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3pm Journal of Digital research & publishing importance that a communication technology has in determining the structures possible for a particular culture. Innis wrote that cultures are shaped by their ‘media bias’ or choices of media, which are either time or space binding technologies in their materiality, encoding and their sociopolitical purposes. (1972, 1991, Chesher 2009). Innis proposed an ethical measure determined by the balance of space and time binding in the dominant media of a culture. A time binding media, which is long lasting like stone, books, or the spoken word in oral communities, favours cultural continuity, priestly and civic structures. A space binding media, which is light and mobile like papyrus, telegrams, or electronic communications, favours conquest, trade and expansion. The breadth and depth of Innis’s empirical research allowed him to draw these inferences from his detailed observations of industries as diverse as the fur, cod, railway and dairy industries. He concluded that difference between media at the material level, the encoding or language level, or the sociopolitical level caused the different features of each industry and the culture that developed around it (1972, 1991). Innis’s ‘soft technological determinism’ has returned to critical favour in this period of rapidly evolving technological change, now that the issue of the agency of animate and inanimate objects has been turned into an issue of relationality. Or, as Deuze puts it, that humans and machines are implicated in one another, rather than one influencing or directing the other (2006). The difficulty faced by cultural and sociological studies is to achieve the breadth of Innis’s approach, which straddled history, economy, politics and technology (Chesher 2009). The commercial and engineering fields, which provide most of the analysis of emerging technologies are also limited by lack of breadth and scope. This highlights the need for a critical analysis of the complex and simultaneous relationship between the materiality, the ‘nuts and bolts’ of a technology, the coding, languages or standards and the socio/political contexts. TRANSFORM, LIBERATE OR DISRUPT? It is necessary to have a framework to understand the hype that accompanies any emerging technology, to understand how Ushahidi may be both a ‘liberation technology’ politically speaking, a ‘disruptive technology’ economically, and potentially transformative or simply part of the ‘hype cycle’. The hype cycle, as described by Gartner (2007), moves from a technology trigger through inflated expectations to disillusionment, gradual enlightenment and eventually reaches an adoption ‘plateau of productivity’. Technologically, Ushahidi is 119
3pm Journal of Digital research & publishing currently at the peak of the inflated expectations curve, along with activity streams and cloud/web platforms, with a projected mainstream adoption, generically, of 2 to 5 years. Ushahidi, the actual organisation, is one of thousands of new technology startups that have more than 60% chance of failure in the first two to four years according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (2007). The recent unveiling in August 2010 of Crowdmap, Ushahidi’s hosted cloud service, may do for Ushahidi what Blogger did for blogging. By lowering the barriers to participation, Crowdmap, which is the simplified online version of Ushahidi, may become hugely popular. Early blogs required technical expertise and your own website or membership in a community that had blogs or bulletin boards set up. The arrival in the late 90s of several free, hosted blog services allowed anyone to ‘just add content’ and contributed to the ‘disruptive’ or transformative effect of blogging on digital culture. A ‘disruptive technology’ is Clayton Christensen’s term for what happens when successful innovation blindsides existing businesses, which tend to be risk averse and customer focused (1997). Ushahidi’s expansion into Crowdmap may be for altruistic reasons or for pragmatic business ones, but causing a ‘disruption’ may well see Ushahidi being used for many innovative things outside of its original scope. Clay Shirky believes that a technology must become ‘boring’ before it is truly innovative and culture changing, when the unusual uses become the norm (2006). In that case Ushahidi would need to lose its initial strong 120
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3pm Journal of Digital research & publishing - artichoke web design

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