Recently, I searched Google Print for a word, because I couldn't remember where it was I read something and I knew approximately what it said but not exactly. Fortunately, the book in question was indeed on Google Print - Futuring: The Explration of the Future by Edward Cornish. Google conveniently jumped me right to the page I wanted. The paragraph was at the bottom with the meat of the information on the next page. I clicked next... and got a "you can't view this page because it is restricted - this is our way of playing nice with publishers and letting you find a book that you want and then buy it, not read it... read online, sheesh! what ideas you have"... ok, but I now knew the book and used a convenient "buy at Amazon" link.
I had suspected that the same publishers that decided that Google Print was ok, would be the brave ones to allow Amazon do its' "search inside". Amazon's "search inside" is actually much nicer than Google Print for the purpose of browsing just one book. The page I wanted turned up as a second link and I was looking at precisely the text I needed. This evening, I will go back to my home bookshelf and retrieve the book, find the page and read it again. In the mean time, I was able to find it online, by playing a strange game around artificial restrictions. I certainly understand the anxiety around Google Print and decisions they have had to make for the service available. Yet these decisions seem totally arbitrary. They are easily circumvented and simply frustrate the user, without achieving the goal. It's almost as if Google Print considered the use of their product in total vaccuum, without thinking about the products and services already available and commonly used.
10 November, 2005
07 November, 2005
Technology & social alienation - Nie redux
Jordan, in a brilliant comment on Steven Winn's SFGate article titled Turn on, tune in, drop out -- today's motto talks about the fearmongering properties of sensationalist media and how the author essentially misses the point of technology use and sociability patterns in his rush to scare his readers into yet another chicken little scream of people turning anti-social with popular technology's help. I am sure Apple appreciated the advertisement.
Of the techno-deterministic statements of technology is bad or it is good or the sky is falling... the "destruction of the public sphere" is not new or different. Yet I wonder if there isn't a minor grain of truth to the statement, however, small and, ultimately, insignificant. The grain of truth may lie in the idea that people engaged with music media, with their ears plugged up by headphones are just slightly more unapproachable than those reading a book. In fact, the jacket of a book can provide an intersting form of common ground, providing basis for contact rather than detracting from it. How often people meet (have met) on buses or in subways? probably less often than in other public spaces more directly designed towards social interaction. So, the percentage of affected possibilities is very very small...
Maybe that's the case... or maybe not. A couple of years ago there were exhuberant articles in NYT, Wired and others about the social possibilities of ipods - people swapping music for a moment, allowing each other to "jack into" each others' ipods. The white headphones signified an exclusive club of people who were somehow similar, if only in their technology use. Maybe after a certain point of saturation this feeling is no longer present or relevant, but it WAS there.
so what's the point? technology provides us with ways to achieve our own goals, but some of these goals are interpersonal and people have a fascinating history of using technology designed for individual consumption as a vehicles for interpersonal interaction. Reduction in interpersonal opportunities in one public sphere may lead to increases of interpersonal experience in others. We are certainly NOT islands. Most of the negative rhetoric screams bloody murder under an odd assumption that we talk to each other merely because we have to. Give us a reason not to and we will just stop interacting flat out.
and yet... and yet i think there are technologies that change the way we interact, that may lock us into our existing social circles and remove external pressure to meet new people (an uncomfortable process for many), that may reinforce our small echo-chambers, making people less tolerant and open to ideas of others rather than more. Expecations of positive impact are just as fraught with determinist rhetoric as the shrill warnings of the pessimists. What we need is a careful assessment of human social behavior and the changes this behavior can undergo in the circumstances of technology adoption... tough one... working on it :)
Of the techno-deterministic statements of technology is bad or it is good or the sky is falling... the "destruction of the public sphere" is not new or different. Yet I wonder if there isn't a minor grain of truth to the statement, however, small and, ultimately, insignificant. The grain of truth may lie in the idea that people engaged with music media, with their ears plugged up by headphones are just slightly more unapproachable than those reading a book. In fact, the jacket of a book can provide an intersting form of common ground, providing basis for contact rather than detracting from it. How often people meet (have met) on buses or in subways? probably less often than in other public spaces more directly designed towards social interaction. So, the percentage of affected possibilities is very very small...
Maybe that's the case... or maybe not. A couple of years ago there were exhuberant articles in NYT, Wired and others about the social possibilities of ipods - people swapping music for a moment, allowing each other to "jack into" each others' ipods. The white headphones signified an exclusive club of people who were somehow similar, if only in their technology use. Maybe after a certain point of saturation this feeling is no longer present or relevant, but it WAS there.
so what's the point? technology provides us with ways to achieve our own goals, but some of these goals are interpersonal and people have a fascinating history of using technology designed for individual consumption as a vehicles for interpersonal interaction. Reduction in interpersonal opportunities in one public sphere may lead to increases of interpersonal experience in others. We are certainly NOT islands. Most of the negative rhetoric screams bloody murder under an odd assumption that we talk to each other merely because we have to. Give us a reason not to and we will just stop interacting flat out.
and yet... and yet i think there are technologies that change the way we interact, that may lock us into our existing social circles and remove external pressure to meet new people (an uncomfortable process for many), that may reinforce our small echo-chambers, making people less tolerant and open to ideas of others rather than more. Expecations of positive impact are just as fraught with determinist rhetoric as the shrill warnings of the pessimists. What we need is a careful assessment of human social behavior and the changes this behavior can undergo in the circumstances of technology adoption... tough one... working on it :)
change of pace
driving home from watching Wallace & Grommit today, I was, for some reason, thinking about friends in distant places and Flickr, research ideas and this silly, mostly useless blog.
Some weeks ago, I'd realized that I actually seem to have lots of these random little potentially interesting thoughts that are never written down anywhere. This blog is certainly a space for such. Instead I use this space for useless links to all things wireless. It's time for a change of pace/space/use. I have been shaping thoughts in my head into an attempt at a model of social interaction and technology use. Trying to take all the myriad random pieces I've been collecting and put them together into something that may at some point resemble a coherent whole. Funny enough, this has been happening in my personal life as well as research (but that's a story for a different blog).
On the way home, I was thinking that technology does alter the way we relate to each other, but, sometimes, in ways we do not expect. In some cases, the outcomes are good, in others, they are not. As human beings, we are adaptible and creative. We use tools, that are available to us, in ways that let us reach our goals. These uses are often creative. The key thing, I think, is that initially, when a technology becomes available, the goals don't change, but the ways of reaching those goals do. Yet the end result, because of technology mediation, may be subtly different or may have more than just the expected outcome. This is where the whole "impact" story starts. Not at the "reaching the goal" but afterwards.
I am getting ahead of things. For now, here is a short idea on how "goals" can be good AND bad. Anyone who's ever procrastinated doing something productive, knows how bad procrastination feels after a while (no sense of accomplishment, just mounting stress and frustration), and how hard it is to break the habit. Anyone who's had minor addictions to Flickr, Bloglines, Friendster and the like, knows how dangerous an Internet connection can be when the job that needs to be done merely requires a CPU. I need to read up a little bit more on habits and intervening goals in psych, but the idea here is that we may have high level goals, and technology may help us achieve them, but the ease with which it allows us to achieve low level goals may actually be a distraction from focus on behavior that would lead to high-level achievement. In a very strange way, this may sometimes play out not only in terms of behaviors such as writing a paper (wich, for example, i am currently procrastinating), but for social interaction as well!
Now back to Flickr... I have a feeling that I may be actually interacting less with those of my long distance contacts, who frequently post on flickr. Partly because I feel I know what is going on in their life without having to ask, partly because I happen to see their pictures and the act of looking through those pictures fills up the time I would have used to write an email, partly because it gives me an excuse. Yes there is a feeling of presence and an awareness of someone elses' life in a way that is both intimate and curious. Yet I think there may be something to a small substitution effect, which actually happens only with ties of a particular strength - i.e. these are not strongest nor weakest ties - these are the ones in between. The ones that, ironically, need most care and nurturing to grow. I wonder if there is a way to observe this empirically.
Some weeks ago, I'd realized that I actually seem to have lots of these random little potentially interesting thoughts that are never written down anywhere. This blog is certainly a space for such. Instead I use this space for useless links to all things wireless. It's time for a change of pace/space/use. I have been shaping thoughts in my head into an attempt at a model of social interaction and technology use. Trying to take all the myriad random pieces I've been collecting and put them together into something that may at some point resemble a coherent whole. Funny enough, this has been happening in my personal life as well as research (but that's a story for a different blog).
On the way home, I was thinking that technology does alter the way we relate to each other, but, sometimes, in ways we do not expect. In some cases, the outcomes are good, in others, they are not. As human beings, we are adaptible and creative. We use tools, that are available to us, in ways that let us reach our goals. These uses are often creative. The key thing, I think, is that initially, when a technology becomes available, the goals don't change, but the ways of reaching those goals do. Yet the end result, because of technology mediation, may be subtly different or may have more than just the expected outcome. This is where the whole "impact" story starts. Not at the "reaching the goal" but afterwards.
I am getting ahead of things. For now, here is a short idea on how "goals" can be good AND bad. Anyone who's ever procrastinated doing something productive, knows how bad procrastination feels after a while (no sense of accomplishment, just mounting stress and frustration), and how hard it is to break the habit. Anyone who's had minor addictions to Flickr, Bloglines, Friendster and the like, knows how dangerous an Internet connection can be when the job that needs to be done merely requires a CPU. I need to read up a little bit more on habits and intervening goals in psych, but the idea here is that we may have high level goals, and technology may help us achieve them, but the ease with which it allows us to achieve low level goals may actually be a distraction from focus on behavior that would lead to high-level achievement. In a very strange way, this may sometimes play out not only in terms of behaviors such as writing a paper (wich, for example, i am currently procrastinating), but for social interaction as well!
Now back to Flickr... I have a feeling that I may be actually interacting less with those of my long distance contacts, who frequently post on flickr. Partly because I feel I know what is going on in their life without having to ask, partly because I happen to see their pictures and the act of looking through those pictures fills up the time I would have used to write an email, partly because it gives me an excuse. Yes there is a feeling of presence and an awareness of someone elses' life in a way that is both intimate and curious. Yet I think there may be something to a small substitution effect, which actually happens only with ties of a particular strength - i.e. these are not strongest nor weakest ties - these are the ones in between. The ones that, ironically, need most care and nurturing to grow. I wonder if there is a way to observe this empirically.
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