The Art and Science of Everything

• During the reflective 20 years of CSCW panel, Lucy Suchman said that she typically doesn’t believe in innovation coming from just a single person. I put two fists in the air. A few days ago, someone was citing how Doug Englebart was discontinuously innovative and I argued that he was also part of a culture that was in motion, and part of a flow of concepts of personalization, cybernetics, frontier living, and disembodiment. My friend argued that it may be so, but Englebart should be credited with envisioning and championing ideas that many thought were crazy but have since given today’s technologies their shape. I wonder what Lucy would say.
• Paul’s talk on Replacing Space got me really excited. He emphasized that space is not a constant, material truth with socially-constructed place layered on top. Instead, space and place are mutually constitutive. Space affords some range of places as we imbue those spaces with social meaning (or can space take on any meaning?), but we also reshape spaces based on these socially-constructed meaning systems, and the cycle of affordance and reshaping continues. Instead of Marx-inspired base-superstructure, we have messy Foucauldian entanglement. (There is probably a better word than entanglement, but I don’t remember.)

  First, he emphasized that rather than creating a new concept for his elucidation of space, he keeps the same term as it is also used the same way in other fields. If we are to benefit from a body of theory and concepts being built in CSCW-related disciplines, we need to keep pace with their conceptual sophistication where it is useful to us. Second, I love the emphasis on power geometries of space — who has mobility and who doesn’t? How is mobility as labor different from mobility as leisure? I’m very concerned with political and social justice and Paul is communicating useful concepts to frame those dialogs. I’d been drowning in the messiness of my framelessness in my power questions.

• The Bookmarks paper I saw inspired me to write a parser for del.icio.us feeds and build a data structure that encodes a date based histogram of bookmark frequency. I figured out a statistic that I think gives me a sense of burstiness in bookmarking. I need to look at how Bernardo & Huberman get their bookmark user samples, get my own, get myself analyzing. All hail RSS.
• Met Gloria Mark at the BBQ, finally. She recommended I check out her work on multitasking. She also mentioned some new work on networked, bottom up organizations and how information workers tactically manage that. It would be interesting if there is increased informality and that informality somehow has learnings for everyday sensemaking stuff that I’m interested in.
• Really rad conversations with Professor Jan. She gave me some recommended reads, gave me some feedback on a paper I’m halfway through, and we just got to hang out a lot more than we have in a while. I repaid her with some design ideas for the interruption management work she presented at CSCW.
• I love the people I’ve met at this conference. So many ideas! So much engagement! Pretty great papers too. Probably the best of any hci-ish conference I’ve been to.

People wardriving or walking around with laptop trying to find good wifi signal. They’re trying to perceive space using alternative sensory mechanisms. Today, we have radically diff tech landscape and a broader set of spaces of interest to cscw.

How have place/space been taken up?

How might recent developments reinvigorate those interests?
Layer cake model

space is the geometric, mathematical account of the world — the materiality of the world as it “just is” and space as the socially constructed reality we weave collectively

is there a tendency to also perceive social life as layered on top of protocols, hardware, platforms? But the “abstractions mired in TCPIP are mired in social practice.” That materiality is shaped by social concerns.

Likewise, the materiality of space is shaped by social concerns.

Paul proposes that “place” is concerned with uniqueness, difference, separation, identity. “Space” concerned with connection, movement, uniformity — the thing that is held more stable through transitions. And both are about social action.

Math is not “natural” — it represents choices made about how to represent the world, and those choices often are made in service of some goal that people have. Edward Hutchins: “Not until the mercator projection  did the straight line have a computational purpose.”

Spatial practice

space is itself enacted

strategic practice = focused on centers of power, like material design of buildings which force people into certain relationships. (force is a little strong, no?) structuring spaces certain kind of way

tactical practices = people going around everyday life, interacting with power forms, but also possible sites of resistance, reappropriation

design is a strategic practice, use is a tactical practice

power geometries 

massey: looking at flows of ppl goods, info and capital, have to look at power arrangements

who moves, doesn’t; who decides on flows; who is liberated or imprisoned

who is mobile, how, and why? mobile computing urban space and consumption, a 20 something year old with a predatory attitude towards city has diff mobility than taxi driver for whom mobilikty is a form of labor

technologies of spatiality 

logics of spatial practice

dangers of “virtual” - the emergence of social and cultural practice around creation of new virtual spaces? dourish suggests instead reconfiguration of existing space

collective legibility of space

“ubiq.” and “seamless” infrastructures? hiding in gps blackspots, exploiting network seams in Treasure.

reading people, objects, and events in space and encountering space as peopled

lilly - what if you could encounter a prison or an interrogation room as peopled? potential for collective action despite spatio-temporal isolation

collaboration w jennifer cole and simon terry - investigating sex offenders in san diego. they’re happy to have a record of where they are as a relief from having police hassle them.

why rewrite space rather than creating new concept? dourish wants to connect space and place in cscw with debates in other disciplines. current accounts of tech in human geography are pretty weak.

Today at CSCW, I attended a panel discussing the typical expectations for ethnography — specifically, implications for design — at CSCW and CHI. The debate was really interesting and covered several points. First, what is the purpose of ethnography for design? In comments, I argued that it serves a two fold purpose — evoking empathy and defamiliarization, and providing analysis to make memorable and comphrehensible complex phenomena in the design context. Paul pointed out that perhaps forcing an implication for design narrows the ethnography down to such a narrow point that it no longer inspires creative imagination. But more than creative inspiration is lost. All the richness lost in cramming ethnography into ACM format is also lost as part of the ethnographic corpus Paul described as being a core concept in anthopological practice.

Today, Bob Sutton’s blog post on workplace dignity highlighted another form dependent on detailed ethnography I fear our CSCW papers will never afford — the meta-analysis of ethnography.

If you want to read the most comprehensive academic treatment of dignity that I know of, check out Randy Hodson’s 2001 book Dignity at Work. He reviewed over 300 in-depth ethnographies – these are academic ethnographies, usually entailing a year or more of intense observation –and ultimately selected 108 cases from 86 published ethnographies for intense quantitative and qualitative analysis. His compact definition is fantastic, “Dignity is the ability to establish a sense of self-worth and self-respect and to appreciate the respect of others.”

What can consumer behavior researchers tell us?

• people are what they possess (William, James)
• (lilly) to what extend is this a western traditional of identity construction?
• Belk and the textended self (Belk, 1988)
• extend self through possessions: body, things, people, places, etc
• connection to self based on distance from core self
• builds on Sartre’s states of existence: having, doing, being
• looks at people who have lost a spouse, possessions in a fire, moving — how does that affect who you are?
• social construction of self
• what do people think of me if they see me using this product?
• what is actually using the product like?
• who do I want to be?
• possessions in our life narratives (erickson 1968; Kleine, Kleine & Allen 1995)
• people have a current understanding of who they are, who they were that they want to hold onto, who they were that they want to discard
• in getting rid of things from our past, we construct our past
• what does this say about japanese culture minimalism? certainly availability of space to move things affects this. infinite space only in parts of the US. (lilly - construct this as prioritizing self?)
• plotting our possessions (kleine, kleine, allen 1995)
• people’s favorite possessions are things that were “like me” and “like we” (reminds me of people in my life)
• applying social identity theory (kleine, kleine kerman)
• social role - what does it mean to be, say, a “college student”
• social identity - waht do they think they are as someone in that social role? often close to social role since they want to be in that role
• ideal identity - who they want to be? often contradictory (partyer who gets straight As), not necessarily deeply rationalized
• social identity perspective on product attachment
• where to go?
• can interactive products help ppl define and move toward their ideal identity?
• can they scaffold the identity construction process, making it epxlicit to the participant?
• can we design products that help people feel better about themselves?
• role expression
• customization, personalization, design-of-self, exhibition
• personal web pages, blogs, digital wish lists, office doros, thermal coffee cups, home, license plates, tennis shoes, sharing playlists, luggage, education, ring tones, background screens…
• role switching
• products used across roles can support switching
• remind me who I am now, here, to you
• ego phone - express availability to different communication channels and different groups (match to roles)
• cosmos - leave personal messages (thought gifts) in space. world is filled with messages from your past. trying to create role confusion
• role enhancement
• music player where mom assembles sample music based on samples created by kids. emphasizes connection to children
• role transition
• high school to college; couple to family; smoker to non-smocker; cared for to care giver; career change
• products for these folks are therapists, life coaches, support groups; professional social orgs, discussion groups
• operationalizing with transitioning to college design study at CMU
• take pictures of things you don’t want to associate with yourself in college (this is sort of a photo collage expression idea, but over time, requiring digital cameras, and open ended)
• can home be made “intelligent” to help parents raise their children and craft their identities? alternative to how ubicomp usually frames problems people have

‘This is Not a Game’: Immersive Aesthetics and Collective Play by Jane McGonigal

Jane analyzes the 2001 game “The Beast,” analyzing the subjective experience of reality created by game authors and explaining how that particular engagement in reality changed players’ orientation towards the world — game, non-game, and in-between. She differentiates immersive games, which make reality the materiality of game play, from pervasive gaming, which typically augments reality with game play devices, firmly placing player activities in a clearly delineated game world.

A particular section I want to follow up on is the discussion of smart mobs as bearing “a strong resemblance to Pierre Levy’s prescription for a socially responsible, politically diverse collective intelligence.” Levy writes “Cyberspace provides us with the opportunity to experiment with collective methods of organization and regulation that dignify multiplicity and variety.” First, is the opportunity really there? And if it is, is it being realized? There are plenty of examples of cyberspace repeating the sociological realities of meatspace. Then how do you design the potential for reaching beyond, or perforating and destablizing those “realities?”

Yet another blog post full of questions with few answers.

Apparently Facebook has a feature that allows you to subscribe to changes in someone’s profile. This completely freaked out my friend Nick, who is a literature/law type of guy — not particularly web 2.0. He does think about some digital law issues.

This discussion is relevant to anyone designing systems and environments to cultivate identity expression or mutual awareness.

Full discussion here:
http://boccebragadoccio.blogspot.com/2006/09/gross-invasion-of-privacy.html

Quotes that summarize  main points:
“It’s not the information itself that matters, it’s the new organization of the information into a format where not just the present is visible but the past as well. Whereas before, only the truly committed would search out a person’s profile and track the miniscule changes being made to it, now these changes are being (a) recorded and (b) announced to hundreds of people.”

“I see your point that by making the process of identity pruning visible, it’s maybe a little like showing someone while they’re putting makeup on. It calls into contrast what they looked like and what they’re moving towards. Facebook violated your performance by pulling your audience into the backstage, where you thought you were alone. Allowing you a warning and an opt out would have been a good option. Either they didn’t think of it or were, as you point out, desperate to get it out.”

Reading the preface to Foucault’s “The Order of Things.”

In it, Foucault seems to describe culture as a grid that defines a shared set of categories, systems of perception, words — a framework a group of people hold in common that enables them to see, describe, and converse about things with others sharing that framework — the framework which allows us to assert sameness between things, introducing order to them.

The cultural grid that undergirds language, perception, and representation

He traces out a space between the presence of culture and the reflexive philosophy of why culture exists — the space of what cultural grids (allowing for definitions of identity and order) have formed the foundation of Western tradition from Classicism to Modernism.

And it is order that gives us an epistemological foundation. However, it seems that Foucault is taking Kuhn’s detailing of the discontinuities in the “progress” of knowledge orders (paradigms) and generalizing it as a history of knowing, rather than of the cultural activities denoted to be “science.” He undergirds the positivist tradition with a cultural grid that he hopes to discover as making such science and philosophy possible.

As I first read this, I interpreted Foucault’s writing to be pointing to the cultural possibilities of self-conscious culture mixers — those who see that there are things to be ordered, things whose orders are socially constructed, and things whose orders they themselves can socially construct. Examples are remix movements, irony, and reappropriation of words like “nigger” and “cunt.” Then I remembered that this was the 60s and that while Foucault’s ideas are part of the foundations of these possibilities, he is not writing descriptively about them. It is in my interpretation that I see these possibilities in his ideas’ futures.

Questions:

• If we are now modern, are the precipitates of Classicist thinking now irrelevant? Or are they a part of our lives, but with an added dimention of modernity? If the cultural grid is different, then language and representation must play a different role than they did in Classicist times. What is it?
• Is post-modernity the cultural self-consciousness catalyzed by those the likes of Foucault?
• Foucault states “all the familiar landmarks of my thought - our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography - breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things…” How is increasing mobility and instantaneous or rapid trans-global connectivity changing the importance of the geographical distinctions — place-based culture — taken for granted by even Foucault in this passage from 40 years ago? This is the question Dourish put to me. My sense is we cannot completely separate geography from culture, as geography constitutes a certain materiality that is part of the cultural gridwork. However, if we interpret geography as we can interpret text, then I suppose there is a space of interpretive freedom and construction in the possibilities of geography. Is geography base, superstructure, or something in between? Latour’s networks (post-Lab Life) mean that materiality is an actor in a network that enforces its own agency. Don’t know what Foucault does with this.

“Technology needs to support social and cultural practices rather than determining culture. Technology is architecture and, thus, the design of it is critical because the decisions made will have dramatic effects. Digital architecture is unburdened by atoms but it is not unburdened by human tendencies of control. … Let the technology … follow the desires and needs of people.“  - danah boyd (via Trebor Scholz)
Especially reading the whole talk surrounding this quote, I mostly agree with danah’s calls for creating infrastructures that allow people to build their own, highly situated tools and applications. My one kvetch is that underlying all these APIs and data services is still an architecture and set of decisions about is impossible, possible, and hard. It would be fascinate to follow an API design team and their reasoning and trace out the values that inform their tradeoffs and decisions.

I don’t mean to imply that I am a technological determinist. Even if we do try to create apps for cultures we don’t understand, in the case of voluntarily adopted tools/artifacts, we won’t force anyone to adopt. People will use the tools to perform their identities and support their cultural<->individual values as they wish, surely adapting the tool in ways we couldn’t imagine. It might be possible to fuck up web 2.0, but I don’t see it as that likely — I believe in technological underdeterminism and life hacking ingenuity where people have some freedom to make their own choices.

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.