Dear friends, designers, thinkers; the user debate is biting its own tail. It was so already before we contributed to it, and I’m worried that it’s likely to go on fruitlessly so as long as it takes for granted a quite specific interpretation of atomism—the belief that the world is made of individuals with inherent characteristics and definite boundaries.
I’m tempted to propose that to be seriously committed to the user question, requires a pause, a willingness to question this worldview. What counts as a person? What might it mean to design not for preexisting, independent individuals with fixed boundaries but for partially known, locally enacted performances, out of which ‘individuals’ may temporarily materialize as relational effects?
How might a non-atomistic metaphysics be enacted in the mundane practices of design, amidst the very real pressures of for-profit mass production? How might one sustainably practice design, insisting that the division between people and machines and other nonhumans is not a stable, universal lawlike division, but a locally negotiated temporary cut? What would it mean to even ask such a thing? To risk it?
At the very least, it leads to following threads that weave their ways through locations quite ‘Other’ to the blogosphere. I want to point to Karen Barad‘s thinking on agential realism. Her article is here, password-protected as if to say: ‘for academics only.’ And I’d be surprised if non-academics would profit much from her cryptic writing even if it was technically accessible (but do note, her book is forthcoming). What’s it going to take to make a difference? Boring wormholes that traverse discourses? speaking allegorically? magical realism? I don’t know.
Today at her seminar Lucy quoted Brian Bloomfield on the boundaries that the use of a technological system can create for thought. The system in question is in the UK National Health Service, but the point is very relevant to social software (such as weblogs and wikis):
Once we had embarked upon the journey afforded us by the system, only a certain terrain was open to inspection; we could debate the the features of that terrain as made visible through the menus, records, and displays of the information system, but we could not switch the machine off and debate alternative landscapes; we could zoom in on details down to the level of records pertaining to individual treatment regimes for a given patient, or pull back and purview the architecture of the database as a whole, but we could not escape the boundaries implicitly defined by using the system.
Dvora Yanow recently quoted a study from the 1970s according to which only 7% of face-to-face communication is verbal (some claim the percentage is around 10). In online interaction, such as the sending and receiveing of social network-service invitations, the ‘rich’ embodied expressions and gestures have to be inferred from ‘poor’ codified information (e.g. tickboxes and a few lines of text explanation). The forced codification that such invitations require has annoyed even the most prolific of the online textual expressionists.
Social sofware developers appear to be grappling with the broad issue of codifying embodied knowledge into computer-readable ‘information’ on many fronts (annotating photos, simplifying moblogging, FOAF… the list goes on). Much of this very interesting work is characterised by a strong epistemological buy-in to the cybernetic worldview formalized by Shannon and Wiener, according to which the world is made of definite entities and ‘information’ can be abstracted from its material embodiment.