 Good evening everybody. I Didn't expect this kind of setup to tell you the truth It's kind of an early Christmas At least when I think of my kids, I think they're going to be a really mad tomorrow that I did not take them With me tonight, but you know, let's not just let's not talk about Christmas just yet. I Have an enormous reverb here on stage. Do you have a monitor here? It's very hard to speak like that Do you? Okay So let's not talk about Christmas just yet But you know January is approaching very fast too as you all know and I'm sure most of your some of you at least Already considering which kind of detox you are going to opt for in January during the first month of the year, so maybe no alcohol after a week of family feasts And then New Year's Eve on top of that Maybe no binge watching of TV shows that basically all are run and the same principle, right in every episode things will take a turn for the verse as if Watching reading the news didn't give you enough of that already at the time So maybe no more doom scrolling on your smartphones a more radical type of detox Discipline your smartphone use maybe limit it to a time frame during the day digital detox You've all heard the term before so I do really hear hear that often, but I seldom see it Let alone to it myself all of this then will be repeated again in spring when you know fasting for Easter comes around of course So it's going to be you know field one again At least if you're Christian or are immersed in a predominantly today Christian culture like many of us are here tonight I believe and it's probably quite safe to say that many of us feel bad about their smartphone user have felt bad about it at Sometime in their life many feel overwhelmed so to speak a bit like tourists Felt in inner cities in the 80s before they got so extensively Chantrified think of New York think of New York City, you know like Grandmaster flash in the furious five We're wrapping in a seminal hip-hop track from 1982 too much too many people too much I'm quoting a little bit more of that I've definitely am not a rapper but just to give you the general idea of a grandmaster flash and the furious five We're rapping about I got a bad habit and I just can't break it Something's in my mind, and I just can't shake it. I need some time and I want some space I got to get away from the human race If you think you're using too much of the smartphone that is and if you think the smartphone alienates you from other people This is your night Not because you're going to be you know reinforced in that feeling because every known guest will bring at least some relief Actually to that sentiment to this remorse He will be presenting a much more positive view on digital technology than what we are used to in this Serious, you know, that's been running for six years now. How fittingly then here that's not talk on the museum Museum of natural sciences or natural history We will also learn that smartphones are actually part of being human may as they become part of nature or Second nature that will have to be discussed So a warm welcome at last now to this third and also last session of making sense of the digital society this year It is as you probably know We have several guests who have come around for a long time It is a joint venture between the federal agency for civic education at the Humboldt Institute for internet and So sci-fi so after the lecture that will begin any minute now There's going to be the conversation on stage between our guests and myself for maybe about 15 to 20 minutes There's two microphones and on the two floors so to speak Hope you can see us very in the back. This is quite quite a hike to you guys back there In the row, but there's going to be microphones and there's also going to be Digital participatory tool as always called Slido so very warm welcome to our viewers on their respective screens at home This is of course being live streamed on the respective Websites and also at Alex TV Berlin. So welcome to you at home or wherever you are And of course the warmest welcome to our guests from England now He's an anthropologist at University College London where he founded the digital anthropology program He has studied the relationships we develop to things cars clothes gear of all types And yes to smartphones the last 20 years He has pioneered the studies in digital anthropology and being an anthropologist He not only listens to what people say about what they are doing like feeling bad about their smartphone use But he actually examines what people do like using it all the time and surprisingly in Innovative ways as we were going to here tonight. So this is definitely one crucial difference to the constant I would like to call it survey mania. We get in the media So we mostly you know most of the time you only hear what people say in a very short time span Answering questions. We don't know or don't even care to know about what they were in the first place Our speaker tonight the fellow of the British Academy Has been head of many research projects around the globe on how people of various age and cultural background Interact with smartphones. He will tell you about that himself in a moment But let me just briefly hint at the great access to these studies. You can get all the volumes Of his research for free in open access formats if you read the small print He wrote me in an email last week. I was actually able to read the small print I had to put my other glasses on but I succeeded eventually and could download some of them If you would like to read the summary of sorts of all those studies You might want to start with the global smartphone beyond a youth technology 2021 at UCL press. He's also published on health topics such as the comfort of people in 2017 which was based on a study of the social relations and communications of hospice patients in the UK of people about to die in other words Very fresh from the press so to speak and yet again as open access if you wish The good enough life a book that combines Philosophical questions about the good life with ethnographical research in a small Irish town whose name I won't dare to mispronounce I just learned now before this introduction that it's actually very easy to pronounce. It's called Kuhn meaning port So to speak that's just a brief glimpse at about three books of a total I think of 41 books. He has edited and or written in the past Decades, but here I'm in the flesh now in his lecture the global evolution of smart technologies Please welcome Daniel Miller Thank you very much indeed, and I'm really delighted to be here in this amazing setting It's it's a museum, but I must admit I'm not actually going to be focusing on the past very much tonight Or indeed actually on the future. This is really a talk about the present and about a device which is Extraordinary that is global and ubiquitous that we all kind of use the smartphone and my main question tonight is Who put the smart into the smartphone? Having said that there is a kind of analogy with evolution since the global development Of the smartphone is kind of a bit like an adapt species adaptation to a local cultural ecology I think smartphones and Darwin's finches Yeah, they have quite a bit in common Now much of what I will provide tonight is a summary of ten years of anthropological research on the use and consequences of social media and smartphones research that shows the extraordinary Contribution that has been made by you That is the users of these platforms and devices a contribution that has rarely been Properly acknowledged so mostly I will be making the case that it is you Who have made the smartphone smart? But we are also in Berlin and I actually couldn't resist the temptation To start and end this talk from a rather different set of observations Last week I published this book the good enough life and much of the volume consists of a debate between anthropology and Western philosophy much of which comes from Germany and I want to suggest that one of the reasons that we tend to diminish Our own contribution to the smart in the smartphone lies actually in modern philosophy Now I imagine it's reasonably conventional to start a consideration of modern philosophy with the work of Immanuel Kant and Although his best known work is the critique of pure reason his critique of practical reason concerned with moral issues Has also been immensely influential and I think it's also pretty Conventional to suggest that Kant was concerned to ensure that advances in enlightenment philosophy and incipient science Should not overturn the foundations of our moral principles Which suggests a certain conservative agenda Fearful of what these new developments might mean for the core values we associate with being human Following the time of Kant the rise of science and technology Gathered momentum and later philosophers seem to have become still more fearful of their consequences for example Adorno and Heidegger Don't seem to have liked each other very much, but they shared a very similar pessimism and condemnation of technological developments Reading Adorno and Hawkeimer's work the dialectic of enlightenment today is really quite shocking It's an extraordinarily elicist work that assumes populations such as us have absolutely no Capacity to resist the techno capitalist structures that create mass culture as a kind of bread and circuses We don't even see our oppression. We're so thoroughly seduced by things like cheap entertainment Try to imagine if you will how Adorno and Hawkeimer would have responded to tick tock Doesn't bear thinking about It's rather harder to delve into Heidegger's views because the writing is a little opaque to be honest The concept of disain seems to be driven by a desire to find something so sort of foundational that it could remain Unsullied by these sort of modern forms of objectification Heidegger's later essays on technology are easier to read and his fundamental Conservatism becomes still more evident also probably not going to be a fan of tick tock in other words much of modern philosophy has a conservative nostalgic and often highly elitist tone that seems Disdainful of our capacities to deal with developments in technology in science This matters to the degree that philosophy matters That it seems to have set the tone for academic work such as in social science and more generally establishing a dominant discourse Which is inclined to assume that new developments in media and technology will result in some kind of loss of humanity At the conclusion of this talk I will return to philosophy in order to think more deeply about what my discussion of the smartphone Says about what we understand it means to be a human being evidence for the idea that philosophy has established a dominant discourse Comes from what would otherwise be a rather astonishing finding for my ten years of research The first five years comprised a team of our kill of anthropologists studying the use and consequences of social media and was called Why we post and as you can see we were sort of distributed all around the world And that was also true of the second five-year project, which was called asser the the anthropology of smartphones and smart aging in Almost every region where we worked we found this extraordinary discrepancy between what people say about smartphones in general And what they actually do with smartphones So if you ask somebody about smartphones The response is almost always negative. Yes, as was just suggested They tell you smartphones are addictive and perhaps we do need a detox period at Christmas or Easter or some other Time and doing without the smartphones. They believe that smartphones are changing our cognitive capacities We're losing our attention span. They talk about filter bubbles and fake news and other ways They believe smartphones are in danger in political debate It seems that people like us have developed many versions of this fundamental Philosophical concern that new technology is resulting in some sort of loss of humanity for example that people are now orientated to screams as opposed to people which is an example of what we might mean by this word objectification and yet If you turn from what people say they do To what they do you find almost the exact opposite sentiments Now our studies are unusual because they are not primarily based on language Our main evidence is not what people say in interviews or surveys or focus groups All the researchers in my teams lived inside communities in different field sites around the world each for 16 months Where they could concentrate on? Observation seeing what people do When we did interview we didn't just ask about the smartphone in general But went through every single app on the smartphone in turn to learn how each was used and why Instead of talking about smartphones We end up talking about things going on in their lives or the purposes for which they're using the smartphones Take for example health How people research symptoms or side effects, you know as soon as anything happens you Google it, right? You're concerned or then you might follow a physiotherapy exercises on YouTube Who doesn't try and increase their fitness to 10,000 steps? Find it easier now to deal maybe with medical insurance or repeat medical prescriptions and 20 other ways in which we're going to be using those smartphone apps To be actually quite useful when it comes to health Or they might describe Going on holiday seen through the lens of the smartphone Starting with a trip advisor to choose a hotel based on a thousand reviews Then booking the hotel and the flights on their phone how they use Duolingo to practice the local language and a qr code to board the plane at the airport Once they arrive they use Google Maps to find a museum and And if they then still get lost in the streets, they might use Google chance late or somebody about where the museum is And as often happens to me Now at that point the idea of a detox from your smartphone like not using all these apps That clearly make those tasks of life easier and quicker now that's starting to sound a little strange So how do we explain why the exact same people are so negative about smartphones in general terms and So positive about what they actually do with smartphones for health Holidays and a hundred other things Now perhaps you can see why I started with philosophy. I Really do believe that there is a dominant negative discourse that comes from the way powerful forces Such as philosophers Intellectuals and the media teach us what is legitimate to say and what is not acceptable to say I Think this does probably apply to lecture series such as this one That you you tend to get the negative stance that some like Zubov's Surveillance capitalism would be typical of what dominates academic writing a relentless critique that assumes that digital Technologies are leading to a loss of humanity in a spirit that follows this kind of conservative philosophy of Course what is being said here is important but it tends to be about the forces that bear down upon the people and Surely we also need some balance based on what we can come to know about the people themselves So as anthropologists we would call that a discourse. It's Not a description generally of what people do but a form of moral legitimation People say what they think you should hear Well, we try and participate and observe to be on people's WhatsApp groups to be with them when they're dealing with health issues and holidays From these 10 years of study, we've already published 20 volumes some you can see there That is nearly 4,000 pages of evidence We also work globally these projects included ethnographies based in China India Africa Latin America and Europe so that we can compare Context our suspicion of language extends even to the term smart phone The words to guess that a it's a phone and be that it's smart Actually though young people hardly ever use the thing to make a phone call and the acronym SM a RT Stands for devices that are able to learn from the way they're being used and yes Smartphones may try and predict what you're going to do next But again, this turns out to be quite a minor feature When set in the context that everything else that we're doing with our smartphones So yes as in 2021 we publish this book called the global smartphone. It's a free download available in many languages The book radically Rethinks what a smartphone is We call it the transportal home That is first and foremost the smartphone is a place within which we now live Obviously, it's a little different from a bricks and mortar home But there are many analogies It's pretty obviously our best address if people want to contact us. We're mostly at home in our transportal home It's the place where today we might do our research and other kinds of work the place where we watch player entertainment You know watch a football match when you're in a queue It's a place where we organize our lives the calendars and all the rest of it It's the place now from where you might go shopping and banking without even leaving this home It's a transportal home because it's so easy to Portal to somebody else's transportal home and spend time chatting to them and sharing activities Without having to drive or take a bus So this was one of many discoveries that we believe Transformer understanding of what this thing is We argue also that the smartphone changes our relationship to the world around us through a property. We call perpetual opportunism This stems from the fact that it's always with us and the one hand the camera has become Opportunistic we can use it the very moment our baby first smiles Or we pass an advertisement for a concert that we think we might want to go and see Or we see something curious that we might want to put on Instagram But equally a perpetual opportunism in that we can share those images Instantly with whoever else we think would certainly be interested in seeing our baby's first smile or the poster for the concert Another example will be the term beyond anthropomorphism The smartphone is clearly not anthropomorphic doesn't have arms legs or look much like a person But actually it goes well beyond any prior technology in its ability to reflect us Including our individual personality When I study someone's smartphone I can tell from this for example Minimalist approach to its usage using as few apps as possible How it can be expressive of a particular kind of masculinity or How the details of a smartphone? Reveal one particular individual sense of themselves as a consummate Professional by the way, it's been set up to link all sorts of Organizational facilities the calendar the notes the websites in this case was expressing somebody who felt that their workplace Hadn't recognized how a professional they really were so they expressed it in their phone that they had in a sense created It needn't be individual smartphones were very revealing of relationships Older couples where it doesn't matter who has the banking app because they pick up each other's phones Or you can see that the grandchild borrowed the phone to play games How did all that happen? My son is a software engineer, and I don't want to disparage the craft that produced the technology They provided us with moments of absolute magic Remember the first time you tried out the original iPhone or perhaps recently your first attempts to play with chat EPT they're marvelous and we do marvel at them Yet the real gift from a software engineer such as my son Has been a form of modesty They built something that is Unprecedented in the degree to which it can be altered and appropriated by the user rather than controlling the user as technology I Don't deny all the problematic consequences of smartphones and surveillance capitalism the rest of it But in some ways I would assert the other side is above the way we as users and consumers manipulate the tech is Generally far more Consequential than the way the tech manipulates us as consumers and That is what our 4,000 pages of evidence. Yes Now this is where you come into the picture. I Don't know anyone who just gets a smartphone and uses it the day it arrives Most people are busy deleting apps often the ones the companies wanted us to use Who here purchased a Samsung Galaxy and actually uses Bixby? We then add the ads we apps we want to use we change the settings and we start building content That's how the smartphone comes to reflect individuals and relationships Our global comparative project then shows how these in turn reflect cultural values A phone in Turkey shows how Kurdish society is organized around kinship While a phone in South India might reflect the way men try and control female sexuality To gain a sense of this anthropological perspective Take two books by my colleague Wang Xinyuan who happens to be here The first was called social media in industrial China Xinyuan lived during ethnography within a factory and that factory represents 250 million people who migrated from rural areas in China to the factory system but what her book showed is how it was the migration the simultaneous migration from offline to online That did more to bring these people to where they wanted to go a correspondence with China's modernity than the move from the village to the factory in her very recent second and I think even better book Smartphones and aging in urban China. She turned to the middle class in Shanghai The book reveals why you simply can't understand the smartphone revolution As it has developed for older people Unless you understand the cultural revolution that they experience in their youth Because the cultural revolution established the attitudes they bring to bear on the smartphone So this second project was called the anthropology of smartphones and smart aging Partly as an attempt to counter the degree to which in the past We've tended to associate these new technologies with young people We assume they're the ones who fearlessly appropriate them and make them do their bidding Well older people are seen as relatively passive and intimidated by new technologies such as a smartphone Yeah, as it happens. That's also less true in China Where older people associate themselves with the government ideal of using the new digital technologies to place China back in the vanguard of nations So she knew and could go to a restaurant and find young people complaining to their grandparents Grandma we took you to this special restaurant for a family meal But you're spending all your time on the phone instead of talking to us To take one final comparative example What do people post when they become a mother? In England we found that typically and this was Facebook Typically, they used they replaced themselves with their infant So these are actually a series of profile pictures the thing you see at the very top of Facebook But it's obviously not the babies Facebook, right? It's the mother So the mother effectively has disappeared from her own Facebook She's replaced herself by the infant and that's very common in an English setting What do Trinidadians post when they become a mother? They post images that say sure. I have become a mother But don't you think for one minute? I am any less glamorous and out there than before I was a mother totally different and You can perhaps now see why our summary volume was not called how social media changed the world But how the world changed social media? Incidentally as has mentioned all our books can be obtained as free downloads from UCL press Where they've already secured more than one million downloads For older people there is one sector above all that is of real importance as compared to younger people and that is health Not out of choice. It's as we get older stuff happens and you have to deal with it Corporations know this and the big ones are in constant competition to develop new apps that relate to health Because they're thinking about quite a lot of money They might make from this sector, which is called mHealth across many countries But mostly and you can never totally generalize that topologists But mostly what was striking in our work was that older people Refused and resisted these bespoke apps that are being produced for their benefit by the companies But because they just didn't want a proliferation of lots of apps Now you might think that that means that they were using phones less for their health than we've anticipated But no actually they were using their phones more for health than we anticipated and That could be explained by another observation What most older people wanted to do was to stay with the apps that they'd become Comfortable and familiar with Apps such as line in Japan we chat in China or WhatsApp in much of the rest of the world Looked at more closely. We found that older people had actually been Very creative and ingenious in finding ways to turn the apps that were not originally designed for health purposes into health apps One of the most important health apps today is what's app? In fact on our website. We've published a hundred and forty page manual on how people in Brazil use what's app for health But none of this reflected our ideas It was based on what the ethnographer Marilia Duke observed people doing with what's app as a means of getting and providing health information Visualizing nutrition linking to health authorities and insurance companies and so forth and that was equally true for medics and for the patients In a similar study Alfonso Otegui worked with a chemotherapy clinic in Santiago, Chile Now while most people would focus on either the doctors or the patients He could see that the key to the clinic which were the often overlooked group Which he calls the navigator nurses who connect the doctors with the patients and they were the ones Who quickly saw the potential of what's app to make their work easier and more efficient? Again, we think of older people as the most passive recipients of new digital technologies But when it comes to something that really matters to them such as health They're often the ones who actually make this transformation in In Ireland where I was working older people had difficulty using their health insurance app But they would photograph the invoice they would use social media to show they would find workarounds To basically achieve the same object So all of this led us to develop Using a phrase we took from the anthropologist Captain Peep the idea of smart from below Then actually the people who make the smart phone smart in terms of its capacity To actually be deployed in a hundred different ways during the day is us Now I've already acknowledged that this depended upon those software engineers who created advice that is open to such extensive change and redeployment Also, there is clearly a digital divide There are people who can't afford phones and there are many many older people who do not have the confidence or the knowledge to use smart phones in this creative way Yet even in the area where people How of the lowest income where we worked? Charlotte Hawkins who was studying these were actually squatter settlements in Camparo in Uganda There were evidence of smart from below In that instance the key to mobile Phone use is mobile money as these people have limited access to banks This level of poverty any kind of illness is a financial disaster You don't have the money to see a doctor. You don't have the money to pay for the medicines So mobile money has become the way younger people in Kampala Send money to their older relatives in the villages when they become ill To conclude that part then smart from below is the way we assert this claim that it is you Who put the smart into smartphones? Now I started with a discussion of a conservative tradition within philosophy But there's a lot of philosophers around there and I want to end with a very different example also, however from Germany Earlier on I implied that the idea that we focus on screens rather than people evokes terms like objectification a term that many people would relate back to the writings of Karl Marx and the sort of negative impact of capitalism I Apologize, I don't know. I know the English words. I don't know the German words, but Marx focused on concepts such as alienation reification fetishism all examples of this idea of objectification None of which sound particularly positive and certainly influence philosophers such as Adorno But originally Marx took this idea of objectification from the philosopher Hegel and Hegel used these terms to present a very different scenario Hegel saw objectification as a Process that allows us to become who we are Yes, the process starts with this self alienation Perhaps let's say the feeling that we've lost ourselves in screens rather than people But humanity has the capacity to overcome self alienation in a process he termed sublation I think the German is something like Alf Hegel We come to see that these screens are created by us and used to connect with even more people So instead of studying how people use objects, we have this sort of dialectical process What's changing is both the people and the objects a Person with a smartphone is a different kind of human being with additional capacities They're now in constant contact with relatives do what's that? Maybe they're having an extra marital affair They might not otherwise have had because they can connect secretly or maybe they've just been caught Having an affair that they might otherwise have got away with because the smartphone is often not quite as secret as we think it is I Made a short film about an Irish guy in his 70s and He was he'd got an Oculus goggles And he was using it to travel around the Rocky Mountains visiting markets in South Africa Places he would probably now never get to or seeing a VR version of a visit to a space station a place He would definitely not have got to a Young person before going to sleep may spend an hour on tick-tock or Instagram wheels seeing so many things They would not otherwise have seen Some that exist online see creatures strange cats remote Mongolia and things that are created through animation and similar technologies So that we exist With possibilities that would not otherwise have been there and then the smartphone becomes this process of Objectification, but it's actually one that makes us more than we would ever have been in the past Okay, I will spare you more philosophical jargon And sort of repeat that point with an argument that we actually developed I was working with somebody called Julian Assin an and there's a book actually about webcam The problem we were trying to solve is this It does seem that every time we get a new technology. Yes Smartphones internet AI or chatbots or whatever we tend to get these two genres of reaction The first and the most prevalent will be the suggestion that there has been a loss of our fundamental Humanity in the past we were proper human beings But now digital media has replaced some element of that humanity with the machine There's the idea as I said that we've lost the tension span or there's the superficiality expressed by the curl except of selfie sounds like selfish Which you know people of older people often save young people or the Hikamori Japanese men who date virtual women and can't face going outside to meet real women or They're like the academic Sherry Turkle suggest somehow that's watching television Which actually is a lot more passive I would say is somehow still more human than this this internet The thing about all of these is they're almost invariably nostalgic The other more muted but almost always inevitable response is to suggest the opposite. Oh There's a new technology. So now we are more than human. We are trans human We are post human or something else beyond human because of our person machine combination Now if we're getting these two due responses every time we get a new digital technology It's getting repetitive if not a bit boring So in our book we suggest that maybe the problem comes back to the word human What does it mean? Because it seems to us that we do have this rather conservative definition of the human a human being is whatever people have been up to now But things have always changed a human being could have been defined as a species that can't fly Then we invented airplanes when our species that can fly In our book we proposed an alternative what we call this theory of attainment Because we suggest new inventions will continue indefinitely into the future and with each new invention We will attain capacities that we don't currently have a Better definition then of what it is to be human would be not just all the things we have been in the past But perhaps all the things that we will be in the future But we're still human That's rather simple language But I think it by and large accords with least my understanding or misunderstanding of what Hegel understood by objectification That is first we see things as alien and opposed to us And then we come to realize that they are our development as was the case in the development of law or religion or art Or indeed a philosophy because Hegel certainly saw himself as a step change in humanity Now listening to all of this you may have got the impression that I have a rather positive view of new digital technologies and Yes, I think it's absolutely fair to say that I am trying to create a balance with what seems to be relentless critique But in a way, it's not really the main point. I'm trying to make here through this consideration of what it is to be human My primary point is not to adjudicate whether smartphones are good or bad But rather try and use evidence scholarship to say actually what they are and what they do Mostly I've been putting the focus on how people put the smart into the smartphone citing Hegel, etc But my arguments in this talk then if it's their human would be just as compatible We're seeing the smartphone as having the capacity to accentuate every negative thing that a human being is or can be If people gamble they can now gamble more effectively Thanks to the smartphone if people are involved in wars then right now in Russia and Ukraine We can see how war is rapidly developing into kind of drone-based battlegrounds often operated through smartphones The Chinese state has always been impressively authoritarian Think of the feudal period or the culture evolution Today the Chinese is a surveillance state beyond any other often using these technologies That has to be said. I'm not sure it's quite weak the level that you had in the culture evolution Which is way before the smartphone So what I'm arguing is that yes, there is a lot that's positive But one of the main reasons people tend to see my interpretation of digital technologies only as positive Is that we tend to have this rather nostalgic and idealization of an often invented past that we now regard as having been lost thanks to new digital technologies So I'm an anthropologist and what I've done this evening. I think is characteristic of anthropology as a discipline Unlike other disciplines. We're rather less involved in activities like testing hypotheses I guess we're more like sort of academic extremists At one extreme we're devoted to the tiniest detail of everyday activity Spending month after month in just one community Looking at every single out My new book the good enough life Discusses in detail how people keep pet dogs how they choose their holidays how they play Briggs or sports what it's like to be a grandparent all very pro-co It's all about one little town in Ireland Which we then might compare with the same level of detail in one small place in Kampala or Milan Yet we use these details and the subsequent comparisons to try and discuss the other extreme the most general ideas about What it is to be a human being in this case through a direct discussion with Western philosophy But this extremism is what allows us to develop an answer to this question of who put the smart into the smartphone Because we don't ever see or study something called smartphones in abstraction It's always some particular smartphone as used by an individual within a family to do something Play games find a partner buy stuff drive somewhere look something up We just can't help Seeing who put the smart into the smartphone Because when we look through the screens of the smartphone We will always in the end be looking at you Thank you So thanks a lot Daniel for this very engaging talk Also, they're very fiery delivery. I highly enjoyed that But it's also part of the acoustics here, right? It's really churchy It feels like a cathedral Especially if you're behind the speakers we can hear even less the reverb gets even more enormous than it is already So I've never I've never felt like this. So since we're kind of in a church Daniel, of course, we have to talk about blame. We have to talk about guilt and I think you sort of started out like this when you talked about the term in a philosopher said to take Sort of the birds-eyed view now to begin this conversation Would it be fair to summarize the beginning of your talk by saying that you sort of compare philosophy at least Kant and Adorno to the Luddites to the machine Sturma in in history that we know burned that weaving machine burned that phone I mean, are they to blame? Look, I don't think I needed to look very hard at the work of these philosophers You read late high-degrees essays about technology You read Adorno about the new mass media. Yeah, I mean radio They couldn't be more down on this stuff, right? They're cursing it thereafter's in a preachy fashion And they do see it in terms of morality very much so so yes I think this is is crystal clear in an awful lot of philosophy it has have conservatives and as things changed It was particularly Conservatives about these new technologies. That was the joke about tick tock. Can you imagine? Yeah Yeah, I think it's there. I think it's obvious and what but what I'm saying in this talk Which is maybe a little different is I think it still has consequences It's not just that the philosophers did it in philosophy We look up to philosophers. We put them on a pedestal. We listen to them and they often Create the the moral discourses that at another level We as you know, we espouse and we talked to so To answer your question. It's yes. I am blaming. Okay, it's clear I think you might overestimate adorners influence by now a little bit. I think I think this might have, you know Been true for a long time. It was for Germany, especially when it came to pop culture Which is actually my field where I come from and yes I don't know it did a lot of damage there, but you also have to see where he came from I mean he saw what what cinema could do as part of being a German war machine and then being part of a different war machine He had very good things to say about radio At some point, which was not the newest technology at the time, but You also blamed it for the rise of fascism, but anyway, well blaming and not blaming. Maybe that's the second point, you know I thought there was a very interesting Addendum in the global smartphone, right the beginning when you summarize the different chapters You point to the fact that I quote now we acknowledge that we lack evidence about significant externalities such as environmental Consequences exploited labor and the study of relevant corporations and If you allow me to add within this series, I would say also What happened to the public sphere because that is of course our main subject or has been a recurring subject in this series so Could not both be true Digital technologies can be really detrimental to all those things that you sort of rule out No, okay, and also be very useful as you look at the word externalities here. Yeah, why am I using that term? Yeah, I'm using that term because the work that we did did loads, but it can't do everything, right and There is Significant and important Literatures there's for example a very good literature actually by anthropologists on things like digital labor that we don't see core centers in India Exploitation in Africa, etc. There's all there's literature about the environmental consequences. There's Literature about surveillance these literatures are out there So you have to put your own work into context. So what I'm basically saying here is that I am not Denying those literatures and I'm not diminishing those literatures But wait a minute. Don't you also have to study the consequences on? Ordinary people as you see it in everyday life and that is not there in that literature So there has to be I use the word balance and I admit that we looked at this whole Scenario and said what's missing? What actually isn't in that debate and that discussion and our job because we can do it in a way Nobody else can is to provide that evidence that scholarship Because to really understand everyday use you've got to have the patience you've got to be there You've got to be with people so I what I'm basically saying is that we are not studying everything about digital technologies We are complimenting other people's studies and Those studies for various reasons would tend to have a more negative aspect Okay, because as I said in the talk they tend to be the things that bear down on us Whereas I'm looking at what we do creatively with and the two meet Let's talk about the creative part Working with the smartphones so to speak and you use the terms of you know redeployment redefining the use of a certain app and so forth and Can you tell us a little bit more in detail how that actually happens? But with one problem we actually do have with apps nowadays in European Union is trying to work against that is the problem of Non-existing interoperability right that you actually it's very hard to go from one app to another app to change your data To to to migrate your data things like that and you said well What we saw especially with old people with health apps when they use like what's up as a health app? Is they sort of redefine their use? How exactly do they redefine the use of the app? Yeah I mean I think the point I'm making is that the so much of the usage that we observe is Not you see that seems to be an envisaged by the people who created the app. So that's redeployment we deploy so They would rather we use the apps that especially made for that particular health purpose They're designed for that. So I gave an example Because you want to concrete example. So one of the team was studying issues about nutritionists working with diet and The point was that the nutritionist wanted a visual diary Because if people if you can see what every what the person is eaten all day long it's better than just having a description and an app had been created so that You could create a visual diary for nutritionists and people would not use it So what the people did do is they found all sorts of aspects of what's app? actually Combined with photography that allowed them to do pretty much the exact same thing but with what's app because they just wanted to use what's app not the other right now What's that was not designed to create a visual diary for nutritionists It's that's an example of this Creativity that people bring to bear they find their way that they are comfortable with with the apps They are comfortable with to do the self-same thing That's the point I'm making and that we observed All over the job It's a genius name. Isn't it to what's app? I think my mother thinks it's the only app existing One of the things in Brazil is people think their phone is They call the phone in Brazil in Portuguese. It's called zappy zappy. So this is my zappy zappy phone in Japan There are plenty of people who have line and as far as they're concerned It's a line machine because there's only use one app. That's it That's that's the phone Just to pick another concrete example from your research from your team of researchers some of whom are present here tonight You mentioned her already very welcome here again from my side Is older people in the Chinese? Field side right tend to identify with the smartphone is being you know It's part of the duty as citizens to actually help the country's Technological advance or progress so they stand in contrast to the more general conservatism of older people elsewhere I would think so do you see different approaches across Europe? Now in different areas or would you say yeah, there's like there's a certain similarity there in Europe with older people being a lot more skeptical In using digital technology or even people in general a lot more Sensitive to data mining for example than they are in the US. Do you see differences across? Yes, I mean I think that the I use a kind of example because it's the most dramatic, right? the possibility that you have older people Identifying with this as the project of China itself China that people in China want China to be the most modern state And they feel you as you said a citizen Duty to try and and you know perform that now I don't know of an equivalent anywhere else so the differences you're going to find between say Brazil and Ireland are going to be more subtle, but they will reflect the differences more generally that people have in Their aspirations as they get older to give an example give that example Brazil and Ireland We'll work a lot with retired people so in Brazil People were exactly Sao Paulo because our pal is different for the rest of Brazil people are very concerned to retain The sort of identity and status they had from their working life So they're using the phone in a way to keep that Trajectory this is who I am and that's who I've always been right in Ireland the idea is I'm finished with work now. Let's do everything else right completely the opposite So the phone then becomes really important because they are just so busy trying out, you know painting and chess and History and all these other activities and one of things about the phone is its capacity for organizing life So in a way, it's not that they do crafts Life itself has become the craft the thing they are Crafting their own life that they're you know I want to be able to do all these things and it actually would be very difficult even to organize them without a smartphone So yes, very different uses of smartphone because they have different aspirations in later life and That would be regional. I mean I say they said it depends on exactly where you are I mean Sao Paulo is different because it's a very work. It's a place that identifies with work It would have been different in Rio, for example, so it's not even Brazilian It depends where exactly you are other difference between Ireland and England, which you say when it huge respect that really two more smartphone use so it gives another insight, please Okay, I mean the real difference between Ireland England is I mean in some ways I think that these countries are the opposite of each other Okay, so do But when you streamed worldwide, okay Well, I've done because one thing is when I was doing the social media project I did 16 months in an English site that was almost exactly the same size as the Irish site So actually I have the comparison right and the problem in England is You get this extraordinary rise of isolation and loneliness remember I also work with hospice patients because English people have very Particularly working class have strong ideas about where and how you socialize The notion you know for this notion the Englishman's castle home is the castle that you don't intrude into the private domain You meet in the public domain and when you get older and it's more difficult They often become very isolated And actually a lot of my work in England was about issues of loneliness I'm not finding that in the Irish setting at all There isn't that particular Cultural idea about you know where you can be with another person there is actually if anything an increase in Sociality during that phase around not just coffee shops but people coming home and and Actually, there just wasn't an issue of loneliness. It did basically did not exist in this site So extraordinarily different. I mean if from a place where this is the Dominant problem to a place where it's virtually non-existent. Yes, there are differences That's what anthropology does. Okay Thank you. So I think it's time to open this up here. I do have many more questions, but I'm sure you do too So we've got we start with the live floor. I think here and then look at slide on what's happening in the online sphere, right? I'm a little blinded by the light as we say, but there's two microphones there. Can you Show me where the microphones are There we go So, please you pass it out in front. Is there somebody in the back to that is ready to? Yeah Okay, let's take I think there was somebody there holding up his or her hand. I couldn't tell right So pass the microphone and please pass it back to the person holding the microphone Well, whatever Thank you so much for giving us the opportunity here. This was a wonderful talk I'm so impressed by your work by your ethnographic work and especially by the cross-cultural aspect of it This is so much work Amazing I am I want to ask you about One aspect of your cross-cultural work that I'm wondering about and that is you have been visiting all these countries that have Very different political structures So some of them are more repressive than others and I'm wondering to what extent this degree of repression is something that creates a difference in terms of the ordinary uses of Smartphones is it something that influences the ordinary uses? I mean the Answer is that for most areas of ordinary life No, I mean if you think about smartphone use if you're you know looking up about a concert your what's that with your family? Your listening to your pop music, etc. Etc. It's very unlikely that would be different, but If you come to the area politics Then of course, it's extremely significant. So one of our studies was of Kurdish people in Turkey and the situation of Kurdish people in Turkey is let us say difficult and one of the points about posting online is That becomes visible So actually one of the interesting results of our work was that you know a lot of people study politics as it appears on online social media Yet we found there was much less politics Than you'd expect because you know if you're looking for a ticket you'll find it But the way we do our work we just see people scrolling through the day and whatever that's there is what we study and The reason there wasn't so much politics is precisely because It would be problematic not necessarily even problematic from an authoritarian state, but politics is divisive And you know that you're often with your family and you don't necessarily want to have quarrels about politics So actually it was one of those areas that was a lot less evident in What we were observing than we had expected In some countries that would be directly because of an authoritarian state and others not so the answer is it depends on the form of content I Would say for most forms of content. No, it's It's much more to do with the difference in things like family relations and kinship, etc But there were certainly certain genres of content where the question would be absolutely pertinent and would make a big difference My can you and you to come and come and answer because I couldn't know you You want to make a coffin because it will I mean I think what you're talking about surveillance. I mean Yeah, I mean I think that This has been a debate from very early on and I think that the most important early intervention was you probably remember when the Arab Spring developed and everybody was saying oh, you know We have these phones and they can be used as a vehicle for liberation. We can mobilize on the street We can have demonstrations. We can overthrow governments and then within a year You have people like Morissau writing a book and saying well actually this is how the Iranian government recognized where the distance were this is a wonderful tool for state oppression because suddenly it's become visible and You can act I mean and the point about China really is that you are being monitored all the time When you really just almost every space you go into people, you know, you have to check out your Your passport and other kinds of identity, etc, etc So it has that capacity and that capacity is increasing over time Daniel now you do sound like a speaker of our series As I said No, I'm not denying its presence. I'm just I know balancing it out. I know. Okay, so there's somebody In the back half. Let's put it like that because I can't really see that far So if you want to say something In the back you have to raise your hand Nope, so there's somebody up here, please. So pass the microphone here. You know what? I forgot to say could you please stand up because it's a lot easier to see for the sound technicians and for everybody else That would be very nice Thanks, Danny. Thank you very much for the presentation so my question is there is an American author who is called Cal Newport and Newport is a social associate professor in Computer science in Georgetown University So he wrote his book and he talks about oh the name of the books are called digital minimalism So he argues that well based on his knowledge The apps like tick tock and social media tick tock or the other similar apps They're designed For people to be addicted to that So what my question is So whether based on this research and we can arrive at arguments that even the least meaningful use or Purpose less use of the ordinary people as actually still have some meaning behind it like posting images and so Yeah, so have agency behind it. Thank you pretty much everything that commerce designs is designed to try and maybe not Exactly addicted but to create demand and design, but hopefully continuous Television would want you to be watching it several hours a day, wouldn't it? So there is a sense in which in a way that is obviously true because otherwise They wouldn't make any money out of it or they wouldn't have any kind of influence The question is are these things particularly different and there has been speculation that the way the algorithm works They in doing is kind of more effective But actually there's two reasons why I'm not really persuaded by by by this The first is that the reason I think people Actually continues, you know, why do I look at Instagram wheels for 40 minutes? I don't think it's because there is some kind of abstract thing out there making me addictive It's because I actually quite like what the cats are doing And actually I quite like these amazing underwater scenes and I quite like these kind of different kind I love the content. I really enjoy it And I think I think this great that I can spend 40 minutes watching amazing things I wouldn't otherwise see I mean if that's addiction bring it on Because actually I think my life is enhanced by the content and most people I know are you you know using these things for content Okay, if they didn't have the content that attracted them, they wouldn't and What you have to bear to balance that view is that the vast majority of things these companies try and do They the idea that you know, there's this brilliant genius Company out there that is managing to control. I mean It's for quite interesting because when you go to some of these countries where I've been where I work people the figure They use would be Mark Zuckerberg. Oh, it's incredible genius. He's got us addicted to this that the other And I look back at the history of this now Mark Zuckerberg Invented something for rating babes in Harvard dormitories People used it for something else. He insisted it should only be used in Harvard. It went to the other universities He insisted it shouldn't be outside the universities It went outside the universities almost everything that Facebook became was despite Mark Zuckerberg getting it wrong Not because he envisaged all these things and this happens all the time students of mine work inside these companies And work with the people that produce the algorithms and it's most of it's like most if you ever worked inside a business mostly, it's a total mess and Yes, sometimes they get it right and and you get a connection But it will be a connection between something they've created like the way a particular algorithm works and something that appeals that actually creates an Access to content that actually we are interested in watching because otherwise we turn it off So I think it's a more comp this notion of kind of it simply they do it and again It goes back to this Adorno thing that we're just passive and we we've been you know put into this addiction No, I just don't I just don't see it The capitalism and addiction is probably another evening worth of Discussion one thing I sometimes wonder especially in Instagram is Why watch something you don't like actually because many I think many people watch things that don't like I've wrote a longish piece about the Beatles film a year ago get back You know this 16-hour Peter Jackson. Yeah, fabulous movie. Yeah, I think but my feet is flooded by the Beatles And I'm going Paul McCartney give me a freaking break You know after all these years and it's like I it makes me it makes me consume it want to consume it less Actually, yeah, because there's so much similarity Yeah, but you can then you're very likely to switch to things that you like more because you can I mean Of course the argument a doesn't always get it right be sometimes people It's what you may like, you know what horror films and things do we like it? Do we not like it? It's ambiguous And but but over time we would probably You know if tiktok isn't doing it I go to wheels or whatever So I don't this idea that we We have become forced to watch a whole lot of stuff. We don't like do you I mean really watch a lot of I don't watch back stuff I don't like I gotta turn over to the next channel. I think I do I think my kids do too, but that's another question We got something from slide on the digital sphere Please Sarah Can you summarize or read us the questions from yeah? Yes, of course? This is a question from our online audience. What gets lost when using digital technologies for example Isn't then isn't there something like an aura that gets lost when communicating digitally as on zoom versus face to face I mean, I think it totally depends on the communication I just don't think you can ever have some big generalization about predigital and Digital what gets lost in non-digital communication, right? Let's start from there Read Goffman or anybody else who actually studies the way we communicate in every day and you will find ordinary Encounters are so dominated by etiquettes about you know in English pub You mustn't say anything that actually matters, right? There were so many genres and constraints it people have this notion that Predigital is somehow natural communication face-to-face and digital is somehow unnatural. It's not like that at all Both non-digital and digital have genres Non-digital there's the way we talk to family over meals. There's the way we talk in the office There's the way we talk in the pub each has its particular cultural forms as Anthropologists would study and they are often very tightly constrained culturally Equally the way we behave on Instagram may not be the way we would in YouTube or the way we would in some other platform what we we live in a world with multiple forms of Interactivity and communication these days. Yeah, some of them are online some of them offline Conversations flow between the two things. I just don't think that any Generalization that says the digital is this and the non-digital is that works anymore It's too complex. It's too differentiated And you know even before we start to get to things like cultural difference. Is there more on slide? I was there I would have one more. Okay, please go ahead. How does class factor into your empirical findings? Why is it that some digital technologies are perceived as a promise or a threat based on that? I mean everything that we know about society Gender nicity class will have its analogy in digital you see because we as I was saying we're human beings with these things So, let me give a negative. I feel I need to give a negative example just so you know I can do that, right? I've given a couple already. So let me let me give one. Let me end with a nice negative example I want to give you an example where the use of digital Makes class worse Okay, not just the typical digital divide, but a different one which I wasn't expecting So I was studying I wrote an article about googling for health information and Googling for health information Like it sounds like it should be equalizing. I mean suddenly everyone has access to the same health information So that should overcome class differences But I found the opposite Why? Because what I found was that the people who had a good education Maybe being to university they would go on Google and they would Recognize which are the health information that is coming from Maybe the German health service or the Mayo Clinic, which could they could trust which they could believe they might even go through that and actually get access to the The scientific papers that could really inform them about these medicines. So being relatively informed. They got more informed If you talk people who didn't have that kind of educational background and were also googling for health information They would usually look at the first thing that came up in Google particularly before COVID was either something that was trying to sell you a product or Was causing anxiety Because media thrives on causing anxiety. So whatever symptom you had you're going to get cancer and Essentially therefore the people who as it were had advantage had more advantage The people who were already in some ways not sure about the information were more misinformed than they were before Now that to me is a clear example of the way the digital exacerbates class differences And where we find that I hope we fully acknowledge and recognize that that is happening and Then what was interesting about that case was I had not expected that at all I just assumed it was equalizing that it wasn't so as for us the key point is always evidence What does the study actually show? So although you know, I keep getting people keep wanting me to come back to this kind of you know Is it good? Is it bad? Etc. Etc. I think that what we need is to go beyond that and actually do slow patient studies of what is happening put the evidence out there let people assess it and Then come to conclusions based on that and that's really what I'm trying to represent Okay, I'm trying again in the back is there somebody in the back Once so let me just have a look if there's someone in the back because we haven't heard anybody on the back rows here And it's many rows So I really have to give me a clear cut signal. Yeah, we got somebody I come back to you later. Okay. Thank you There's a microphone, please. Hi Thank you very much. I think it was a very nice to Little bit confusing hear me back. It was very nice to get this positive framing While digitalization is often viewed very negatively I would however would like to go into a more negative side which is dark patterns dark patterns where the software is built in a specific way which Tries to make you buy a certain product by the way how the software is presented to you and There's a lot of studies showing that it's actually quite effective to do that To use these dark patterns. Have you noticed that and all your studies with a smartphone or Come upon it my argument would be this of course There any any company that is out there is going to try and persuade you To buy their product and we'll use whatever technology they can and we've had centuries now of advertising Logical manipulation of all kinds Vance Packard was writing about this in the 1950s Subliminal messages that were sent to you so you didn't understand that you were actually being persuaded to buy something You really didn't want This is capitalism and I hope I've not suggested for a moment that it's weakened by the digital On the contrary it will use whatever new digital technology It can get hold of Whatever it may be. I do not know any about dark patterns, but whatever it is plausible I'm sure you're right. It will use whatever it can to try and enhance profitability by selling a product But it's not that that suddenly Happened with the digital the digital is the meat is a transformation in the means by which this is done But companies were not less vociferous or manipulative before the digital They are what they've always been and there's a way and I don't want to over-exaggerate the generalizations about capitalism There's all kinds of different. I mean, I've also done books about business and about capitalism. It's a very complex phenomena There are plenty of companies out there that want to do good things Sell you things because they think they're really going to be beneficial to your welfare We we over-generalize all the time about these things, but as I said at the end of my my talk Whatever is going on is likely to be exacerbated and Transformed by the use of digital technologies. So, you know, when we're looking at bullying in the school playground I see the ways it actually Enhances bullying and also decreases it because people can see what's going on and that will be true of selling us Things are being commoditized and things are being Decommodified as we see the digital and we see many examples that around us It's never one or the other But the the things that are being done through the digital are being done in new ways But why forget history? What why have this notion that somehow these none of this there was no advertising before the digital there was Thank you. I think Daniel. They dimmed the lights for us I think we're ready to take our hands from our heads But look the look a lot better on video and you know nobody's going to delete it anyway So, okay, we got somebody in the third row like to comment on something before we Wrap this up. Thank you. Please. Thank you for the talk My question is do think you refuse or it's a appreciation of technology or the smartphones Would be different if you study say if you studied youth or children Not to go even to infants who you know, we know how they use it because there's quite a difference of the elders Oh Any population that you study will have its its specifics and Any population we could have these discussions the positives and the negatives, but okay Let's let's take the example if you like of children I think from previous work I've been doing the children actually are more susceptible for example to advertising than older people and Actually, there are more possibilities of manipulating them through advertising I'm saying there always was but that can be enhanced by the digital and I certainly see that on the other hand One of the there's people like Dana Boyd and a number of other people have written about What's happened in terms of the way young people use digital technologies and to tell the little story What they argue is that certainly in a place like the UK Over the last few decades It's statistically it's safer than it ever was to be a child The chances of something happening to you when you let's say if you were to walk to school is actually decreased good evidence But the assumption of parents is exactly opposite of that Whereas 1956 is children walk to school now a parent would be seen as neglectful if they let their child walk on their own to school So parents would be much more controlling over the kids activities Now that means they used to go out and play with each other out in the street and now they can't what they do is sit at home and Play Minecraft Through the phone with their friends in other words the kids are using it to bring back Social activity with other kids that their parents have suppressed and their parents Then blame them for being too much on the screens But it's the parents who stopped them playing with the other kids, right? So if you put it in that context Yes, you can see examples where it causes issues problems manipulation, etc. And I've studied school bullying for example And I've looked at things, you know, I'm trying to understand the relationship things like anorexia bulimia Cutting and the things that happen nasty things that happen in school and how that relates to things like smartphones, etc But that's always going to be the case with the younger people is with older people I can tell you stories that kind of a problematic and stories which actually show the children actually Achieving capacities that they were otherwise denied that we would like them to have we would like our children to socialize with other children Play Minecraft with them. I think it's decent enough thing for them to be doing. I Really like that moving around thing here down here because as we are reminded soon enough We won't be able to do that anymore by those other two guys there The other two dinosaurs, so let's move around a little bit for the last question. There's so much I wanted to talk about we have to wrap it up. I'm sorry So much I wanted to talk to you about you know about the body something 19th century philosophers weren't very good at to think about the body a relation from social media to the body about eating disorders about best-aatures About the rise of sports and all that but we can't do it Let's take another German relentless critical stance At the end. I'm not even German, but you know, I just love this negativity in this country It was actually drew me to move here and if you Look at that big picture again you rhetorically really nicely landed At a you right who put the smart into smartphone. It was you You was also the person of the year. I think in 2007 Time magazine has a person of the year every year in 2007. It was you. It was us It was the internet user in 2007 and when we think back about all the tech Utopianism in any kind of decade. It's always been about the empowerment of the user in the 90s It was about everybody has learned how to code, right? We all were empowered as coders nothing of this happened Then it was like mp3. It was the distribution of everybody can be his own artist his own gallery his own everything None of this has really worked out either then of course it was crypto and it was NFTs None of this has worked out for the majority of people either but all those sort of Let's say I wouldn't even call them Ideologies, but maybe even wishes or utopias for the future have led to is rising inequality Each of that utopia of the last 30 years has led to more Inequality in the internet and not equality. So that's why I have this slight red alert in my head going off When I'm addressed as the center of technological development because I have been addressed as the Center of this revolution for the last 30 years and it's never been true Okay, there's quite a few things there for a last question Inequality is absolutely risen, but to be honest I Would take my explanation of that from somebody like Piketty and from change is in the political economy And the way we understand things like asses inflation, etc And the way government, you know Problems about government said there are many reasons for understanding how inequality has increased over the last several decades You can read books like the spirit level Piketty. I think is as good as any and not really about the ticket It's about the political economy. So it's so it is those That's where you go to understand something like you know things like housing and welfare and taxation systems, etc, etc That's what inequality is really about and what it comes from within that To take what you were talking about about the hype I think What I hope I've tried to convey today is that this these imaginaries about what's gonna happen positive and negative rarely come to me Both sides, right the end of the you know the end of humanity or as I said the idea that we are coming more than human As I said, we keep coming up with those again and again and at the level of hype No, most of that is never realized whether we think it's going to create more inequality or more equality or whatever But what we need to do is just what I've tried to say there is get away from these vast overgeneralized useless Discourses that the digital is this and the digital is that and it's good and it's bad these teach us nothing It's a huge field. It's changing almost every aspect of ordinary everyday life and What I'm trying to say is tell me are you talking about farmers in India? You're talking about factory workers in China. You're talking about Brazilian civil servants Then are you talking about? Their family life. Are you talking about how they relate to work? Are you talking about sports? what we need is sober patient assessment of Ev of all these Complex and context your instances because that is the actual world So I'm just not interested in the discourses Whatever they said I want to know about the lives of people how they experience this the contradictions that they themselves face day by day in every little element of their lives and Bring that as knowledge So that we actually have material We can use to discuss these kinds of issues And that really was the intent today take come down and be with people and Let's not worry so much about Grand discourses because it's you're right then they never told us much and they probably never will Never tell us I think it's very surprising that in the end of this very engaging talk of this evening I highly enjoyed a discovered a little bit of the advocate of German dialectics in the end something I didn't really expect at the beginning. Please ladies and gentlemen Daniel Miller. Thank you for coming out