My background is working on very simple things – nothing complex like the social sciences. We attempt to understand these things deeply enough that new and deeper questions emerge to provide better insight. The basic framework is simple and fixed – the scientific method – but there have been dramatic changes in understanding as well as the techniques It impresses me that this very simple invention has endured for so long and moved thought so far.

But the relationship with the "consumer" is changing and I'm concerned how trust is established in both directions and people make appropriate changes (thinking of global warming as an example). People have always been content to have technology develop from basic science. Now basic science is telling people they need to make changes in their use of technology and there is very little trust.

curious times…

These are the very issues I find myself grappling with as I attempt to write my dissertation proposal. I am studying the changes happening in the entertainment industry, primarily those wrought by consumers + technology, and the smaller subset of those who are trying to make such ventures their primary employment/money-making venture.

As I am working on grant applications and pleas to faculty to be on my committee, I am continually asked "what's the problem you're trying to solve?" And I have to tell them that I don't always know; I'm trying to study the changes happening in order to FIND the problem or more likely, problems. I don't know that I can actually find a solution, but I am pretty sure I can do some significant work toward finding those patterns that we can then use to make more sense of how the entertainment industry is going to evolve, and maybe, just maybe, this research will have something to say about how cultural practices that involve technology will affect other industries as well.

Yes, it's messy, it's new, and there's a lot to be learned. Those very qualities make it incredibly hard to articulate a "solution" or even a clear "problem" to be studied. I think a lot of anthropologists (even those with some business background) don't really grasp the fluidity among consumers, industry, technology, creativity, politics, and culture that is happening around us, and I feel a bit panicky at being forced to narrow down what I want to study to a "question;" it makes me feel like I'm going to miss something important along the way.

A tip of the academic tam to anyone who is working in this area. Leave breadcrumbs!

For example, in Grant's "value tax" post earlier he criticized Microsoft for setting the boundary of its responsibilities short of providing device drivers for Vista. That raises an interesting question more generally: What makes buyers place responsibility on side or another in a given context? Why does it seem reasonable to bitch at Microsoft about HP's lousy Vista print drivers but it is less common to blame DirecTV for the many lousy TV shows carried on its satellites?

Another boundary: How do we (and do we) distinguish "commercial" from "charitable" activities? This is a profane vs. sacred type deal. What mechanisms are used to keep these categories separate? In general, when to cultures strive to maintain such boundaries and when do they allow them to blur?

In a way, an increase in fluidity, if it were really happening, would imply a breakdown of this basic cultural function of category separation. Is that anthropologically possible, or is there instead always an equilbrium with somewhat stable cultural categories, so that apparent periods of fluidity are just transient states?

If anthropology can cut into those questions, it will be very useful.

I am not one, but I would have thought that during these heady times anthropologists would offer two kinds of unique value that other disciplines do not:

1) Anthropologists have an astute understanding of human nature, in particular the aspects of behavior that seem wired into the species to give it grounding. I am thinking here of rituals, rites, traditions, object significance, etc. People are creatures of habit and the brain an advanced patterning machine, so these tendencies will still be present even if expression are in emerging (and possibly) novel forms

2) Anthropologists have an understanding of how (wo)man is shaped by the environment and how it in turn shapes her/him. Even though the radically changing ‘environments’ in today’s modern world are perhaps less of a physical nature than the past, surely there is wisdom for the more intangible, fluid forms we interact with today that can be gleaned from the past?

Imagining there is a timelessness with 1) and a relativism with 2) anthropologists are in the position to recontextualize the murky present as it unfolds – out of the apparent chaos it might otherwise seem to an untrained observer and into a broader landscape of evolving humanity

And having written the word 'anthropologist' many times in this response I realize the danger in omitting the ‘s’.

Anyway rambly thoughts.

Of relevance to these ideas is a recent article in the "Journal of Evolutionary Economics" by Lane and Maxfield, which distinguishes 3 types of uncertainty:

- truth uncertainty (whether a proposition is true or false)

- semantic uncertainty (what a proposition means)

- and, ontological uncertainty (what entities exist in the environment, and what relationships and interactions they have).

We seem to have entered an era in which business, cultural and social environments have far greater, more frequent, more dynamic, and more pervasive, ontological uncertainties.

Reference:

David A. Lane and Robert R. Maxfield [2005]: "Ontological uncertainty and innovation", Journal of Evolutionary Economics, 15: 3-50.