Geetha Narayanan: Teaching Social Implications of Technoloy

Geetha Narayanan has been at the forefront of the developing digital industry in Bangalore, India’s renowned ICT centre for several decades now. Being the founder and director of the Srishti School of Art Design and Technology, she has been developing and implementing programs that blend design thinking, problem, project or place based learning with new digital technologies.

Srishti is a college of Art Design and Technology that provides both undergraduate and graduate programs in various fields of industrial and communication design, experimental media arts, gaming, animation and visual effects. Students of Srishti collaborate with a large variety of partners during their education: with art and design contexts in India and around the globe, with international companies like Nokia and also with people in urban and rural localities to improve social conditions of life. Narayanan is concerned to develop business models that sustain a creative community of students and faculty through the conceptualization, development and implementation of various forms of educational entrepreneurship. Geetha Narayanan is formally trained in mathematics and international education. Currently she is finishing her dissertation “Complexity and System Thinking, Memetics, New Technologies, Learning and Social Change” at Sheffield Hallam University.

Geetha Narayanan has lived in Bangalore since the 50’s and has witnessed how public funding in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s made Bangalore India’s technology and engineering centre. In those days it was a city of hope. In the 90’ s, with an industry already there, Bangalore became India’s Silicon Valley. However, Narayanan argues, IT is built on a short-term vision and now with the change in the current financial market it has to be seen whether the city of Bangalore can actually sustain itself.

The way people want use technology in India and the way they connect with each other and the things that they actually do with it, are not necessarily the same as the way that people in the West use technology. Texting of course has taken over many people’s lives, but texting does not reach those who are not literate. People who can’t read and write, can’t text. Therefore, Narayanan suggests, voice and the voiceover IP and others will actually have a far greater impact than is expected even today. Also for India it is not about needing lots of technology, but about being able to use the right technology.

In the lived practice in the homes grandmothers have taught to be very careful with materials and this attitude is still reflected in many homes. However today the upper middle class students of Srishti have a different relationship with material. The students are very much in the ‘check’ attitude, and use mostly packaged goods. On the streets of India however, the relationship with material is extremely witty and conscious. Everything is recycled and everything is re-used. In communities the use of technology is mostly creative and communicative. The elite sector which is geared towards going up the social ladder, is focused on personal assets: personal memories, life blogs and pictures. People at the bottom of the pyramid however are looking for sharing, connecting, collaborating, creating ‘oneness to go forward’ as it is said in Karnataka. The use of technology in the bottom segment is critically different from the elite.

The learning environment of Srishti is an open environment; always in a state of flux, there is a survival of the fittest, and there are new ideas, which are constantly allowed to be seeded. And there are silo’s, containers of solid knowledge. No institution can be without silos, one needs them to have legacy. The leadership of Srishti is not about leading to success.

If you allow openness, constant experimentation, flux, people coming and going, there is a lot of feeling unsettledness. To be able to get up the next day after something has gone wrong and bringing your team back together is the greatest challenge Narayanan faces as director of Srishti. As a result people at Srishti are now less afraid to fail. Failing is crucial for learning, even when the world outside is not very kind to people when you fail. It makes them stronger. Human beings deal with failure with their hearts and their minds both. Failure of technology is different all together. Technology can provide data as input for decisions, but the meaning of data is contextual and technology cannot know. Even intelligent technology can never be part of failing as part of a learning process as such. Technology deals with failure as a statistic.

When suggesting that technology actually functions as a social engineering tool, Narayanan disagrees with this formulation. It is too much like there is a utopia that has been determined and we are all to achieve that utopia through instrumentation of technology and of human beings. She prefers to talk about processes of learning and adaptation that are embodied, with or without the use of technology.

Narayanan emphasizes that it is very important to place the human being and the ‘humanness’ at the centre of technology. It is about the human prospect and the human spirit. The prospect is what you have before you; the spirit is what you have inside you. Whatever we do with technology should expand the human prospect and also expand the human spirit. Societies, which are built on the foundation of people not trusting one another and protecting themselves against each other and the data net, which surrounds human beings, suffocates ‘humanness’. More and more people have to have the courage to say, “I won’t be part of that”, states Narayanan. Today there is far too much deficit thinking that is controlling our lives. Technology should not only be monitoring the deficits, technology must be about optimism and people have to make a conscious choice to remain open, even if it causes them problems.

Narayanan expects that a huge feminine gender based transformation will take place in India over the next 20 years. Women will be empowered to be able to take care of their families and have a professional life because of education, micro-credit let finance, and through the developing technologies as well.

Only water remains a huge gender burden in Indian society; women have to spend a lot of time collecting it. However, in the media there is a very gender stereotyped woman being promoted. While today some older women politicians in India do not adapt to these stereotypes and remain successful in their work anyway, Narayanan notices this is changing; younger professional women need to perform a certain feminine stereotype to be able to be successful at all. Narayanan regrets this deeply, but realizes that in the current media technology era this will not change. Youg women have to learn to deal with it and find their freedom and fulfill their potential anyway.

Geetha Narayanan argues it is time to question our systems of knowledge. Professional life gets more and more dependent on keeping virtual identities going: 100 % blogging, 100% FaceBook and 100% one’s own websites etc. There is a conflict evolving between the virtual web 2.0 image oneself and others versus the just having a friend and being together sometimes.

This conflict challenges the systems of knowledge in which traditions of orality are included as well. What are systems of knowledge? How does lived practice generate knowledge? How can old traditions of India contribute to systems of knowledge? And what role can technology play in evolving knowledge other than by mechanisms, which are created by a perpetuating thing of hits, tags, social media etc. So much knowledge can be found by interacting with people, especially in India where there are still oral traditions alive, which go back for centuries. Google as a system of knowledge is limited in this sense, even though young people think one can find anything online.

The complexity paradigm of self-organization, complexity, co-evolution, adaptation, all words that come out of Santa Fee, has been the dominant paradigm for the last decades and Narayanan wants to juxtapose this to create a better understanding of knowledge systems and then maybe answer the question about social engineering.

When watching the media, Narayanan finds it also a great cause of concern. On the one hand it is all open, participatory, everybody’s values are going out, but sometimes things can go very wrong. Mass hysteria is a very bad thing. There are real questions to be asked about it. The complexity of networks is unviable and this should be in the focus of attention. In the coming years Geetha Narayanan wants to focus on simpler networks and more meaningful networks, in smaller area’s and at smaller scale, taking more time to do things, to be able to answer some of the real and substantive questions we have discussed in the here presented interview.

View full transcript including film fragments here

Hereunder the transcript in text.