Tariq's Take

Stanford University – Science, Tech & Society Program Commencement – Student Address – June 13th, 2010

A couple of people have asked me to post the address I made at Stanford's Science, Technology & Society Program commencement ceremony. I do this with some hesitation. Things were incredibly hectice in the days leading up to graduation and I ended up writing the speech an hour before delivering it – so it's probably not my best work. 

Also, the address was meant to be spoken and doesn't quite come across on paper. For this reason I will post both the text and a reading of it. Finally, I should add that much of the speech was unwritten when I delivered it, so I'm paraphrasing what came off the top of my head.

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I’d like to begin by addressing a question to my fellow graduates: By show of hands, who knew coming in to Stanford that they would be an STS major? [only one hand is raised] Obviously, we who knew coming into Stanford that we would study Science, Technology & Society are rather atypical among STS majors.

We are far more typical in the sense that STS represented a disciplinary framework that allowed us, and indeed, required us, to reconcile interests in science and engineering with pursuits in public policy and business and the humanities. In my case, Stanford topped my list of schools precisely because such an interdisciplinary course of study existed.

There was more to it than that, though. I followed in the footsteps of an older brother and sister, who brought the things they’d learned in the their STS courses back to our dinner table in DC. The discussions were lively, colorful and ranged from trivial speculation on the latest gadgets or Internet startups to ruminations on the role of mobile infrastructure in international development and the implications of failures in STEM education to future of minority communities.

This is to say, even before I came to Stanford, my engagement with STS as a discipline was stimulating, horizon expanding and eminently relevant to people and places I care about. It is no surprise then, that during my time here at Stanford, STS has been more than just an academic discipline, more than just an ivory tower pursuit. It has been personal.

Professor McGinn and many others have encouraged and empowered us not only to understand theories and frameworks in the abstract, but also to engage in a personal sort of inquiry. We were encouraged to think about lofty questions such as what values are embedded in and engendered by technologies.

But we were also invited to think about the fabric and fibre of our own lives and be rigorous, deliberate and experimental in deciding which technologies we will use and which we will not, which add richness and variety to our lives, and which have unacceptable costs.

For me, STS has provided principles and insights that will actually inform the way I live my life. It has grown my ethical mind and my ability to recognize nuance and complexity, perspectives and stakeholders. It has taught me to balance exuberance with healthy skepticism and to be lucid about equivalencies – to understand that an email is not a letter, nor an ereader a book nor the human mind a computer.

It has taught me that technology cannot be the chief barometer of human progress, lest we sucomb to the tragic ironies embodied in the fact that food production and prep technologies have created for us the problem of obesity, without solving the problem of hunger; embodied in the fact that technology has increased the variety and abundance of food we can eat, but in many cases degraded its nourishing value.

In our time, the symbolism of progress has become deeply intertwined with technology, but we we must not confuse the symbols of progress, for actual progress.

As we go out into the world we must understand that technology will play some part in the way we solve trenchant global problems. But let’s not forget the place of sweat and labor and paradigm change; let’s not forget that the most important endeavors facing us are not technical ones, but rather have to do with expanding and re-drawing our circles of empathy to be ever more inclusive.

As practitioners, if you will, of Science, Technology & Society in the world we must subscribe, in the words of one great public intellectual, to “a sort of blues inflicted hope rather than a cheap American optimism”.

That is to say, we must live the Senshimer-Baltimore debate – tempering an optimism around technology based in the faith that somehow technology will solve the very problems that it engenders and perpetuates, with an understanding that we and our world are actually delicate and impermanent, that we are constantly threatened by our own genius.

These are some of the things that STS has taught me. But to return to the idea of how STS has not just been lofty and abstract, but also personal – let me share with you in closing, a story that is both deeply personal to me and quintessentially STS.

I am one of 8 breastfed children. Bear with me here, I know the mention of breasts discomforts the puritan in every American. You see, in our times, this is a highly unusual occurrence. For over 30 years my mother has counseled mothers and families on the challenges of maternal and early childhood health. Much of her work has been in teaching poor, minority women about the benefits and practice of breastfeeding.

This is pretty bizarre in the sense that, only a generation or so ago, breastfeeding was the only way to feed children, whereas now it has to be taught and advocated for, even among experts such as pediatric doctors. What happened over the course of one generation that disrupted the transmission of a vital practice which had gone on uninterrupted for millennia? The answer, is manufactured baby formula and its lobby.

At a time in American history where the ability to consume manufactured industrial goods became the ultimate barometer for upward mobility and success, nutrient dense and far superior human breast milk was replaced with expensive, manufactured, dairy-derived products. This is a perfect case study for the STS discipline. In this instance a food technology (infant formula), taken as a symbol of progress, won out over actual progress with deep cultural and health repercussions.

And with that story, I leave you. To my fellow graduates, I wish you joy and abundance. To the STS department professors, lecturers and staff, thank you, thank you and thank you. To the parents, families and mentors, thank you, thank you and thank you. To all, be well and peace be upon you.

On Saturday I spent a delightful evening at Stanford's Senior Formal – it was a pretty spectacular affair. I didn’t bother to bring my camera because I can always rely on every young lady at the party having one – you've seen it: cute, pink, canon. 

As I eagerly wait for the photos to post to Facebook, some musings I've had at the intersection of FB, digital photography and college culture (read as alcohol) are beginning to crystalize.

The jestful adage ”if it’s not on Facebook it didn’t happen” is becoming a powerful statement of reality for young people. Many can attest, for instance, to the sort of ripples that an announcement that “so-and-so is in a relationship with so-and-so” creates in a FB social circle. 

A recent study aptly titled "Look at us: Collective Narcissism in College Student Facebook Photo Galleries" explores the ways in which FB has transformed the way we use and share personal photos. 

Authors Andrew Mendelson and Zizi Papacharissi (of Temple and U. Chicago respectively) conclude from looking at some 20k+ photos, that "the central objective among college students on Facebook was the recording and posting of their participation in the social rituals of college." No surprise there.

Certainly photos are narrative aids in telling a social-status garnering story about participation in college life. More than that, I suspect that photos serve as a sort of cognitive aid or reality augmentation. The emergence of cheap digital photography and a nearly ubiquitous sharing medium increasingly shapes the way young people parse lived experience. Bear with me here:

Over the past several years I've had dozens of day-after-the-party conversations. What I've concluded from these is that many of my peers dramatically overreport “how good a time” they had last night. Part of this is semi-conscious – tales of epic nights of mayhem are an important cultural ritual in college and people play up the "good" parts while skipping over the bad. There may be more to it than that though.

How do you tell the story of a night you don't remember very well? You reconstruct it using the clues available to you.

You have a neon-yellow drink bracelet so you know you went to the Sigma Fratty Psi party. You have a receipt for five milkshakes and $30 worth of chicken tenders in your pocket to you know you hit up the LateNight eatery. The receipt has a name scrawled on the back, so you know you hung out with a girl named Mindy (or Minty?) who could only remember 9 digits of her cell number.

Then you go on FB. There are a couple of photos of you with buddies, with pretty ladies – you were all smiling and apparently having a good time. You vaguely remember some unpleasantness, but a dozen pictures of smiling, fun-having people assure you that a good time was had all around.

Not so. That vague unpleasantness you remember – shortly after the last photo you lost track of your buddies. You wondered around feeling alone, disoriented, miserable. Then you marked your territory around a palm tree…in vomit. Having lost your keys, you then called your roommate, almost unintelligibly drunk and maybe crying a little bit, and got him to retrieve you from the hallway.

Ok, so I took this scenario to a ridiculous extreme, but this is I suspect, representative of an actual phenomenon. Facebook photos don't just tell other people what we experienced – they tell us what we experienced. And like Fox News, they lie – the photos are out of context, plus, who doesn't try to put on a good face for those conspicuously staged, destined for FB snapshots?

"…[because he doesn't have a computer] there is so much of my life that he misses out on that the rest of my family gets to see…it's very hard for him to visualize what it is I even do in my day-to-day world."

In the above interview from PBS Frontline's Digital Nation series, producer and blogger Daniela Capistrano laments how her father's refusal to live digitally has disconnected him from her increasingly digital life. Her frustration resonates with me as I'm sure it does with so many people who have friends and loved ones still living in the analog.

We got my father a laptop back in '07 (I flew to Miami to set it up for him, seriously) and he's gotten pretty good at the basics like email (although I still have to remind him about email etiquette like thread hijacking and ALL-CAPS). My mother on the other hand, is somewhat of a tech whiz.

Family, the most important business
Capistrano's story reminded me of my own musings around the internet and the family dynamic. There has been a lot of talk lately about how web 2.0 tools allow businesses and governments to more effectively engage employees, customers and constituents. Blogs, wikis and social media tools like twitter and Facebook allow stakeholders to inform the decisions that impact them and collaboratively create knowledge.

Families are using some of these same tools to conduct the enormously important business of family. Web 2.0 tools allow for the active collaboration and decision making, and passive awareness and sharing. In my family for instance, we use a Google group frequently to discuss family matters and share information of common interest, particularly around health, personal finance and politics. 

Business conversations are increasingly media rich and take place across many platforms; in my digital household, our threads are rich with links, calendars, maps, images and video as we go about the hard work of family.

As governments and other institutions struggle to regain the public trust in this age of turmoil, web 2.0 tools, and the ethos of openness that has grown up along side them, have become central to transparency efforts. I've seen a similar dynamic play out in my family in terms of what and how we share.

Now more than ever, I'm clued in to many of the challenges my parents and siblings face and involved in plans for facing them. And it's not just because I'm "old enough" to participate in family decision making - new tools make inclusiveness practical and normal.

A few stories from my Family 2.0
Facebook helps me keep up with six of my siblings; they always have some passive awareness of what is going on in my life and I can check up on my little sister's FB suitors and figure out a little about what's on my moody teenage brother's mind, leaving him notes to publicly remind him I love him even if he doesn't feel like talking to me. 

This past Friday, my siblings and I organized a birthday surprise for my mother and I got to see the look on her face as she opened the fruit sculpture, from 1500 miles away. 

As I write this piece, my big sisterbear is taking the lead in organizing travel for three generations of my family plus significant others to my graduation in June; her strategy doc, shared with the fams via Google Docs, would make her old boss at Deloitte proud. 

One of the best laugh's we've ever had together as a family was over an email: A friend of mine emailed my father about interviewing him for her thesis research. My father replied saying, among other things, "The best way to get in touch with me is generally to just Hollaaaaaaaaa! Peace, El-Tehuti".

(My father recently changed his name from "Emory" to "El-Tehuti" which means something like "sage" in Ancient Kemetan. I still laugh every time I see the email signature. More on this in a future post)

There is a lot that has and should be said about how digital technologies can tear at the fabric of family life. Yet these same technologies have brought my family together, and not just digitally.

Blindness – "Sounding Off By Profession" Clip from Tariq West on Vimeo.

It strikes me as odd how we use occupational labels to describe people outside of a work context. I remember sophomore year of college when I was applying to finance internships and several friends took to introducing me as “the banker”. They probably meant it flatteringly mostly, alluding to my apparent ambition; they may also have been calling me a pretentious d-bag.

It bothered me. I wasn’t a banker.  If I worked in finance or at any other job, I would hope people could find something more descriptive of me than my occupation. You know, like social commentator or paradigm shifter or peace keeper (I can dream right?).

Watching the film Blindness reminded me of this pet peeve.  In an early scene, the newly-blind victims of some mysterious ailment introduce themselves as “pharmacist,” “taxi driver,” “financial planner,” “optometrist” etc… It begged the question of how they each settled on those labels as the most relevant ones, even above their names or hometowns.

The filmmakers seemed to make the point that our positions within society are fragile and not as weighty as we tend to believe. If we were stripped of our sight and left to fend for ourselves, the precious labels we construct wouldn’t matter.

A viewer could almost as easily take away something much more insidious; that economic labels are what remain when everything else is stripped away, and that our truest selves are somehow related to our economic agency.  This is why I find occupational labels problematic.

Why don’t we introduce our doctor friends as “healers” or our lawyer friends as “justice advocates”? Probably because the labels themselves connote a sort of institutional ethos vested with virtues such as healing or the pursuit of justice. But that is not all they’re vested with. They’re laden with status and reek of economic utility.

Other occupations that are not institutionalized professions, such as “hotel maid” or “tax driver”, are even less useful as labels outside of a work context. They do not reveal anything about an individual’s inner life, about who they are and what they would like to offer the world.

Not all doctors are healers nor all lawyers advocates for justice. Some taxi cab drivers are sophists and humorists, some bartenders, spiritual counselors and entertainers.

Occupational labels can be useful, valuable even. We may short-change ourselves though, by applying them as defaults rather than just when they are useful for conveying economic information (i.e. what skills and knowledge we have to sell).

Surely we can find better, truer ways of describing ourselves, of conveying not just what we are “certified” to do, but what we choose to do and why. Go ahead, try it. Come up with a label for yourself that better describes your inner motivations, your person.

Now put it into circulation.

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This post is featured on: The Daily Get Up, Brazen Careerist
Originally posted on Tariq's Tumble