23
May 1985
Might
there be an "Anthropology of Computers"?
There
are precedents at least on the fringes of Anthropology for looking at
particular technologies as they mold and are molded by people; one could easily
argue that Anthropology of the Automobile should be a concern of twentieth
century anthropology if only because of the ubiquity of the thing itself and
the aura of cultural significance that surrounds it. People are conceived, born, and die in
automobiles; people devote large proportions of their income to the purchase
and maintenance of automobiles; people invest their automobiles with human
characteristics (names, gender, personality) and lavish affection upon them in
various ways --buying talismans and amenities, ritual washing and stroking--
and often the automobiles themselves serve as status markers and expressions of
social identity for their owners. The
fact that many of these behaviours are found wherever
automobiles exist (with interesting variations) marks the subject as clearly
falling within the ambit of anthropology.
While
the Automobile is an obvious and perennially fascinating cultural artifact, it
is in some respects just too easy as an ethnological target; a researcher must wade through a morass of cliche and common knowledge to get at the kernel of what makes the Automobile so
significant a cultural artifact, and arrives at this nubbin only to find that
it is principally males who worship at the Shrine of Our Ford, and further that
the dynamics of this domain of culture are mostly superficial --styles and
appearances appear to change, but in fact fundamental alterations in the
culture of automobile behaviour have been very few over the last four decades.
Another
domain of material culture and technology that promises greater dynamism and
that is probably of more wide-ranging significance is that of the
Computer. Here we deal with an artifact
whose development and proliferation is mostly confined to the last 40 years,
and therefore many potential informants have observed the whole process of
evolution. Furthermore, this evolution is very extensively (albeit obscurely)
documented and recent years have seen the beginnings of efforts to popularize
and make accessible its history. At
present the technology is spreading very rapidly and finding its way into
homes, schools, offices and stores all over
It
is tempting to examine the Computer Revolution as a parallel to the development
of a religious movement; new Ultimate Truths are discovered by Prophets (George
Boole, Alan Turing) and become the property of a
small body of Disciples who become privy to the Central Mysteries and spread
far and wide to communicate the Mysteries to new Converts, some of whom
themselves become Priests of the new Vision and take on the responsibility of
further spreading the Vision and further developing its Exegesis. To outsiders (gentiles, heathen) this
Priesthood's maunderings are mumbo-jumbo, but Converts are made among the
young, some of whom leave home to follow a Pied Piper but on their return are
unable to give a satisfactory account of what they have seen and done. These new converts may be much changed in behaviour, with a tendency to abstraction and obscure
muttering amongst themselves. In some
cases the Civil Power sees something to be gained from public support of the
new Movement; such support tends to favour the
creation of Orthodoxy amongst the members of the Priesthood, and thus to
establish a clear set of steps that a new intendant
must pass through in order to be admitted to the Mysteries and become an Adept
and thus have access to a permanent position within the emerging
hierarchy. If the means of access to the
Mysteries are kept in the control of the Priesthood and the Civil Power the
hierarchy becomes entrenched and the pathways to power and other rewards are
clear and severely limited. But even the
most seamless of Orthodoxies has within it the gnawing worms of Heresy, often
in the form of young Adepts who wonder if It mightn't
be better If... Clever Orthodoxies find
means to coopt such young Adepts, but there seems to
be a never-ending supply of curious young who ask uncomfortable questions and
aren't always to be satisfied with the old answers and received wisdom. As long as the means to the Mysteries remain
the monopoly of the hierarchy the heterodox can be controlled fairly easily;
but once the means escape the control of the certified Priesthood a whole new
ballgame develops, in which people who are not members of the Priesthood can
directly experience whatever Ultimate Truth there may be.
There
are points at which the parallel is unsatisfactory, but also a number where the
picture is accurate enough to give one pause.
In any case, the process of evolution of the Computer within North
American society has taken some significant leaps within the last decade as a
result of a change in the accessibility of computers themselves. Formerly the capital-intensive nature of the
technology restricted it to universities, governments, the military and large
corporations; a Sacred Priesthood makes a pretty accurate description for those
who had access to the devices themselves, although a sizeable population of
altar boys, handmaidens, acolytes, flower arrangers, vergers, janitors and
deacons was also necessary to their proper functioning. All that changed as technological
developments in miniaturization of components vastly reduced the cost of
Computes and made it feasible for a person to build a computer from scrounged
and scavenged parts; Freiberger and Swaine's Fire in the Valley details a version of the
process that eventually produced the Apple computer and thus made home
computers available to a mass market.
What is most astounding about the process is its rapidity: a decade ago
a small number of hackers were experimenting in garages; five years ago Apple,
Commodore, Radio Shack and others had clearly established a mass market for
microcomputers; presently all sorts of people have found that they can't live
without their microcomputers. It is
difficult to identify any precedents for this rapidity in human technological
history, and this is at least in part why social scientists seem not to have
caught on yet. What seems to be the
direction or trajectory or tendency of the evolutionary process at one point in
time may seem very different a year or even a few months later. Likewise, "state-of-the-art"
equipment is outmoded within two years and obsolete in less than five (at least
in the sense that new equipment that does things better or faster reaches the
marketplace and nudges out "old" equipment).
Whole
new sectors of the retail economy have appeared in the last few years as
franchises for the supply of hardware and software have proliferated and as
mail-order supply houses have sprung up to take advantage of the rapid growth
of the market. Companies are founded and
go out of business with bewildering rapidity, such that the list of advertisers
in a cult mag like Byte changes spectacularly from
year to year; 80 of the 346 in the April 1985 issue were among the 350 in the
April 1983 issue. With this volatility
comes a number of recognized hazards; equipment bought one year may be
"orphaned" the next when its manufacturer goes out of business,
products announced or even advertised sometimes do not yet exist
("vaporware" is the term coined to describe software of this sort),
and the phrase Real Soon Now is recognized ruefully as describing products that
are not quite yet on the market but just might be along "next
Quarter".
The
anthropologist can find grist for various theoretical mills amongst the
populations of Homo digitalis, but the simple tasks of descriptive ethnography
remain to be done before the choicer cuts of the carcase
are apportioned
and the less preferable fragments are left to be fought over. A remarkable number of Murdock's Universals
of Culture are manifested within or affected by the computer world, and one may
with justification argue that few domains remain blissfully unaffected by the
proliferation of microcomputers. This
invasion has not gone unresented and unopposed, and
there are many people in the general population of
Because
of traditions of cross-cultural comparison and focus upon the nexus between
belief and behaviour, anthropologists have a unique
perspective on human capabilities and foibles.
Activities and conceptions that are taken for granted and seem mundane
and prosaic (or fitting and proper) to members of a culture may serve an
anthropological observer as keys to the underlying ethos of the people in
question. Miner's classic Nacirema article (Body ritual among the Nacirema)
exemplifies the applicability of this analytical framework to societies with
which we are intimately familiar, and it is within the tradition of Naidanac and Nacirema studies
that the present research is undertaken.
It seems strange that studies of the complex relationships between North
Americans and their technological matrix have not been more common; few realms
of human endeavor are better documented than the development of tools, machines and
devices, but we know surprisingly little about what people think about them, or
how they perceive their lives to have been changed because of specific
technological innovations, or how they
have made accommodations to the presence of new devices. We have plentiful literatures on the effects
of various technologies upon people (children and television violence, rock
music and hearing loss, tractors and displaced sharecroppers), but the adaptive
side of the relationship seems often to be ignored, and consequently technology
is seen as doing something to people.
The alienation implied in this view does indeed have venerable
historical precedents and does represent one side of the relation between Man
and his creations; often technological innovations have had the effect of
lessening the freedom and increasing the oppression of individuals and groups,
generally for the benefit of other more powerful individuals and groups. It was this oppression, more than the
machines themselves or the ingenuity that produced them, that provoked the
wrath of the Luddites who smashed textile machinery
in 19th century
(this piece goes elsewhere)Entry into the microcomputer world
is a process that commonly takes months and is fraught with Mysteries and
pitfalls. The neophyte must tread a
narrow and dangerous path between the first impulse to "get a
computer" and the actual purchase of hardware; there is much to know and
either no place or too many places to learn the essentials. Caveat emptor is essential advice, but the
buyer is in a perilous situation compounded of his own hopes, illusions and
desires. There are few disinterested but informed parties
to assist, and many predatory vendors (often ill-informed) whose main interest
is in moving product in a volatile marketplace.
The consequence is that some buyers find they have made wrong decisions
in hardware or software or both, and many find that they can't quite do what
they thought they were buying the wherewithal to accomplish. This disability is partly a matter of the
buyer's limited understanding of his own needs and capabilities, but also
significantly a consequence of the sales tactics of and the level of
post-purchase support available from vendors.
A variety of enterprises has sprung up, purporting to be in business to
help people learn to use particular software packages by means
of workshops, videotapes, and computer tutorials.
(this piece also goes somewhere else) Involvement with
microcomputers is at once a solitary and a social activity; a devotee may spend
hours incommunicado, staring at a screen oblivious to howling children and
ringing telephones and seemingly in a world of his own making until a power
failure or call of nature breaks the spell.
And yet what appears a solitary perversion is paradoxically a highly
social activity: the devotee is mystically joined to thousands of others, known
and unknown, who are using the same brand of machine or running the same
software. Again we have here a
phenomenon with few precedents in technological history, although mutual
participation in mass-media events like television viewing and radio listening
are appropriate parallel cases. What
makes these activities "social" is the fact that people discuss them with
one another --just as "Who Killed J.R.?" and "War of
Worlds" and afternoon soap operas and the Kennedy assassinations linked
people after the fact, WordStar and DBaseIII and Zork and PacMan users exchange
information with one another when they meet and discover their common
passion. In much the same sense owners
of Apple computers or Epson printers have information that is of significance
to one another but to no one else; sometimes such links are formalized in
"Users Groups" (some of which may even meet in face-to-face
interaction) but often meetings are casual and may even be virtually anonymous,
as when paths cross on networks or bulletin boards. The details of these various venues for
"social" interaction are a separate topic, and here I will only note
that all those who are, for example, in thrall to Big Blue have interests in
common even if they are not personally realized. The legal profession recognizes this form of
social relation in the twentieth century
phenomenon of the Class Action Suit, but it is less formally indicated by such shibboleths as bumper stickers
sporting the legend "I'd Rather Be Zorking"
and Apple lapel pins.
(and another) The empirical beginnings of research on North American microcomputer culture must address a number of questions on a continent-wide basis: who buys microcomputers? what do they do with them? what common experiences have they undergone in the passage from neophyte to User? Some of the basic descriptive information seems readily available in the form of marketing profiles, and the advertisements in computer magazines are fairly clearly geared toward a narrow market, essentially middle class and male. But just what people do with their computers is less easily ascertained, and what and how they think about them is still more obscure except for such fugitrivia as anecdotes and Letters to the Editor in cult mags. Once the dimensions of variation are understood it might be possible to treat the array of mags as a corpus for content analysis, but it is important to recognize that there is great variety in knowledge and sophistication within the population. Furthermore, the whole domain changes very rapidly indeed and generalizations made at one point in time about the state of knowledge or development of persons or groups are unlikely to remain true for as long as six months. Just who is best equipped to attempt to disentangle the empirical and theoretical problems posed by the Microcomputer Revolution is likewise an interesting question. Nobody knows enough of the right things to comprehend all of the relevant universe of people and data. Insiders to the worlds of Programming or Hardware have insufficient perspective on the problems and viewpoints and expectations of the vast numbers of tyros who are just beginning to learn about computers, and beginners must thread their way through jungles of concepts and terminology that have grown up in the last 20 years to deal with new situations and problems that have few precedents. A researcher beginning at any of the various entry points must learn a new lexicon (indeed, sometimes a whole new language...), only to find that elements of it are not portable from one sector of the Computer World to another. The problems are remarkably similar to those of an anthropologist making first contact with tribesfolk whose lives and thoughts he or she hopes to distill into a dissertation or ethnography; it is necessary to have a sponsor to help one through the initial mysteries and make the appropriate introductions, and the identity of the sponsor has a lot to do with the perspective that the researcher eventually adopts as his or her own.