Paparazzi Ethnography

11/10: I met for coffee today with Joe Kantenbacher, whose seminar lecture I had the good fortune of attending last week. Joe ably provided data on how scholars have talked about the topic of behavior modification, as it relates to energy and climate change. The presentation was provocative indeed. Joe began by pointing out that if climate change is anthropogenic (human induced), then, instead of looking for financial or technical solutions to green house gas emission reductions, we should orient ourselves toward identifying a climate policy that can shape the aggregate set of human activities to reduce our carbon footprint. After all, as Joe points out, last year, residential households in the United States were responsible for producing thirty-nine percent of the nation’s green house gas (GHG) inducing carbon dioxide.

Joe Kantenbacher

Joe’s presentation was a trial run for a paper he plans to deliver in a few weeks at the Behavior, Energy and Climate Change (BECC) conference taking place in Sacramento, California. According to the their website (link here), BECC is focused on understanding the nature of individual behavior in order to accelerate our transition to an energy-efficient and low carbon economy. One aspect of the conference — whose attendance anticipates policy makers, social scientists and media —  is to “achieve viable solutions” for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by efforts as design, effectiveness of policies, and individual actions.

With these preoccupations, Joe decided to cull from bodies of scientific literature the kinds of stimuli or technique that researchers had concluded would result in behavior modification. If this last sentence sounds a little complicated, well, it is, in part, because the topic is a little complicated. But the point was so interesting, that I began to think about it in discursive and historical perspective. And before I go there, I want to provide a little more description about Joe’s presentation which captured my interest, while fully acknowledging that I cannot unpack his full intellectual vision.

At the beginning of his talk, Joe casually reminded us of the various models used in different academic fields for interpreting behavior modification – such as prices (economics), culture (anthropology), and normative values (sociology). Second, he pointed out that each of these fields identifies society as the appropriate scale for examining behavior modification (I add a footnote of dissent on this point as anthropology has abandoned society altogether in favor of the subject and rationalities that govern the individual). Third, while society may be the scale for investigating behavior among different disciplines, each approach suggests a specific rate-of-change. Economists, for example, believe change can occur overnight (e.g., triggered by a spike in prices) while sociologists believe that rates of change follow longer patterns of structural shift, such as, for example, from feudalism-to-capitalism, or from modernism-to-post-modernism.

I enjoyed the review. It was a reminder of the need to keep a sharp look out for what we are calling: scale of object, temporality of dynamics, and form of registering events.

Well, here is where Joe’s talk became even more curious. After culling through the record of 1970s-1980s science literature, and pulling articles that crossed over topics of behavior, energy and climate change, he then created a visual networking image to elucidate the spatial relations of different disciplinary authors who were publishing topics akin to each other.

VOSviewer program

At first, upon seeing the image, I must admit that I thought his discussion had shifted toward the epidemiological. But as he explained to us, he was using VOSviewer, a program that can help you construct maps based on network data using a clustering technique. Toward the end of his talk, which I don’t quite recall, my visual attraction so distracted by the VOSviewer image, Joe suggested that researchers had and could identify a variety of forms, by which modification of behavior takes place, and these forms include: public commitment, invoking norms, tailored information, feedback, modeling, goal setting, and a few others. Some of these techniques for influencing behavior could be considered antecedent (before-hand), such as goal-setting, while other could be considered consequential, or what might be called carrot-and-stick (e.g., rewards, feedback).

I think Joe is on to something, in that he has identified a suite of practices, aimed toward governing the body, around the issue of energy and climate change. The lecture struck me profoundly because of the possibility of a history of future unintended consequences that may derive from the inception of a certain idea-force:

Climate change is a scientific fact. But what will it mean to us, that it is now a social fact? Stated differently, in addition to an empirically changing world that we register by science-based instrumentation, what does it mean for us, as a group of persons, to call attention to ourselves as responsible and capable of changing the global climate? What possibly can it mean, to begin living under an idea-force  — a regime of life, in which we identify ourselves, collectively, as the Sun King?