The Art and Science of Everything

A post describing many strains of thought on collective action and cooperation, specifically thinking about sociable media
Collective Action on collectivate.net

I value this post more its references than its analysis.

• I like the distinction between collaboration and cooperation. It’s useful when you talk about people trying to get to a common goal, vs people supporting each other because it helps them achieve individual goals. The distinction has seemed muddied in my exposure to social software literature.
• Scholz argues that the internet is an incubator for the balkanization of society into plural monocultures - archipeloagos of cultures consisting of special-interest groups and subcultures, where those with dissenting points of view are branded non-expert or off-topic. I’m not convinced the internet increases this tendency, rather than provides another site of human organization like the suburbs, city neighborhoods, Orange County, Ave Maria, or San Francisco. In providing alternate, virtual spaces, surely the internet provides greater opportunity for affinity group to interact, but it could also has the potential to let individuals safely begin to explore alternate cultural groups and expressions. I don’t see how the internet uniquely affords homogenous affiliations and discourages heterogenous affiliations.
• Scholz argues that the web no longer disenfranchises users, citing usage numbers for services like Blogger and Youtube, as well as internet usage numbers in the US. This doesn’t prove much of anything. Looking at the PEW 2005 report on Digital Divisions, 22% of Americans say they do not live in internet connected households and have never used email or internet (not included are “net evaders” who have access at home but choose not to use it). Of these, 31% of those without internet access say they simply do not have access, 6% expect it to be difficult or frustrating, and 5% say it is too costly. The remaining city reasons like lack of interest, fear of addiction, or lack of time.I do agree that in all the divide of raw access is narrowing, but there’s a lot of complexity to disenfranchisement as Hargittai and Dimaggion point out in their literature review on digital divide issues. There many open questions as to whether a persistent knowledge gap exists by those who are connected to early adopter networks — those who will always have the first look at new technologies and the capabilities that become available. Autonomy of use (do you use the internet at work or in the privacy of your home?) is a predictor of online skill in finding information. Demographic information was more modestly predictive of online abilties (p. 34, Dimaggio et al.). While the digital divide of access is closing, it still isn’t closed.
• Even if the digital divide is closed, evidence that the internet improves the lives of those who have access is not conclusive. Hargittai and DiMaggio cite studies that find that computer-correlated wage increases can often be explained by higher-wage, higher-skill workers being first to be given digital tools when a workplace upgrades its equipment Using the internet for information is correlated with having a college education, while less educated Americans use the internet more for entertainment. Kids with internet in the house get better grades, but they don’t know if that’s only correlation for now.

John Mark was telling me about a Eudora plug in that places a waiting period on your emails so you can have a cooling off period during which you can take back some terrible mail retort you’ve composed. We talked about how it would be cool if it could actually detect when I’m angry, perhaps eavesdropping and using some voice processing. This is a very Lilly-centric solution since I curse my computer when I’m frustrated (well, mostly I get frustrated at my computer, not humans).

That spurred another idea. What about a computer program that eavesdrops on me and when I seem to cursing (or acting otherwise, detectably angry), flashes a picture from cuteoverload.com? I’m sure something so simple will have lots of rough edges and annoying interludes, but it would be an interesting probe into the sort of subtleties of attention and overture that Wendy Ju talks about in her paper on implicit interactions.

Implications for Design by Paul Dourish (CHI 2006 paper)

Central points:

• The requirements that ethnography provide an “implications for design” creates a relationship in which knowledge is produced for the benefit of the designers and administrators — those who wish to create some goal state in a system that happens to have people (”users”) in it. Instead, Suchman proposes ethnography as providing an account of the partnership in which producers and consumers co-constitute one another, in part through technological artifacts.
• A key part of ethnography often lost in the way ethnography gets thrown about as a design methodology is the self-consciousness of the observer as a part of the social relations richly described. The observer is not a positivist instrument for transmitting impressions of the observed. (However, a lot of SCOT could be construed as including this subjectivity in non-human observation instruments’ construction as well.)
• Ethnography can have empirical outcomes, which inform others of the simple facts observed, as framed and understood by the observer, but we should not overlook the analytical outcome — those that, when revealed, call into question or qualify assumptions tacit in the design, the specification, the technologist-consumer relationship…

I read this article because I was writing an email to PD and I wanted to make sure I didn’t misuse ethnography and ethnomethodology when I really meant interview. I got more than I bargained for, but that’s good.

Wendy Ju, at Stanford’s Center for Design Research, has written a paper called Designing for Implicit Interactions. It’s probably one of the most clear thinking, insightful, and useful design papers I’ve read in a while. Her frameworks are general enough that you can think about it in the context of ubicomp or just designing rich web interfaces.