The dilemma of the post-pandemic digitization: The presentable liberty and the perpetuated violence
Biao Xiang, a Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford, says in an interview that: Too often we think about the concrete image of individuals and also the abstract image of the countries that we neglect the grey area between us, that is called the “vicinity”. Indeed, when talking about the post-pandemic situation in China, we too often talk about the nation’s paradigm shift on digital systems and how they would empower us as mainstream citizens. It shows a dilemma between presentable liberty for those who the system serves and the perpetuated symbolic violence on the people who dwell in the grey area, the “vicinity”, the margin of a system, or even outside the system.
The Presentable Liberty
Since the Covid-19 outbreak took place during the Spring Festival, the largest holiday for Chinese laborers to return to their families, the work resumption afterward would cause huge social mobility. Therefore, it operated in a relay, expanding from service-oriented industries to intelligence-based industries to intensive industries. This led to the fact that certain social groups could enjoy the services provided by other people while they were not required to perform their work and still got the salary. They seemed to be liberated by the pandemic from their social roles of producers and turned into consumers. Subsequently, they fueled the development of digitization, during which a fragmented and unstable economy in the form of service industries and platforms boomed. Online education, remote collaboration, online retail, online life services, and digital citizenship systems have been widely adopted and developed, giving people more freedom to preserve their original pace of life at home.
As a result, the post-pandemic stage has turned into a vast and strange carnival of consumerism. We can see the overwhelming e-commerce advertising, service promotion, live streaming, co-branding, and other business activities flooding in our social media and applications. But they did not enter our lives in an evil and intrusive way. Instead, they approach us with the false impression of “having more free choices” and shape our cognition of having a good quality of life. The “presentable liberty” is actually a system trap, created by the enterprises in pursuit of profits, to turn people into a chess piece that moves towards consumerism. On celebrating the nation’s revival and being blinded by the trap of consumption behaviors, it would be even harder not to neglect those social injustices still happening in the nation.
The Perpetuated Violence
When we look at the gray area between ourselves and our nation, we would see that the isolation during the pandemic has created a sense of distance between different social groups. Under this weak social relationship, it is difficult to generate real empathy. People may suddenly have collective sympathy for specific events, but this only enhances the pseudo-participation of society on social media that is “liking is to participate”, “watching is to participate”, or “reposting is to participate”. Other than that, the popularization of digital services, such as didi (Chinese version of Uber), takeaway and delivery, have also aggravated people’s self-centeredness and egoism. Therefore, true online public participation is reduced to emotional consumption or a complete disregard rather than actual action, which could be a new form of symbolic violence other than racism, sexism, classism and ecoism. If “making things happen” is the role a designer should play by Ezio Manzini, then we should think about the role designers play as “making things vanished”.
Take the online food delivery service as an example. Due to the epidemic, people have developed the habit of ordering takeaways at home, and the number of orders on takeaway platforms has surged. However, due to the system’s delay, the short-term order growth has put tremendous pressure on the limited deliverymen. And since the system holds a rule: Delivery over time will cause the delivery staff to lose their delivery fees, so consumers have taken on-time delivery for granted. Therefore, many delivery staff would even break the traffic rules to deliver them on time, bringing huge risks to their safety. But the user experience designers, as usual, tried to change the rules of the system with a small “leverage point”. In this case, they added a button to the user and said, “wait another five minutes’’ to postpone the delivery deadline.
This is ridiculous to me that without solving the problem of the system arranging 20 orders for a delivery person simultaneously, providing the wrong delivery route, calculating the time in a minimum way, and imposing strict punishment rules, the designers are only thinking from the user’s point of view, and their thinking was also very unfair and biased because they assume the user would pay for the system’s neglect. The reason might be that the target users of their products are in the same social class as them. Therefore, during the developing process, they can easily find problems from their own perspective and resonate with each other, confirming that this is the right thing to do, creating a certain reinforcement feedback loop that colonizes their opinions in those biased service systems. Nonetheless, once a system is implemented, it will take a substantial cost to pause, look back and make up for the errors. Therefore, this kind of perpetuated violence of neglect in the systems will become increasingly difficult to resolve and aggravate society’s polarization.
“Although this social discrepancy is recognized, everyone feels that it is the basic rule of the game. Everyone should continue to play in this game, and those who are in the lower class will look up and try to catch up with the upper one without questioning the rules.” Says Biao Xiang. When we think that symbolic violence has erased the voices of these marginalized figures, are we aware of what kind of voices these people are making? If not, how do we see the role that the system should play? Is it possible to design a system that can recreate social welfare, not by colonizing another social class or pushing class division to promote the welfare of a certain group of people to achieve universal benefits?
When the mainstream are celebrating their presentable liberty, are they hearing the crying of the marginalized and the underprivileged?
— — XIV0FVN J1VNG
Source:
1.https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2056305120947657
3.https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/Mes1RqIOdp48CMw4pXTwXw
4. Meadows, Donella H., and Diana Wright. 2008. Thinking in systems: a primer.
5. Boehnert, Joanna, and Dimeji Onafuwa. “Design As Symbolic Violence : Reproducing the ‘Isms’ a Framework for Allies.” Intersectional Perspectives on Design, Politics and Power, November 14, 2016. Accessed October 25, 2018.
