A few days ago I read Pieter Tijmes’ excellent chapter on Albert Borgmann’s philosophy of technology in the book American Philosophy of Technology: The Empirical Turn, before getting sucked into NPR Music’s equally (although differently) excellent live stream of concerts in their showcase at the South By Southwest (SXSW) conference. That juxtoposition got me thinking about the nature of experience in relation to technologies, particularly vis-à-vis Borgmann’s device paradigm and thoughts on the relation between technology and reality.
In his device paradigm Borgmann lays out a compelling framework for thinking about the distinctive characteristics of modern technologies, or devices, and their relation to the good life. A device, he says, is something that separates means from ends, and provides a commodity without requiring any particular engagement on our part. While devices disburden us, they can also draw us away from the kinds of activities that lead to the development of character and engagement with our world. In contrast, things richly interweave means and ends and gather together multiple contexts. They serve a centering and grounding role. They are also bound up with focal practices: things like celebratory meals, practice of a musical instrument, festivals, and runs (not the treadmill variety). For Borgmann, technologies typically fall squarely into the ‘device’ category, and thus constitute a threat to focal practices.
From another angle, Borgmann similarly describes the kind of information that is produced by technologies as being independent of reality, and sometimes seeming to replace it. This is in contrast to ‘natural’ information, which is rooted in the physical world and is significant in its own right. He sets up an opposition between reality and technological, or hyperreal, information. The technological, for him, calls us away from focal engagement with reality.
This is an approach to thinking about technologies that is quite useful and provocative, and that I really like. But its pessimistic assessment of the role technologies play in our lives doesn’t seem entirely warranted. After all, some technologies can actually be thing-like and facilitate focal practices (as Verbeek has pointed out). And on a deeper level, it seems that technology is also increasingly providing ways for us to engage with reality.
This is where my experience of virtually watching SXSW concerts comes in. NPR Music had a high quality live video stream of the concerts, as well as a chat room that enabled conversation among music fans and the NPR Music hosts (and collective complaints when the video feed gave out). At one point I asked a question in the chat room (about how on earth Colin Stetson was able to produce those crazy layers of otherworldly continuous sounds on his bass sax). NPR answered this in the chat room, and then also sent a tweet with the explanation. So I was at times simultaneously watching a video feed through my laptop that was hooked up to my tv and sound system, sitting at my computer and monitoring and contributing to the chat room, and also monitoring Twitter. By some accounts, this would be a very fractured experience.
But it also has some of the same characteristics of Borgmann’s focal practices. It was not the same as actually being there, for sure. But in some ways it was richer because of the other interactions and experiences I was able to have – a better view, the artist interviews after the concerts, the other people commenting in the chat space, etc. I was also able to see several of the All Songs Considered presenters after only hearing them for several years. Usually I hear them report on these kinds of concerts once they come back and wrap them up in podcasts, but in this case I was able to see a video stream of them actually there talking about it as they experienced it live.
Another ‘context’ that was woven into this experience was the political movement to eliminate federal funding for NPR. One performer actually gave a shout out to NPR for its extremely important role in supporting and bringing visibility to independent musicians such as herself, and admonished the crowd to pledge (with their right hands up) to do everything they could to ensure that NPR would remain in existence. Given the legislation passed by the House that day that would discontinue funding for NPR, this is in a way a very pressing ‘local’ issue, in the sense that it affects the everyday lives of everyone both physically at that venue and those of us who watched online. When the performer said this I was also reminded of how much music I have discovered through NPR Music and KCRW Music over the years. (And I actually called my congressional representatives later to ask them to support funding for public radio.)
So in this small experience there were drawn together my history of listening to All Songs Considered over the years; the space of the performance in Austin, Texas; the space of the online chat room in which many strangers were able to in some way share a virtual experience; and the broader space of political debate over funding for NPR. It was an experience that called for me to be present and engaged: with the performances, with the musicians I heard for the first time and began to follow, with other music fans, with NPR Music, and with a political issue that had achieved new relevance. Although it was entertaining in many ways, it was much more than entertainment as commodity.
Some digital technologies can certainly act as devices that call us away from engagement with the real. But, as I’ve been describing here, they can also serve as powerful tools for engaging with our worlds. These are very real worlds that matter in real ways – even if we sometimes need to use mediating technologies to reach them.
Filed under: philosophy, technology and experience | Leave a Comment
Tags: case study, music
I just put together a position statement for a particular venue, but realized in the process that I was basically writing the first draft of my dissertation proposal. So I thought I would post that part here.
Digital technologies increasingly shape the ways in which we know about and engage with the world. They mediate our perceptions, actions, and interactions with others. Their design and configuration determine what is possible, and shape the social interactions and culture that emerge around and through them.
Any time there is a technological device or infrastructure that captures activity and makes it visible so others can see it, there is the potential for a social space: a space of mutual awareness of presence and activities, and thus the possibility of interaction. Displayed records of activities might be designed to serve as social cues, but they can also do so unintentionally. For example, a shared network file system is not seen as social at all; yet even something as simple as the time stamp of when a document was created or modified and the name of a user can indicate that a person was at her computer and working on a particular project at that time. Even on a blog, that is explicitly social, there are cues that might not be seen as contributing to sociality but that nonetheless provide social information. Seeing the name of an author and a time stamp on a post sends the signal that this person was there at this particular time, which can lead to a sense of being in a shared space at the same time. Other mundane things like an instant messenger buddy list that gives a sense for who else is online (or not) provide information about what is going on in one’s world. And of course the amount and types of information that are captured, transmitted and displayed through technological means are only increasing.
As we design things, we are potentially not only setting up flows of information and social spaces, but also plugging them into and supplementing other flows of information and social spaces. Just as we can in the physical world sense something like a coming thunderstorm or the mood of a crowd by putting together a multitude of subtle cues in the environment, we can also get a sense for the world in a different way by putting together a multitude of mediated cues that bear witness to other types of activities.
There is currently no good language with which to make visible and critique the types of social spaces that are set up by the architecture of things that articulate these interactive spaces. We can talk about how values and interests are built into designs (as in STS) and about the culture that emerges around them (cultural studies). Yet neither of these areas of inquiry can speak directly to the design of actual artifacts, and point to the specific places where the technical rubs up against the social.
While this type of analysis is important for pedestrian activities and interactions, it becomes even more crucial when it comes to pervasive computing elements such as embedded sensors and ambient displays. We understand how we can perceive and be perceived in the physical world through touch, sight, hearing and smell. But there are now new ways of detecting and making activity visible, ways of being in and knowing the world around us that have been made possible only in recent years.
We need ways to think about things as they relate to whole systems and the embodied experience of them in order to inform design and enable critique. The goal of my dissertation is to develop such a language and supporting theoretical framework: what I am calling the architecture of interaction.
Taking a cue from architects, who are used to thinking about how concrete designs shape experience and interaction, I argue that digital technologies can perform a similar function. Digital architecture provides an infrastructure that can shape flows and patterns of activity; provide or restrict access and visibility; articulate social spaces and connections between them; shape the mood of spaces through aesthetic and historical properties; and shape subjectivities in relation to the environment.
A key part of where architecture (both physical and digital) meets the social is in its tangible substrate. A substrate can, among other things, allow or prevent action and determine what is visible. For example, a concrete wall prevents one from passing through it and also from seeing through it, while a glass window allows one to see but not pass through it. In the digital realm, the architecture of a blog can similarly determine what is possible (e.g., posting, commenting, sharing through social media) and visible (e.g., counter of how many ‘retweets’ or ‘Diggs’ a post has received that records and makes that activity visible).
Another key aspect of architectural substrates is how they can come to record and bear witness to activities that happen in, on and around them. The nature of the substrate determines the types of traces that can be left behind. So for example, grass can have a path worn through it by many people walking over time. The substrate of the grass can record the activity of walking in the trace of the path. Air can also be a substrate, as smells of things like food, smoke or perfume can linger even after their original sources are gone, suggesting that they have been recently present. Something like a concrete wall may be sprayed with graffiti that bears witness to the presence of hooligan artists. And deep ruts in the pavement at an interstate exit by a truck stop are a record of the many trucks that have sat there at the traffic light.
In the digital realm the relation between substrate and trace becomes more complicated, as it can be largely determined by the designer and may be non-obvious to users. Indeed, this is one of the particular challenges of pervasive sensors, as the particular activities they record, and the ways in which they are later displayed, may not be readily apparent. A more straightforward example is that of the blog post mentioned earlier that has a tool for sharing the post via social media, and a number associated with each that also serves as a counter for the number of times other visitors to the blog have utilized it. This particular element of the blog serves as a substrate that captures the activity of sharing via social media, resulting in the trace of the number in the associated counter. And of course recording and sharing of activities is a fundamental part of the architecture of the widely used social networking site Facebook, which is in and of itself a complex hornet’s nest of issues involving activities, traces, visibility, and sociality.
When it comes to digital architecture, there is clearly a tremendous flexibility in the relation between activity, trace, and perception. Ambient sensors and displays in particular are amenable to a wide range of captured activities and displays in which the relation between them is not at all clear. But in addition to the potential confusion, there is a much more serious issue at stake regarding mediated perception of reality.
When seeing a desire path that has been worn through grass, there would be little reason to believe that it has been (or even could be) caused by anything other than a number of people walking the same trajectory over a period of time. But technological traces and the perceptions they engender can be much more easily subverted. For example, a lawyer may have the sending of an email delayed until the early hours of the morning to give his client the impression that he is up late working on the case, counting on the fact that the client will trust the substrate of the email system to objectively capture the email time stamp as a trace of when the message was sent. Or consider the classic stunt of the ingenious crime show villains who replace live surveillance camera feeds with a pre-recorded video loop. In this case the hapless security personnel are duped by what they naturally consider to be a straightforward relation between camera, reality and displayed video, but which is actually a lie that plays on assumptions of how the technological apparatus normally functions.
It is thus important to understand the nature of traces, both in order to make the operation of technologies transparent to users appropriately and to critique the relation between perception and reality that they support (or subvert). I refer to this issue of interpretation as the hermeneutics of technologically-inscribed traces. This is a key part of the architecture of interaction, since traces are the single means of making actions visible and thus entirely mediate perception (unlike in the physical world where several senses can be used).
Filed under: dissertation | 4 Comments
Tags: dissertation, theory
Feenberg on Marcuse
I ran across this video of Andrew Feenberg giving a book talk for the release of the volume he edited on The Essential Marcuse. He talks about Marcuse’s thought in the context of his life, and he is able to give a personal perspective as well since he was one of his students. It also gives a good sense for the intellectual milieu that Marcuse was part of, and his relationship to his early mentor, Heidegger.
Filed under: philosophy, social implications of technology, talk | Leave a Comment
Tags: Feenberg, Heidegger, Marcuse
I’m uploading the course syllabus that I designed as an assignment for the advanced pedagogy course I’m taking this semester. I would really love to teach this class someday. Feedback and suggestions welcome!
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Tags: syllabus
lecture on design
Last semester I did an introductory lecture on design for the undergrad social informatics class using a Prezi that I spent an inordinate amount of time putting together. Since I finally got it online (long story), here it is:
http://prezi.com/kqzlw7dmcnnx/
(It would be really spiffy if I could just embed the thing here. But since I found out from WordPress that this isn’t possible, the plain old link will have to do.)
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Tags: design, presentation
I’ve been taking advantage of the Thanksgiving down time to do a bit of filing and shredding, and in the process I came across a book review I wrote for the Social Informatics seminar last spring of Langdon Winner’s Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology. Even though it was published in 1986, I find it to still be extremely relevant. And I was reminded again as I read my review of how much this book has influenced my own research trajectory and approach. So I thought I would post my review here.
In The Whale and the Reactor, Langdon Winner provides a trenchant analysis of the political dimensions of technology. Although situated in both philosophy of technology and political science, Winner describes it as a ‘work of criticism’, in the tradition of the more familiar literary criticism. He argues for going beyond viewing technology merely in terms of its development and tool-like use to instead look at how technologies contribute to the structuring and organization of human practice and meaning, and shape the very nature of our existence.
The book is a collection of essays divided into three parts: Philosophy of Technology; Technology: Reform and Revolution; and Excess and Limit. In the first section, he considers the nature of technology, particularly as it relates to politics and society. He portrays technologies as ‘forms of life’ that actively shape human activity and meaning; regarding them as morally neutral leads, in his view, to ‘technological somnabulism’ in which we as a society “sleepwalk through the process of reconstituting the conditions of human existence” (p. 10). He also shows how artifacts can have political qualities by either effectively deciding social issues through their existence or configuration, or by being inherently political. Lastly, he considers technē and politeia, highlighting ways in which technical systems can play the same role as politics in structuring society, only with much less deliberation put into their design than is involved in other democratic political processes.
In the second section on reform and revolution, Winner critiques several concepts and terms that have been used in discussions of technology. He takes the history of the ‘appropriate technology’ movement as one example, telling how it gave up on the broad societal changes pursued by its more radical forebears to instead see hope for societal change in consumerist visions of better technology. Instead of trying to change the world, their goal became building ‘better mousetraps’. Winner also critiques the notion of ‘decentralization’, shedding light on what is a frequently-used but fuzzy concept and pointing out that technological development has tended to reduce the number of centers of control. The concept of ‘computer revolution’ is his last target. He identifies as ‘mythinformation’ the standard argument of computer romantics that computers can provide people with information which will then become knowledge, which will lead to power which will lead to democracy. Although the perceived logic of inevitable social progress through technological development is attractive, Winner points out that there are flaws in every step of this (implicit) argument.
In the third and final section on excess and limit, Winner looks at some of the more overtly political aspects of technology. He explores how conceptions of nature, the framing of issues in terms of risk assessment versus hazard, and the casting of issues in terms of human values can shape environmental policy and decisions. He concludes with a chapter of personal memoir in which he describes how he came to be interested in these political dimensions of technical systems. He summarizes his experience with technological development, as crystallized in his experience of seeing a whale surface in the ocean just offshore from a nuclear power plant construction site, as that of technology going where it has never been.
The Whale and the Reactor is insightful, and at times witty and provocative. Winner points to the urgent need to think clearly and decide democratically about the world we are building through technological systems. However, he by and large leaves open the problem of how to go about addressing this need. One is left with a sense of the importance and urgency of these issues, but generally must look elsewhere for the tools and strategies with which to address them.
Winner’s overarching concern with putting limits on technology (as reflected even in the title of the book) seems to reflect an assumption that problems with technology are ones of scope and degree rather than character, a slant that is perplexing in light of his simultaneous call to look at the political qualities and effects of specific artifacts. Winner is not anti-technology by any means, so this connotation of technology poisoning everything it touches is an odd conceptual dissonance.
Winner’s primary contribution with this book is in his persuasively making the case that technology is political. It is an ordering of the world and human activity. And not only is technology political, but political decisions can also be effected by technological means. In light of this argument that Winner makes, technological decisions should be made consciously, wisely, democratically, and under the full weight of their significance.
Filed under: commentary, research, social implications of technology | Leave a Comment
Tags: book, review
One of the first topics presented in the undergraduate social informatics course (I202) that I have been helping to teach for the last couple years is technological determinism – a perspective that views technology as an almost unstoppable force that impacts society and forces it to conform to the technology. While it is understandable how someone who lived through the industrial revolution might have this view, research in the last few decades has roundly refuted it as a theory and restored human agency as a crucial dynamic in technological development. However, remnants of technological determinism are still visible in advertising, technophilic magazines like Wired, and even sometimes in academic research.
One of the first assignments in I202 asks students to find one of these examples of technological determinism. So a few weeks ago I flipped through my latest issues of Wired to find some good examples that I could talk about in class to illustrate what they needed to do. To my surprise, this turned out to be an uncharacteristically difficult enterprise. Instead of the typical portrayals of the latest and greatest technology taking over the world, I saw technologies that empowered humans to meet their goals (although there were still a few with overtones of technological world domination). Most of the technologies were positioned as subservient, not assertive or demanding.
Television commercials for big tech companies, like Intel and IBM, have also recently been showcasing the people who work there more than specific technologies. Employees and human needs take center stage; the technologies are almost incidental.
The latest Intel commercials are particularly interesting (not to mention brilliant and amusing). One shows the co-inventor of USB technology being treated as a rock star as he walks through the office at Intel. Another shows a room full of people on their hands and knees looking for an extremely small dropped device.
The USB commercial places a quite dramatic emphasis on the human agency that brought the technology into existence – the technology itself doesn’t appear at all.
In the lost device spot, there is also an interesting relationship between people and the technology. First, the device itself is physically tiny in relation to humans. Instead of the technology looming over people, it is rather the people who loom over the technology and actually have to take care of it in a way.
After noticing this general tendency in the technological zeitgeist, I started wondering what brought it about. My theory is that it is related to the recession. There is now a diminished faith in the ability of the free market to (on its own) bring prosperity. One of the stronger strands of technological determinism is related to this logic of the free market, asserting that the free market will ensure that the best and most efficient technology wins. It seems logical that our skepticism about the free market might then carry over to a skepticism about technology as well, or at least technology that exists as part of a natural trajectory of development independent of human needs, goals and consequences. If this is in fact the case, hopefully this human-centric attitude toward technology will persist even after the recession.
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Tags: commentary, social informatics, technological determinism, theory
Creating Space for Reflection
In a recent Daily Show segment, reporter Jason Jones skewered the New York Times for printing ‘aged news’ rather than ‘real news’: when web pages can be updated moments after something happens, a report that is printed the next day is already old.
This digital media-enabled push toward real-time news does seem to sound the death knell for traditional media, at least in its role of news source. I’m not incredibly sentimental about paper newspapers, but what exactly is it that we are heading toward?
One of the most powerful recent examples of digital media being used to report breaking news in real time was the use of Twitter to cover the Iran election and ensuing protests. Reports from people within Iran via Twitter were frequently the best or only source of information regarding what was happening. CNN was, especially at first, criticized (via the #CNNFail hashtag) for not monitoring what was going on through social media sites, particularly Twitter, although they did do this more later on. The Iran election coverage is an example of one of the positive uses of digital speed, allowing the rest of the world to monitor the actions of the Iranian regime in a way that would not otherwise be possible.
On the other end of the spectrum, there is also another recent example of real-time ‘news’ that is arguably not as productive. After his recent death, the news media seemed to be able to talk about nothing besides Michael Jackson. The choice to cover all things Michael Jackson rather than, say, the continuing Iran election protests, police violence against Uighurs in China, or the overthrow of the government in Honduras, is one issue. But what I want to focus on instead – and the example that I found probably the most disturbing – is the focus on real-time updates.
On the morning of Michael Jackson’s memorial service, I turned on CNN foolishly hoping that they might cover some real news, since the memorial wasn’t due to start for several hours. Instead, what I saw was a reporter in front of the arena where it was going to take place, in the dark, reporting that no one was there yet.
In my opinion, this is the perversion of our collective conditioning to want to know what is going on in real-time – even if it is just to be reassured that nothing is going on and therefore we are not missing anything. This was foreshadowed by Marshall McLuhan when he talked about the immediacy of media, and about the world imploding because of electric speed.
I’ve just started a long-overdue reading of McLuhan, and I was struck by several things he said in the introduction to Understanding Media:
In the electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action. It is no longer possible to adopt the aloof and dissociated role of the literate Westerner.
And:
Electric speed in bringing all social and political functions together in a sudden implosion has heightened human awareness of responsibility to an intense degree. It is this implosive factor that alters the position of the Negro, the teen-ager, and some other groups. They can no longer be contained, in the political sense of limited association. They are now involved in our lives, as we in theirs, thanks to the electric media.
And finally:
The aspiration of our time for wholeness, empathy and depth of awareness is a natural adjunct of electric technology.
McLuhan highlights some of the positive possibilities of electric speed, such as the potential for experiencing a greater sense of responsibility and empathic connection to others. (And he wrote this in 1964, before the internet!) So why is it that this potential is so frequently not realized?
I think part of the reason might lie in the distinction between knowledge and wisdom. We can now get information about what is going on in the world – lots of it – in real time. And the currency and immediacy of that information seems to be the accepted indicators of value. But in the constant quest to find out what is going on at any given instant, there is little time to reflect about what it all means.
Reflection is the process that can turn knowledge and experience into wisdom. But how can reflection be encouraged in this era of electric speed?
Maybe one approach would be to extend reflective design research. This line of research has thus far explored ways in which information can be presented in informative but ambiguous ways that encourage reflection. Is there a way to go beyond the typical examples of reflection about personal or office activities to encourage sustained and productive reflection about, say, community dynamics, national political issues, or even things happening in other parts of the world?
The short and fickle attention span that is the norm on the internet is conducive to superficial awareness, but not deep understanding of complex issues that can lead toward productive action. Yet it seems that the ‘electric media’ still has the potential to facilitate a sense of implication in each other’s lives and of the consequences of our actions that McLuhan described. The only (rather large) question is: How can we design to create space for this type of reflection?
Filed under: design, media, reflective design | 3 Comments
Tags: news, reflection, twitter
For the last class of HCI seminar Marty Siegel asked us to draw a picture of our research and explain it in one page. So I tried to illustrate and talk about what I mean by design ripples. Here is my attempt:
(I don’t know why I couldn’t get this to show up inline, but it wasn’t for lack of trying.)
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Tags: thinking
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Data is never raw
The only problem is that data is never raw. It doesn’t just spring fully-formed from CPUs. It is always ‘cooked’ in some way by the technologies that capture and collect it, by the designers who choose to configure those technologies to collect certain kinds of data in certain ways, and by the people who use them – or perhaps choose to subvert them.
It thus seems that the challenge ‘raw data’ presents for those of us who study the social implications of technologies is to make visible the ways in which data is constructed – and the implications this messy human constructedness might have when it is used.
Filed under: commentary, social implications of technology | 2 Comments
Tags: data, information