(This is a response to the CTIN 532 Inventory Homework assignment, http://interactive.usc.edu/members/peggy/archives/009175.html)
Seeing as this is a blog post, it is going to be more ‘bloggy’ than my actual presentation. First off, I think it is silly to assume you can get a complete picture of a society by the items one person carries on them. Even the items of Average Smoe is only a picture of the world of Average Smoe. I’ll agree that it gives you a picture of part of society, particularly (for us) a slice of the Electronically-Advantaged Graduate Student. We only had items with us that had to do with our daily lives at school. I mean, books and games are a big part of my culture and I had neither on me. And for the world, TV is a supreme beast of our (or at least America’s) culture and I doubt any of us had a portable TV on us. I don’t applaud the strong presence of TV, don’t get me wrong, but you can’t deny its sickly grip on everything.
Anyhoo, I’m getting off topic here. Plus making myself a wee-bit of a hypocrite (I like to watch *some* tv after all. And play games on it! Squee! TV, you’re my bestest friend, let us never fight again!)
First comment will be that I was surprised, when you itemize everything on oneself, how much more you carry in your pockets than your backpack. Although having small things like credit cards, more credit cards, individual keys, etc, count while not counting each individual sheet of paper in a notebook may not be a fair. But whatever :^) All I can say is the wallet is a wealth of items, as I am sure the happy thief is aware of.
And now onto the actual assignment.
I’m not sure how to talk about climate as clothes would be a good indicator of this but... with A/C it totally screws up your results. I would say, since I was wearing a t-shirt and jeans, that it was 70-80 degrees out (knowing my taste for clothing, I am not sure what another person could say about it. For example, I used to wear shorts in Massachusetts when there was four feet of snow outside. I was teased about it, but anyway, the point is that one would have assumed the temperature to be toasty and warm when in reality it wasn’t and I was just being a silly (and possibly lazy?) girl. Dang, this is a run on parenthetical statement of doom. To summarize: it is difficult to tell the overall climate from clothing without knowing a little bit about the person wearing it. This is why we do giant studies on thousands of people and don’t just look at one person as the overall average is generally fairly correct). Back to the point, with A/C (and heating) I can’t tell you anything about the real climate. It could have been below freezing or above melting outside but I’d be dressed for where I’d be spending the majority of my life - in climate controlled wonderfulness. Which is maybe the point. But there is no way to tell I was dressing for A/C and not the climate of the location just from the items I was carrying with me. So I feel I must say that my clothes tells me that the day the inventory was taken, I expected to spend my time in a moderate temperature and a dry climate (no umbrella, raincoat, etc, so rain was not expected - again, I either live in a dry place, had a weather forecast, or was spending my time indoors).
I do have some interesting, and true, observations from my belongings, although again, I stress that had I not known that the overall judgement from these belongings were generally accurate I would have to have my caveat that a single sample is not an accurate description of the whole group).
I had $2 bucks and 3 credit cards and a debit card in my wallet. I think this points to the culture I live in to be a fairly cashless one, and I’d have to agree. How often do we use cash for anything? Seems to me, we don’t if we can help it. I theorize that it is the natural evolution of our society in an attempt to not make us liars when we tell beggars we don’t have any cash on us. :^) In reality, this is more likely because physical money is loosing its worth, and a natural result of the transition from gold -> money representing the gold ‘in the bank’ -> money representing digital money ‘in the bank’ -> the digital money.
The cell phone is the most interesting ‘cultural-item’ I had with me. It gives us the ability to talk to anyone else out there in the world with a (working) phone, no matter where in the world they are - at any time. This is supreme access! The fact that I, and every other person (I think...) in the class has one just shows how prevalent a cellphone is in our society. Indirectly, it also speaks of our affluence as we can all afford the evil service fees. So, we’re all middle-class and above people, I’d say.
The computer is another thing we all had on us. If that doesn’t speak of affluence or horrible indebtedness, I don’t know what does. Anyway, the computer speaks volumes about accessibility of knowledge in our society. You, again, have to extrapolate beyond the mere ‘computer’ object and actually go in to its usage, but I think it is fair to consider the internet as a derivative of the computer. But you can also consider the past were only the wealthy and the priests could read and write, and now any of us could write a book! But back to the internet - anything we want to know, be it how to make chocolate dipped ants to how a nuclear reactor works, is at our fingertips (although I hope we take into consideration the source of such knowledge to gauge its validity).
The fact my backpack has a special pouch for the computer and a little strap to keep it tucked in and safe leads me to conclude that our society is so computer-centric that we make special considerations for it. By a company mass producing backpacks with such things means that computers are very prevalent in our society, as is our desire to keep them with us and keep them safe.
My bottled water (and lunch, although it was in the fridge, I still brought it with me to school) shows that we are a mobile people, going far away from a source of food and water and hence having to bring some with us. This of course disregards restaurants, cheap/forgetful people who skip lunch, and stuff like that. But if I were to look at the items themselves, this is a conclusion I would draw. I would also say that the fact I had to bring bottled water with me means I expected to find no source of drinkable water anywhere near me, so this would mean that clean water is probably an issue in our society. In truth, drinkable water should be a better term. Why does the fountain water taste soooo bad? Minerals in the source or chemicals they put in it to clean it. Either way, there is no source of drinkable water for me at ZML unless its in a packaged little bottle from some random town’s water reservoir.
We are also a society consumed with fear. Sure, anyone can say this, and it would still be true. But what items, dear public, do I possess to draw this conclusion from? I had no weapons on me (even my leatherman knife was in my closet), no mace or anything like that. What I had was a set of keys. Sure, I’ll admit it is perhaps exaggerating a tad, but we all lock our cars, lock our houses. We are afraid that we will be robbed in our absence (in fact, we generally lock these things even when we are in them, but I have no object that can point to this). We seek to protect that which is ours (hence my screen protector for my beloved mac and its hard cover case). Not that its bad - we’d never have a society that would be free of people breaking in and robbing stuff (note though that locked doors hardly deter a determined thief, but it does give us peace of mind and discourage the standard thieves to go find someone with an unlocked door). But look at how our technology is making better and better locks to safeguard us - my car key is backwards, a rectangle with a center part carved down to make it unique and un-duplicatable by standard means. My apartment key is electronic. No longer are standard keys (and their locks) what we depend on anymore.
Then there is my little CPR kit I’ve carried with me since High School. It contains gloves and a little rectangle to use when doing mouth-to-mouth so you don’t get any nasty germs when saving someone’s life. I mean, again, its good, there are diseases out there you can catch with blood and saliva contact. But I am so safety-conscious I have it with me. This also speaks of society as a whole - we are aware of diseases and we have lots of them. It also speaks on how connected we are as a people - diseases and illnesses that were constrained to one part of the world are now found anywhere. While before we only had to deal with stuff from our climate or whatever, we now have all (or at least many.... and we made some new ones ourselves to boot) the diseases and illness of the world (mad cow, avian flu, apparently still the Bubonic Plague, etc) to contend in.
And somehow my conclusion from looking at my inventory is that we live in a world that is actually really small, with the use of our technology in a mental sort of way with phones and computers, but also in a physical sense with planes and such (sadly, I didn’t have a plane ticket with me. I did have a receipt from a airport restaurant though, does that count?). It’s like we have made ourselves all squeeze into a two-bedroom apartment even though there are like 50 of us. Sure, I can find out what all of us have to say on what to have for dinner, but such close company makes me think you are all giving me diseases and are going to steal my crap the second I turn my back. And it actually does increase the chances of my getting sick exponentially (although I don’t take into consideration medicine, as in reality we live a lot longer now than a hundred or especially a thousand years ago, despite the increase of exposure to diseases). Yay!
Although I reiterate that looking at one day’s belongings for one person is never an accurate description of the society that the person lives in. And one must know something about the items and the society they belong to in order to draw any correct assumptions. Although with many samples you can draw some conclusions, but how 'correct' they are may never be determined (of a society you know nothing about).
Thank you for reading all this!
