Just a quick Sunday post- At the beginning of this month, a U.S. Appeals Court ruled that filming police officers is protected under the first amendment. As we have covered before, social networking sites are very powerful tools for protestors. They are organizational tools for peaceful protest, they provide safety to those that wish to get out of dangerous situations, and they also broadcast the events of protests beyond their geophysical boundaries. Now that capturing video won’t land you in jail (or on the pavement) I think we are seeing some important citizen footage of the #OccupyWallSt Protests. The major news outlets have largely failed to cover them, but maybe our online platforms can get the word out. Until, of course, they start censoring protest as well.

Here’s one more-

In the Spring semester of my third year of college I had a stats class that really took the life out of me. One day I elected to take a brief nap in a dorm lounge. The picture above was taken shortly after I laid down, and subsequently posted on Facebook. Out of context, it appears as though I am planking– an internet meme in which individuals are photographed intentionally laying face-down in strange places. It has popped in an out of the global media for almost a decade but resurfaced over this summer into a world-wide activity. It has since inspired similar activities including owling, Batmanning, and stocking. I will refer to the entire trend collectively as “performative memes.” Unlike Anthropology Major Fox or lolcatz, these memes are about performing a certain embodied act, not producing an image for visual consumption. All around the world, friends are taking pictures of each other doing strange stunts and posting them on the internet. What exactly are we doing –socially- when we engage in performative internet memes?

Even though I am laying facedown, and someone has photographed me, I am not engaged in planking. I have not defined my activity as planking, (it wasn’t even called planking in 2008) and I did not intend to share this activity with anyone else (even though the photographer did). And even if I were planking, it would be a relatively unimpressive instance of planking, since many of the most popular occur in strange and dangerous places. So dangerous in fact, that one young man in Australia died after falling seven stories in an attempt to plank on the ledge of a balcony.What is it about this activity that compels individuals to risk arrest, injury, or even death? Certainly there is the usual dose of bravado that goes with any kind of intentionally public stunt. The possibility of internet fame has also been known to encourage questionable behavior, but neither danger nor fame fully explains the sheer number and variety of individual efforts. If danger and fame were the only motivating factors, new posts on the planking Facebook page would get increasingly more dangerous and outlandish. Instead, we get multiple instances of planking at weddings, planking in store aisles, and a wide range of planking-related media. There is a spoof movie trailer, a touchdown plank, and even t-shirts.

What sort of theory can we bring to bear to describe performative memes? Chris Kelty, in his book Two Bits, concludes that free software communities form something called a “recursive public.” A recursive public is a group that is organized to create the very means by which it constitutes itself. Free software makers make free software so that they can use the source code to communicate and make more free software. Planking does not create the means by which one shares their planking activities, but it does create the context in which the activity gains meaning. By participating in performative memes we show others that we are a part of the same international community. By engaging in performative memes, participants constitute a social imaginary that gives meaning and context to the actions of subsequent and existing participants. When someone goes owling in an art museum, I might owl in a natural history museum and post my picture as a response. We are communicating a shared idea, and we derive pleasure from the shared experience. More than just a shot at internet fame or recognition (although that is a motivating factor), performative memes are a way to nonverbally communicate a shared cultural practice. In hopes that I may reflexively push performative memes in the direction of recursive publics, I submit for the internet’s approval my attempt at stocking with a photo of an owl:

This is the first of a two-part series dedicated to answering the question “Do we need a new World’s Fair?” It is an honest question that I do not have an answer to. What I aim to do here is share my thoughts on the subject and present historical data on what these sorts of events have done in the past. In the first part, I explore what previous World Fairs have accomplished and what we must certainly avoid. The second part will investigate what a new 21st century fair might look like, and how it would help our economy. Part 1 is here.

Yesterday we looked at the last few World Fairs that were held in the United States. Those  20th century fairs demonstrated technologies that today we take for granted as common-place. Everything from Juicy Fruit gum to fluorescent lighting has been introduced to the world through these massive fairs. World Expos still take place, but are now found in China, Japan and South Korea. The 2012 expo will be held in Seoul, South Korea. The latest World’s Fair, Expo 2010, was held in Shanghai, China and set historic records as the largest and most well-attended expo. But the success of the Shanghai Expo doesn’t quite translate to America’s shores. As The Atlantic’s Adam Minter wrote last year:

To American ears, the concept of a World’s Fair sounds archaic, and when applied to Shanghai, a contemporary symbol of all that is new, vibrant, and even threatening, it’s disconcerting. But in Shanghai, where the future is an obsession, this reported $46 billion hat-tip to the past makes perfect sense: just as New York once announced its global pre-eminence via World’s Fairs in 1939 and, again, in 1964, the organizers of Expo 2010 view the six month event as nothing less than Shanghai’s coronation as the next great world city.

Iron Man 2 opened with the Stark Expo. It might be the only exposure younger Americans have had to the concept of an expo or World Fair. It is strange when you think about the press and excitement surrounding Apple keynotes, E3 conferences, SXSW, and Science Fiction conventions that a World Fair has not already been proposed. It might have something to do with the Gingrich congress making it extremely difficult to participate in expos overseas. By not participating at a global level, it has been extremely difficult to keep Expos in Americans’ minds. But it is also has to do with how we think about technological innovation. Apple is well-known for its secrecy, and Google seems to be picking up similar habits. Displaying what the world may look like in 30 years, means showing your hand to your competitors.

More popularly, among consumers, there is a sense that technological innovation follows linear tracks that are defined by market selection of “the best” technology and access to the hardware and software necessary for making goods and providing services. In reality, technological innovation is a social process that is constantly shifting based on wholly socio-cultural and political influences. Technology is socially constructed, and the process of innovation can be steered if the proper amount of directive force is applied. It is as simple as goal setting. If there is a goal that most of us find useful, or even exciting, we can achieve it in a collaborative way.

Typically, these sorts of grand schemes get increasingly boring when you get to particulars. But I find the particulars even more exciting. Future World Fairs may be held in Houston or San Francisco, but I’m in Atlanta right now (attending a conference) so I have Georgia on My Mind (sorry). Let’s say the new American World Fair is held in Atlanta, Georgia in 2014. Billions of public and private dollars are brought to a region that recently hit a new low in job rates. Because these are such big ventures, building and preparation takes years and can employ thousands of people. When the Olympics are held in a city, the city is often left with enormous athletic facilities that need to be reengineered into different buildings. But with a world fair, the infrastructure is much more useful. You leave office parks, labs, and other facilites that are useful for the very industries that the fair helps incubate. Building a regional high-speed rail line to funnel visitors from other major population centers would have the added benefit of leaving a much needed infrastructure improvement for the region.

Like I said yesterday, a 21st century world fair would offer the opportunity for a break-out small business to be globally recognized almost overnight. GM was able to control the vision of the future, because no one else had access to the media outlets that drove visitors. Having an Augmented Exposition means the crowd decides what the future looks like. If a twitter backchannel can help organize entire revolutions it can unseat the visions of big corporations in favor of the little guy. If you read tech blogs as regularly as I do, you will notice a reoccurring theme in tech conference coverage. There is always a story about the unexpected breakout success. Twitter itself was a break-out success at the 2007 SXSW festival Since then, Quora and Foursquare have followed similar trajectories. If the 21st century American world fair is structured to foster small business discovery, we could see an increase in economic activity many fold above the initial investment cost of the fair. This is a big if. Corporations have the power and capital to preemptively keep small business out of the process. It is important that the expo organizational committee come from the public sector, not the major corporations. The planning needs to be an open process with citizen’s oversight committees at all levels. The Augmented Exposition could be the way forward, if we are ready to do the hard work of building our own future.

This is the first of a two-part series dedicated to answering the question “Do we need a new World’s Fair?” It is an honest question that I do not have an answer to. What I aim to do here is share my thoughts on the subject and present historical data on what these sorts of events have done in the past. In the first part, I explore what previous World Fairs have accomplished and what we must certainly avoid. The second part will investigate what a new 21st century fair might look like, and how it would help our economy. Part 2 is here.

A “World Fair” is first and foremost, a grand gesture. They are typically months if not a few years long. Think of them as temporary theme parks, or the the olympics of technological innovation. They are extravagant, optimistic, and brash. But let’s be clear here. All of the World Fairs held in Paris, Chicago, New York, and Seattle had sections that are deeply troubling. The 19th century fairs had human zoos and “freak shows.” The 20th century fairs were, in many ways, launchpads for the corporate take-over of the public realm and the plundering of the very cities that hosted them (more on that later). But that does not mean the form is totally useless or inherently bad. In fact, a new American World Fair might be just what we need.

The World’s Fair in Paris celebrated the 100th anniversary of the storming of the Bastille and asserted France’s prominence as a intellectual and political powerhouse up until the first World War.The Exposition Universelle gave the world the Eifel Tower, popularized Heineken beer, and deeply influenced the work of Claude Debussy.

In Erik Larson’s best-selling book Devil in the White City he describes the many and varied inventions that were first showcased at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair (also called the World’s Columbian Exposition) which have now become common-place in our lives:

[Visitors to the fair] saw the first moving pictures on Edison’s Kinetoscope, and they watched, stunned, as lightning chattered from Nikola Tesla’s body. They saw even more ungodly things- the first zipper; the first-ever all-electric kitchen, which included an automatic dishwasher; and a box purporting to contain everything a cook would need to make pancakes, under the brand name Aunt Jemima’s. They sampled a new, oddly flavorful gum called Juicy Fruit, and caramel-coated popcorn called Cracker Jack. A new cereal, Shredded Wheat, seemed unlikely to succeed-“shredded doormat,” some called it- but a new beer did well, winning the exposition’s top beer award. Forever afterward, its brewer called it Pabst Blue Ribbon.

And there are many others firsts: Commercially viable electric lights,the ferris wheel, and (unfortunately) the electric chair.

The 1939 New York World’s Fair introduced the American consumer to  nylon, air conditioning, fluorescent lighting and science fiction conventions. But by far, the most popular exhibit was  by General Motors. Entitled “Futurama,” visitors were awed by the huge model city of the future. All visitors left with a (very accurate) pin that read “I have seen the future!” The exhibit promised sweeping highways full of sleek cars and tall buildings. Sure enough, by the 1960s highways had plowed through many urban downtown neighborhoods and everyone heralded the arrival of the easy-motoring lifestyle. There are two ways of looking at GM’s exhibit. First, we can take it as it is- a good, honest guess at what our built environment will look like in the not-too-distant-future. Or we can look at it as a strategic marketing initiative- creating the necessary public support for a massive outlay of public funds for corporate profit.

Kenneth T. Jackson’s Crabgrass Frontier provides an excellent account of the American landscape’s transformation from cities with their hinterlands, to sprawling suburban networks. The decentralization of populations and the rise of cars as the dominant mode of American transportation was no accident. It was a business decision. Jackson writes-

Looking twenty-five years ahead, it offered a “magic Aladdin-like flight through time and space.”… Five million persons peered eventually at such novelties as elevated freeways, expressway traffic moving 100 miles per hour, and “modern efficient city planning…

The promise of a national system of impressive roadways attracted a divers group of lobbyists… In 1943 these groups came together as the American Road Builders Association, with General Motors as the largest contributor.

The ARBA poured millions of dollars into congressional coffers while it attracted even more corporations- tire makers, oil companies, car dealers, and construction companies. GM, since the 20s, had been buying up streetcar lines under the name of a subsidiary, and replaced them with less efficient bus lines.

Technological progress and innovation appears to us as a straight line. We go from the Model T, to the 2012 Mustang through a series of improvements that are based in scientific innovation and capitalist competition. But that is rarely the case. Science is a social process and its material output, technology, has the social embedded within it. World Fairs have the ability to define the future: Give it a frame, and assign the benchmarks of progress. If we want to see a world in which our carbon footprint is minimized (or eliminated) urban poverty is conquered, and our manufacturing base is restored- we need a roadmap. We need to know what that looks like. In the hands of GM, the New York World’s Fair became the launch pad for a particular vision of the United States. A World Fair of the 21st century has the potential to be a more democratic affair. Of course large companies like GE, Google, Verizon, Apple, and even GM would have a large presence. They could attract large crowds. But as we saw at Theorizing the Web 2011 services like Twitter can augment our collective experiences. A small start-up can be discovered, a collective voice can be identified and heard, and powerful companies can be openly and loudly criticized and ignored.

In part two we’ll explore more recent world fair events and consider what an American 21st century fair might look like.

[Edit 09/07/11 @ 5:03PM EST]  It has been mentioned in the comments, and elsewhere, that while the Postal Service is facing a solvency problem, that problem is the direct result of Republican-led legislation that burdens them with excessive overhead. I completely agree with this sentiment. The 109th Congress, passed the “The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act” in 2006, which you can read in full here. The law requires that the USPS  pre-fund 75 years-worth of pensions, and prohibits them from selling  goods that are not directly used for sending letters and packages. I suggest you read more about this legislation here and here. I encourage all of you do to your own research and post what you find in the comments.]

Reading the news lately, makes it seem as though the Post Office is giving its final economic death rattle. Post Master General Patrick Donahoe spoke at a Senate hearing yesterday, and according to the Christian Science Monitor:

Donahoe reiterated a list of cost-cutting measures he has been proposing in recent months to erase the agency’s deficit, which could reach up to $10 billion this fiscal year. They include eliminating Saturday mail delivery, closing as many as 3,700 postal locations, and laying off 120,000 workers – nearly one-fifth of the agency’s work force. (This doesn’t include another 100,000 jobs lost to attrition that the agency does not plan to replace, for a total of 220,000 lost positions.)

These  are  disgraceful solutions to what could be considered an exciting opportunity to innovate. The Internet is being blamed for many of the Post Office’s problems, and it is safe to say that email has put a significant dent in their revenues. But revenues are only half the story. Expenditures are equally important. Duany, Plater-Zyberk, and Speck in their book Suburban Nation relay a conversation with a former (unnamed) Postmaster General who explained that most of our postage goes to the gas for the trucks and vans that carry mail to the suburban fringes of municipalities. Indeed, the USPS has the largest civilian truck fleet in the world. In an era of austerity, we need to look for ways to reduce spending while maintaining affordable services. I just think we need to spend less money on machines, and more on people. The internet can help us do this.

This is not completely my idea. Planning students have been writing masters theses on these sorts of projects for at least a decade. But they have not been noticed because it requires a certain change in how we do business. The first (and most drastic) step is to suspend door-to-door mail service. First class mail can be scanned and delivered to a registered private email address. Packages are to be delivered to Neighborhood Package Centers or NPCs and kept in individual lockers. Residents receive notification via cell phone or email that a package has arrived and they are to pick them up in a specified locker with a generated key code.

The Neighborhood Package Center could become the centerpiece of Augmented American Civic Life. During my short stint as an intern in the Sarasota County planning department under Peter Katz I wrote a white paper on the subject. By suspending door-to-door services, you generate considerable traffic (and buying power) in specific locations where the NPC is built. These locations become the areas of economic revitalization that we need the most. NPCs will work best in dense walkable neighborhoods which, are also the neighborhoods that need the most help. Rural and suburban neighborhoods can take back vacant Wal-Mart storefronts and use them for the civic good.

Neighborhoods will harness the economic power of Amazon and eBay and capture them in the very brick and mortar of their downtowns. Businesses that cannot do business on the internet (think coffee shops, restaurants, gyms, hair salons, etc.) will take advantage of the increased traffic the NPC provides and setup shop nearby. This is also an opportunity for new business models.With refrigerated lockers, residents can order groceries on the internet and pick them up within several hours. Entire virtual farmers markets can happen, and local retailers can drive the short distance to place their goods in the centralized NPC.

Letter carriers could be the employees of new 24-hour federal internet-enabled civic centers. The NPC has the potential to augment our downtowns and build necessary social capital that communities need. It also means contracting with companies to offer every citizen some kind of cell phone access to tell them when they have a new package. Let us take this opportunity to eliminate the digital divide as well. We can reinvigorate our downtowns by improving our digital infrastructure. When neighborhoods come together to pool their resource, we create thriving local economies that are the basis for a strong union. It is clear that the current incarnation of the Postal Service is an unsustainable business model. Let us see this as an opportunity to do something truly innovative, and not put more people out of work.

Last Tuesday, Slate’s editor David Plotz wrote about a social experiment he performed last July.

I was born on Jan. 31, but I’ve always wanted a summer birthday. I set my Facebook birthday for Monday, July 11. Then, after July 11, I reset it for Monday, July 25. Then I reset it again for Thursday, July 28. Facebook doesn’t verify your birthday, and doesn’t block you from commemorating it over and over again. If you were a true egomaniac, you could celebrate your Facebook birthday every day. (You say it’s your birthday? It’s my birthday too!)

Plotz’s Facebook wall was filled by well-wishers on all three of his “birthdays.” He writes,

My social network was clearly sick of me. I received only 71 birthday wishes on July 28, down from more than 100 on my first two fake birthdays. And even more skeptics caught on to the experiment: 16 doubters, compared with 9 from three days earlier.

He concludes that Facebook encourages its users to lead shallow lives in which we mindlessly send uniform birthday greetings in exchange for social capital. As Plotz puts it, “The wishes have all the true sentiment of a Christmas card from your bank.” Indeed,  I know many people who turn off their Facebook walls on their birthdays to prevent such insincerity. But the birthday has always been somewhat insincere. According to the Greeting Card Association of America, the greeting card industry is a $7.5 billion-a-year business, a quarter of which comes from birthday card sales. Their products are far from indivdually-crafted sentiments from the heart. For a few examples visit our fellow Society Pages blog Sociological Images. They have two great posts on birthday cards one that reinforces Jewish stereotypes, and another that is just plain sexist. about problematic representations of gender in father’s day cards as well as birth announcement cards. Just from those posts alone, I think Facebook does less to insult us than the greeting card industry.

But there’s still one more aspect of Plotz’s argument: Even if the birthday wish is sincere, how can it be meaningful if they say it on the wrong day? Obviously they don’t really know its my birthday. The assumption here, is that true friends and close family members have your birthday written down somewhere, and they go to the trouble of wishing you a happy birthday when it comes around. But your birthday is written down with a bunch of other friends and family members. For example, my 91-year-old grandmother sends birthday cards to all of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. How does she do it? She has them all written down in a pocket day planner in her indecipherable handwriting. How is this day planner any different from the automated birthday list I have syndicated to my calendaring application? I didn’t sit down one afternoon in January and copy over my friends birthdays. A server did that for me. Its up to us to provide accurate information.

Perhaps Plotz experiment shows us the true nature of Facebook Narcissism It has nothing to do with online profile preening and self-aggrandizement. Rather, it has everything to do with a search for authenticity. Having an “authentic” and “sincere” social interaction with a loved one. An authenticity that won’t be found in the aisles of a Hallmark store or a someecards message. Its an authenticity that sits outside of the McDonaldization of holidays and special events.

Most of us here at Cyborgology have written at least one post about augmented warfare and revolution. I suggested that the panopticon has moved to the clouds, and PJ warns that we may soon see it descend into a fog. In the wake of the Arab Spring, we have all commented on what it means to have an augmented revolution (also here, here, and here). The Department of Defense is well aware of this global trend, and is dumping lots of money into understanding how to maintain what I will call online superiority. Just as nations fight for ground, air, and sea superiority in a given conflict, they must now maintain a presence in online meeting spaces. Surveillance and intelligence efforts have always been a part of warfare, and monitoring and disrupting information flows has always been a tactical advantage. While previous engagements in informational warfare have been about information exchange, what we see now are efforts to gain online superiority in order to directly disrupt physical, financial, or tactical resources.

A good example is Stuxnet, the malware jointly developed by Israeli and American forces to disrupt the Iranian nuclear program. By sabotaging a relatively mundane piece of hardware, they were able to severely damage Iran’s uranium-refining capacity. But the United States is aware that other entities are working on similar weapons. They recognize the increasing importance of online meeting spaces as the originators of this sort of action. Outside threats might include China and Russia hacking into infrastructure control networks. Perceived domestic threats include the various Anonymous hacker collectivities such as Lulzsec or AnitSec. And of course, there’s always Wikileaks.

DARPA has released a solicitation to companies that can help the government with the” four basic goals” in the area of Social Media in Strategic Communication:

Just as automated drones are providing total battlefield awareness, this solicitation belies a desire for high-level surveillance of large groups of people. The curation of information is, once again, extremely important. As David Streitfeld  noted in the New York Times’ Bits Blog, this technology “would be, at its most basic level, an Internet meme tracker.” In the civilian world, we have sites like Klout and Hunch that crawl your various social media profiles and determine your network influence or what kind of wallet you prefer. DARPA is much more interested in what kind of political movement you influence, and what sorts of foreign governments you prefer.

Online superiority means the panopticon extends into our online lives as well. The Foucaldian panopticon works in three stages: 1) an individual knows they are subject to surveillance but, 2) the act of surveillance is not observable by the surveilled, thus 3) one internalizes the surveillance, acting as if they are constantly being watched. We are already encouraged to act this way as a reaction to the moral panic of online privacy. We are  told to worry about online predators and potential employers, but after 2015 whenDARPA hopes to complete this project, we’ll have to worry about our government’s opinions of what constitutes appropriate online behavior.

Last week Nathan and PJ introduced us to Americans Elect 2012 by asking the question: “Can we elect a ‘wikipedia’ president?” The idea is seemingly straightforward- define the broad categories you find most important (your “colors”), answer questions to determine the popular positions of most Americans, and find candidates that most closely resemble your opinions on the issues. The result is a “third party” candidate on the ballot in all 50 states with a platform that most people agree with.

I have reservations about this process, and they fall into three categories. 1)Poorly designed questions. These questions are confusing and might not elicit the responses people intend to give. 2) Leading questions. To be fair, the language that Americans use to talk about politics is full of pre-defined frames and evocative images that push people in certain directions. It is virtually impossible to create a set of questions that extracts the thoughts of individuals with total neutrality. Our thoughts are like electrons- the act of observation changes their behavior. 3) The reinforcement of ineffective partisan thinking. From the Americans Elect website:

1)Poorly Designed Questions

Let’s take a look at a two foreign policy questions:

Both questions are too vague to illicit meaningful data. In the first question about troops abroad, is it referring to those stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan? What about our intervention in Libya? Does this mean we should close up all of our overseas military bases in Germany, Japan, Panama, Belgium, Italy, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, etc. etc.? Does this imply that we still use unmanned drones? What about cyber warfare? It might sound like nit-picking, but does an effective question elicit the same answer from both a pacifist and a proponent of drone warfare? In the second question, the terms “significant investments” and “resources” are far too-vaugue to evoke a meaningful answer. Person A’s answer may imply humanitarian aid for injured parties, while person B may select the same choice but advocate the utilization of the federal government and the IMF to liberalize trade barriers. Both parties, each with very different intentions, will likely select the same answer.

2)Leading Questions

There are many of them. Leading questions frame the issue with a certain slant. For instance:

The term “tackling” is already confrontational, but even more problematic is the term “illegal immigrant.” This term carries strong negative connotations. One’s identity is not “illegal.” There are many complicated relationships and life events that bring an individual from their home country to the United States. To relegate them to a single illegal status is one particular viewpoint. These words are rhetorical tools, and embedded within them is the power to change minds and frame debates. While a plurality of respondents chose amnesty, the question’s wording makes it easier to argue for prosecution at a later time.

3)The Reinforcement of Ineffective Partisan Thinking

An organization based in the principle of nonpartisanship, should not ask this question. Can’t one have a principle that requires that they work with members of the other party?  We are already back into the partisan fray. Without much thinking we can figure out how a mainline Republican or a Democrat would answer the following:

You might be thinking- “Well, we need to stop assuming all Democrats are pro-choice and anti-gun, and Republicans want to ‘drill baby, drill.” But the problem is not the division into categories, but the categories themselves. These dichotomies have already been set up. The truly innovative thinking will come when we realize that the solution to our energy crises may come from also saving the environment.

Until Americans Elect radically changes the question system, we will end up with a candidate that may jump across the aisle a few times, (a social progressive with conservative economic stances, for example) but we will not come close to transcending partisanship. The candidate selection process might be novel, but the content of the issues are presented in the same dichotomies that Americans Elect identifies as the problem. Truly innovative (even radical) thinking will come from a politics that shatters these dichotomies and finds solutions in the rubble.

The original work described in this post was done in collaboration with Audrey Bennett and Ron Eglash and funded by the National Science Foundation’s GK-12 grant-funded Triple Helix Program. You can read all of the dispatches from Ghana on the3Helix fellows’ blog.

Alternate universes can be a lot of fun. We can make Superman land in the USSR, put goatees on normally clean-shaven cast members, and revisit moments in history and play the “what if” game. It is the stuff of science fiction and fantasy. But there is much more to be said about the various parallel universes that might exist. At least, that’s what a lot of social theory has us believe.

At the end of the 20^th century social scientists released dozens of books and articles with the words “social construction” in the title. Social constructionism became a very useful tool for the post-modern author who wanted to deconstruct such difficult topics as organic chemistry or high-energy physics.  Their premises were rather straightforward and were unceremoniously summarized and simplified by Ian Hacking in his book “The Social Construction of What?” (2000). Hacking writes:

“Social Constructionists about X hold that:

[1] X need not have existed, or need not be at all as it is. X, or X as it is present, is not determined by the nature of things; it is not inevitable.  (P.33).”

Hacking, as a philosopher of science, was concerned about the liberal use of the term “social construction” and wanted to know what exactly it was that we were all so busy “constructing.” Why would we talk about the social construction of institutions when, as any Sociology 101 class would teach us, institutions are social entities that cannot be explained without their social components. You might as well talk about the brick construction of brick homes.  The more interesting moments of social constructionism (according to Hacking, and I agree) are those things that are not recognized as such. Such social construction theses have changed the world. One of the most notable and well-known theses is from Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, in which she proclaims, “One is not born, but rather becomes a woman.” In this brief sentence, she rejects the assumption that when one’s biology (sex) determines their role in society (gender).  It was a simple distinction that was crucial in the launching of the feminist movement.

In the late seventies sociologists, historians, and anthropologists began studying such “unsocial” topics as laboratories and scientists. These authors, by the late 80s, had formed a well-defined school of thought titled “Social Construction of Technology” or SCOT. Everything from the stove, to the bicycle, to the interstate highway system were shown to be just one of countless other possible technical arrangements.

Social entitles such as Victorian family structures, notions of masculinity and femininity, and class distinctions were crucial in the creation of present-day ovens, bicycles, and highways (respectively). All of them show a way things could have been, but are not. Their current forms are not, as Hacking would say, inevitable. It is my contention however, that we need not limit this perspective to historical accounts of invention and innovation. There are alternate innovation timelines happening all around us, especially in developing nations.

These alternate innovation timelines are the result of different people getting access to different services and technologies, at different times. Most of us may consider a smart phone to be an extravagance that we could do without. It is a luxury item that offers entertainment and functionality that, while extremely useful in our hectic lives, is not as necessary as our transportation to work or the electricity that does work around the house. Smartphones are things that you get once you can afford them, and not before more basic necessities have been filled. If you do not have a smartphone, you access social networking sites through a computer at home, work., and/or school. Those that have a smartphone, probably use it in tandem with a full computer. But when one looks at the role cell phones play in the lives of low-income communities and developing nations, we see a different picture. The cell phone is not a luxury item, it is a communication tool that helps individuals pool resources, overcome obstacles, and gather information that would otherwise be unobtainable.

Mobile penetration has increased 100 fold since the year 2000, in almost all African nations (read the full report by Kas Kalba for the precipitating factors [PDF]) and the usage patterns of these phones differ considerably from those in developed nations. Cell phones are plentiful, almost always pre-paid, are shared with others, and specialized for specific tasks.

While in Ghana, we conducted about two-dozen interviews. Of my twenty-two interviews, half had smartphones and half had keypad only phones. (I considered anything with a full keyboard or a touchscreen, a smartphone.) Four interviewees had two cell phones that they used for specific purposes (one for calls and texts and the other for internet browsing). Three of those four had two smartphones and the other one had two keypad phones.  Facebook is experienced, by and large, over the phone in a mobile format.

In their keynote at the 2011 World Wide Developer’s Conference, Apple’s Steve Jobs noted that half of iPhone users never connect their device to a computer after the initial setup. Tech blogs hailed the beginning of the “post-pc” age, in which the work of full PCs has moved to a variety of handheld devices. But in reality, this is unique to the West and parts of Asia. The developing world never had a “PC era” and is not “post” anything. The cell phone was most individuals’ first connection to the Internet and social networking. Using Facebook was partially synonymous with the self-reported act of “browsing” but was not considered part of “the internet.”

While cell phone use in Ghana looks similar, people relate to the various technologies surrounding it, in a much different way. We don’t need to bother with SCOT’s historical “what if’s.” We can look at the present-day differences of cell phone adoption in developing countries and see what has developed. Smartphones are used frequently by people from varying walks of life and shape their definitions of where the Internet begins, and Facebook ends. Most importantly however, it means any work that uses IT in the developing world, must take into consideration the unique history of that technology’s adoption.

[Edit 23:04EST]- I just remembered a picture that sums up how successful cell phone companies have been in Ghana. This was taken in the lobby just outside of the international arrivals terminal at the Accra Airport: