Ethnography and More

If there is one real advantages to "second wave" Internet based e-commerce it is the simple fact that you can get with little or no effort just about any used book you want other than an original Guttenberg. It is pretty awesome that you can get a decent copy of a book that is out of print or isn't in the library. It is terrific, and I wonder how people did their work without it back in the dark ages.

What is most exceptional is that while people are using various online "marketplaces" like Amazon it really is small merchants who drive this, not the big boys. It's "peer to peer" marketing.

One book I just got this way is a book by Edwin Hutchins called "Culture and Inference : A Trobriand Case Study." It's going to be quite helpful. One of the things it will provide is a methodology for research. It also makes the point on how much of our expertise is culturally embedded. Looking very much to reading it.

Also, spent all day Saturday on a big old Coast Guard cutter out in a snowstorm with ten degree weather and 40 mile per hour winds. I even got to steer. It was great!

Blacksmiths etcetera

Deep into a book on activity theory. Been reading about blacksmiths and now scientists and it's making me think about Chomsky. Too much maybe.

Sassure and Peirce, when they each came up with the idea of the inherent arbitrary nature of signs, implied that signs, whether they be words written on a page or utterances of sound, gained their meaning from social/historical processes. A word is nothing without an infusion of meaning, and for the meaning to make sense it has to be social. We share the language process with others. Language is, from this perspective, just another tool, albeit a particularly unique and powerful one. It's a tool that makes tools, but like any tool it exists within contexts of use. (actually, it's more like a toolbox. I think.)

Chomsky modernized the field by saying there must be a language organ, as language was too complex to be explained by any other means. But what if language is inherently shared? if the cognitive task is distributed? We don't know language except in the context of use, and that use is highly scaffolded, collaborative and reliant on a larger culture? Just as I can't make a film without a few thousand employees of Eastman Kodak.

And, as I might as well jump off the cliff now, what if the "works of Shakespeare" really were the works of ALL the actors, stagehands and editors? What if they were collaborative too, and Shakespeare was just the glue?

Now I said it, and that means that I don't have to put that in my dissertation.