How Culture and Technology Create One Another: Ramesh Srinivasan at TEDxUCLA
Summary
TLDRThis talk explores the profound impact of technology on diverse cultures worldwide. With 5 billion people having mobile phones, we witness unique intersections of technology and tradition, from an Indian guru to a Papua New Guinean crocodile hunter using phones as flashlights. The speaker delves into how technology can inspire collective action in marginalized communities and the importance of rethinking the underlying codes of technology to incorporate diverse cultural perspectives. The discussion culminates in the potential for a digital revolution that empowers various cultural voices and knowledge systems to coexist and enrich our global technological landscape.
Takeaways
- 🌐 The world has approximately 7 billion people, with about 5 billion having mobile phones and 2-3 billion having some form of internet access.
- 📱 Mobile phones have become ubiquitous, even among groups like Indian Gurus and fisherman in Southern India, showing their utility in various contexts.
- 🌊 Technology, such as mobile phones, played a critical role in a fisherman's ability to warn his family about the 2004 tsunami, saving lives.
- 🐊 In Papua New Guinea, people from a shamanic cult use the light from their mobile phones to hunt crocodiles, demonstrating creative uses of technology.
- 🎥 In Andra Pradesh, India, marginalized communities use video cameras to document their lives, which inspires collective action and challenges fatalistic views.
- 🤔 The speaker explores the intersection of culture and technology, questioning how technology's codes and algorithms are influenced by Western knowledge structures.
- 🌱 The concept of 'Tribal Peace' technology was developed with Native American populations to empower their indigenous traditions and knowledge systems.
- 🏛 Museums are digitizing their collections, and there's a push to include indigenous perspectives, allowing for a more diverse understanding of cultural artifacts.
- 🌱 The speaker advocates for a rethinking of technology to allow for the coexistence of different knowledge systems, leading to a more inclusive digital landscape.
- 🌐 The potential for 'emergent' technologies arises when different forms of knowledge meet, as seen in the biological diversity of Papua New Guinea.
Q & A
What is the approximate number of mobile phone users in the world today?
-Approximately 5 billion out of the 7 billion people in the world have mobile phones.
How does the speaker describe the impact of mobile phones on diverse cultures?
-The speaker illustrates the impact by sharing stories such as an Indian Guru using a mobile phone and a fisherman in Southern India using his phone to warn his family about the tsunami, demonstrating the diverse and creative ways mobile phones are utilized across cultures.
What is the significance of the crocodile in the shamanic cult mentioned in the script?
-In the shamanic cult, the crocodile is worshipped as a spirit, and part of this worship involves hunting the crocodile at night, which is a significant cultural practice that the speaker explored during his time in Papua New Guinea.
How did the people in the remote region of Papua New Guinea use mobile phones for hunting crocodiles?
-They used the light emitted from their mobile phones to spot the eyes of crocodiles in the dark, as they could not afford flashlights due to the lack of battery supply in their remote area.
What was the speaker's goal when working with communities in Andra Pradesh, India?
-The speaker aimed to change the fatalistic perspectives of these communities and explore whether technology could facilitate collective action by documenting their traditions, stories, and issues through video cameras.
What is a 'filter bubble' as mentioned in the script?
-A 'filter bubble' refers to the personalized algorithmic selection of information based on one's online behavior, which can create a personalized echo chamber of information, as discussed by Eli Pariser in a TED Talk.
How does the speaker suggest rethinking technology from a non-Western perspective?
-The speaker suggests rethinking technology by considering alternative ways of knowing the world, such as Aboriginal maps that are based on stories, traditions, and performances, rather than the structured, separated concepts typical of Western knowledge.
What was the purpose of creating the 'Tribal Peace' system with Native American populations?
-The 'Tribal Peace' system was designed to empower sovereign indigenous local traditions by creating a technology that respects and is built around the knowledges, categories, and concepts important to these communities.
How does the speaker propose the integration of diverse cultural knowledge with technology in museums?
-The speaker proposes integrating diverse cultural knowledge with technology in museums by allowing different cultural perspectives to coexist and inform one another, leading to a new way of understanding and digitizing museum objects that respects both Western and indigenous interpretations.
What is the concept of 'emergence' as it relates to the speaker's discussion on technology and culture?
-The concept of 'emergence' refers to the creation of new and unique forms when different species or forms of knowledge meet and interact, as seen in the biological world and as the speaker suggests could also be possible in the digital world when diverse cultural knowledge systems inform technology.
Outlines
📱 Mobile Phones and Cultural Intersections
The speaker begins by highlighting the prevalence of mobile phones, with approximately 5 billion out of 7 billion people owning them. This widespread access to technology has led to unique intersections between culture and technology. The speaker shares anecdotes, such as an Indian Guru using a mobile phone and a fisherman in Southern India who used his phone to warn his family about the incoming tsunami, saving lives. These stories illustrate how technology is being integrated into diverse cultural contexts, suggesting a profound impact on societal dynamics.
🌐 Technology and Cultural Codes
The speaker delves into the influence of technology on culture and vice versa. They discuss the Western, Enlightenment-based logic that underpins many databases and algorithms, which contrasts with the interconnected, story-based knowledge systems of some indigenous cultures. The speaker shares their work with Native American populations, focusing on the creation of 'Tribal Peace,' a technology designed to empower indigenous traditions. They emphasize the importance of rethinking technology to accommodate diverse cultural perspectives, advocating for a bottom-up approach that respects and integrates local knowledge and ways of knowing.
🌱 Emergence of New Knowledge Systems
In the final paragraph, the speaker explores the concept of 'emergence' in the context of technology and culture. They use the example of unique animals in Papua New Guinea, which exist due to the parallel existence and occasional mingling of different species. This serves as a metaphor for how different forms of knowledge can coexist and inform each other in the digital world. The speaker suggests that by allowing diverse cultural voices to exist in parallel and interact, we can create new, innovative systems that reflect a variety of perspectives. They conclude by emphasizing the need to rethink the underlying codes of technology to empower diverse global voices and fulfill the early, grassroots promises of the digital revolution.
Mindmap
Keywords
💡Mobile Phones
💡Internet Access
💡Cultural Intersections
💡Collective Action
💡Technology Codes
💡Filter Bubble
💡Aboriginal Map
💡Tribal Peace
💡Zuni Knowledge System
💡Emergence
Highlights
Approximately 5 billion out of 7 billion people have mobile phones, indicating a high level of mobile phone penetration worldwide.
Between 2 and 3 billion people have some form of internet access, showcasing the digital divide and its various contexts globally.
The Indian Guru's use of a mobile phone despite traditional practices illustrates the intersection of technology and culture.
A fisherman in Southern India used his mobile phone to warn his family about the tsunami, saving lives through technology.
In Papua New Guinea, a shamanic cult uses mobile phone lights for hunting crocodiles, demonstrating creative tech use in remote areas.
Technology can inspire collective action, as seen in rural Indian villages where video cameras document local issues and traditions.
The potential of technology to facilitate social change is explored through the empowerment of marginalized communities.
The codes and algorithms behind technology often reflect Western knowledge structures, which may not align with other cultures' ways of knowing.
The need to rethink technology's underlying codes to include diverse cultural perspectives is emphasized.
Aboriginal maps represent an alternative way of knowing the world, challenging the Western approach to cartography and technology.
Tribal Peace is a system designed to empower Native American traditions through technology, reflecting local knowledge and categories.
The project with Native American reservations aimed to create a technology that respects and reflects indigenous knowledge systems.
Museums' digitization of objects presents an opportunity to rethink how different cultural knowledge systems can coexist in the digital realm.
Zuni Elders' engagement with museum objects highlights the stark contrast between Western and indigenous interpretations of cultural artifacts.
The potential for technology to enable the coexistence of diverse knowledge systems, leading to new forms of innovation and understanding.
The speaker's vision for technology is one that allows for the empowerment of diverse cultural voices in the digital revolution.
The importance of rethinking the codes behind technology to hack new meanings and empower underrepresented groups in the digital age.
The speaker's call to action to consider the global and diverse engagement with technology, aligning with the early countercultural promises of the internet.
Transcripts
we live in a world today with
approximately 7 billion people in our
world today and astonishingly about 5
billion out of those 7 billion people
now have mobile phones and something
between 2 and three billion out of those
7 billion people have some form of
access to the internet though that's
very diverse and very different in
different circumstances in different
contexts around the world but what this
creates are very uncanny interesting
fascinating and surprising intersections
so we see for example this man here an
Indian Guru not necessarily your first
order consideration of who a mobile
phone user would be he's got his big
Chillum in his hand but the mobile phone
somehow is providing some utility for
him
and then on the left hand side we see
this fisherman and this is a great story
because this is a fisherman in Southern
India who was out at Sea when the
tsunami hit all of us remember the
tsunami when it hit he was out there
with his mobile phone and he was calling
his family and texting his family on the
shore in these huts on the beach saying
I see these terrible waves coming get
off of the shore and that did save some
lives though the tsunami was ultimately
highly disastrous for for all but that
story doesn't just end in India that
also concerns my friend sebie
ma does everybody see the fascinating
crocodile tattoos he has on the on his
back so seimi is part of a shamanic cult
where they worship the crocodile spirits
but part of worshiping a crocodile
Spirit doesn't necessarily mean not
touching the crocodile but actually
hunting it in the middle of the night so
I spent time on the seic river in Papa
New Guinea trying to understand how
these people are living their lives and
how technology might be influencing
their lives in different ways and what I
found was in the middle of the night we
would go out in these large Dugout
wooden
canoes and try to hunt crocodiles
together and I'm really bad at hunting
crocodiles I don't know if any of you
have expertise in that but that's pretty
hard to do but what you always try to do
when you try to hunt a crocodile is look
for the eyes of the crocodile in the
middle of the night so I thought we
would try to do this using a flashlight
or something along those lines right but
these guys didn't have any flashlights
because they couldn't afford any
batteries because there was hardly any
supply of batteries out in this
extremely remote region of the world how
do we find these crocodiles they're
using their mobile phones the lights
emitted from their mobile phones to look
for the eyes of the
crocodile and that creates this
situation this enclosure these
crocodiles in this enclosure and that
big guy on the back charged me luckily
Papa new guineans know how to build
fences so that got me really interested
in thinking about how is culture
changing thanks to the diffusion of
Technology around the world and I study
these questions in very different
contexts with very different communities
and today I'm just going to give you a
bit of a sample of some of those stories
so this is in Andra Pradesh which is
kind of Southeastern India here and I
was interested in communities that are
sort of on the margins of society in
rural parts of India who have very
fatalistic sorts of perspectives about
their lives and their abilities to
generate economy development social and
political power in various ways and what
was interesting here is I would hang out
with a group in these different Villages
and generally what happens is when
people have meetings in these different
Villages they sit around and talk about
their dreams their visions and so on but
usually what comes out of those meetings
is there's nothing we can really do
about the process well is there a way to
change that dynamic
and can technology somehow facilitate
the changing of that
Dynamic so this is kind of what I was
looking at here people taking video
cameras using video cameras to try to
document different Traditions different
stories different issues different
realities that they were experiencing
collectively and together sitting and
watching the videos that one another
were creating in such a way to actually
inspire Collective action and we saw
fascinating effects start to happen
people were using video cameras to
document abuses by the government people
were using video cameras to document
their trades and their capacities and by
creating these videos they were able to
collectively rally around the content
produced by that technology to actually
try to generate some forms of what we
call in social sciences Collective
action from below so we see various
forms of mobilization that can occur but
if you trust communities if you trust
cultures if you trust people to have the
power with technology rather than
presuming what technology does or does
not mean for people and that got me
thinking about a lot of interesting
questions so far I've only talked about
uses of technology and creative uses of
Technology but what are the codes of
Technology what's behind those databases
what's behind those algorithms what's
behind what Eli parizer in a huge Ted
Talk called the filter bubble what are
the assumptions the codes that make
technology possible
well it turns out that new technologies
like many forms of science that come in
our world today come out of a particular
moment in the history of science that
come out of Dick har and the
Enlightenment and those days where you
try to separate knowledge create
structural ways of mapping the world so
you see an example here of what one
might call Western knowledge parent
child relationships between different
concepts but these concepts are neatly
separated from one another in such a way
that knowledge is structured and if you
look at the databases and the algorithms
that structure our world today they
follow similar sorts of Logics but now
with 5 billion people having access to
mobile phones and us really starting to
be increasingly concerned with the
voices of diverse people we have to
rethink these codes that underly
technology that's why I say it's not
just technology creating and shaping
culture it's also culture
creating and shaping technology as an
example look at this this is an
Aboriginal map this is an Aboriginal way
of telling a story about the world it's
actually a very similar form to that
which we just saw except it represents
an alternative way of knowing the world
this is an ancestral being a crocodile
spirit and when you look at this map it
may not make sense to most of us but
when Aboriginal people look at this map
they are able to navigate their
landscape because it's all based on
stories traditions and performances is
there a way to rethink technology from
the perspective of this
map so this is something I was thinking
about as I was assigned to do different
projects in different parts of the world
I worked quite a bit with Native
American populations and I was actually
brought out to work with 19 Native
American reservations in east of San
Diego County in the deserts on the sides
of mountains trying to think about how I
could design and build a technology
because these guys had internet access
that actually could Empower their
Sovereign indigenous local
traditions and so we ended up building
the system which we call tribal peace
and this was grafted on a beautiful
image of a manzanita tree which is a
symbol of rebirth across the populations
but what's interesting is not just the
creation of the technology but the codes
behind the
technology and that works by talking to
people like Jane Dumis here on the left
a woman who has impacted and shaped my
life a woman who I actually had a dream
about just two nights ago Jane I came to
Jane with sage and tobacco shared my own
stories told her about my own Traditions
as someone who's from Southern India and
got her blessing to actually help me
design and endorse and articulate the
system to work across these very
geographically dispersed reservations
east of San Diego County and what we
were able to create was an alternate
mapping
of the different knowledges that these
different communities had so they were
able to actually structure their world
around different categories that are
highly non-western like visual metaphors
like oceans like deserts so we basically
created a system around the knowledges
and categories and Concepts that were at
the core of these communities and to me
that was very fascinating to think about
how such a system could be designed from
the bottom up not just based on
metaphors but based on cont Concepts and
ways of knowing the world that are
important to these
communities so I really started thinking
about these questions more and more now
I'm here as an associate professor at
UCLA this is my team that we work at in
at Zuni which is a Native American
reservation in New Mexico quite remote
and we're trying to think about these
questions in the context of museums
because museums now are increasingly
digitizing their objects and we're
trying to think about what is the zi way
of knowing the world and how could that
become empowered in the digital world
more largely especially when it comes to
objects such as this so this is a bunch
of Zuni Elders they're looking at
objects that are sitting in museums and
they're trying to analyze what these
things mean to them versus what museums
usually say about that right so how do
we introduce this alternate way of
telling a story about the world and
rebuild Technologies from such a
perspective or this piece of pottery
here this Pottery was taken about 600
years ago excavated from Zuni sitting in
a museum in England and the way the
museum in England describes this piece
of pottery is radically different than
the ways the Zuni themselves understand
this piece of pottery and it's primarily
around these dramatic differences on in
this in this image here you can see on
the right hand side the way the museum
describes this piece of pottery ZX
34215 or Plains Indians or or lump of
concretion but what do the Zoni say when
they see these objects from their
history from their Traditions they tell
stories cuz it's all about stories at
the end of the day that's how people
locate their experiences locate their
histories think about themselves and
articulate their dreams and the zi talk
about oh when my grandmother had a
birthing Ceremony this piece of pottery
reminded me of a pottery that was used
in that ceremony
examples like that so there's some
intersections around names but there's
dramatic differences that we can see on
the left hand side so what would it be
like to rethink systems from such a
perspective where the zi way of knowing
and the Western way of knowing could
both exist in parallel and could inform
a radically new way of rethinking
everything from a Google algorithm to a
Facebook filter feed to the ways we
create databases that order and
structure the world we live in and and
this might be a little off the shelf
here but I think it creates
this these are two extremely rare
beautiful and unique animals that are in
Papa New Guinea today this is a frog
everyone's seen a frog right what what
does this frog have it has giant
fangs this is a kangaroo one might say
but it's sort of a strange type of
kangaroo it's a tree
kangaroo so what happens when different
forms of knowledge meet one one another
it creates what biologists call
emergence but in the digital world this
can also be possible and the reason
these animals exist in Papa New Guinea
is simply because all these different
species have been able to exist in
parallel and occasionally meet and
mingle with one another to me the truth
of really empowering cultural voices
around technology is allowing those
different voices to exist in parallel
and speak to and inform one another and
I like sometimes drawing different
graphics to try to you know sort of in
it my ideas and bring them into reality
and I think it looks something like this
you know we've all talked about fractals
and Chaos Theory and and complexity
Theory so on and so forth but these are
different ecosystems just like the Zuni
knowledge system that exist in parallel
but they inform one another they have
weak ties within one another and what
comes out of those links between those
nodes and those networks are frogs with
fangs because we really need to think
about the world in which we live and
assume and understand that not every
person in the world engages with
technology in the same way and that most
of those Technologies are locked in to
Black boxes or white iPods how do we
rethink the codes how do we hack out new
meanings how do we Empower those diverse
people that are coming to the digital
table how do we empower the digital
Revolution to fulfill the early
Grassroots promises that were part of
what we thought about when we invoked
the internet to begin begin with this
came out of a countercultural movement
how do we think diversely and globally
about these questions so these are the
questions at the core of my heart it's
an honor to get to share them with you
today and thank you very much for your
time
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