December 19, 2004
Anthropologists inspire tech companies
Every year, the people of the Trobriand Islands in New Guinea exchange ornamental seashell armbands and necklaces to bind their circle of fishing communities to each other, explains New Scientist (via plsj).
One of the "kula" exchange key features is an apparent element of altruism. Because the chain of gift-giving passes from island to island in a circle, no community receives a present from the one it gives to.
According to anthropologist Richard Harper, the kula exchange could inspire new ways to make technology useful. That is why Harper, along with others of his profession, is increasingly being employed by high-tech firms to apply lessons learned from traditional customs to tomorrow's high-tech products and services.
He has been working for Vodafone in the UK since 2003, where he has adapted kula-style gift-giving rules to encourage social bonding among groups of people in phone-texting networks. Under his guidance, Vodafone has launched its Postcard service. You send an MMS picture-and-text message to Vodafone, who will print it as a postcard and mail it to whomever you want. Like the islanders' gifts, Vodafone's postcards are permanent - unlike text messages.
The idea is that the recipient will then want to send a postcard of their own, perhaps to a third party, and so draw more subscribers into the network. Exchanging more valuable artefacts, such as music or video files, may be next.
Anthropologist and computer scientist Travis Breaux expects this kind of input to become more common. "As technology becomes more pervasive, the role of the anthropologist in its development will continue to grow," he predicts.
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