3
Native Americans, Networks, and Technology
Having discussed the power of storytelling in relation to technology and its potential to shape and empower community voices across the world, I turn now to the challenge of rethinking the very languages, or codes, by which technologies are designed. This chapter considers how networks and databases can be reimagined through collaborations with Native American communities in remote regions of Southern California. It argues that technology-facilitated networks can be formed and created from the grassroots. Communities themselves can take hold of digital technologies to build connections with others to empower shared economic, cultural, and political objectives. This is in contrast with a history in which technologies have been deployed to maintain a reliance on institutions of power and privilege. The story I share in this chapter relates to the importance of developing collaborations that support community ontologies, or the shared values, beliefs, and ways of knowing that are central to the cultural and social lives of grassroots users.1 This must be the case even when such ontologies fail to correspond or fit neatly with beliefs and values that originate from Western intellectual and professional traditions.
The previous chapter considered the power of using technology to tell one’s story. This chapter takes that theme further to intervene in the “ghost in the machine.” We can reconsider the design principles we employ when we develop databases and network infrastructures based on community ontologies.
This book’s first chapter explained how many of the ontologies that populate the digital world emerged from the Enlightenment-era histories of cultural institutions such as museums and libraries. Anthropologist of science and technology Lucy Suchman has coined the term “detached intimacy” to describe a troubled world in which technologies resemble the image of their creators rather than those they claim to serve.2 Starting a conversation about how we create and design digital ontologies provides an opportunity to rewrite the structures and languages of technology to support the initiatives, voices, and understandings of communities left invisible and objectified. An interest in ontology advances this book’s argument that we must transform our thinking about technology to support collaborative community-based projects. Not only must the support of diverse ontologies shape projects concerned with preserving or archiving knowledge, but it must also inspire collaborations and design efforts that invert long-standing relationships of power and inequality between cultural “professionals” and culturally diverse peoples on the margins. I discuss the possibility of transforming the networks and databases of technology in relation to a multiyear collaboration with nineteen Native American tribes dispersed across San Diego County in Southern California. To best introduce this effort, I first discuss what is lost when the belief systems and ontologies of Native Americans are objectified or ignored.
Auctioning the Sacred
It seems that every couple of years a controversy breaks out that juxtaposes assumptions of the “modern” Western world with the beliefs and values of indigenous and developing world communities. The current controversy about which I write involves the selling of Hopi and Zuni (Native American tribes from the American Southwest) sacred items and masks at an auction in Paris, France.3 Indigenous items have historically entered the hands of art collectors and cultural institutions via ambiguous and unethical histories that date back to the times of their theft from the lands and the peoples from which they came. The “routes” these objects have traveled, often over centuries, speak to a range of political, economic, social, and cultural histories, the vast majority of which are conveniently forgotten.4
Conversation around the power of preservation or “archive fever” has emerged as a response to histories of exploitation.5 This approach argues for the importance of preserving these objects so they can be maintained for “posterity” or “society.” Yet these approaches toward archiving, including the implicit belief in preservation they espouse, are rooted in the epistemologies of those with power and privilege, which have the power to define what preservation or archiving may mean. This can be seen to be the case even with the current interest in “community archives,” which turns over the archival task to community institutions without questioning the epistemologies of “saving” that underlie the larger archival project. Much like sociologist of science David Turnbull’s criticism of the contradiction that one can “collect” biodiversity, indigenous beliefs and values are often dismissed and demeaned whether we speak of colonial auctions or cultural heritage projects.
As discussed in the previous chapter on my work in Andhra Pradesh, the auction I describe in Paris speaks to the challenge of respecting a community’s rights and the power of collaboration and praxis. Not only is collaboration that starts with the voices of a community the correct and ethical choice, but it also holds the possibility of supporting a world where diverse voices, priorities, and practices of knowing are respected and shared when appropriate. This support of diversity must not be based on the panoptic, cosmopolitan gaze of knowing the “other,” but on the respect of traditions by which culturally diverse or indigenous communities share and pass on their knowledge.
With respect to the auction in Paris, both the Hopi and the Zuni tribes claim their items entered Western and foreign hands through illegitimate channels and now they wish that they be returned. These objects represent the spirits of ancestors that have passed on. The items are thus integrally connected to rituals, people’s lives and families, mythologies and stories, and most importantly the sacredness of land and geography. To break any of these connections without proper sanction by the tribe itself represents a type of cultural “violence.”6 This is related to the concept of “structural violence,” which refers to institutionalized relationships that structurally increase inequality and harm the life chances of a subordinate group.7
Philosopher and social theorist Michel Foucault has argued that such forms of violence are enacted and normalized through seemingly innocuous institutions and practices.8 This occurs by having the power to define, for example, what is considered sick versus healthy, or achievement versus failure in medical and educational institutions. Foucault describes the “rarefaction” of discourse,9 whereby commentary and dialogue are made possible relative to existing definitions, but only insofar as they accept assumptions about what is normative and acceptable. These assumptions are created by elites and perpetuated through historical inertia and bureaucratic structures. Foucault points out that cultural violence is perpetuated through seemingly inclusive systems, what one today may describe as liberal or neoliberal. These systems appear democratic, yet in practice they subordinate beliefs and practices not in line with those who manufacture discourse and manipulate media and technology systems to maintain their power and privilege.
Consistent with this, the liberal nature of collecting and preserving that accompany institutions such as the Paris auction may effectively silence the voices of the Hopi and Zuni. “Educational” projects that make cultural objects widely available to the public, as positive as they may seem from one perspective, may work to silence, devalue, and disrespect indigenous or community-specific approaches that seek to guard and protect information.
The Paris auction chooses values of commodification and exhibition while violating indigenous spiritual principles. The Hopi and Zuni see the auctioning of such items as harmful to their own community and the wider world; indeed community members have pointed out both in conversation with me and in published literature that they see themselves as stewards to these objects whose duty is to ensure that their spirits remain beneficial to the world.10 When a spirit is wrongfully treated, as with this auction or any other process of wrongful collecting, tribal leaders believe it can create great harm for all beings by interrupting the harmony of the complete cycle of life.
Indigenous peoples have responded to the troubling museum and archival practices of collecting and preserving tribal objects by developing their own cultural institutions, whose inward focus differs dramatically from that of their Western counterparts. These organizations are dedicated to serving their own communities rather than the larger public. Objects in such institutions are preserved insofar as they are woven into the lived experience of community life. The idea of separating an object from its “source community” is considered profane in such institutions. These organizations thus represent what some tribal leaders have described as a “middle place” by upholding their community’s sovereignty while recognizing the external world for what it is.
Taking this perspective, Jim Enote, Director of the A:shiwi A:wan Museum and Heritage Center at Zuni wrote a memo to journalists, institutions, and diplomats, imploring them to boycott and stop the Paris auction. He argued:
In the late 1800s and early 1900s ethnographers, anthropologists, and associates of museums and private collectors were dispatched to Zuni to collect items that represented the ceremonial and ritualistic aspects of our culture. This was no simple and painless undertaking because items ceremonially made and used in our religious ceremonies are never to be sold and traded. . . . If the shameless business of dealing in sacred and ceremonial antiquities and bad karma that goes with it isn’t enough, I must say buyer beware because the only way to absolutely authenticate a Zuni ceremonial object is to see the truth at the source by having Zuni people . . . inspect the object. . . . Let’s bid farewell to the deceptions, plundering and pain brought on by this exploitative and unethical trade in sacred objects.11
Enote’s remarks focus on the question of “authenticity” as Western colonial cultural institutions grapple with troubled histories. His reference to the “source,” or the originating community from which an object comes, is important to consider in today’s digital world. This is because the “source” is often forgotten when what counts as knowledge depends on the output of various crowdsourcing algorithms. The importance of the source is compromised when what counts as knowledge is that most voted upon or most highly estimated by the crowd.
The belief systems, values, and perspectives of source communities are threatened in the digital world, where terms such as openness or participation are evangelized without scrutiny. We cannot simply develop systems, technological or otherwise, that just “average” everyone’s opinion. These support mass participation rather than diverse knowledge. The perspectives and ways of knowing held by diverse communities must be considered sovereign, autonomous, and worthy of respect.
It is interesting to consider the idea of source in a world where the effects of climate change are proving increasingly disastrous. Indigenous peoples as a whole represent the largest mobilization against projects such as gasoline pipelines and mines that threaten the natural environments in which they live. In cases such as climate change, it is all the more important to think about the power of source—of regional, local, and community ontologies and of how they can inform movements for change and justice.
Just as everyone should not be given an equal voice in discussing the destiny of objects sacred to the Zuni, perhaps it is time to think more carefully, ethically, and respectfully about the overall sovereignty of local knowledge. Yet unfortunately we seem to be headed in the opposite direction. Gilles Neret-Minet writes: “I am also very concerned about the Hopi’s sadness, but you cannot break property law . . . as these are in [private] collections in Europe: they are no longer sacred. When objects are in private collections, even in the United States, they are de-sacralized.”12
In the above passage, French auctioneer Gilles Neret-Minet states that indigenous objects are tradable, “public” commodities. In so doing, he dismisses the practices and beliefs of the indigenous communities from which these objects came. Ethical notions of sacredness, heritage, and history are discarded in favor of stated “values” that treat an indigenous object as a public commodity. Neret-Minet’s words speak to the continued reign of inequality in a global cultural economy where images, finance, objects, and peoples asymmetrically move from local context to global spectacle. Cultural anthropologist Arjun Appadurai describes this phenomenon by the term “scape,” which he defines as fluid, ever-changing factors that contribute to cultural, political, and economic inequality.13 In this mirage of equality and access, one voice matters far more than another, even in cases where the “other” has a deeply personal and spiritual relationship to the object at hand. My analysis exposes the discourses that empower corporate and colonial interests at the expense of indigenous and subaltern peoples.
I wish to build on this example throughout the remainder of this book to consider the supposedly democratic and participatory digital world in which we live. Can we acknowledge different knowledges as sovereign even when they fail to neatly “fit” together in our newfound digital age? To do so, we must rethink how we design databases, networks, and other “codes” of technology.
Databasing Cultures
How have technologies been used to preserve cultural and biological knowledge? A classic response in scientific and cultural institutions has been to create a database. Sociologist of science David Turnbull elaborates upon this:
Hardly a month goes by without the announcement of a new database, some massive assemblage of information. . . . But at the same time, we are facing in classic postmodern fashion, a profoundly challenging conjecture in modernity . . . the possible wipe-out of most life on earth including ourselves. . . . With the recognition of the need for a global biodiversity database has come a rather belated acknowledgement that biodiversity does not exist in isolation, biodiversity is inseparably linked to cultural diversity, to indigenous knowledge.14
Turnbull’s point is that despite potentially benign intentions, most databasing efforts perpetuate the misguided oxymoron of “collecting” diversity. Historically the accumulation of these objects and materials occurred via the use of analog databases, employing lists, indices, and categories as organizing tools. As chapter 1 has described, it is dangerous to place blind faith in “storage technologies” such as databases as they stand, as thus runs the risk of treating a social or political technology as neutral and universal. Similarly, we must probe the languages and ontologies by which databases are created. From this perspective, we should not see a database as truth, but as a container or structure by which information is stored and classified.
Digital technologies are increasingly implicated in conversations about climate change and the loss of diversity today. These crises have only magnified public calls to collect and preserve species that may soon be lost to extinction. What is often left undiscussed are the epistemologies behind collecting. It is assumed that knowledge is preserved despite the displacement of an entity from its original environment. For critics like Turnbull, knowledge is erased rather than enhanced through such practices because the conditions that make such diversity possible are conveniently ignored. We have become so obsessed with managing “knowledge” that our efforts have focused on managing data rather than understanding the processes and contexts by which we actually know!
National Geographic anthropologist and TED talk luminary Wade Davis has described linguistic and cultural diversity as an ethnosphere. He points out that in the last generation alone half the world’s languages have been eradicated. Davis argues that “it’s not change or technology that threatens the ethnosphere. It’s power.”15 His point is only partially true. While technologies in a vacuum, if that were to ever exist, are not at fault, it is their deployment in line with the ontologies of the powerful that threatens diversity.
Technologies that claim to “collect” or “connect” may in fact ignore the profound differences between the cultural traditions, perspectives, and knowledges that they attempt to “preserve.” In this spirit, we can see how the biodiversity archives Turnbull critiques may fail to “preserve” knowledge because of their mistaken belief that one can work with a single classification system to integrate objects and knowledge that come from different places, peoples, and times:
Assemblage of cultural diversity is an oxymoron. To coordinate commensurability, to order according to a common standard or measure, to make uniform, is to deny, suppress, and stifle diversity. It sublimates different into [a singular] identity. Assemblage and diversity are in contradiction with one another, so we have little alternative except to find ways of working with incommensurability and contradiction . . . if we are attempting the assemblage of knowledge of complex, multiplicitous, interactive phenomena we need a complete rethink of all the components and ontologies involved. We need to rethink the very ideas of assemblage and of diversity, which implies rethinking our understandings of science and knowledge and of the enlightenment project itself.16
Most scientific and cultural archives take specific actions, events, and practices and abstract these into indexable, comparative data. In the process, they filter out that which fails to “fit” with existing classification protocols. Lost in this transaction are the voices, values, and practices of communities on the ground. The microprocess is transformed into the stable and quantifiable entity. The “noise” of culture is ignored. Knowledge, through this process, is mistakenly seen as a specimen or commodity to be managed rather than a phenomenon that emerges from a complex range of peoples, places, and landscapes.
A powerful illustration of the articulation of diverse ontologies is through maps. Maps, created by diverse cultures and communities in distinct places and times, speak to the power of thinking through multiple ontologies. An example of this may be seen in maps created by aboriginal peoples.
The dhulan, or indigenous map, illustrated in Figure 3.2, is based on the “dreamtime” of the Yolngu, an aboriginal tribe based in North Arnhemland in Australia. In contrast to the linear longitude-latitude system that anchors Western Cartesian maps, the Yolngu map is experiential. It relates the embodied experience of walking on the land and represents a memory of this experience through dreamtime, or songline, stories. Both this and a Cartesian map are expressions of different ways of knowing, different ontologies, neither of which can be fully described by the other. We can apply this example to how we think more broadly about the design, deployment, and meaning of technology.
The Paris auction case discussed earlier in this chapter is a particularly egregious example of what happens when a complex cultural or social knowledge system is objectified within an ontology that treats knowledge as a fixed specimen. Blindly assuming that one can transform an indigenous object into a commodity to be sold or a specimen to be exhibited ignores the practices of peoples for whom such objects may have profound local, cultural, and spiritual meaning. Folding such objects into existing technical systems of classification or ordering can violate the perspectives and voices behind the object, precisely because these systems of ranking or classification were developed with little consideration of the knowledge practices that gave birth to the object.
An alternative approach could support the sovereignty of multiple ontologies, or the knowledge traditions and practices of diverse communities. Such technologies could support the sovereignty of different ways of knowing. Yet sadly, today we seem to uncritically embrace technologies that subsume, filter, absorb, and misrepresent diverse community ontologies. When we maintain this unfortunate status quo, we silence rather than support diversity. We must do away with the types of user-centered design or appropriate technology projects that give all the power to an engineer or creator far removed from the project’s communities of users. We can complicate and open up our understandings of what makes up a technology, whether we speak of an indigenous map or an Internet infrastructure:
[New media technology is] forged of connections made up of secretaries, semiconductor manufacturing workers, railroad systems, data centers, trade agreements, arms dealers and other hybrids. These appear as background to the heroic actors (programmers, marketers and users). . . . [T]he origin stories of the standing reserves of nature and labor are part of the narratives one must unravel in postcolonial computing.17
Much like the need to criticize terms such as “user,” we must also rid ourselves of the myth that knowledge is fixed or static. Essential to this is the treatment and respect of culturally diverse knowledge as sovereign, autonomous, and incommensurable. Instead of seeing diversity as a problem of “lack of fit,” we can respect and embrace difference. We can think of technology similarly.
Postcolonial Moments—Stories from Aboriginal Australia
Our cultural diversities neither can nor should be translated into one another—they can be respected for their differences. To illustrate this point, I share historian, anthropologist, and philosopher of science Helen Verran’s discussion of a meeting between an aboriginal tribal community and environmental scientists in the early 2000s.18 Her ethnographies describe the motivations of scientists seeking to learn from the Yolngu aboriginal people of Australia’s Northern Territory. These scientists came to the meeting interested in learning from the indigenous practice of “land burning,” a process where fires are deliberately started on the land to assist its fertility. Despite their acknowledgment that the outcome of this process has contributed positively to the land, Verran explains that environmental scientists remain biased toward the sciences. This comes into play in the “postcolonial moment” of this meeting where
disparate knowledge traditions abut and abrade, enmeshed, indeed often stuck fast, in power relations characteristic of colonizing, where sciences usually line up on the side of the rich and powerful. Postcolonial moments interrupt those power relations, redistributing authority in [the] hope of transformed contests for the exercise of power.19
This story juxtaposes distinct ontologies. On the one hand we have the Yolngu aboriginal practice of worrk, the process of setting fire to the brush. On the other is the scientific practice of a prescribed burn, which follows protocols from the environmental sciences on land management. While knowledge of worrk is passed down through oral and performative traditions, the prescribed burn exports its traditions via videos, procedures, films, and books.
Verran analyzed these two practices ethnographically over the duration of the collaborative workshop. She points out that worrk builds on a metaphysics that combines people and place (people-place or clan-land). In contrast, seen from the perspective of environmental science, they are distinct. For Yolngu, however, people and place cannot be seen as distinct—place gives birth to people and people tend to place. They are better understood as integrated and interwoven. For there to be harmony between the two, it is thus critical to reject the distinction between them. Yolngu knowledge builds on specific relationships between families, lands, and practices. They are activated through practices, performances, and rituals associated with the ontology of worrk. In contrast, the prescribed burn for the sciences abstracts these practices into sets of steps and guidelines that can be enacted theoretically anywhere, independent of the specific scientist or landscape. The connected vector of people to land is absent in this scientific ontology.
Both worrk and the prescribed burn represent different ways of knowing and are thus examples of distinct ontologies. Although both relate to the collective memory associated with their traditions—articulated through performance and ritual on the one hand, and scientific rules on the other—they do not neatly fit with one another. Neither can be fully captured or defined by the other. The scientific ontology filters out contextual, personal, and environmental information, which it sees as nonessential to the prescribed burn and fails to fit within its preexisting ontology. Specific people, places, and performances are removed from the equation. Yet in the indigenous case, these specificities and materialities are essential. In this sense, the two ways of knowing are ontologically incommensurable.
Verran’s story reveals the scientists’ inability to translate or absorb the knowledge of the Yolngu into the canon of environmental science. She points out that the fact that Yolngu knowledge and environmental science fail to neatly fit with one another is an opportunity rather than a problem. Incommensurability presents an opportunity to appreciate rather than dismiss diversity. Sadly, what tends to occur in contrast is the misrepresentation of local knowledge into the supposedly stable and omniscient ontology of the sciences. During this process, local knowledge is filtered and cleansed so it can be inserted quickly and easily into existing databases of scientific knowledge or cultural heritage. Ironically, these knowledge management systems may be seen as advanced because of their objectification rather than appreciation of such diverse knowledge.
Within any postcolonial moment, such as the meeting Verran describes, lies an invaluable opportunity to “open up and loosen” our treatment of difference and diversity. We can make more explicit the means by which we understand that which differs from ourselves and use this as a point of departure to reimagine how we may choose to design communication technologies. The possibility of moving past one’s own ways of knowing requires an awareness of existing biases. The scientists are unlikely to ever become full-fledged members of the Yolngu, and while the converse may occur, it is unlikely that a Yolngu member would be seen as a traditional scientist. What offers the most hope is the possibility of having a new conversation based on the appreciation of difference. Verran thus argues that working with multiple ontologies, respecting the sovereignty and autonomy of each, can be exceedingly valuable. She gives an example from the Yolngu meeting:
[The scientists] worried that the decision about the site might be made solely on the basis of what they saw as “Yolngu politics.” . . . [S]ome of the scientists had begun to feel that too few people knew what was going on, or what would happen next. Perhaps some began to sense that the proceedings were the almost arbitrary decisions on the part of just one man. While scientists might be content to trust a scientific expert, it seemed much harder to trust the expertise of this old clan leader. . . . One of the scientists expressed anxiety over his perception that people were just blindly doing “what they had always done” without appropriate consideration and planning. There seemed to be no general understandings of habitat, and without that how could any evaluation be made? . . . . And further, while the talk of “mother fires” and “child fires” was romantic, how could that metaphorical language be taken seriously?20
Verran’s story ends as a failed opportunity. She argues that this failure is due to the scientists’ refusal to give up power and control in terms of how they wish to learn from the Yolngu. The scientists failed to “loosen” their understanding of how the world is ordered and how the land should be understood, maintaining what feminist philosopher Donna Haraway describes as the “biopolitical narratives” by which they configured their studies. Haraway describes the means by which scientists polish “an animal mirror to look at ourselves,” a form of narcissism that persists alongside the claim to learn from the “other.”21
Verran’s ethnography points to the contrasts between the performances of the Yolngu and the abstractions of the scientists. What may bring all these actions together, however, is an underlying sameness—they speak to what makes us all human, our ways of knowing. There is a deeper underlying humanism that connects us all, but it must not be embraced at the cost of disrespecting diversity or maintaining historical misrepresentations. We live in a world where different ways of knowing are not treated equally. We must not embrace sameness without confronting the continuing asymmetries of power and voice.
That said, we cannot respect diverse ontologies without recognizing how the knowledges of those at the margins tend to be plundered by existing systems of political economy. Simply stating our respect for difference is thus insufficient—we must also guard against the usurping of the other. Philosopher of science Arun Agrawal has argued that non-Western knowledge practices are often commodified and plundered through the use of science and technology.22 What is “included” is in reality captured, objectified, and misrepresented. One example of this is bureaucratic repositories that collect and manage exotic, indigenous knowledge. Yet they cling to political and social agendas exported by their creators.
Classifying Knowledge
Consistent with the turn I describe in chapter 1 toward “storage technologies” that took technological development and design hostage, we must consider the implications of archiving knowledge according to the fixed ontologies of the sciences. Historian of science and technology Geoffrey Bowker describes the birth of the scientific archive as an attempt to take control over the commencement and commandment of knowledge.23 This involves taking power over both “creation stories” and the political economies that shape the respect for different forms of knowledge.
Systems of discourse, or the presumed conceptual generalizations that govern and shape many aspects of social and political life, are far from neutral. Like many of the technologies that populate our world, they are constructed and communicated by those with power and privilege. One mechanism by which these forms of knowledge are developed and transmitted is through classification, a key “knowledge practice” that demarcates the distance between deviance and acceptability, between what is invisible and visible.
Bowker and feminist sociologist Susan Leigh-Star’s important text, Sorting Things Out: Classification Systems and Their Consequences,24 describes the power of classification through historical and cross-cultural examples. The authors explain how the “noise” of knowledge is filtered into ‘stable” categories through ‘black-boxing.” Black-boxing includes social, political, and cultural arrangements that govern many aspects of our world. These only become visible when their normal “behind the surface” functioning ceases. Black-boxing has a type of “casual magic” so invisible and “normal” that it tends to go unnoticed. This works to silence controversy, the presence of dissenting opinions, and the possibility of accepting fundamentally diverse knowledges on their own terms.25 As information and classification scholar Jonathan Furner points out:
The presence of standardized classification systems allows the organization to work with a variety of different types of “knowledge objects,” compare these, perform generalizable and repeatable operations, yet ultimately privilege a particular type of memory, which actually involves forgetting the ultimate singular, commanding architecture by which the classification system was created. The classification scheme is then “an objective representation of a subjective point of view—that of its human constructors, who share the perspectives and ideologies of those populations with which they identify.”26
Classification takes the subjective and makes it objective, transforming the specific into a science. In doing so, contradicting narratives, those that fail to be neatly translated, are erased and forgotten. One of Bowker and Star’s prime examples is medical classification, specifically the International Classification of Diseases (ICD). The authors describe the multiple meanings left invisible by this classification. They further discuss other systems, including the Nursing Interventions Classification (NIC), the classification of viruses and tuberculosis, and race in apartheid South Africa.
Bowker and Star point out that the use of these classifications by medical institutions speaks to how discourse operates. Their presence in seemingly neutral and public institutions helps them be uncritically accepted. This is due to their acceptance by supposedly “beneficial” and “scientific” institutions. Yet in reality many of these classifications ignored the diversity of South African tribal cultures and treated their traditions as savage or unworthy of acknowledgment. In so doing, the classification systems represented a key pillar of a racist regime.
Activists, scholars, and others can transform and disrupt these systems of classification. From this perspective, systems can be reimagined to support the boundary objects that reconcile different ways of knowing and classifying data.27 Star had long used field-based, observational methods and feminist critiques to study the infrastructures of information and technology.28 She argued that what is seen as marginal is most critical because it may reflect an inflection point through which “layers of control and access” are produced.29 In this sense, power and marginality are dialectical—each produces and shapes the another.
The concept of boundary object, now a central tool of deconstruction and critique used by sociologists of technology, identifies the central role of objects to serve as a pivot between different ways of knowing, linking community-specific and shared meanings.30 This theoretical term is insightful as it speaks to any entity that can be connected to multiple perspectives, opinions, or knowledge practices. Examples of a boundary object could include maps, field notes, specimens, museum objects, or any entity that can be tied to multiple understandings or perspectives.
Boundary objects are dynamic and can have different meanings for different communities. They can become discursively commanding at times, particularly when tied to the agendas of those with power and privilege. As they become more powerful they “move and change into infrastructure, into standards . . . [and] other processes.”31 One can subvert the reign of elite meanings around boundary objects by designing systems that unlock the multiple ways by which these objects are understood and worked with.
One must deconstruct and interrogate the practices that create technology-facilitated facts, realities, standards, and classifications. The library and information science field (LIS) has contributed greatly to the intellectual study of classification, as it has long looked at how classification “standards” are formed and has considered different methods by which they are reconceptualized.32 Primarily, LIS scholarship has focused on libraries, archives, and museum institutions. Yet in theory these approaches can be applied to the critique and design of any system that claims to preserve or share knowledge.
Information studies scholar Barbara Kwasnik has written about a wide range of classification systems, arguing that ordering and categorizing powerfully shapes one’s experience with information. She asks us to reflect on how classification systems may enable or constrain the process of knowing, including the context behind the information one may access:
Classification is the meaningful clustering of experience. The process of classification can be used in a formative way and is thus useful during the preliminary stages of inquiry as a heuristic tool in discovery, analysis, and theorizing. . . . A good classification functions in much the same way that a theory does, connecting concepts in a useful structure. If successful, it is, like a theory, descriptive, explanatory, heuristic, fruitful, and perhaps also elegant, parsimonious, and robust.33
Kwasnik discusses a set of different classification structures commonly used by information professionals and scholars to model the informational objects, referred to in the LIS field as “documents,” that they wish to share, preserve, or enable for access.34 She argues that “hierarchies” have become a standard for information classification based on their use of “parent-child” relationships. Hierarchies carry rules of attribute inheritance, meaning that every feature of the parent is transmitted to the child. She also mentions other models, including (a) trees, where information maintains a partial, but incomplete, inheritance from its parent/s; (b) paradigms, where pieces of information are connected on the basis of an intersecting relationship between two different categories; and (c) facets, where pieces of information are placed in more open-ended relationships which themselves may shift over time.
Much like Bowker and Star’s African apartheid example, the vast majority of classification systems follow hierarchies and standards developed by those with political and social power. With this critique in mind, feminist LIS scholars have discussed the means by which standards maintain the power of elites. Feminist studies scholar Hope Olson’s analysis of the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) notes the absence of any discussion of women and non-Christian religions within this supposedly neutral and public system. Olson argues that such standards perpetuate an Aristotelian project that privileges hierarchy by treating their various categories as discrete, fixed, and endowed with “watertight” boundaries.35 These logics must be challenged and rewritten.
Olson reminds us that the “philosophical traditions of the West have delineated a concept of reason that is exclusive of women and other oppressed groups.”36 One can thus say that classification systems tend to reflect the biases and ontologies of those with the power and privilege to design and circulate such systems. We must consider this in relation to databases, algorithms, and other “codes” of technology.
Classification decisions shape the standards that govern how cultural knowledge is preserved and shared, particularly in information institutions like libraries, archives, and museums. In short, they form the basis for managing knowledge. Yet these standards are often in tension with the very processes by which knowledge is created. For example, the CIDOC CRM standards model37 has been applied to a wide variety of cultural objects that originate in diverse communities worldwide. Yet it filters out the stories, practices, and experiences associated with these objects. Within this ontology places are seen as distinct from peoples and communities, and time and space are seen as unrelated. Certainly there are ways of knowing the world that are inconsistent with such assumptions.
Standards, much like classification systems, allow data to be interoperable, or cleanly comparable and computable.38 Data can therefore be calculated, quantified, and processed to supposedly inform policy and decision making. Yet they encounter a problem when they misrepresent the experiences and realities of the communities from whom the information they gather originates. Inflexible standards, classification systems, and database architectures can thus block alternative approaches toward thinking about design and communication, invoking a classic problem with the history of science whereby an overreliance on computational models obscures other possible realities.39
Much like my discussion of databases, standards, and classifications, the ontological questions this book asks can be viewed in relation to the algorithm, a set of rules acted upon by an automated system, particularly a computer. Algorithms increasingly shape our technological experience as they present information to users on the basis of the rules by which they are programmed. Google.com, the world’s most popular website, owes its popularity in part to its famous search algorithm. This and other sites and mobile platforms have begun to “push” information onto users on account of the choices encoded into the algorithms by which they have been programmed. As algorithms shape our experience of what counts as knowledge and how it should be presented and ordered, they must be critiqued, questioned, and reimagined.
A cross-cultural awareness reveals that algorithms, repetitive and formulaic patterns of abstract thought, have been articulated in societies in the Arab world as far back as Mesopotamia.40 Sociologist Ted Striphas in his book Algorithmic Culture, and communications scholar Tarleton Gillespie have written about the cross-cultural origins of algorithms and the ways in which they increasingly shape many facets of contemporary life.
We must consider who writes and is influenced by algorithms in relation to our current moment of algorithmic personalization. Eli Pariser, CEO of Upworthy and cofounder of MoveOn.org, has argued in his book The Filter Bubble that personalization is increasingly part of the everyday lives of users of networked, digital communication systems.41 His critique is that the invisibility of algorithms, such as those that generate the Facebook news feed, are opaque to most users and may privilege the trivial and agreeable rather than introducing perspectives about which we may disagree. Even if our “friends” on such systems tend to be similar to ourselves this invisible algorithm performs a civic injustice.
Despite this important critique, our discussions of algorithms and classification systems ignore the grassroots perspectives of communities and cultures that have little power over the destinies of public politics and business.42 We must change this as we think about collaboratively designing and deploying technology to support the ontologies of diverse communities and users.
The Community Ontologies of a Refugee Community
To provide some background on my work with ontologies, I share an early experience I had working with Somali immigrants in the Boston area while a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Laboratory. At the time, my thinking about knowledge and how it is represented in computational systems was influenced by my professor, renowned MIT computer scientist Marvin Minsky.43 In his courses, I learned about the concept of ontology from the perspective of the computer sciences, focusing on the design of databases, algorithms, and computational models according to Western-derived precepts of logic and rationality. The computer sciences have thus created ontologies in the design of knowledge management systems, which model knowledge “objects” according to predefined semantic sets of terms, rules, and relationships. While computer science ontology projects differ substantially from one another, they are united by the common assumption that knowledge can be formally described, mapped, and expressed through logical categories and relationships.44
At this time, I had also become interested in electronic publishing and community technologies. Our research group at MIT had developed software and web-based platforms for diverse community groups to publish their stories and even develop their own electronic newspapers. We had even begun to explore the possibility of building web-based templates for the simple publishing of user-created content. While some of us found this amusing given our geeky knowhow of the HTML scripting language, we quickly realized that in these distributed publishing models lay great promise. We eventually recognized that the software we designed helped give birth to today’s blogosphere!
Entering MIT, I was interested in exploring the theme of electronic publishing and community technology in collaboration with peoples of diverse cultures and ethnicities. Thanks to the advice of a friend I had begun to volunteer at a local Somali community center. I noted how the Somali community in New England consisted of mostly recent immigrants from a part of East Africa that could not simply be defined based on race, religion, or geography but instead as a deeply diverse group. My volunteer work had focused on working with youth on schoolwork. In that process I had noticed stark differences related to gender and clan between the different kids I would meet. While I learned about such significant diversity within this community, I also recognized a commonality of experience amongst those I met. The vast majority of Somalis attending the center were refugees fleeing a civil war as Sunni Muslims in a post 9/11 America.
Given the absence of immigrant-oriented projects at the Media Lab at the time, I saw great opportunity in exploring how to collaboratively design a system to support my new friends. Community leaders from the refugee center had expressed to me their concern with the digital divide they were facing. Their concern was focused less on access to technology and more with the inability to use digital tools to support the many challenges the faced around housing, legal rights, employment, heritage, Islamophobia, and racism. Thus, together we embarked on a project that we called “Village Voice.”
I had recently been introduced to ethnographic methods and was convinced of their value in supporting my relationship with the Somali community of the Boston area. Engaging with the methods of participant observation, an ethnographic approach that bridges descriptive observation with engagement, many interesting insights began to come my way. For example, I observed the importance of Friday visits to the mosque, not simply for religious reasons but for the social capital, or civic meaning, for those attending these events. The Friday meals served political, social, and cultural purposes, and the patterns of eating and conversation provided a powerful glimpse into the cultural process of navigating between traditional and contemporary subjects of importance to community members. Could I design a technology that supported community-based practices such as these Friday meetings? An approach that presumed what the Somali community’s values or “needs” were would likely misrepresent these ethnographic experiences. If I designed a database or digital archive that understood the Friday mosque visits solely as “religious,” I would lose sight of the multiplicity of other meanings related to the events of this important day. The ontology that influenced how the system classified different pieces of information would objectify and stifle a dynamic cultural practice. I would also have to carefully distance myself from technocratic tendencies by presuming that the technology itself would empower the community.
I learned to respect what I learned from collaborating with this community rather than remaining attached to the computational models designed in our laboratories. With such a spirit of praxis, we could collaboratively develop technologies to support community-based values, practices, and ways of knowing. Over several months, we developed “Village Voice,” used by the Somali community center in Boston and at home by various community members over the next five years.
Fluid Ontologies
How then can we change the ways in which we design technologies to better work with the communities with whom we collaborate? With that challenge in mind and many frustrations behind me, I developed the concept of “fluid ontology” dating back to my collaborations in 2001 with the Somali refugees in the Boston area, described above. Fluid ontologies represent a methodology by which classifications, descriptions, values, and the priorities of communities can influence the design of digital systems. Later in this chapter, I describe how I applied this approach in my collaboration with tribal members across nineteen Native American reservations in San Diego County.
A fluid ontology is created through community-driven consensus. It works with a select focus group placed in charge of reflecting on the collective traditions, practices, values, priorities, and epistemologies of their community. In light of these reflections, the group designs maps of key topics and themes in the life of the community. These maps must do more than simply list topics; they should describe the relationships between different elements.45 The fluidity of this method relates to the importance of it being seen dynamically rather than being a static map of community life. Community members are thus requested to iteratively design and reflect on the ontology they create over time. It is also important to see the fluid ontology as more than a statement of areas of agreement. Thus, the design of this ontology may also include themes that have provoked disagreement and dissension, such as the politically loaded questions of sovereignty and casinos among Native Americans. This method is thus employed as a way of transforming the technical codes of a new media technology to support what is salient in community life. Algorithms, interfaces, and databases can thus all represent points of intervention through the use of this method. It is inspired by the belief that we must design and mold technology to serve our communities rather than the opposite way around.
My development of this method was influenced by psychoanalytic philosopher Michel de Certeau’s writings on tactics.46 In contrast to top-down strategies that exert control and maintain power, de Certeau explains that tactics are the “means designed by people to circumvent or negotiate strategies towards their own objectives and desires. . . . [T]actics broaden the scope of who participates, how, and in what contexts.” In particular, I was inspired by the design tactic of tracing, which exposes the origins of an issue and its subsequent evolution.47 Tracing is a type of “mark-making” where data are collected to record changes that occur over time. It relates to the idea of fluid ontologies because of its interest in designing systems to support the values and ontologies of otherwise silent user communities.
In contrast to these approaches, the majority of human computer interaction research (HCI) focuses on developing easily usable interfaces, limiting its attention to the front-end experience of a user. This makes sense, given that most design research explores how to “efficiently” communicate information to users. This approach can be revisited in light of our recognition that the goal of efficient information sharing may not be quite as neutral as it may seem. The fluid ontology approach moves past the limitations of a “user” to embrace the diverse knowledge systems, values, and protocols that are part of community life. Communities are no longer simply users in this approach—they are the masters, and the system becomes the servant. Yet researchers must be mindful that the concept of “community” itself can serve as a homogenized construct. Often community-based initiatives merely privilege the voices of those who have the power to “speak” within that community.48
Fluid ontologies are thus “flexible knowledge structures that evolve and adapt to communities’ interests based on contextual information articulated by human contributors, curators, and viewers.”49 Cultivating such an ontology involves considering the following:
- (a) Gathering a set of representative digital media objects: This recognizes that not all knowledge can be represented through an image, audio, or video object, and that even these representations are partial and incomplete. Different types of media objects have different capacities built into them, and what they may mean to different community members depends on the information being shared within a database.
- (b) Community-driven practice: As with any larger project, the sharing and communication of knowledge must be motivated and led directly by community members rather than solely by the researcher.
- (c) Back-end as a blank slate: Designers and engineers, much like ethnographers, tend to have preexisting assumptions. For designers, these often relate to their ideas about how systems should be designed and what represents a well-designed database architecture or classification system. While recognizing the inherent reflexivity in any collaboration, developing fluid ontologies requires stepping as far away from these biases as possible.
- (d) Ontology emerges through collective reflection, based on values, ethics, and knowledge practices: This most challenging element of the fluid ontology process is also the most satisfying and enriching. A fluid ontology is emergent, not preconstructed, and its emergence is a function of collective dialogue and reflection. What ends up being included in an ontology may involve objects, actions, times, symbols, concepts, experiences, or anything else agreed upon by community partners A fluid ontology represents a way of demarcating a digital community space. It is important that this “map” be created on the basis of the choices made through the messiness of reflection and dialogue. This is facilitated by community members themselves, who rotate in terms of helping to streamline group conversations.
- (e) Recognizing that a fluid ontology is partial: Simply because an ontology is generated by a group of community members does not mean that their choices completely reflect others in the community who they may claim to represent, or even represent themselves fully. All communities are diverse and multifaceted. Instead of this being an obstacle, this complexity can be embraced by the humble recognition that no ontology is totalizing. Thus, fluid ontology is a subjective, ever-changing, representation of choices led by a group of community members in their attempt to take command over a technology that stores and communicates information.
- (f) The embrace of adaptivity and instability: Many technologies are designed on the precepts of persistence and predictability. In contrast, fluid ontologies view instability as a virtue rather than an obstacle to be eradicated. Indeed, the form of a fluid ontology should never be predetermined.
One can apply the fluid ontology approach to consider nondigital environments as well. One area of intervention could be in information institutions such as museums, libraries, and archives. These institutions have long been criticized for misrepresentation, partly due to their support of objectives detached from the peoples they claim to represent. Today museums, archives, and libraries are confronting these histories and attempting to rethink their practices of representation and ownership. Particularly important is the growth of community-based approaches toward assembling, appraising, and managing archival records and collections, a potential game changer from the practice of objectification and inequality.50 This may force a radical requestioning and rejection of principles of preservation or memory, to adopt a worldview that rejects Western principles of accumulation, storage, and classification.
We must rethink the building blocks of new technology, including interfaces, databases, and algorithms, to support collaborations with diverse cultures and communities. Chilean engineer, entrepreneur, and politician Fernando Flores and his colleagues have pointed out insightfully that “technology is not the design of physical things. It is the design of practices and possibilities.”51 With these insights in mind, I turn now to the Tribal Peace technology initiative, a multiyear collaboration I had with a group of Native American reservation communities.
The Tribal Technologies of the Kumeyaay
For three years I collaborated with a remarkable project involving nineteen Native American communities living on fragmented reservations across San Diego County. The project, called the Tribal Digital Village,52 provided access to wireless Internet technology and supported the design of a digital environment that voiced the perspectives, aspirations, and ontologies of disenfranchised indigenous peoples.
The Tribal Digital Village was a partnership between UC San Diego, a group of tribal reservations in San Diego County, and Hewlett-Packard (HP). I was initially invited to join the project by a revered family friend, Srinivas Sukumar. He had worked for HP for many years with the intention of serving communities outside the company’s normal consumer profile. The goal of this partnership was to set up wireless Internet infrastructures to serve marginalized Native American communities who lived in highly mountainous, dry, windy, and inhospitable regions north and east of San Diego. The intention was to support a group of nineteen Native American reservations of Cupeno, Luiseno, Kumeyaay, and Cahuilla tribal ancestry.
Knowing of my work with Somali refugees and my interests as a graduate student at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, Sukumar and his team invited me to consider how the infrastructure could create a digital space that would serve these communities, in contrast to the vast majority of digital networks that reinforced inequality. The project would later be named “Tribal Peace.” The existing team invited me to attend project meetings with tribal leaders to see if there was interest in collaboration. I soon moved to the region and ultimately to the reservations with the goal of supporting a vision articulated by cultural and political leaders from the nineteen reservations. They hoped that this environment could energize their “ways of knowing,” threatened heavily by many years of violence and disenfranchisement. After building positive relationships with them over some time, I later lived on the reservations for a period of three years.
Figures 3.4 and 3.5. Maps of traditional and current lands inhabited by the Native American communities of San Diego County, California.
By combining the different reservations in this project, Sukumar and his colleagues were creating a type of “metacommunity” across a set of nations whose cultural histories were significantly different from one another, and who had sometimes taken opposite sides in past conflicts. The reservations were dispersed over a hundred-plus mile radius in East San Diego County that differed topographically, with some communities located in fertile valleys while others were on more remote and mountainous terrain. Some of the reservations featured a checker-board geography that broke up the contiguity of shared tribal land. As Christian Sandvig, a communications scholar who has spent some time in these reservations studying technology infrastructures, has pointed out, “The only common feature of the reservations in this area may be that they were lands that no one white wanted.”53 The Spanish, Mexicans, and finally Americans had forcibly stolen the most fertile lands, including those with coastal access. These tribes were “pushed into the rocks” and placed on arid desert mountainsides.54
The reservations were disconnected not only in terms of space but also in terms of infrastructure. The distances between communities cannot simply be measured “as the crow flies” but must also take into account their access to physical infrastructures, for example, to roads and public utilities. For example, while two reservations may have been only fifty miles apart, to travel between them could take several hours. Additionally, the violence of the national border nearby added to the disconnection experienced by tribal members, given that their ancestral lands straddled the border between the United States and Mexico.55
During my time with these communities I witnessed many forms of fragmentation. Communities experience a disconnection not just from one another, but also from the common threads of their history and culture. Tribal historians and scholars of ethnic studies have pointed out that the tribes’ shared seafaring and agricultural traditions were lost as their lands and identities were attacked over centuries of colonization.56 All that seemed to remain was the annual journey taken by reservation youth to their ancestral homes next to the sea. Over the years of my collaboration with these communities I accompanied groups on this pilgrimage. The sight of a group of tribal youth singing and dancing on the beaches against the massive backdrop of the La Jolla-based mansion of former presidential candidate Mitt Romney brought a sad feeling to my heart.
The tribes had long been disconnected from their historical threads of identity, memory, and economy. Indeed, over three years of fieldwork from 2002 to 2005, I observed a stunning absence of access to resources and infrastructure, history, memory, language, and identity. Over multiple years, I met fewer than ten tribal members who spoke their traditional languages and only three elders who were respected as medicine people and carriers of knowledge and tradition. While I am mindful of the need to avoid exoticizing a connection to tradition as a panacea, my ethnographic experience seemed to me a cultural extension of what sociologist Emile Durkheim conceptualized as “anomie,”57 a condition of placelessness, fragmentation of identity, and dissolution of social bonds.
This was the context in which the Tribal Digital Village infrastructure was introduced as an intervention to empower local and cultural connectivity within and across the reservations. Yet as with many other digital divide “solutions” that I have critiqued throughout this book, this infrastructure too was mistakenly seen as a technical obstacle to be overcome rather than an opportunity to develop a sociotechnical approach in collaboration with communities that remain alive today. Indeed, there are over 50,000 Native American people living in San Diego County today, though there were only 8,000 on the nineteen reservations where I lived and worked. The nineteen reservations together represent approximately 15 percent of the overall county’s Native population. Studies have repeatedly shown that urban Natives fare far worse than those on reservations in terms of educational, economic, and health attainment.58 Moreover, these reservations represent only the statistics calculated in the United States. A large number of indigenous peoples of Kumeyaay, Luiseno, and Cupeno descent live in greater poverty just miles away from their counterparts on the southern side of the U.S.-Mexican border.
We often assume that the decreased cost of communications and storage technologies makes possible greater connectivity between rural and urban communities. Yet the private corporations that provide the infrastructure for communication tend to be disinterested in providing information and communication technology resources to these communities, given the lack of easy returns on that investment. Native Americans’ lack of financial resources, combined with their lack of population density, means there is “too much space and not enough bodies,”59 which contributes little to no capital investment in initiatives that directly serve the Native American communities.
The lack of a robust infrastructure, whether one is speaking of water, power, or telecommunications, is the residue of an undelivered promise whereby tribes historically had exchanged land for infrastructure and subsidies. Native communities across the United States have long been the ethnic groups most digitally disconnected from broadband infrastructures.60 Sadly, they are also the most disadvantaged communities in the entire nation in terms of economic well-being, education, and health.61 Communications scholar Christian Sandvig points out that the Native reservations of San Diego County are often seen as “rural . . . [with] drugs, [with) alcoholism, (with) different types of abuse, the poverty . . . just the whole thing.”62
The issues are not just infrastructural but also interwoven with the presumptions of use and sharing that drive most Internet and social media technologies, according to Craig Howe, a Lakota scholar: The Internet’s “universalistic and individualistic foundation [must be] restructured to incorporate spatial, social, spiritual and experiential dimensions that particularize its application[. Without this,] cyberspace is no place for tribalism.”63 Overcoming these barriers was a challenge that involved thinking about technology and infrastructure in relation to the material conditions of place and the ontological experiences of culture. Indeed, the Tribal Digital Village project designed and deployed a digital infrastructure on a physically harsh topography and landscape, navigating winds over a hundred miles per hour, intense amounts of dust and dirt, steep mountains, heat, light, and the ever-present risk of earthquakes and landslides.
Yet such a project would not have been possible without the local knowledge of the communities living on this land. As Sandvig explains:
While one might think of the corporate engineers that developed and sold these towers, antennas, and radios as the experts on them, in fact the user of a device who is intimately familiar with its operation in their local context often has far more information about its performance characteristics and uses. . . . [T]heir approach provided some innovative engineering.64
It is rare for urban scientists and engineers to think of infrastructure as local or place-specific. Much like new technology or the Internet more generally, infrastructures are far too often viewed in a top-down manner. Produced by intelligent and well-intentioned scientists, mere access is mythologized as bringing about empowerment. At most, scientists think about usability, of manipulating local conditions to make the tool “fit.” Sadly, space is seldom provided for the voices of “users’ to shape the design or deployment of infrastructure.
Consistent with this, the history of the Tribal Digital Village started as a conversation that excluded the communities that were to be “connected.” The idea originally emerged from conversations between elite technical institutions, including the UC San Diego Supercomputer Center scientists, the National Science Foundation, and Hewlett-Packard. As scientist Hans-Werner Braun, a research scientist at the supercomputer center and one of the technical designers of the Tribal Digital Village wireless infrastructure, put it, “I wanted astronomy stuff and ecology stuff. . . . [S]omehow I got the thought, for no good reason, wouldn’t it be cool to involve Native Americans? And I put it into the proposal, but had no idea how to do it.”65 The specifics of community and place were afterthoughts.
Despite his perhaps benign intentions, Braun’s perspective represents the common teleology of the heroic scientist or engineer. The dogma associated with a “technical solution” is far too easily imposed on “needy” rural, immigrant, and indigenous communities worldwide. What remains notably absent is the agency of the local community. Indeed, such efforts fail to consider the ethical approaches toward collaborative ethnography and praxis described in chapter 2, and the importance of respecting local ontologies. It is for these reasons that indigenous communities often see such technological and scientific developments as misguided, intrusive, and worse still, as culturally imperialistic.66
My first connection with the nineteen reservations in San Diego County was through their governing “Southern California Tribal Chairmen’s Association.” This was the institution that enacted the Tribal Digital Village (TDV). Having been invited to join the effort and help the team think about a digital space to serve the communities, which we ended up naming Tribal PEACE (acronym: Preserving Education and Cultural Expression), I became interested in working with the existing dynamics and networks in and across the nineteen communities. I was fascinated by sociologist of technology Madeleine Akrich’s rich ethnographies from Cote d’Ivoire, which describe the different ways in which lighting kits were hacked and modified to suit the community goals of watching television rather than the “developmental goals” delivered by the French NGOs.67 While my initial introductions were to tribal cultural and political leaders through the TDV effort, I was determined to collaborate and learn from a far wider range of community members.
My goal was to collaborate with tribal members to develop a technology that respected shared local ontologies, keeping in mind the lessons around praxis discussed in chapter 2 in relation to my work in India. During my fieldwork I noticed that some technologies lend themselves more easily to “modification” than other devices, practices, and infrastructures. This flexibility, described by scholars as generativity, can be an important precept in design thinking about technology.68 While the TDV effort was based on the idea of “appropriation toward parity,”69 I was interested in designing a technology in the image of the voices, ontologies, and priorities of tribal members across the reservations.
I reflected on stories I had read about the introduction of plumbing in the 1980s in the villages in India where my parents grew up. Despite the promise of this infrastructure to make life easier and empower the community, in many ways it supported civic disconnection. The community no longer met and communicated at the local water well, making the latter obsolescent as a public space. I was concerned that TDV could have a similarly anti-civic effect that magnified existing cultural disconnections. From this perspective, the TDV could threaten local organizing and communication. In the next section of this chapter, I describe further ethnographies of peoples and places that shaped the development of our Tribal Peace project.
Listening and Learning
Just five months after my initial meetings with tribal leaders, it is October 2003 and Ross Frank, UC San Diego (UCSD) professor of Ethnic Studies, and I had driven two hours into the deserts of East San Diego County. After traversing several windy roads, we arrived at the Campo Reservation. Campo is one of the nineteen reservations located in San Diego County. According to Frank, it was similar to several others in terms of the health and education challenges it faced.
Upon arrival, tribal members explained to us that there was an absence of physicians with knowledge about traditional Native American health. Diabetes, obesity, and alcoholism were rampant across the reservations. Visiting primary and secondary schools on this reservation was even more distressing. I observed students studying their own histories via textbooks written in New York and London.70 According to those I met on this reservation, this perpetuated a sense among the youth that their culture was no longer vibrant. They lacked the agency to write their own histories. Indeed, I met no one at Campo who was conversant in traditional languages, songs, dances, and rituals. Power over the past, present, and future lay elsewhere.
Nonetheless Campo’s tribal leaders expressed their desire to reclaim the sovereign identity from which they felt disenfranchised. Understanding that my role was to listen and be of service, I was interested in how I could support the reclamation of community identity through the design and appropriation of technology. I noted that this community would have to be “imagined,”71 as the tribal communities of Southern California had been in conflict with one another through much of their recent history. Just as we must guard against homogenizing the world through the use of terms like “global village,” as I have argued in this book, I recognized the dangers of homogenizing a tribal or indigenous community. There was great conceptual value in the idea of “imagined community,” however, as it could assist us in our collective effort to counter systems that have shaped inequality and poverty.
Communities like Campo are rarely the recipients of substantial technology infrastructure grants. Now I was being invited to understand and design a project for Campo and several other reservations. I listened, learned, and looked for opportunities to support the goals and visions that would emerge from the conversations I would have with a range of community members. In my first three months of fieldwork I visited every tribal leader possible across the nineteen reservations. My most fortunate encounter was that with Shonta Chaloux, a young visionary leader from the San Pasqual Reservation. Shonta was a former football star and local hero who had decided to return to his community in order to transform the educational deficit and loss of cultural knowledge among the youth. Shonta was widely respected in his community, and respected by its different subgroups as well.
It was far easier in these early days to develop connections with tribal elites, given the ways in which I had been introduced to the field. My initial contacts were with the Tribal Chairmen’s Association and the Tribal Digital Village project. Navigating this challenge represents a delicate balancing act for those of us who work with ethnographic methods, for while we respect our contacts we realize that they may not represent the voices of others in their community. I recognized that I would need to lateralize my outreach efforts and ethnographies, reaching out to as wide a range of community members as possible to develop the types of partnerships that would make our Tribal Peace project more radically inclusive.72
Shonta had laid out his vision for developing technologies that could reconnect his people to their cultural, educational, and political priorities. Wanting to build on the work of Anthony Pico, the Viejas Band leader, and Leonard Peltier, a famous Native American revolutionary who has been incarcerated since 1977, Shonta argued that we could design a system devoted to the issue of political sovereignty on the basis of the principles of action research and praxis. This system could serve as a space for communication and dialogue that leveraged the TDV infrastructure.
I had envisioned designing a system to empower conversation and community building around a wider range of issues, rather than simply that of sovereignty. Nonetheless, I noted the importance of following the perspective of leaders like Shonta. My initial experiences across the reservations led me to believe that the theme of sovereignty could become an important bridge to a range of other conversations. For example, in Native American politics tribal sovereignty is connected with education, cultural customs, and gaming. While education speaks to the reclamation of history, cultural customs speak to practices that reveal the distinct and original rights of Native Americans as early sovereign nations within the United States of America. Casino gaming, according to other leaders, is critical although controversial, as it may provide the needed resources to allow reservations to operate their own educational, political, and social institutions.
In the months that followed, I learned how important it was to learn from and listen to the gatekeepers I encountered. This built upon a sense of comfort I had developed after six months of living on different reservations and meeting a range of political, educational, and cultural leaders. With the familiarity tribal members had developed with me, I was invited to share my background and interests at an intertribal culture and education meeting. In February 2003, I spoke of my previous projects at MIT that were based in India and with Somali refugees. Reflecting on these experiences, I shared my belief that we could leverage the Tribal Digital Village infrastructure to design a technology that respected the local ontologies across the reservations.
As my presentation concluded, I was introduced to Linda Locklear, professor of Native American Studies at Palomar Community College and a member of the Nambi Nation of North Carolina, who had relocated many years before to the San Diego County region to work with the Kumeyaay and Luiseno reservations. Shonta mentioned that I should meet Linda as she could help me better understand the dynamics of the local tribal communities. Linda had conducted language training and video interviews with different Native members in the region for local cable access television programming, and was interested in seeing how some of these initiatives could also be applied to digital media projects.
After a polite introduction, Linda asked me about my motives for conducting this project and whether I was planning to profit from my work with the Native American communities in any way. She asked whether as a graduate student I had tried to iterate upon and replicate a model from which to craft an academic or professional career. Noting that research productivity is an academic currency, Linda pointed out that her Native American friends were not interested in being studied or framed as an object of curiosity from afar. This conversation was my first direct critical encounter with a Native American community member during my first months of fieldwork. I had been warned that when working with Native American communities I would face mistrust and suspicion and have to deal with it. The projects that succeed are the ones that recognize and respect such cultural and social tensions.
It was thus important to respond to Linda with both openness and understanding. I explained to Linda that like many graduate students I was indeed investigating a thesis, but my motives behind my work were activist and humanist. I believe deeply in being of service and doing what I can where welcome to support the social, cultural, and political empowerment of the communities involved. My research would focus on the process of collaboration and design around technology rather than an exoticized objectification of the communities. In many ways my ethnographies would focus on stories of self. If invited to do so, I believed our collaboration would help us create a technology that could be a resource for community members in the nineteen reservations. It would be the property of the Tribal Chairmen’s Association, and live on the Tribal Digital Village servers.
In response Linda expressed further doubts, asking whether I had read Edward Said’s Orientalism,73 and stating that she knew the true motives of graduate students and outsiders from institutions like Harvard and MIT. As a self-proclaimed “mother hen” of the Native peoples, her role was to protect their interests and say what others were too afraid to say. She even asked if I knew whether Shonta was an enrolled tribal member of San Pasqual, given the blood quantum rules that governed enrollment. I responded with my personal reassurance that she would be helping to oversee and critique the project on an ongoing basis. I had signed a nondisclosure agreement and property transfer to the Tribal Digital Village administration, and I gave her my word that I would not try to market or make any personal profit off my experiences with the native communities.
I left this interaction feeling I had learned an important lesson about how an outsider could be perceived in tribal communities. I also learned that despite the distressing poverty such communities face, they have agency and a spirited determination to fight back against those who perpetrate oppression. Linda’s justified concerns spring from a long history whereby anthropologists have “studied” native communities, masking malevolent intentions through the use of deceitful language and performance.
Over the next several months, my collaborations with Shonta and others in the reservations allowed me to learn from the important criticisms raised by Linda. I realized, however, that Shonta was not the key point of reference for most of the people I was meeting. He was better known at San Pasqual and its neighboring reservations than in others that were further away. Because of the time he spent off the reservations and his relative youth he was not universally identified as a key interlocutor across the communities. In my initial months of fieldwork, I noted that to design a technology to support local practices of knowledge sharing and communication, I had to work with rather than ignore the networks that already existed.
Over the next three months, I tried to understand how the Tribal Peace system could harmoniously build on existing connections. This in turn forced me to grapple with important questions related to the larger one, including: How were people in the communities connecting with one another presently? What types of networks were influencing the existing elements of identity, economy, culture, and politics? I realized it was neither technologies nor institutions that connected the people I had met. Instead, the very few threads of kinship I noted were related to revered individuals, regarded by most with collective respect and as a source of inspiration.
Tribal members would often mention the name of Anthony Pico, chairman of the Viejas Reservation. Not only was Viejas self-administering a successful casino, but Pico’s government had also reinvested the revenue it had acquired into supporting community health and educational programs. Pico had channeled his leadership position into becoming a major national advocate for political sovereignty at both the state and federal levels. He wanted to eliminate dependence on government programs, which had provided poor services and infrastructure that contributed to their poverty.
After attempting to meet Pico for several months, I was given a thirty-minute audience to present our project and listen to his perspectives on the technology that we could then work to design. Pico referred me to a number of his most successful teachers and aspiring entrepreneurs. He advised me to recruit a demographically inclusive group of tribal members across the reservations to lead the effort. Some months later, with the first release of the Tribal Peace system, Pico recorded a greeting video for users who logged in. He also created several video pieces based on conversations with me and other youth. These were then circulated via the system. As a popular political and educational leader, Pico became a key bridge for the project, whose networks could be supported and augmented by the Tribal Peace system.
The only name I heard more often than Pico’s as I traveled and lived on the reservations was that of Jane Dumas. She was from the Jamul Reservation and had grown up in a small hut, learning Kumeyaay and Spanish before English. Many tribal members saw Dumas, who has now passed on, as the last living link to a shared cultural memory. She had witnessed the fall into poverty of many reservations and was determined to support cultural and linguistic revitalization. She had learned a great deal about tribal plants and medicinal traditions that were specific to the region from her parents, particularly her mother who was a revered medicine woman in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Thus, as one of the few traditional speakers of the Kumeyaay language and as a practitioner of tribal medicine, she was a bridge between tribal heritage identity, collective action, and aspiration.
When I met Dumas, I went with sage and tobacco in hand, token offerings in recognition of her status as a powerful spiritual teacher. My offering of these sacred herbs was accompanied by an introduction of my own background as a South Indian Hindu, helping to create a shared and intuitive space of kinship, respect, and mutual understanding. As we sat together, I reflected upon my own beliefs and values, while showing her my familiarity with her people. I explained my goal of designing a digital technology that could support the sharing of local ontologies and the building of social networks across the reservations. We visited nearby Lake Crenshaw, a sacred landscape that Dumas suggested would be appropriate for our first meeting. She first recited a prayer to the four directions, blessing our collaboration. Explaining the potential to “recover so much that we have lost,” Dumas explained that new technologies could only support community building and cultural revitalization if they were built upon existing values, knowledge systems, and beliefs. Despite the changes in climate, the region had retained its beauty, Jane said, so all was not lost. The land inspired her tribe to recover its political and cultural identity. As long as the land survived, the tribe could hope for a rebirth.
It was time to face the challenge of creating and mobilizing grassroots networks across the reservations. As most technologies had misrepresented Jane Dumas’s community historically, whether through book or video, our meeting convinced us that our collaboration gave us a unique opportunity to challenge the dehumanizing effects of colonization. I recognized that Dumas’s blessing of the project could shape its destiny within the community. She could connect us with her extensive social networks while serving as a spiritual and cultural guide.
Cultural knowledge had long been shared between the communities of San Diego County through performances and oral traditions such as songs, dances, and storytelling. These were now being lost at an increasing pace. It was important for us to design a technology that could reactivate these traditions as a catalyst toward the future. I recognized the potential of multimedia elements such as sound and video to assist us in this goal, allowing people to speak as they chose to share places and images with fellow community members. Supporting these local ontologies would require us to recognize that a video in a database, even if it was classified according to tribal categories, was hardly sufficient in and of itself to speak to this performativity. Instead, it was how the communities engaged with such objects that would make all the difference. In this sense, a sociotechnical crafting of our system would need to consider how it could fluidly represent the practices of the reservations, actively engaging peoples to transcend passive spectatorship. We recognized that we would have to design a technology that facilitated rapid feedback, thereby empowering conversational elements important to native life and identity. While the practice of sharing and viewing video or songs is not the same as being present in person at a ritual, as I note in chapter 2, I believed certain elements of the oral culture could be experienced through the rapid sharing of video, promoting the interactive practice of digital storytelling.74
Over my first eight months of fieldwork, it was my time with Anthony Pico, Jane Dumas, and Shonta Chaloux that shaped my consciousness and the design and development of Tribal Peace. These introductions and partnerships became part of my larger effort to visit as many educational, political, cultural, and economic institutions as possible across the nineteen reservations. I visited schools, libraries, tribal government offices, health clinics, housing groups, technology offices (for the TDV), youth association programs, and local businesses. At times I walked across the public lands of the reservations, sitting, reflecting, and contemplating.
I recognized that the system’s appropriation by these organizations needed to be understood in ways that went beyond mere user statistics. Our goal should not be to fixate on how many people would “use” the system but on who these users were, and how the system could support their diverse practices, aspirations, and agendas. I thus began to build connections with educational resource centers on the reservations, tribal government offices, tribal libraries and museums, and employees at local clinics and schools. If even one political leader were to leverage this system in support of a struggle for sovereignty, my vision of supporting the causes of these communities would be realized, even if the user statistics told a different story. Rather than how many, I was most interested in the who’s and how’s.
Fluid Ontologies and Tribal Peace
As I became better known across the reservations, people from different reservations began to express an interest in working with Shonta and me. We were able to form a focus group of community members that included men and women, and a range of occupations and ages. Our first design workshop in January 2004 brought together seventeen tribal members from thirteen of the nineteen reservations.
It became clear that it would take time to build the trust that would increase collaboration and representation across the tribes. Many of the attendees were unfamiliar and uneasy with new computer technologies, but still brave and curious enough to attend the workshop. They ranged between the ages of 28 and 65 and were involved in teaching and education programs on different reservations. It was our hope that after they learned the techniques of multimedia storytelling, the attendees would be inspired to share these techniques with others on their reservations. In this workshop, each attendee presented an example of what he or she felt was an inspiring story from his or her reservation, focusing on elements of community life. Each attendee then created a video of his or her own based on his or her personal vision. Shonta and I assisted with editing or storyboarding questions.
“This was created by your own people, your children, and grandchildren,” I explained, “and without any knowledge of technology beforehand. And today you too can create rich visual stories of your own.” This was an important first step in engaging community members to share and reflect on their own stories, given my experiences just two years before of collaborating with Somali community members in Massachusetts. A rapport was established, especially between class attendees. We ended the meeting by asking the attendees to create one or two pieces on their own time to present at our second meeting, which would focus on designing the initial version of Tribal Peace based on the fluid ontology method described earlier in this chapter. This method dynamically engages community members to reflect on shared themes and concepts to shape the underlying architecture by which a system can be designed.
Our second meeting occurred six weeks later. In between these meetings, Shonta and I traveled to different reservations, hoping to publicize the project and recruit more members to join our committee. With some success, we were able to recruit members from seventeen of the nineteen reservations to the fluid ontology design meeting. This time powerful conversations began to surface after the participants had watched the different video stories. One provocative piece that warrants discussion came from a teenage student from the Pala Reservation.
In this video, the student interviewed fellow students and a local tribal leader about the jobs available on the reservation. As the video was playing, several members of our design committee objected to the arguments presented. An attendee from Viejas, where Anthony Pico was chairman, argued that reservation members at Pala were not embracing casinos in the “correct way.” This stance was immediately countered by another committee member who explained that casinos often represented a gateway to alcoholism and the plundering of her people by wealthy corporations from Las Vegas. A third member, from a reservation that had no casinos but was closely aligned with Viejas, added his perspective. Casinos could have value, he argued, if they were brought into the communities in “the right way.”
Instead of viewing these disagreements as forms of weakness to be ignored or filtered out of the technology design, the fluid ontology approach recognizes the great power of debate and discussion. Indeed, themes in tribal life that heightened people’s passions and inspired differences of opinion were privileged in Tribal Peace’s initial fluid ontology. For example, there was a great deal of debate in our meetings around “gaming,” or the influence of casinos on tribal life. Some participants argued that this reflected a sustainable and robust form of income. It could support their peoples, given all that they had lost in a history of fragmentation, displacement, genocide, and depression. Others, however, saw the presence of casinos as the “gateway drug” that afflicted tribal members. Casinos, if administered by an external company such as Harrahs from Las Vegas, would be given power to influence tribal life and force the dependency of community members. Some participants argued that casinos stymied alternative possibilities—their presence cultivated a detachment from entrepreneurial, activist, and public forms of organizing that empowered self-determination and sustainability from the bottom up.
Such debates must be welcomed rather than dismissed when we think about technology and community life. Including the theme of “gaming and casinos’ in our fluid ontology is an example of how the classifications and databases of our system could be organized around the boundary objects theory described earlier that brings together multiple forms of interpretation that fail to “fit” with one another. The design of this ontology could support what scholars of information, social life, and education John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid describe as the “social life of information.”75 This idea argues that shared interpretations about information have great social and cultural impact. Our goal was to design Tribal Peace’s fluid ontology accordingly, recognizing that over time this ontology would shift as social life and interpretations themselves took their own turns. We would thus continue to design and modify the fluid ontology for Tribal Peace over several meetings.
Casinos and gaming were but two of several themes that emerged from the first focus group meeting. Several other topics were raised, including political sovereignty, youth education, the U.S.-Mexico border, and more. As political writer and commentator Walter Lippman famously observed, publics are ever in the making. Accordingly, we considered our design meetings part of a process rather than a naïve statement of truth or empiricism. The fluid ontology we would develop would be revisited and redesigned over time via periodic committee meetings reservations in line with shifting social, political, and cultural life across the communities.
Designed over three focus group meetings in the end of 2003, approximately nine months after I had made my first visit to the reservations of San Diego County, Figure 3.6 illustrates our first fluid ontology. It was important for the committee to design this ontology in the shape of a tree. Trees hold powerful metaphorical and symbolic allure for people in the reservations. Over our two years of collaboration, community members often spoke to me about the importance of the Manzanita tree, in particular as a collective symbol of rebirth. They thus saw a relationship between this tree and our collaboration. Both could serve as catalysts for collective action and thus a rebirth of sorts in the communities.
The fluid ontology was not just a list of categories and their relationships, but a visual articulation of imagination, memory, and aspiration. We can see how the roots of this tree diagram display the San Diego County native reservations, while its branches are divided by major themes and their subtopics. The tree has a depth of two levels: Roots, six major branches, and their sub-branches. Each of these represented careful design choices that came out of our meetings and were revisited in later design workshops, which produced new structures and classifications.
Critical to this or any ontology are the selection of topics and the ways they are grouped together. Figure 3.6 contains branches labeled “Medicine People,” “Order,” “Ocean,” and “Darkness and Light.” These topics were identified on the basis of conversations between focus group members. They also relate to collective memory and meaning. “Darkness and Light” was a carefully chosen term used to reflect the recurring theme of negative and positive energies by which community members experienced the living and nonliving worlds, based on threatened spiritual practices. “Ocean” is a powerful term for the Native Americans of San Diego County because of their historic proximity to the ocean and their ancestral practices of fishing and being coastal people. The category “Medicine People” describes the ancestors and communities of their past (Jane Dumas is one of the last survivors), following the traditional approaches toward health and plants that were at the core of indigenous life.
It is notable that this ontology weaves together terms as distinct as Culture, Imagery, Community Development, Leadership, Education, and Technology. With these major themes, the past, present, and future can be articulated within an integrated, yet fluid, architecture. In line with the goal of maintaining fluidity, the focus group could choose to remove, rename, or reclassify a topic as they wished.
Figure 3.6. Our first community ontology, listing topics, themes, and values across the nineteen native reservations.
The decision to designate “Culture” and “Education” as top-level categories speaks to their central importance in the eyes of the committee. Additionally, the decision on where to assign a given sub-branch speaks to the community’s unique means of understanding itself. That choice also raises other interesting questions, such as: Why is the category “online library,” for example, placed under Education rather than under Technology? These types of choices can inspire valuable reflection.
The first interface of the Tribal Peace system is depicted in Figure 3.7. The system was designed to allow community members to share content with one another based on the themes from the fluid ontology. Community members could share, view, and comment on video, text, or photos between the nineteen communities. Any tribal member could select one or multiple topics from the ontology through our interface. The system would then retrieve image, audio, or video pieces that would be grafted onto the branches of the above Manzanita tree interface. Thus, while a tree interface supported the front-end experience of system use, another tree structure represented the fluid ontology that structured how pieces of content could be categorized or retrieved.
Our initial focus group meetings paved the way for the recrafting of further fluid ontologies, to be held every three months from that point onward. In these meetings, the committee would reflect on content shared via the system by users in all nineteen reservations, and craft or modify the fluid ontology. The essence of fluidity lay in the ability to adapt, evolve, and recombine the codes of the system based on ever-changing perspectives coming from the community. The Tribal Peace system ontology was thus continuously revisited and recrafted. To this day, it remains accessible to the reservations and is maintained and lives on the TDV servers.
Ritual Communication
This chapter has focused on the power of intervening in some of the codes of digital technology, whether we mean by this databases, interfaces, or algorithms, to support the values, knowledge practices, and aspirations of local communities. My collaborative efforts with the tribes of San Diego County and the stories I have shared of Tribal Peace represent an example of how we may strive to design technologies collaboratively to respect the voices and ontologies of local communities.
The system we designed has been incorporated into the Tribal Digital Village technical infrastructure. While it continues to be used by schools and cultural institutions on the reservations, its technical and design maintenance remains a challenge. This speaks to the reality that a technology cannot be understood in an isolated vacuum. It is interwoven with a range of places, peoples, values, and other infrastructures. Without robust educational and economic systems, even more community-centric technology efforts such as Tribal Peace may be unsustainable.
As I argue in my critique of user statistics, this project is meant to respond to what philosopher and social theorist Michel Foucault has called the “triumph of quantification.”76 Standard metrics that measure numbers of users can be set aside in favor of more deeply intuitive insights focused on design processes, representations, and supporting appropriation by existing community networks and institutions. All these challenges speak to the complexity of working with technology to support local communities in a world where their voices remain mostly silent.
Our effort was inspired by the goal of supporting lateral networks—activating connections between peoples living on the margins. This is consistent with communications scholar and theorist James Carey’s insights on “ritual communication,”77 which describes the power of grassroots knowledge sharing. In this communication process, no singular technology design blueprint can have all the power. In contrast to the ritual model, Carey argues that the transmission model, which treats users as passive and the designer as omnipotent, is a tragedy of our times. Supporting ritual communication must include a consideration of the codes by which such communication systems are written. For Carey, the tragedy of the transmission model has long-standing precedents dating back to the time of the telegraph. This model is obsessed with social elites while treating the rest of society as passive consumers or users.
When we step away from a myopic model of design, policy, or system development we open up a wide space of possibilities within the framework of what telecommunications and policy scholars Harmeet Sawhney and Venkat Suri describe as “liminal.”78 They argue that “what is especially interesting about Tribal Peace is that it goes way beyond solving problems or puzzles, and tries to generate indigenous ontologies. . . . [I]t is the ‘fluid’ of fluid ontologies, enabled by lateral networks that make the whole effort so special.”79
It is at the margins or peripheries of first world-centric thinking that technologies and networks can be reimagined. For example, media studies scholar Anita Chan’s recent book Networking Peripheries describes how the grassroots digital cultures of Peru may shape practices, strategies, and material realities that diverge from the universalizing imaginaries of Silicon Valley.80 Consistent with this, scholar of social informatics and computing Eden Medina’s writings on “cybernetic revolutionaries” present a Chile-specific set of narratives that influenced the CyberSyn system in the context of Allende’s democratic, socialist government of the 1970s.81
The many examples I have shared throughout this chapter reveal that the stories, codes, and infrastructures associated with digital technologies have the potential to represent powerful means for ethical reimagining. We are beginning to see interesting examples along these lines today, for example via the video game “Never Alone,” designed collaboratively by Inuit Alaskan indigenous peoples with a game designer. This game follows scripts that are consistent with community values and ontologies.82
As my involvement with the Tribal Peace project came to a close in 2005, I reflected on what I had learned through this collaboration. I had to rethink the ways I designed technology, approached communities, learned to listen, and opened myself up to the unexpected. My goal remained the same—to consider “life-worlds, livelihoods, life systems, lifestyles and life cycles”83 that shape renewed thinking about technology and whose voices it can represent and support.
Chapter 4 builds upon this extensively by recognizing that ontology is much more than the technical expression of a community. Rather it is a way of performing knowledge that supersedes technology. It reveals that in their best moments technologies support the things we do—the actions and practices by which we know and communicate.