I'm adding this link to the "jaywalker shaming" public screens/surveillance system I mentioned in class too. https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2017-07/31/content_30303525.htm
I was trying to recall the Chen reading that we had for our class with Nitin last semester when you brought up the jaywalker shaming at the end.
It's fascinating, but perhaps unsurprising, given Chen's discussion of China's jiahu zhangzhi system that regulates social relations through "three historically constituted principles or dosa: qing (sentiment), li (reason), and fa (legality) (Chen 238). He mentioned how legalistic measures enacted by the state--"jaywalker shaming"--are interpreted by the China's "civil society" as "the workings of a paternalistic system" of punishment" (238). So there's a historical and cultural specificity attached to this particular example in that there's a cultural or political logic, or algorithm, that surfaces. Also I find a bit of irony in this jaywalker shaming that also attends to the specificity with respect to China's political and cultural infrastructure: if we think of algorithms as the "non-neutral social/technical set of instructions with productive power" hidden underneath the abstractions of objectivity, universality, and pragmatism, then this example almost turns the table around. The cultural logic is intentionally made public in the hopes of an undesired output (jaywalking) will affect the input (behavioral guilt?). I think that this example also reminds us to situate algorithms, however we define/describe/approach them, within a specificity that is proximate to the conditions through which they operate. Insofar as we critique the universalizing of algorithms fashioned with technologically deterministic descriptions, we shouldn't universalize our critiques of them either.
Kuan-hsing Chen, Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization. “Overcoming the Present Conditions of Knowledge Production,” 211-256 Durham (NC), Duke University Press, 2010.
Your presentation was really interesting Anthony.
ReplyDeleteI'm adding this link to the "jaywalker shaming" public screens/surveillance system I mentioned in class too.
https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2017-07/31/content_30303525.htm
Thanks Patricia!
DeleteI was trying to recall the Chen reading that we had for our class with Nitin last semester when you brought up the jaywalker shaming at the end.
It's fascinating, but perhaps unsurprising, given Chen's discussion of China's jiahu zhangzhi system that regulates social relations through "three historically constituted principles or dosa: qing (sentiment), li (reason), and fa (legality) (Chen 238). He mentioned how legalistic measures enacted by the state--"jaywalker shaming"--are interpreted by the China's "civil society" as "the workings of a paternalistic system" of punishment" (238). So there's a historical and cultural specificity attached to this particular example in that there's a cultural or political logic, or algorithm, that surfaces. Also I find a bit of irony in this jaywalker shaming that also attends to the specificity with respect to China's political and cultural infrastructure: if we think of algorithms as the "non-neutral social/technical set of instructions with productive power" hidden underneath the abstractions of objectivity, universality, and pragmatism, then this example almost turns the table around. The cultural logic is intentionally made public in the hopes of an undesired output (jaywalking) will affect the input (behavioral guilt?). I think that this example also reminds us to situate algorithms, however we define/describe/approach them, within a specificity that is proximate to the conditions through which they operate. Insofar as we critique the universalizing of algorithms fashioned with technologically deterministic descriptions, we shouldn't universalize our critiques of them either.
forgot to cite the article i referenced:
DeleteKuan-hsing Chen, Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization. “Overcoming the Present Conditions of Knowledge Production,” 211-256
Durham (NC), Duke University Press, 2010.