Discipline and Punishment 2.0

What do three or four stars in Goodreads or Rotten Tomatoes tell you? Do you buy rating system? Well, to point out the obvious, of course it helps you to get a feel of something, whether the product lives up to the name. For example, Haruki Maurakami’s The Strange Library may sells well due to its author’s fame and the fact that most Strange Library books are sealed with plastics in bookstores so you cannot peek at how disappointing the book is. (I am not a Murakami fan. I am not disappointed, but it is disappointing for his fans).  

I never buy public ratings for books, movies, restaurants, because I have peculiar judgments.  But, what if the ratings are related to safety? For example, Uber taxi app that will automatically pop up the driver’s rating when you are ordering a car. Well, I kinda trust this. Like I trust airbnb’s rating. So, I do not negate the use of rating in this sense. Aside from its functions, however, it itches me how rating scrutinizes service provider to influxes of users’ opinions. But, don’t all businesses work like this? When I saw the Uber taxi rating, I imagined what if I got rated on-line or publicly for every single task I got in my workplace. With my face and name in it. I wouldn’t like it. Then, why do I like the Uber taxi rating?

One day, I participated in this workshop. Their objective is to practice how to be innovative social problem owners and to design the results into prototypes. The people are great. Most of the participants and mentors are doers, practitioners, and they are used to get requests from clients to design their products based on user’s experience so it will satisfy the users, us, those who could buy, those who make the rules and what is good & not. The participants were divided into several groups. We then got couple of days to define a social problem that we would solve, one day for research and prototype designing, and one day to finish our prototypes.

The teams were very creative. Several social problems they chose are: the lacks of Jakarta waste management, Jakarta government’s plan to manage informal food vendors that causes most of the vendors cannot sell from their usual spots, how to locate our lost items, etc. Interestingly, the solutions to most of the problems are to make the elements visible. For example, for the “lost items” problem, they would like to put something that could be detected and located with your devices (obviously). Another example is to list, rate, and locate the food vendors so we could detect where they are since they will be strolling around, not in a fixed area. Look, both people and object could be located!

No one objected when rating food vendors. However, when a group proposed an interactive device in museum space that could detect which paintings that you like, people suddenly felt uncomfortable. Why? Isn’t the idea the same? To instantly detect and announce what you like, to cut social interactions to infer your favorites, to cut the context why people like something at that particular time, etc? Why do we put CCTV for our babysitters and watch it from our iPad in the office, in non-challant manner, while we do not like being observed? Is it a matter of different social classes?

I could get the idea of Airbnb and Couchsurfing, for example, because the rating is reciprocal. With food vendors, babysitters, etc. it is not reciprocal. Of course, they could give their own “ratings” of the users or employers through words of mouth or other tactics. But, doesn’t it bother you just a bit to see how technology becomes more and more intrusive rather than liberating? If you have any examples of non-intrusive technology or product design, please let me know (I will browse IDEO site as well). On the other hand, we could argue, through all of the money they get from good rating, technology could be a liberating tool to succeed, and it gives a “measurable” steps: more stars mean more customers (?). 

Aside from the benefits for you and for the service provider, what do you feel when you give out stars on the people we could lurk at and decide their narrative of quality for public? Practicing our minor power at least? Surveiller et Punir, Discipline and Punishment 2.0.

    

She tries to give a confusing smile as she likes Murakami but hates this book (or is it because she is cold from Edinburgh weather?) Where are the stars to be clicked? Would be easier than figuring out this puzzling smile! :) 

Kafka’s Remarkable Letter to His Abusive and Narcissistic Father (from Brainpickings)

In Indonesia, we consider family is the ultimate nuclear group where children could find refuge and support. We also assume that seniors would be taken care of the children, and babies from young family will easily find support from the grandparents, if not from babysitters. Our social policy also hinges toward the assumption that every individual has a familial safety net. When that's not always the case. With this thought, we tend to be dismissal with policies that could cover individual's interest. We do not imagine a differently-abled person or a senior walks out of their home alone. There is no such thing! Since we assume they have family. We assume they have a nice, decent, non-abusive family. Hence, we do not create infrastructure for individual people. Instead, we promote that marriage will give the solution for better life (since you'll have a spouse and children who take care of you). We also glorify communal value, when not all people feel comfortable in social bonding. Meanwhile, I have always believed that detachment from social life is important as well, to respect individual thought, privacy, and empowerment. 

Brainpicking just shared Kafka's letter to his abusive and narcissistic father. Good entry to de-romanticize family.  Not all family is nice and glam as our new order Posyandu ad. The spectrum of "abusive" is not necessarily physical, but broader and more delicate than that, as what Kafka wrote below:

"To you the matter always seemed very simple, at least in so far as you talked about it in front of me, and indiscriminately in front of many other people. It looked to you more or less as follows: you have worked hard all your life, have sacrificed everything for your children, above all for me, consequently I have lived high and handsome, have been completely at liberty to learn whatever I wanted, and have had no cause for material worries, which means worries of any kind at all. You have not expected any gratitude for this, knowing what “children’s gratitude” is like, but have expected at least some sort of obligingness, some sign of sympathy. Instead I have always hidden from you, in my room, among my books, with crazy friends, or with extravagant ideas… If you sum up your judgment of me, the result you get is that, although you don’t charge me with anything downright improper or wicked (with the exception perhaps of my latest marriage plan), you do charge me with coldness, estrangement, and ingratitude. And, what is more, you charge me with it in such a way as to make it seem my fault, as though I might have been able, with something like a touch on the steering wheel, to make everything quite different, while you aren’t in the slightest to blame, unless it be for having been too good to me.

This, your usual way of representing it, I regard as accurate only in so far as I too believe you are entirely blameless in the matter of our estrangement. But I am equally entirely blameless. If I could get you to acknowledge this, then what would be possible is — not, I think, a new life, we are both much too old for that — but still, a kind of peace; no cessation, but still, a diminution of your unceasing reproaches."