February 08, 2006
(Re-)Mixing Culture - Homogeneity, Recombination, and Infinite Possibilities
One of the fears of globalization, and the hegemonic spread of certain powerful cultures, is that everything will end up being the same. Visit Tokyo and you can eat at McDonald's or KFC. Visit Russia and they're all listening to Britney Spears (or some such).
While such forces certainly exist, they are not the only, nor, I suspect, even the predominant ones. My experience is leading me to think that what's much more likely than a prevailing homogeneity is recombination -- memetic splicing that leads to something different from the elements that contributed to it.
Food is an obvious example... Here in the Bay Area the idea of a "fusion" restaurant is becoming passe, because chefs are drawing from all manner of sources to develop culinary products. I had dinner at a neighborhood restaurant in Berkeley where the salad was vietnamese-inspired, the soup was thai-inspired, Stacy had a delightful Mexican-inspired dish, and we all enjoyed tapioca pudding for dessert. The restaurant didn't make a big thing out of the cultural progenitors -- the chefs simply decided to pick and choose and create a menu that made sense.
Another obvious example is music. Take The Punjabi Rapper. Actually, that's it. Does any more need to be said?
An example closer to my professional work life. Stacy, who is getting her Ph.D. in anthropology (archaeology, specifically) attended a design ethnography workshop at the American Anthropological Association conference. There, she learned about affinity diagrams (aka, playing with sticky notes), and realized that her practice could benefit from this method that had been developed in HCI as a way to make sense of user data. And, of course, HCI had long been drawing from anthropological practice to understand user populations.
This is a trend affecting society at every level. And it's not simply a matter of taking two distinct things and having them combine to make a third. It's a matter of taking a part of two distinct things can now be recombined in any number of ways, because each of those original things can be broken down, and have its elements combined with elements of the other, leading to an explosion of possibilities.
The best example of this process is molecular biology, and it wasn't until we understood genes, combination and recombination, mutation, and selection that we could really have a framework to appreciate what's happening in our cultural world.
So, I guess I'm saying -- don't get down in the face of global sameness; relish the opportunity for recombination to lead to infinite cultural possibilities.
February 05, 2006
With a veiled reference to Billy Ocean
Last week saw the release of my essay, "Get Out Of Your Lab, and Into Their Lives," about the woes of lab usability, and the opportunities that remote usability and field research give us. Peterme readers will recognize the genesis of this essay in an earlier post here.
Technorati Tags: fieldresearch, usability
