The word of the Lorax
But now, says the Once-ler, Now that you're here,
the word of the Lorax seems perfectly clear.
UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
nothing is going to get better.
It's not.
But now, says the Once-ler, Now that you're here,
the word of the Lorax seems perfectly clear.
UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
nothing is going to get better.
It's not.
I think a lot about the lifecycle of websites. I’m frustrated by so much of the short-term thinking I see in the world today, and the way we think about websites is a part of that: it’s “normal” for them to just go up in smoke as soon as their authors stop paying attention. People switch platforms and providers and break links without a second thought. It pains me to see people build websites with no feeling of obligation to them — when you put something out into the world, it is your responsibility to care for it.
At the same time, I wonder if this obsession with permanence is misplaced.
Care brings the worlds of action and meaning back together, and reconnects the necessary work of maintenance with the forms of attachment that so often (but invisibly, at least to analysts) sustain it.
...What if we care about our technologies, and do so in more than a trivial way? This feature or property has sometimes been extended to technologies in the past, but usually only ones that come out of deep folk or craft traditions, and rarely the products of a modern industrial culture.
...Is it possible to love, and love deeply, a world of things?
Third, you’ve got to do this with love. You’ll need to take a radically different approach to supporting and partnering with customers to help them adjust to new and better ways of working.
I recognize this is a very niche endeavor, but the art and craft of maintaining a homepage, with some of your writing and a page that's about you and whatever else over time, of course always includes addition and deletion, just like a garden — you're snipping the dead blooms. I do this a lot. I'll see something really old on my site, and I go, “you know what, I don't like this anymore,” and I will delete it.
But that's care. Both adding things and deleting things. Basically the sense of looking at something and saying, “is this good? Is this right? Can I make it better? What does this need right now?” Those are all expressions of care. And I think both the relentless abandonment of stuff that doesn't have a billion users by tech companies, and the relentless accretion of garbage on the blockchain, I think they're both kind of the antithesis, honestly, of care.
Maintenance has taken on new resonance as a theoretical framework, an ethos, a methodology, and a political cause. This is an exciting area of inquiry precisely because the lines between scholarship and practice are blurred. To study maintenance is itself an act of maintenance. To fill in the gaps in this literature, to draw connections among different disciplines, is an act of repair or, simply, of taking care — connecting threads, mending holes, amplifying quiet voices.
Ethnographic studies are distinct from ethological research in other species because we can speak with our subjects and ask them questions. This has tremendous value, but much of what humans do is not spoken, and we also observe, count, and measure.
From my records, research questions emerged that I never expected when I was making them.
Quantitative data collection involves systematic and repetitive observations on the same set of variables.
Accurately capturing how people spend their time is contingent not only on systematic data collection, but also on participants moving in a relaxed and normal manner through their daily activities. Just as primatologists habituate their subjects to their presence, anthropologists first must develop rapport and trust with the communities in which they live.
Scan samples and focal follows are two commonly used behavioral observation methods.
During a scan sample, randomly selected individuals are located at specified time intervals, usually every ten to fifteen minutes, and the observer instantaneously records what the participant is doing.
Focal follows complement scan samples by documenting the continuous sequence of an individual's activities. During a focal follow, each subject is observed over a period of several hours with each change in activity recorded with a start and stop time.
In most traditional societies children help care for their younger siblings. However, it is often the case that a child minding his younger sibling does so out of the corner of his eye while playing with other children. Is this play or child care?
I organized behavioral codes to contain several levels of information. As in this example, if a child is outside playing with friends while minding her two-year-old sister, the activity was coded as 675: the 600 signifies noneconomic activity, the 70 that it is playing, and the 5 that it is playing while in charge of a child. All activities were coded in this way. A nested classificatory hierarchy preserves both detail for future research and flexibility to lump or disaggregate activities for analyses. This method of nesting information carries over into many kinds of coding and classificatory schemes.
Because they live so successfully in their world, we expect our subjects to readily explain the strategies that underlie the behaviors we observe. This can be trying, because from their point of view we are asking the obvious, a child’s question.
Important connections are often made by accident, outside the bounds of our research agenda.