A late response
Posted on May 27, 2003 @ 17:35 in Research
As if a week of returning fits of jetlag wasn't enough, it is being served with a chaser of slow burning flu *snirf*. Owen brings up a couple of good points that I've been meaning to respond to, but being clogged up so badly kept me from that, mostly because this post actually involves thinking. So, keeping with the dialogical ebb and flow, I'll start with the last point and sort of work my way back up.
Cultural accents of machinery and globalization. I'm not an engineer and many of the subleties of cultural differences in engineering and design have probably escaped me, but indeed, technology is never neutral and always engendered/embedded in a specific cultural, historical and economical context. In my recollection, 1970s electronics coming from Germany, France, Japan or the USA, had a distinctly different feel to it. I'm not sure there was an equally pronounced Dutchness in technology, but I'm pretty sure I'd be able to point out 60s and 70s Dutch kitchens among other examples. Some of the cultural differences lingered long after globalization started, but I agree that globalization causes an increasing homogenization in technology. In another 100 years I'm sure though, that historians will be able to adequately read our current state of mind from (or into) our technologies. As an aside, I always felt that Gibson and Sterling did a great job on bringing out the particular sensibilities of the Victorian age and how that impacted on their technology (and how their technology shaped them) in The Difference Engine.
My own research is not a cross-cultural study per se, but it's interesting to see that when actively focusing on Dutch weblogs, one of the first things that catches my eye is a subtle difference with their more US-centric brethren. The difference is not so much in the technology itself I'd say — although it would be interesting to look at for instance the Dutch weblog tool Pivot and compare it with other weblog tools — but in the unspoken conventions of what makes a good log: what sort of things do you write about, what sort of sites do you link to, what's in your sidebars, and not unimportantly, what do you tell about yourself? One of the things that appears to be conceptualized differently is the "about the author" information. US/English weblogs, at least the ones I'm frequenting, tend to give some information about who author is in real life, whereas many Dutch weblog authors appear to create more of an online personality, rather than tying that selfpresentation to their real life identity. Caveat: I'm only describing a not (yet) quantified observation here.
Going with the flow, rather than the ebb, here and jumping to the point of intentionality of/in (re)presentation. Certainly, some home page or weblog authors are more aware of their online presence than others. Goffman also deals with intentionality in the presentation of self, showing how certain aspects indeed are under the control of the subject, while other aspects escape that control, for example because the subject doesn't realize those aspects might be important, or because there is only so much one can do about one's physical appearance, or because the subject makes a faux pas and lets some information slip out unintentionally. The interesting thing here is the common assumption that online you have a much greater control over your selfpresentation. Still, various everyday aspects of our social reality are encoded in the way we choose to represent ourselves. In a research on family home pages, conducted by a group of students I taught last trimester, it turned out that on the majority of researched home pages the traditional family structure with the father as head of the family, the mother as loving care taker and the children as focus of the family life, was mirrored not only in the content of the home pages, but also in the very structure and layout of those pages. The navigation, for example, invariably listed the father first, then the mother, followed by the children.
My own research is not about classification as an end, but as a tool to think about the everyday processes of social interaction. Intentionality therefor is not in and of itself interesting; what interests me is which aspects of identity are considered worthy of intentional (re)presentation on a home page, and the reasons why they are worthy of active construction. My particular research focus is gender, and why and how home page authors choose to make it (or not make it) an explicit part of their selfpresentation. I'm not just interested in an "on-off" answer here, I want to particularly focus on different social and cultural understandings of masculinity: what do people "do" to present themselves as male, and most of the time a particular kind of male. Gender here is understood not as an innate quality, but as a rather fluid and negotiable set of social, cultural, etc. norms, conventions and stereotypes.
And no, I'm not using "Bacon's table of more or less." I presume you mean Francis Bacon, but I'm afraid I'm not acquainted with this particular theory/concept of Bacon.
Metaphor: If you're interested in that, have a look at George Lakoff & Mark Johnson's book Metaphors We Live By. They talk about how metaphors structure our experience, and how some metaphors are more prevalent than others. Especially spatial and directional metaphors are central to organizing knowledge of the world. The metaphor of the "home," which is already encoded in the term "home page," not only encodes various social connotations of "home", but also implies a particular type of navigable and inhabitable space. Although it probably won't fit in the current research, it would be interesting to see which metaphors are used to construct home pages, and whether they build on different metaphors than spatial/directional ones.
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