As a pathetic hacker fanboy I try to at least keep up with the worldview of the digerati. I find this work interesting not just because I secretely want to be a sysadmin, but because people who work with technology are eclectic thinkers who often think big thoughts outside the box. And while they rarely read anthropology they do have a strong intuitive sense for the culture concept — they recognize that human beings have some biological givens which cannot be resisted (need for sleep and its repression figures strongly here) but at the same time they recognize that there is something arbitrary and conventional the needs that good design fulfill. My most recent foray into what might be called (after the publisher) the “O’Reilly Ethos” was “Peter Morville’s”:http://argus-acia.com/bios/morville.html “Ambient Findability”:http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/ambient/, which seemed to me to be the best ‘big picture’ book that’s come out recently.

The problem with a book named ‘ambient findability’ is that it is in danger of being meme long, and once you’ve read the title you don’t need to read the rest of the book. Even the slim 179 pages of the book suggests that the author had trouble filling it out. Now there is certainly a lot of superb stuff in the book. The last third — which actually discusses information architecture and how people find stuff online — is fascinating and I recommend it heartily. The rest of the book attempts to locate this discussion in a wider account of how humans and animals dwell in and navigate through the world. The problems with this part of the book are hard to overlook. The breathless, Cluetrain-style prose (e.g. “We’re surely headed in the general direction of ambient findability. So strap on your seatbelts, power up your smartphones, and prepare for turbulence. Beyond this place, there be dragons. Or is it streets paved with silicon?”) is derivative and tired. And it doesn’t help that much of what it promises is a rehash of SmartMob hype that is already looking as prescient as late-80s promises of VR helmets and headgloves. But what really got me was a passage on Polynesia which not only upset me as someone who lives in this region, but because of the way it reveals how much of human wayfinding Morville should have noticed given his topic.

In the section “human wayfinding in natural habitats” Morville writes that “today… [the] ability to ‘read’ the natural environment has been lost” and a a result we “marvel at the mysterious skills of our ancestors, such as the Polynesians who navigated open ocean voyages without instruments.” Luckily for us (he writes) he writes, “ethnographers often provide a glimpse into the past by studying indigenous, living societies that have preserved their ancient culture and tradition.” He then goes on to quote someone quoting Raymond Firth’s account of spatial orientation in Tikopia where “the islanders use the expressions inland or seaward for all kinds of spatial reference… Firth reports overhearing one man say to another: ‘there is a spot of mud on your seaward cheek’.” Morville concludes that “only a very small island would support the particular system employed by the Tikopians.”

There is so much that is wrong with this passage I don’t even know where to start.

Now unless if there is something I don’t know about Peter Morville, ‘the Polynesians’ are not his ancestors. They are and were the ancestors of all of the Polynesians who are alive and well today. Claiming Polynesian heritage for himself and his audience (whoever they are) would be like Samoans claiming to be Mayflower descendants — the migration in question occurred long after the claimant’s community had already settled down. I know that for Morville Polynesia seems like some distant and mystical land, but many people consider it rude to have their cultural patrimony coopted so casually. And, of course, mystery is one thing, ignorance another. Polynesian (actually ‘Oceanic’) navigation is only ‘mysterious’ if you’ve never read any of the “excellent “:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1581780249/qid=1149275644/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/104-3477947-3147165?v=glance&s=books “books”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0520080025/qid=1149275644/sr=1-2/ref=sr_1_2/104-3477947-3147165?v=glance&s=books “written”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0824815823/ref=pd_bxgy_text_b/104-3477947-3147165?%5Fencoding=UTF8 on it.

Next, I have to admit that comparing current societies with past ones is a legitimate research strategy. But let’s not fall into the fallacy of some crude nineteenth century Comparative Method, which holds that nonwhite people live lifestyles somehow frozen in time and practicing customs from time immemorial. Polynesian people — including Tikopians — are people with history (in this case a colonial one ellided by Morville’s account, but I won’t go into this as most readers already know how that critique goes). If Morville is intereted in ancient Polynesians, we do have special anthropologists who can help him — we call them ARCHAEOLOGISTS. Like the kid in The Sixth Sense, they see dead people.

And of course anthropologists don’t have a monopoly on the Polynesian past. The best thing that Morville could have done would be to actually ASK a Polynesian about voyaging traditions. For instanfce, Morville shares a university with the superb Polynesian historian “Damon Salesa”:http://www.lsa.umich.edu/history/facstaff/facultydetail.asp?ID=99, whose “writing”:http://www.princeton.edu/~hos/Workshop%20II%20papers/Salesa%20paper.pdf on Pacific voyaging is freely available online.

And come on — just because you preserve aspects of your past in your current culture does not mean your current culture has remained static. An ethnographer interested in spatial and temporal orientation could do research on people living in Michigan, for instance, in order to unearth the ancient and mysterious ‘360 degree’ system of geometry that they inherited from their Babylonian ancestors. Surely this does not mean that Morville thinks propitiating Marduk is a good way to grow market share in his book?

And all of this is based on the assumption that Polynesians have ‘lost their culture’ — a sentiment that would not only piss off many Polynesians who read it, but surprise them as well. After all, the last time someone sailed from Hawaii to Rapa Nui was “2000”:http://www.pvs-hawaii.com/about_pvshistory.htm. The last time someone sailed from Hawaii to Tahiti, the Cook Islands, New Zealand, Tonga, and Samoa — 16,000 miles in all, all with traditional navigation and no motor — was 1987. It is true that most Polynesians prefer to take the plane today and that not everyone has the skills necessary to do this sort of voyage. But heritage voyaging is a thriving pastime in Polynesia and Micronesia today. So much for ‘the lost and ancient wisdom of our ancestors.’

Fifth, I’m not sure what qualifies as “a very small island” according to Morville, but sea/mountain orientation is widespread in Polynesia, including the Big Island of Hawaii, which is over 4,000 square miles in size. In fact I — and everyone else in Hawaii — use these terms every day in our lives. In Hawaiian they are “Mauka” (towards/with the mountains) and “Makai” (towards/with the sea). Shopping malls in Hawaii are divided into mauka and makai sides. There is a blurb in Lonely Planet Hawaii explaining what mauka and makai mean. This is not an ancient and exotic custom, it is how those of us who make the islands our home.

But what can explain this persistence, despite the physical size of our islands? This is the question that cannot be answered by an approach which focuses on navigation of ‘natural’ environments. The sea/ocean distinction works because it is a method of wayfinding in a cultural landscape. All landscapes are cultural because human beings always invest them with meaning. Customary units of land (ahupua’a) run (they are still the basis of municipal districting) from the mountain to the sea. This provided ecological diversity tied to subsistence needs but it is about an orientation that is not just spatial, but cosmic. In old Hawai’ian society (and throughout Polynesia and possibly even bits of island Southeast Asia) social stratification was horizontal, not vertical. Ali’i, the nobility, were people of the sea who came from abroad to rule over maka’ainana, the people of the land. The ali’i were (are — one Republican senate hopeful is a pretender to the Hawai’ian throne) associated with violence, sovreignty, and salt water (kai). The people of the land are associated with farming, peace, and freshwater (wai). Ku, the god of war and sacrifice, is the god of the ali’i while Lono, the god of freshwater and fertility, is the god of the people. And guess what? Today in Hawai’i its the rich who own the beachfront property and schmoes like me who lived up against the mountains.

There are many — many — more examples here that could be given. But the point is that all of this is exactly the sort of thing that Morville should know about if he is truly interested in a more wide-ranging account of human orientation. Indeed, it seems that he understands that ‘normal’ people with smartphones and GPS watches mark place in exactly this sort of way. But somehow ‘meaning’ has come to mean ‘digital’ and he understands ubiquitous computing less as culture by other means and more as something new and different. By missing all the anthropological literature landscape his account of findability is remarkably diminished. This is too bad — books like Wisdom Sits in Places or Senses of Place are emminently readable and easily available.

I think ultimately the problem is not that Morville didn’t do his homework — the book is only 179 pages long after all! The problem is that this would have been much better if it had been 700 pages long and was a general tour how human wayfinding in all its forms. The other big problem is that the view of human anture and human functioning that informs the view point of a lot of the digerati is derived entirely from pop science writers reading each other’s books. It would be unfair of me to blame popular writers for not being professors since this is not their job. But there is a danger of creating an echo chamber which drowns out alternate and more fruitful approaches. I wish people would look under the surface of things before they take on assignments like this. If Morville had done this, I would have found the ambience of his book much more to my liking.