Media and Culture

Social transformation and "revolution" — what is it?

Social processes and social change

Fragmentation

Globalisation

Toffler etc.

Hiltz & Turoff

Kling

Landauer
(Landauer, TK, 1995, The Trouble with Computers, MIT Press.)

The Web — the cyberpunk

The cyber-flâneur, asocial if not antisocial, observer not participator

Social exclusion (and inclusion)

Access to (and access through) IT systems

Authority structures at various levels

Government and control

E-Society programme

Electronic government

SOSIG: Social Science Information Gateway (see Politics)

Wittgenstein — forms of life

Philosophical Investigations

Wenger — communities of practice

Wenger E. (1998). Communities of Practice. Learning Meaning and Identity, Cambridge University Press.
Wenger E and Snyder. WM. (2000). Communities of Practice: The Organizational Frontier. Harvard Business Review, Jan-Feb, pp 139-145.

Use of the social to examine and interpret IT

Doubtfulness of accounts with "one dominant logic" (Kling):

things are very different in different cases

(What is it to account for something in terms of narrative?)

Potency of technology "drivers", the need to be "up to date"

cf. Bank PCs.

This also in design, etc.

Nicholas Rossis' surveys; Richard's Oz studies.

Ability of such innovation periods to "disclose" aspects of practice, ideologies, etc..

Issues in HCI:

• Historical relationship between "algorithmics" and issues of use and usability
• Power and influence in academia, science vs. soc sci, etc.
• Breakdown of the "computability perspective" (contra Kling)
• Use &Usability — "human factors" — determined to a large extent by social factors, as well as cognitive factors
• DIRC as an example

Reeves and Nass

Byron Reeves and Cliff Nass, The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers and New Media Like Real People and Places, University of Chicago Press, 1996. — Research from CSLI at Stanford.

The "personality" projected by technology is critical to how people use it, e.g.:

Gender stereotyping applies to computer voices: Female voices are perceived as less effective evaluators and more nurturing than are male-voiced systems. Female voiced computers are perceived as better teachers of love and relationships and worse teachers of technical subjects than are male-voiced teaching systems

These things are very resistant to education and information: you can tell people that the voices are just computer voices, but they still perceive them as having different attributes

The effect is likely to be stronger with very realistic voices (hence much research on improving text-to-speech, cf Edinburgh University spin-out Rhetorical Systems)

Dominant people like dominant characters; people smile when characters on the screen smile at them; people take offence when the computer breaks rules of politeness

New research (Stanford Link) indicates that personality can also be projected effectively by choice of vocabulary etc. in text, giving rise to a "personality style checker" (patent applied for!)

 

Other contrasts

Contrast between social and cognitive issues in HF/HCI

Contrast in methodologies: Kling-style (?) "ethnomethodology" versus TAGs and similar

(Payne, S.J. & Green, T.R.G., (1986) Task-action Grammars: A model of the mental representation of task languages. Human Computer Interaction, Vol. 2, pp. 93-133.)

This also breaking down now — approaches like "cognitive work analysis", with large social/organisational component

(Perhaps related to the social turn in cognitive science? But consider also ethnomethodology's antipathy to theorising.)

Cf. two papers from INTERACT 99:

"The usability of computer-based work systems"
Kurt Dauer Keller, Aalborg University

"New Technology and Work Practice: Modelling Change with Cognitive Work Analysis"
Peter Benda and Penelope M. Sanderson, Swinburne Computer-Human Interaction Lab

Some attempts to link the social and the phenomenological, cf. Keller, e.g. through context vs. theme in a perspective-oriented approach. "'Usability' is not reduced to questions of design but associated with the sociocultural background through the explication of the psychosocial work environment" (561-2) …

Social roots of Internet growth. Why is it different from what Hiltz & Turoff expected?

Example of educational technology: integration into existing practice is always the determinant of any real success

Complexity, randomness and the hazards of prediction. The Poverty of Historicism (Karl Popper).

The invisibility of the successful

"Technology" is our word for stuff that doesn't work yet.
(Douglas Adams, borrowed from Danny Hillis – designer of the "Millennium Clock"— see http://www.longnow.org/about/board/hillis.htm
see also http://www.wired.com/wired/archive//2.01/kay.hillis.html)

(Also: "Technology is technology only if it was invented after you were born" — Anon?)

Dr. Johnson's warning:

Net: Anything reticulated or decussate, with interstices between the intersections.