TECHNOLOGY IN CULTURE
The aim of the present work, as previously articulated, is to contribute a research
strategy for extending human-technology interaction design methods
whose end products are culturally responsive concepts, user requirements, and
systems requirements. The present work envisions a research strategy grounded
on the principle of a co-determining relationship, which is unpacked in
chapter 5, between technology, culture, and human forms of life. This enterprise
necessitates further working definitions of concepts and terms employed.
3.1 Definition of terms: HTI, systems, and artefact
The usage of the term human-technology interaction in the present work broadly
encompass people’s usage of technology, although it is employed to specifically
address some issues within the context of information and communication
technology. This definition therefore subsumes human use of knowledge,
which constitutes technologies, in addition to various tangible objects, and
these objects can function automatically or semi-automatically as in the case of
machines. Hence human-technology interaction necessarily involves physical
and cognitive motion. The term “interaction” refers to the action-reaction between
two or more self-contained unities; more precisely, the observable motions
between a human and a technology, without presuppositions as to whether
the given technology constitutes “intelligence” as often articulated in discourses
regarding computerized technologies (for a more complete discussion
on this point, see e.g. Suchman, 1987, pp. 5-26). Therefore even a mundane
technology such as that of slicing a tomato with a knife can be described in
terms of human-technology interaction. That is, the motion of the muscles sets
forth another physical motion, or a re-action, of the knife moving through the
structure of the tomato. In this respect, it also follows that using the knowledge
of how to use the knife is a cognitive phenomenon.
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It is important to explicitly foreground the role and position of the overall
HTI process within the human context: it is supposed to support human-tohuman
interaction processes, inclusive of interactions with natural, institutional
and societal processes (e.g., Saariluoma & Leikas, 2010, pp. 17, 20). And as will
be discussed in chapter 5.2, this distinction between human-technology interaction
as a process and as a component of technology interface usability concepts
is of primary importance to envisioning technologies relevant to human forms
of life.
The term human-technology interaction, as it is used in the present work,
is compatible with the term human factors to the extent that both refer to the scientific
discipline of designing for human use. Both constructs concern “… a
body of information about human abilities, human limitations, and other human
characteristics that are relevant to design” (Chapanis, 1996, p.11). However,
the term human-technology interaction is used exclusively to distinguish an
admittedly biased point-of-view of systems and systems design relative to the
traditional point-of-view constituted in systems engineering. The emphasis is
on humans and human factors as the starting point for systems design.
The term system is defined as “… an interacting combination, at any level
of complexity, of people, materials, tools, machines, software, facilities, and
procedures designed to work together for some common purpose” (Chapanis,
1996, p. 22). Emphasis is also given to the human-centric view of systems and
system design while acknowledging this view must be integrated with the architectural
and functional views in order to fully describe the requirements for
a given system, and eventually producing it embodied in an artefact used by
people. The term artefact subsumes material and immaterial objects and subjects
pertaining to human interaction with technology.
3.2 Defining technology: a cultural artefact
What is technology? The present work adopts José Ortega y Gasset’s definition:
“…[T]echnology is man’s reaction to nature or circumstance. It leads to the construction
of a new nature, a supernature interposed between man and original
nature” (Ortega y Gasset, 1972/1983, p. 292). What one calls technology is
therefore a product of interaction between humans and environments in which
they are situated. This implies that technology is a reaction to the necessities of
life. However, one can see that this is not necessarily true when one considers
the nearly daily encounters in contemporary life with cultural artefacts such as
books, television, movies and digital games. Ortega y Gasset’s insight is also
instructive:
“But technology is not restricted to the satisfaction of necessities. As old as the invention
of tools and procedures for keeping warm, feeding, and so on, are many others
serving to procure obviously unnecessary objects and situations. As old and as widespread
as the act of lighting a fire, for instance, is that of getting drunk. I mean to say
the use of substances and procedures, which produce a psychophysical state of
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pleasurable exaltation or delightful stupor. The drug is as primitive an invention as
any. So much so, in fact, that it is even open to discussion whether fire was invented
primarily for the purpose of avoiding the cold—an organic necessity and a sine qua
non [emphasis in original] of life—or of getting drunk. We know of primitive tribes
who light a fire in a cave which makes them sweat so profusely that, from the combined
smoke and excessive heat, they fall into a swoon akin to drunkenness. These
are the so-called sweathouses”13 (Ortega y Gasset, 1972/1983, p. 293).
Four points deserve emphasis: first, there is inherent ambiguity in the relationship
between the form and function of what Ortega y Gasset calls the constructed
“new nature”; that is, a new artefact that interposes between humans and
nature. The second point is that the new artefact—i.e., technology, has both tangible
and intangible form. The technology of lighting a fire consists of tangible
objects as well as knowledge of at least the procedure involved. Acknowledging
this ambiguity helps to understand the possibilities for variations in the meaning
of technology, meaning that affects usage, meaning that gets passed on
from one generation to the next. Third, throughout history technology has been
envisioned in various ways to solve problems encountered during people’s interaction
with nature and circumstances. Fourth, technology is a product of a
creative process and people can use it creatively. Hence the given definition
allows us to analytically think of technology’s material/immaterial, semantic,
and functional dimensions. This is the rationale for adopting Orgeta y Gasset’s
definition.
For contrast, Mario Bunge provides a less philosophically inclined definition,
though it echoes the fourth point emphasized above: “In fact we conceive
of technology as the design of things or processes of possible practical value to some
individuals or groups with the help of knowledge gained in basic or applied research
[emphasis in the original]. The things and processes in question need not be
physical or chemical: they can also be biological or social” (Bunge, 1988, p. 604).
Many mundane objects and situated actions in daily life, from cooking a
meal to driving an automobile, can take on universal as well as varied form and
meaning. In contemporary daily life, new technologies such as, mobile telephones,
text messaging, social media, and instant messaging (De Angeli, 2009;
H. Li et al., 2011; Rangaswamy & Singh, 2009; Sun, 2007) are subject to this phenomenon.
13 The quote is from a revised translation. The original text is as follows:
”Pero es el caso que la técnica no se reduce a facilitar la satisfacción de necesidades
de ese género. Tan antiguos como los inventos de utensilios y procedimientos para
calentarse, alimentarse, etcétera, son muchos otros cuya finalidad consiste en proporcionar
al hombre cosas y situaciones innecesarias en ese sentido. Por ejemplo, tan viejo
y tan extendido como el hacer fuego es el embriagarse…—quiero decir, el uso de
procedimientos o sustancias que ponen al hombre en estado psicofisiológico de exaltación
deliciosa o bien de delicioso estupor. La droga, el estupefaciente, es un invento
tan primitivo como el que más. Tanto, que no es cosa clara, por ejemplo, si el fuego se
inventó primero para evitar el frío—necesidad orgánica y condición sine qua non—o
más bien para embriagarse. Los pueblos mas primitivos usan las cuevas para encender
en ellas fuego y ponerse a sudar en forma tal que entre el humo y el exceso de
temperatura caen en trance de cuasi embriaguez. Es lo que se ha llamado las ”casas
de sudar” (Ortega y Gasset, 1939).
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It has been said earlier that unexamined assumptions about concepts used
in human-technology interaction design have proven to be problematic. One
can say that this problem can be traced to the tacit status of technology’s relation
to culture. The connection could be made more obvious with a simple
thought exercise by examining many mundane artefacts of daily life such as
food and time.
Humans are the only known animal species that cook its food. Foods that
people eat, when and how they are eaten are components of every culture. Imagine
what would happen to the food cultures of the world if one takes away
the technology of cooking with heat. With regard to the idea of culture as rituals
and traditions, for example rituals and traditions supporting concepts of time
(see e.g., Hall, 1959/1973), imagine what would happen to rituals of making
appointments for lunch, or to meet with a friend to see a film or to meet a client
to discuss business, if one did not have the technologies embedded in timepieces
like clocks and wristwatches. Similarly imagine the types of adjustment one
would have to make to the whole English culture and the history of the English
empire, if chronometers were never developed in the eighteenth century for
maritime navigation in conjunction with establishing Greenwich as the starting
point for measuring “accurate” time. And similarly one cannot deny the significance
of European shipbuilding, navigation and their underlying technologies
(Larson, 2011; Sorrenson, 1996).
Consider the so-called exterior single-leaf hinged door that one uses for
entering residential buildings (e.g. houses and apartments). Doors and their
function are things that one usually considers as obvious. People enter and exit
houses, apartments, as well as various types of building without much thought
about them. But consider the following: in some countries (e.g. Finland and
Sweden) the majority of home’s exterior single-leaf hinged doors open outward,
while in other countries (e.g. Spain, United Kingdom, United States) these types
of doors swing inward (cf. discussion of doors in Norman, 2002).
From the perspective of human-technology interaction, the architecture of
thresholds (i.e. doors, gates, portals and passageways) in connection with the
architecture of structures and the traditional function of a private home as a
space for residence, sojourn and interaction, presents an exemplary artefact that
one can study to help shed light on the issues at hand.
The daily action of entering and exiting various types of spaces, such as
bedrooms, bathrooms and boardrooms, is a microcosm of human interaction
with an interface: the door. This view could help in conceptualizing how a mundane
object such as a door is actually a technology with a long history of development
throughout the evolution of human cultures.
The form/function of the door compels one to speak of separateness and
unity (cf. Simmel, 1994). Viewing the threshold on the physical level, architectural
theorist Laurent Stalder aptly comments, “The threshold separates the
public and private sphere, private and common property, and self-determined
and over-directed action. As an architectural element or spatial configuration, it
highlights historically specific, culturally determined zones of transition [emphasis
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added], in which certain gestures and activities are performed” (Stalder, 2009, p.
69). Stalder also characterizes the door as a point of transition. Georg Simmel
addresses these transitional movements at the physical and metaphysical levels
in his essay about bridges and doors. He provides important insights on this
circularity:
”Whereas in the correlation of separatedness and unity, the bridge always allows the
accent to fall on the latter, and at the same time overcomes the separation of its anchor
points that make them visible and measurable, the door represents in a more
decisive manner how separating and connecting are only two sides of precisely the same act.
[emphasis added]. The human being who first erected a hut, like the first road builder,
revealed the specifically human capacity over against nature, in so far as he or she cut a
portion out of the continuity and infinity of space and arranged this into a particular unity
[emphasis added] in accordance with a single [emphasis in the original] meaning. A
piece of space was thereby brought together and separated from the whole remaining
world. By virtue of the fact that the door forms, as it were, a linkage between the
space of human beings and everything that remains outside it, it transcends the separation
between the inner and outer. [emphasis added]. Precisely because it can be opened,
the closure provides the feeling of a stronger isolation against everything outside this space
than the mere unstructured walls. [emphasis added]. The latter is mute, but the door
speaks. It is absolutely essential for humanity that it sets itself a boundary, but with
freedom, that is, in such a way that it can also remove this boundary again, that it can
place itself outside it” (Simmel, 1994, p. 7).
Simmel’s (1994) metaphors articulate the circularity of interaction between humans
and the environment. The acts of separation and unification are codetermined
in the door. Applying this circularity to Stalder’s (2009) observation,
culturally determined transitions allow a further assertion that technology and
culture are co-determined and therefore cannot be separated. The historical account
of the door further shows that this mutual determination has been embodied
concurrently within cultures and the artefact of the door itself, and
passed on from generation to generation all the way to contemporary daily life.
The cultural meaning of the door has dissolved into the background to the
point that laypersons would have to expend much effort to articulate the door’s
connection to their culture, literally or metaphorically.
While the history of threshold technology goes back to ancient times, and
thus has had ample time to recede into the realm of tacit knowledge, one can
say that the cultural meanings of contemporary artefacts such as computers and
their software programs have already reached a similar tacit status especially
among the generations who were “born digital” (that is, those born after the
advent and diffusion of the digital computer and related technologies). For instance
in the U.S., young adults of the so-called millennial generation (that is,
people born 1977-1993) tend to use their mobile phones for more purposes (i.e.,
taking photos and videos, sending text messages, going online, sending email,
listening to music, and playing games) compared to their counterparts from
older generations (Zickuhr, 2011). Fifty-three per cent of adults aged 65 or older
are using Internet or email. The latest data (April 2012) on the number of Internet
users from this cohort is significant in view of the modest growth for several
years (Zickuhr & Madden, 2012). It is interesting to note also that another archi53
tectural component—a window—has become a trademark as well as the metaphor
for the interface between material and immaterial spaces of computing.
In light of the preceding examples, one is confronted with the issue of different
usage in different cultural contexts of technologies that have become diffused,
prevalent in daily life, and more or less standardized. There are logical
reasons for the differences, and many of these reasons are linked to cultural
characteristics.
Culture and technology are inseparable, not even in principle14 . There is
no technology-free culture. Separating the two would necessitate undoing human
cultures. Certainly contemporary cultures in all parts of the world would
not be the same if electricity, automobiles, telephones, airplanes, nuclear energy,
television and computers did not exist. One could safely argue that if all the
computers in our world vanished suddenly, contemporary civilization would
fall into a chaotic state.
At this point, there has to be a differentiation between the view of culture
and technology presented here from the notion of technological determinism;
that is, the idea that technology is a predominant determinant of social life, and
that technology develops autonomously (Mitcham & Nissenbaum, 1998). Although
there is agreement with José Ortega y Gasset’s (1939/2006; 1972/1983)
argument that human beings are essentially technological and that history is
transformed by changes in technology, the view proposed in this work asserts
that the relationship between culture and technology is one of co-determination
or co-specification. Whilst changes in technology cause changes in the practices
and ideas of a culture, changes in a culture’s characteristics could similarly trigger
changes in technology.
Once the co-determination of culture and technology is acknowledged,
one could also begin to see how technology artefacts used in daily life might
trigger variations in sociocultural conventions.
3.2.1 Technopolitics
The idea that technical things have political qualities is perhaps one of the more
esoteric if not provocative notions in the discussion of technology’s functions in
societies. Much of the rhetoric, if one even becomes aware of it, is based on tacit
assumptions. Most people would not notice it. The news media for example
published stories of the trouble the company Google had with the German authorities
regarding its project to photograph practically every meter of German
cities in connection with the company’s map service (Bilton, 2013; Kirk, 2010).
Google employees driving around in cars equipped with 360-degree view cameras
apparently managed to gather a database of residential wireless network
access information. The issue of privacy invasion was implied (Rakower, 2011;
Wiggers, 2011). Yet in major metropolitan areas, the presence of surveillance
video cameras is ubiquitous in street corners, and in practically all the nooks
and crannies of the city. Most people probably do not think much about the im-
14 Cf. technoculture as semiosis (Vannini, Hodson, & Vannini, 2009, pp. 469-473).
54
plications of surveillance activities (Goold, Loader, & Thumala, 2013). One is
made more aware of surveillance technology’s utility to the collective wellbeing,
as for example in the way the police were able to narrow the list of suspects
for the bombing during the Boston City Marathon in 2013 in the U.S.
through their database of videos gathered from cameras situated in the immediate
vicinity of the event (Atlas & Stohr, 2013; Kelly, 2013). On a more mundane
level, one neither pays much attention to how various information and
communication technologies silently and automatically keep track of one’s
movement, of the products one buys, and of how much money one spends
(Caviglione & Coccoli, 2011; Langenderfer & Miyazaki, 2009; Ybarra, 2011).
Where is the politics? The simplified answer is everywhere. In discussing
technology’s political dimension, one must acknowledge how the meanings of
technologies are socioculturally constructed (Bloomfield & Vurdubakis, 1994;
Feng, 2000; Winner, 1992). Introduction of technology in contemporary human
domains of action is rationalized, for instance, in terms of its utility in increasing
efficiency.
The sociocultural semantic engineering of technologies could be intentional,
non-intentional, or emergent. The salient point is that as an observer, one has
an accustomed way of looking at things, and one sees the details of the form
and function of artefacts as innocuous. But it is not always so. Langdon Winner
(1980) explains for instance that the two-hundred overpasses in Long Island,
New York were originally designed to discourage buses on the motorways of
Long Island, thereby giving an advantage to automobile owning European
Americans of the upper- and middle-classes to use them for commuting and
recreation, while sanctioning poor people, particularly African Americans who
normally used public transit. They were kept off the motorways because the tall
buses could not drive through the low-hanging overpasses. One consequence
was to limit access of racial minorities and poor people to Jones Beach.
Nuclear power plants and nuclear weapons are examples of inherently political
technologies. These artefacts entail explicit control by designated authorities.
One can also observe the intended, unintended and emergent political dimensions
of information and communication technology artefacts such as computers
and mobile phones within national boundaries as well as globally. One
can see recent examples of the power dynamics of technology in the U.S. National
Security Agency’s activities to tap into electronic mail data on a global
scale (Hopkins, 2013; Miron, 2013), and in the blocking of social media applications
in Iran and Egypt (Tusa, 2013; Wojcieszak & Smith, 2013), and of Internet
search in China (S. W. Kim & Douai, 2012).
Consider the growing gap along the socioeconomic divide as an unintentional
consequence of the introduction of computers in societies (Hargittai,
2008), or the role of mobile technology in the political economy, as for instance
its use during the mass political uprising in the Philippines (Pertierra, 2002).
The theory of technological politics offers a framework through which one can
begin to interpret and explain some of the puzzling patterns manifesting
around us.
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To sum up: thus far the presentation on the import of culture to human
experience has aimed at establishing the interdependency of culture and technology.
Technology and technological change are vital to the evolution of culture.
People have developed stone tools, bows and arrows, digging sticks,
ploughs, agriculture, ceramics, wheels, machinery, computers, telecommunications,
bio- and nanotechnologies. These inventions have assumed a material
social existence. They have also influenced survival and reproduction. One cannot
fully disengage technology from human culture without having to undo
much of human history.
One can say that contemporary human existence, especially in urban areas,
is highly dependent on technology and technology-supported practices. People
who live in highly industrialized habitats take for granted much of the technologies
that surround them. They become acutely aware primarily through
breakdowns in the techno-environmental infrastructure, for example through
disruptions in the electrical power grid and in the distribution of subsistence
materials. In contrast, daily life in less industrialized habitats is characterized
not only by disruptions but also by outright failure of the techno-environmental
system to provide subsistence materials to millions of people.
Culture and technology are artefacts intimately intertwined in the continuous
history of human experience. Cultures at the band level of development
that subsisted (still subsist) through the practice of foraging, as it is known ethnographically,
could not have diffused without the development of technologies
such as bows and arrows, kayaks, blowguns, stone and bone tools (Henrich
& McElreath, 2003, p. 124). Cultures at the level of tropical forest slash-and-burn
farming villages needed the technology of creating fire; Neolithic mixed dryfarming
villages required agricultural technologies; the amplification of pristine
states of Mesopotamia, China, India, Peru, and Mesoamerica required hydraulic
technologies in conjunction with irrigation agriculture (M. Harris, 1979, pp. 101-
102).
If one accepts the notion of a planetary culture whose characteristic includes
noetic participation on a global scale (e.g., Jenkins, 2006; Thompson,
2007), then one has to acknowledge the role of computer-mediated technologies.
Hence technology has developed as a by-product of human coupling with the
environment, and the use of technology has become a means of intervention
that transcends and modifies constraints. Technology and related practices have
been developed to gain a degree of control over rates of subsistence production,
especially the production of food and other forms of energy; technology and
related practices have been developed for expanding, limiting, and maintaining
population size (M. Harris, 1979). And from modernity onwards, it is clear that
advances of technologies paralleling developments in mathematics, physics,
computer science, neuroscience, cognitive science, biology and nanoscience are
accelerating human intervention to the planetary ecosystem and shaping cultures
at all levels.
4 CULTURE IN HTI: CURRENT APPROACHES
Situating this work’s themes and propositions into a current perspective necessitates
a summary of recent developments in HTI research. This chapter provides
a non-exhaustive summary. Leikas (2009, pp. 36-66) provides a comprehensive
review of contemporary human-centric, or “user-centric” design approaches
including ethical design, value sensitive design, worth-centred development,
inclusive design and gerontechnology, and emphatic design. The following
exposition adds to this review beginning with the most widely practiced
approaches.
It has been suggested that the notion of integrating culture into the design
of technology artefacts is a relatively new addition to the agenda of HTI researchers
and designers. There seems to be a growing realization of the need for
more empirical studies to fill the gaps in the literature to aid a deeper understanding
of cultural effects on the design of artefacts. It is possible that we are
still at the stage of paradigm development when design practice has to be first
deconstructed to get a deeper understanding of its methods in relation to the
current dynamics between socioculturally determined behaviour and ideas, and
technology use. Indeed, current research work on human-technology interaction
methodology deconstructs established theories and practices to propose
alternative research and design strategies.
Several research strategies, applicable either to particular domains of action
or to general purposes, have been proposed. Reviews of current HTI literature
support the drive for realigning artefacts to achieve cultural fit. Research
seems to be shifting away from traditional usability methodology moving toward
proposals of holistic approaches, seeking alternative cultural theories as
basis for examining the effects of cultural factors on the design of artefacts, and
deploying culture-related research much earlier in the design process (e.g., a
specific artefact has not yet been produced prior to deployment of a study). The
following sections present research frameworks that have been proposed both
for domain specific and general application.
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4.1 Human factors in ergonomics
Professional practitioners often use the terms human factors and ergonomics
synonymously. While there are subtle differences in the definitions of the two
concepts, they are both concerned with designing to accommodate people
(Chapanis, 1996). Human-technology interaction, as “work” has been viewed
traditionally from the perspective of systems engineering. This implies that
while the discipline of human factors in ergonomics (HFE) aims to ensure the
well-being of workers, this state of being is ultimately a means to an efficiently
functioning system. Human factors are thus subsumed into the description of
the system. Depending on the type of system being developed and the systems
designer/engineer’s appreciation and acceptance of human factors, people may
or may not be situated in the centre of the design process. This should not come
as a surprise when one traces the lineage of the ergonomics concept to the work
of Polish scientist W. B. Jastrzebowski who original proposed and defined the
concept in 1857 (Karwowski, 2012); that is, at the later stage of the Industrial
Revolution. One can see the dynamics of machines serving humans versus humans
serving machines in the objectives set up for the HFE discipline (Table 2).
TABLE 2 Objectives of human factors ergonomics (HFE).15
Objectives for affecting
users and operators
Improve the working environment; reduce fatigue
and physical stress; increase human comfort;
reduce boredom and monotony; increase
ease of use; increase user acceptance; increase
aesthetic appearance.
Operational objectives Reduce errors; increase safety; improve system
performance.
Reliability, maintainability,
and availability, and
integrated logistic support
Increase reliability; improve maintainability;
reduce personnel requirements; reduce training
requirements.
Other objectives Reduce losses of time and equipment; increase
economy of production.
One could say that contemporary HFE practices are accumulated in theories
and practices aiming to ensure that human requirements are not forgotten during
the systems engineering process. It arguably contributes to the well-being of
people who use a given system.
In contrast to system design targeting highly selected or skilled people
(e.g., airplane pilots, nuclear power plant operators), design of systems such as
telephones, DVD players and personal computers for general use precludes the
assumption that the users will be selected in any particular way or will receive
any training at all. Cultural human-technology interaction design and a sub-
15 Adapted from Chapanis 1996, p. 16.