; Kockelman 2011; Suchman 2007; Zaloom 2006)."

• anthropological notions of culture and western notions of artistic style, deeply habituated with little control: "I will argue that this tradition was informed by a Romantic heritage of modeling the notion of culture on the presumed purity of Western high art." 719

• Culture as Style: styling styles through algorithmically mediated sociality

  • " useful for elucidating the contemporary historical moment of increased mediation of sociality by computerized algorithms that routinely analyze people’s styles of behavior as statistical probabilities and then allow individuals to anticipate and reconfigure these styles"

• style as embodied or unconsciously known seen as responsible for endurance and durability of culture

• cultures defined by style; embodied, habituated style (e.g. Boas) 720

• Benedict, patterns of culture: "A culture, like an individual, is a more or less consistent pattern of thought and action"

• Bateson: patterned art object and patterned culture —> style; cybernetics: culture as information

• Bourdieu, Geertz on culture as style, "Bourdieu emphasizing the body as the infrastructure of culture and its reproduction and Geertz highlighting sym- bols as the stuff culture is made of"

• Bourdieu and Geertz "appropriate the notion of style to talk about cultural integration” (habitus, symbols)

• innovation seen as possible within constraints of existing style: "innovation as the product of the exploration of the space of pos- sibilities within the constraints of a specific style."

  • style then seen as possible only in existing system: "Conceptual spaces are spaces of possibilities that derive from a given set of restraints"
  • manipulating algorithms that replicate styles then allows for transforming and reconfiguring governing rules

• human jazz players likened to machines; Syrus is a machine designed not to: "Syrus, then, is a machine that is supposed to simulate the contingency of human action and thus to assist players who have become more like the machines of yesteryear"

  • Markov models, also used to replicate existing styles: "James took issue with scientists and composers who use the same com- puterized algorithms he uses but for simulating well-known and already familiar musical styles"
  • stylistic combinations not possible from a human
  • requires rethinking "the anthropological tradition of theorizing culture as artistic style" Herder: "each group is an organic whole that embodies a unique genius and that can only be understood in terms of its unique history" Boas — cultural pluralism, unique history of each culture against evolutionist, diffusionist, determinist accounts of culture
  • instead of culture as art, creativity of a people: "culture as habituated tradition within a framework of cultural determinism"

• unity of style because style expresses broader way of life for a group: "style as the crystallized expression of a broader way of life of the social group within which a specific artwork emerged."

• style of life for a given Culture (Spengler)

  • style as holistic and integrated, an organic whole, like the culture concept: "integration of seemingly distinct parts suggested by the culture concept"
  • conceptual and aesthetic unity of culture, through style

• anthropologists presume to have unique position in understanding a culture’s style :"the assumption that the anthropologist has a privileged access to understanding the true nature of cultural phenomena of which less refined people"

• inadequacy of culture-as-style to account for emerging “mingling of styles:” "This genealogy explains the inadequacy of this tra- dition to account not only for the kind of “mingling of styles” that is fast becoming a key logic of sociality in the present historical moment but also for anthropology’s long-held dif- ficulty to theorize the dynamism and fluidity that characterize social life in general." What’s a style vs a way of life?

• style as form not subject (725)

• purity of form and style in anthropological notion of one culture, one society: "It suggests that anthropology’s emphasis on the “one culture for one society” principle stems in part from the view of Western high art as an emblematic form of cultural integration” (726)

• mingling of styles as barbarism, nonculture (Horkheimer & Adorno)

• coherent culture concept = purity of artistic style How can one culture develop different styles of music, then?

• style of styling styles: "a theory of style must be a theory of specific restraints that create patterned phenomena."

• computer algorithms as nonhuman agents that provide: "the option to reconfigure existing styles of behavior by reconfiguring these restraints with relative ease."

• role of material restraints in computing

• western conceptions of creativity as recombination Algorithms make it possible to identify, quantify, and reproduce style, realizing an abstraction

Cory Knobel and Geoffrey C Bowker 2011 Values in Design. Communications of the ACM 54(7): 26.

• human values in technology design
• security/privacy, hardware design, culture valence (as “Internet architectures go global”) value clashes:
• mobiles and locatability/accountability
• design of search algorithms and subject position/location: "The algorithm that provides nearly universal access to knowledge also unwittingly suppresses knowledge of African countries. Or is this always un- witting? A search on “Obamacare” pro- duces a taxpayer-paid-for link to http:// www.healthcare.gov as a top hit.1"
• Values in Design: "Decades of research in the sociology of science and technology have shown that technical infrastructures reveal human values most often through counterproductivity, tension, or failure."
  • goal of design that creates less friction around values
• design as prescriptive, normative: how users ought to use/behave/interact/engage
• "Design must be integrated in ways that challenge assumptions about what can and cannot be changed." What does it mean for design to respect existing values? What’s at stake or assumed?

Bruno Latour 2005 Reassembling the Social: an Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press

• science and tech now co-extensive with “society,” social is everywhere and yet nowhere
• science/society division now unclear
• STS analyzed construction of science, but what about of society?
• what is the social, society, social factors, social order, practice, structure, etc.
• the social/society as a domain (separate from others), in which the social came to explain everything called social
• the social as a “context” for other activities; application of scientific method (quantitative tools, objective observation)
• society not as context but as connecting elements, among others
• social not as a glue: social is what is glued together by many other types of connectors
• social aggregates are what need to be explained by the specific associations provided by other domains:
  • tracing of associations
  • the social not as a thing but a type of connection between non-social things
  • new heterogenous assemblages of things formed by associations which must be traced: “the tracing of new associations and to the designing of their assemblages"
• the social as the thing to be explained, not the explanation: ties that make up the social are non-social
• Actor-Network-Theory
• goal of reconnecting, reconstructing, reassembling, not just deconstruction
• non-human agents, role of actors as experts who understand what they do
• reassembling social into a collective not a society