Watching Hans Rosling’s TED Talk, Debunking Third-World Myths, the first thing I thought was, “Wow, all that data and the way it’s displayed is wonderful. I’m so glad there are other people out there who want to do things like that, because I sure don’t.” Then his lecture ended with a bit on how actually, no one wants to compile, display, and analyze data the way he does. Actually, what he didn’t make clear, at least to me, was whether or not this impediment is caused by those who keep the data in regards to monetary concerns – they simply don’t want to fund it? They don’t want to release it without making a profit?
And so what was the point, really, of his talk? That we need not only people willing to do this kind of statistical analysis (which I think he proved is completely possible) but that we also need freedom of access to the information and between those working on the data? I found myself far more interested in the very large among of time he spent using the statistical analysis/data to deconstruct his students’ (and perhaps our own) notions about the way the world looks in terms of its economic flatness. It reminded me of the First World Problems Meme:
Making jokes about having “first world problems” I think began as a way for those of us in the “first world” to acknowledge how truly, truly trivial some of the things that vex us can be. It’s ostensibly meant to be mocking of ourselves. But this meme, and these kind of jokes, have quite rightly come under fire for being, well, racist may be the right word, and if not certainly ignorant, in assuming that just because someone lives in the “third world” they wouldn’t have problems with things like takeout menus or cellphones not working properly or wifi being slow because we flatten the “Third World” and forget or aren’t even aware that these technologies and the ridiculous vexations that come along with them are also globally available. Another, more explicitly race-coded term for these jokes is “white people problems.” Naming the meme is this way makes its problematic title that more clear.
Seeing the data Rosling displayed really drove home to me how valid the criticisms of this meme are – when Rosling displayed as world flattened by the internet he was raising an interesting point that I wish he’d spent a bit more time on. Designing for a web audience means that we are designing for a world wide audience, and this means we must redefine our understanding of audience. This audience may speak a different language but have the same literacy skills and face the same kinds of challenges we do, and also have the same interests and curiosities we do. We cannot, must not, look at the internet as a first world problem.
The second TED Talk, Lawrence Lessig’s How Creativity is Being Strangled, also spoke, much more directly than Rosling, to the ways in which the old system of information and cultural creation and dissemination (read culture) refuses to cede ground to the re-emergence of read-write culture. I though a lot about his notion that presenting the established paradigm with competition is the best way to disable or shift it, and I think he’s right. I wonder just how powerful these new technologies are. The simple expectation of new users that the right to remix (and it is seen as a right) be available to them (us) suggests to me that those in control are fighting a losing battle.
Even before watching Lessig’s video, I wanted to share this website with you all. In it, Kevin Weir has gone into the Library of Congress’s digital archive of historical images and animated many of them. Some of them are ghostly reimaginings of what the photo might look like brought to life:
But wait, who’s that in the background? Surely it’s not H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu! Still, consciously intended or not, this image communicates a sense of looming dread over the evils of warfare, whether or not you know who Cthulhu is. The image of a dark monster peering out through drifting smoke, peering down at the bombed out ruins of a town is quite evocative. Indeed, many of the animations are much less subtle and border on the absurd; many are almost Monty Pythonesque.
Perhaps we scholars wouldn’t use images like these with such artistic license, but it made me think about our ongoing debates in class about what it means to alter an image, when it’s appropriate. Sometimes, even, and perhaps especially in their caricature, these animations capture the way we in the present might imagine the historical mood of the image:
These images also represent the way that, through remix culture, we might be able to bring historical images to life. Image you’re staring at a photograph of Abraham Lincoln and he blinks at you. How does that alter not only the users experience, but our own narrative?
Edit: So far this week I have commented on Sheri’s blog, as well as Richard’s.
