Products Are People Too
Image: Own photo, from objects described below.
Here’s one thing people do: They gossip. They chitter-chatter.
Tacit knowledge is communicated through idle conversation about nothing in particular. And it’s a vital way for knowledge to travel through groups, and to travel down generations. It’s not written down… it just happens when you’re not busy.
Gossip helps groups bond, and helps us anticipate what our neighbours are up to without having to dig out the information actively.
Could our products gossip about one another?
What if everything in my home had alert lights for things that mattered but not much. My washing machine could have a hopper in it to store my laundry tablets, so it’d know if it was almost empty or not. My dishwasher, if I had one, could report how full the filter is. My freezer could know whether it needs to be defrosted. From the point of view of functional products, all these items should have blinking lights on them. Imagine instead that they gossiped—sent little messages out only a few feet. When I passed them, my mobile phone would pick them up. On the tube, bored, I’d read the gossip. If I didn’t read it, it would disappear in a couple of days. Video recorder which shows a blank screen instead of blinking a clock, and just gossips about me having not set it.
And just thinking about cultural transmission a bit, what if products learnt off their elders and betters? What if our portable products with wifi connections defaulted to using whatever the elder products in the house used, so my new wifi toy would learn and defer to an Airport Express which has been plugged in and active for a couple of years, or a feisty new computer which sends an awful lot of data.
Oh, this slide! These are the Teletubbies. This is a great example of how myth and cultural transmission works.
I photographed these Teletubbies at the anthropological Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam. They are wooden and hand-painted (you can see the brush-strokes) copies of Dipsy and Po, and were found being sold by a Javanese street trader. What you can’t see is that they’re standing on a toy chariot.
This chariot is normally occupied by traditional demons and other figures, and these children’s characters are so well-known that they have displaced them to sit in the same niche. That’s cultural transmission for you.