RE: QWERTY vaulting

Eva Ekeblad (eva.ekeblad who-is-at ped.gu.se)
Sat, 26 Sep 1998 22:44:08 +0200

Hello everybody

At 20.52 -0400 98-09-25, Eugene Matusov asked:
>What do you think?
referring to the multiple and often poorly coordinated rationalities that
cross around a given cultural practice as what makes our typing fingers
itch for words like "irrational", "ignorant" and "unreflective".

Yes I think what gets into the protocol on QWERTY or school teaching
depends on who is talking, why and to whom. There is actually some
interesting stuff on historical narratives that are spliced together from
thematically contradictory material in the next chapter (Ch3) of
MindasAction, and I think that as minds work these patchworked,
heteroglossic and conflicted modes of intelligent action ar by far the most
common. Which also reminds me of Mike Cole's African observations in the
60s: how people who were smart in local public life came out as dumb and
perceptually impaired in imported tests.

I also think that what Bill Barowy and Nate Schmolze got out of the pole
vaulting example, how cultural tools have "winners and losers" is what has
kept me, through everyday experience, from believing that artifacts are
universally designed to be convenient and efficient. Affordances and
constraints of a tool are always relative to particular users, and as a
small person I've been on the losing side with furniture etc. for most of
my life. Well, for example, chairs may be convenient for some kind of
standard person, but I can rarely rest my feet properly on the floor. These
sorts of experiences teach you something about design... On the other hand
I don't claim to have been similarly habituated into thinking of myself as
a (very particular) patchwork of borrowed materials: THAT has taken
considerable study, and still takes some discipline to apply.

Then, thinking about terminology I wonder what would happen if we could put
words like "irrational", "ignorant" and "unreflective" (AND their positive
complements) in a kind of quarantine for a while... these dichotomies seem
to be the kind of cultural tools that for the present appropriate us more
than we are able to appropriate them.

Eva
eva.ekeblad who-is-at ped.gu.se