Urgent Evoke

A crash course in changing the world.

Fight crap culture, innovate by creating better culture...

I'm on mission one of Evoke and trying to play my part by responding to one of the "secrets of social innovation." Ethan Zuckerman wrote: Don’t fight culture (If people cook by stirring their stews, they’re not going to use a solar oven, no matter what you do to market it. Make them a better stove instead.)

I may be misunderstanding what he means, but I would have thought that fighting culture is almost by definition what innovation is. The cultures that enforce female genital mutilation, h***phobia, suppression of women and so on should be fought, as should emergent cultures of mass consumption of disposable items without thinking of the consequences. Culture is the manifestation of society and for planetary survival innovation is not in the form of products it must be in the form of culture.

As developing countries becomes richer the old make-do and re-use culture is replaced with a consumer culture. Long standing sustainable ways are replaced with fashionable unsustainable ones.

One of the most useful innovations might be to make vegetarianism cool for Chinese (veges have massively lower carbon footprints than carnivores) That's what I mean by cultural innovation. Don't need to invent a new kind of oven or stove - just create cultures for what gets cooked on them.

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Comment by Chris Ke Sihai on May 15, 2010 at 1:53am
Interestingly, Charles Darwin was a descendant of Josiah Wedgewood, a prominent Quaker who supported the anti-slavery movement. He sponsored the "Am I Not a Man and a Brother?" campaign, which basically took a religious stance against slavery.

His innovation was to view humanity as a common family rather than seperate races, a paradigm shift that a) led to the abolition of slavery and b) was influential in bringing Darwin to the conclusions he made about the evolution of species. Both Wedgewood and Darwin explained their idea within a context that was meaningful to the people around them - christianity - instead of jumping on a box and telling people they were all wrong.

I also picked the don't fight culture theme, because I live in Taiwan and have spent years trying to reconcile the local understanding of how language works with my own, which is based on a completely different system. What success I have is due to finding ways to teach people in terms that make sense to them, rather than "this is the way it has to be."

Fot binding, the norm in this part of the world, ended because it started to be seen as uncool - in large part because the Chinese were measuring themselves againt the dominant western powers that were chipping away at their country. After they concluded for themselves that it was not in their own best interests, the practise died out.

This man has a good insight about creating social pressure:
http://www.ted.com/talks/rory_sutherland_life_lessons_from_an_ad_ma...
Comment by Turil Cronburg on May 15, 2010 at 1:57am
I'd also point to Simon Sinek's TED talk, about the importance of WHY, for the reason why I talked about the why being far more important to culture than the what. :-)
Comment by Nick Heyming on May 15, 2010 at 3:53am
Great insight. I think there's two different semantic concepts here, one that is talking about pop culture and 'that which is cool', which needs to be attacked and changed. The other concept is regional 'culture', which every society has and needs to be understood to effectively implement any new ideas.

The current paradigm is a hegemonic, global pop mono-culture that replaces these regional cultures and introduces ideas and inventions out of context, with many negative repercussions. Rik is right that we must attack this h***genizing, insensitive global crap culture, but those who point out that we must remain sensitive to regional cultures are correct as well.
Comment by Turil Cronburg on May 15, 2010 at 11:21am
So... respect some people, but not others. Got it.

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