“Everything we do is focused on ensuring that we provide a high-quality experience for all our customers, who are ethnically diverse and live and work around the world…
…. The technology we use is built on standard algorithms that measure the difference in intensity of contrast between the eyes and the upper cheek and nose. We believe that the camera might have difficulty “seeing” contrast in conditions where there is insufficient foreground lighting.”
Notice that HP never actually claims responsibility in overlooking users with darker skin color. They blame the HP Cam’s inability to track black people on the camera’s algorithm. Essentially, they blame the algorithm and the camera. HP never says that their programmers didn’t program the algorithm to process conditions with less contrast. They didn’t blame themselves for not doing careful ethnography on its diversity of users. They didn’t blame managers for not even considering non-light skin users during the entire design process!
Does this signal a new era of corporate responsibility? In the Industrial age, if a worker’s arm was cut off, the blame was placed on the machines. In the Digital Age, is the blame placed on 1’s and 0’s—those ignorant algorithms?
In both eras, the blame is placed on the inorganic objects - the technology. The managers, the programmers, the designers and the company are put in the clear.
In HP’s case, I suspect that their focus groups (if they held any), did not reflect the diversity of their customer base. I suspect that the programmers are light-skinned and do not have many friends with darker skin colors. This is a great example of how a technology’s design fails to be relevant for populations that have been historically ignored by tech companies. While in this youtube video Desi claims that “Hp Computers are Racist” with irony, underlying his statement is a history of companies ignoring black users, even them they prove to be a profitable customer base.
I hope this teach’s HP a valuable lesson, that non-light skin users, are not just end-clients. During the entire design process, the diversity of its user base should inform the way its technology is designed, programmed, tested, and launched.
I just discovered the ideas of Michael Cartier - he’s kinda like Gilles Deleuze + Manuel De Landa - but more concrete and understandable. At least that’s how his translator, Jon Husband of Wirearchy Site, makes him sound. What I am fascinated about is how Michael speaks of ruptures as opportunities for cultural shifts.
Cartier proposes 4 different scenarios for the 21st Century: consumerist, (renewed) participative democracy, environmentally conscious, and oligarchic soft fascism (security state). Here’s more graphs that explains these scenarios. These are great starting points for discussing where one sees their company, themselves, and their community.
Here are screenshots of the 4 scenarios from the video.
In speaking about their methods, they say that they are attempting to
“reconstitute the logic of a system in which we will live, shaping it into a portfolio of trends. It analyzes our society using a model which integrates at the same time technological, economic and societal developments, based on a range of readings which support an analysis of the flow of trends according to three vectors in time” Read more about the
I love it!
The video focuses on the information mediating tools that have spanned our history, leading up to what they call, Internet 2.look to the figure below (pulled from their wesbite, not the video):
A comment on the abundancy of information: The video shows two screen shots where the narrator says that a digital society is not based on the economics of scarcity, but rather an economics of abundance.
While the reality of this may be true - because digital products inherently have unlimited iterations without quality degradation which radically changes the industrial model of the fixed production line and stable categories of consumer and producer- I contend that this is not a reality that that media and corporate information industries live in. Scenario #1 addresses this reality.
I would love to engage in a more explicit and nuanced discussion about the role of information. It seems to me that Cartier and Husband’s video renders information as a inherently valuable resource - one where information is now abundant - being created by me, you, and you, and all of us! woohoo!! But Dan Schiller has argued that if we want to apply a political economy approach to information, we have to treat it as a commodity instead of a resource.
“The only way we can analyze the political economy of information is to treat information as a tangible commodity, not as a resource. A resource is something that inherently has value. Information itself is not inherently valuable. It is the social reorganization around information that makes it valuable.” pg 9. Schiller, Dan. How to Think About Information. 2006.
Schiller’s theoretical angle on information as a commodity (a focus on the exchange value as opposed to the use value), allows us to see how industries that are invested in controlling digital artifacts react to the new economics of abundance in a digital society. It is precisely because there is a new social and cultural organization around information as an abundant resource, that marketers are now selling scarcity. They actually HAVE to market the idea that there is a finite limit of their digital product.
As a result, marketers now are engaged in selling authenticity, which is the central argument of Gilmore et. al’s book, Authenticity: What Consumer Really Want. Because there are sooooo many copies of products now, buyers are trying to figure out where is the “real” product. So this could range from me searching for the “real” version of Lady Gaga’s Telephone or some mashed-up version, or me searching for the a “real” Slap Chop to some wannabe slap chopper.
Reading and wathching all this just makes me want to SCREAM - I’m flushed with excitement! I love these kind of videos that capture 1000 years of history in 3 min. There’s something so satisfying about watching such high quality generalizations and overviews. I think in academia we get so much into the specifics of things and we’re penalized for making general statement in fear of being being an essentialist - it’s the tricky boundaries of academia that require one to back up whatever they say. I am a fan of Jon Husband’s and Michael Cartier’s generalizations! Oh and I am a fan of the designer, Benoit Masse.
Check out ConstellationsW & Jon Husband’s Wirearchy Site. I need to spend a day just dissecting all the intellectual goodies on both of these sites. Hey Jon, you’re a great translator! If every French thinker has you as their translator, then maybe they would be more understandable! Deleuze needed you!
A Comedic & Educational Film Poking Fun At Ethnography
I am now assigning Walter Wippersberg’s 1994 Film, Dunkles, Rätselhaftes Österreich - Dark, Mysterious Austria, to all my students! If you teach qualitative methods, consider including this in your syllabus.
Produced for Austria’s SBS-TV, this films poks fun at old-school ethnography from anthropologists and the National Geographic-esque like exposes on the exotic Africans and South American natives.
“A team of the All African Television network wanders into the darkest regions of the Eastern Alps. They observe the habits and rituals of the natives and make not one, but two ethnological major break-through discoveries.” IMDB
“At 5:40, we learn that the team has disproved the theory that Europeans are monogamous; starting at about 7:50, they describe the elaborate costumes and militaristic symbolism of clans of the Tyrol region of Austria; and at 15:00, there’s a great discussion of the curious obsession with “patently useless activities,” such as biking for no other purpose than biking itself.
Aside from the humorous commentary, it’s a great way of illustrating the sociological imagination, which requires us to step out of our own culture and try to look at it through the eyes of an outsider — and, as C. Wright Mills put it, to recapture the ability to be astonished by what we normally take for granted.”
Often times ethnography can feel so heavy and serious power and culture, power and culture, power and culture. But what does power and culture look like? How do you explain exoticism, imperialism, and ethnocentrism? Dunkles, RätselhaftesÖsterreich is a wonderful video to start those conversations because it’s silly! Part of why I love ethnography so much is that it is so fun and I think this is a great reminder for ethnographers to laugh a bit at ourselves. In all of our musing over the practice and theory of ethnography, we’ve got to remember that we live in a wonderfully silly world and how lovely it is that we live in a period where we get to play all day in collecting knowledge of “man,” a la Foucault.
I don’t think i could ever visit the Alps of Austria without constantly thinking of this video.
UPDATE: Also check out Kitchen Stories, a Swedish film about an ethnographic study on kitchens. It’s a comedy. You can buy the DVD on amazon and watch 2 clips here. Thanks Leila Takayama for the tip!
Hi, this is where I (Tricia Wang)share my thoughts from an academic and industry perspective on the socio-cultural contexts of technology usage & designing culturally situated user research. More about Cultural Bytes.
