Semiotic dynamics

I’m in an informal reading group with some of the gang from complex systems, cog sci, and linguistics. One of the papers we’re reading for today really illuminated - in an HCI/d way - the talk Jeff was giving yesterday about the shared collective space of intention, meaning, and understanding. Since I know Dewey and Turner, et al, can seem a bit flimsy to some students with a more technical background, I thought the opening page of this paper made a great concrete example of how the complex emergence of meaning impacts our future technical designs.

Here is a link to google scholar (you still have to click the top link “Semiotic dynamics for embodied agents” by L. Steele to get the PDF): http://tinyurl.com/yqv2ov

To make this relate directly to our discussion yesterday, you might just consider semiotics as “words”, dynamics as “interactions”, and embodied agents as “people.” If you’re intrigued, move on to the later pages where you’ll see how the modern research in artificial intelligence (2006), very much mirrors the modern perspective on HCI/d that Indiana U teaches. This technical research in this paper clearly suggests that artificial intelligence specialists need to look at language acquisition and understanding as an emergent property of social context and shared interactions.

Just like Dewey.
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Friending, Ancient or Otherwise

Sorry to purely link to this, but i think it’s worthwhile for this group: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/weekinreview/02wright.html

Death and Facebook, Grief Online

So this morning, for the second time this year, my high school graduating class lost one of our own. She wasn’t a close friend of mine, but she was definetely someone who I loved talking to, always seemed to be smiling or laughing loudly, and had a close group of friends that loved her very much. After learning of her death (or that someone had told someone else that they had heard a girl from our graduating class had been in a car wreck), I decided I should check out the facebook to see if people had said more about the events (to confirm that they were true or not was my primary motivation). I went to her facebook profile and a friend of hers had just posted a message on her wall, stating that today she had been in a car accident and unfortunatly, had not survived. It seems that at this point, very few people knew about the terrible events. About fifteen minutes later, my NewsFeed notified me that a group had been created for the remembrance of the friend we had lost. I instantly joined the group. Approximately twenty minutes later, the group had gone from 3 members to 47 members. I am willing to bet that by the time I finish typing this blog entry, the group will have increased in its member size even more significantly, more posts will have been written on her wall, more images will have been posted showing her with her friends, more information about the car accident itself will have been revealed to the public, and people will have started a unique process of grieving that would not have been possible five years ago.

This “grief on facebook” phenomena seems to be something that many participate in. My guess is that the community of the facebook isn’t really fully realized until something such as a death of a friend occurs. The instant nature of notifications and messages to large amounts of people make the grieving process even more interesting. Individuals who are participating can share their favorite stories of their lost friend, can post images that remind everyone how great that individual was to spend time with, there might be some closure in leaving a message for your lost friends on their facebook wall. I think this would be an interesting space to research…. I know it happens each and every day for many individuals who are members of the facebook community.

Have any of you experienced similiar events on facebook?

My Paper: Goffman’s Presentation of Self and YouTube

Goffman’s Presentation of Self in Everyday Life was published in 1959 with the intent of establishing a description of meaning in social interaction.  Goffman said that people present an “idealized” version of themselves in public (front stage).  People present more consistent versions of themselves to coincide with norms and societal laws.  When not in public (behind stage), these social rules do not need to be followed.

However, I believe that technologies such as YouTube has blurred the personal and private rules to the point that there is no back stage. Technology is shifting the concept of privacy.

I want to know if Goffman’s idea still holds true.  I am going to search YouTube for “Drinking and Puking” and hypothesize that Goffman’s idea does not fit.  Seeing YouTube presentation of self, I do not believe that the distinction between front stage and back stage still holds true.  There is a reconstruction of public and private space and there is a mutual shaping of technology and behavior.

For design idea, I am going to suggest an instant removal option on YouTube because as these people go out and search for jobs, there is a need for them to reestablish their boundaries between personal and private.

What do you think?  I know there are some books out there already that look at presentation of self and technology, but I’m going to focus on the YouTube idea.

Home Improvement Social Network & the Social Network Big Picture

This weekend I helped tar down loose shingles on my roof, fixed my gutters, repainted parts of my house including my garage door and roof-pipes, and installed a new window to meet city regulations.  I ended up paying about $100 in labor for two guys to help me out for a several hours.  Now just about everything we did I could have done on my own, but I didn’t know how to get started in a couple of cases and didn’t have all of the tools needed.

In the end it worked out really well but it was only because I happened to have a friend that had a friend that knew how to do this stuff.  I was fortunate to have this connection with someone that I trusted.  It struck me that there are so many needs in this industry.  Labor workers are constantly looking for small jobs to help out with.  Many home owners want to do things on their own, but may not know how to get started.  It seems a social network for organizing these kinds of jobs would be really nice to have.  As I was working with the laborers, we bonded in a certain way and became friends.  Some people could be employed by this social network just by helping people with home improvement stuff on a contractual basis.

Now creating a social network for just this purpose might not be a good idea just because there are so many networks that we can utilize for this purpose.  Instead we could program apps in Facebook for this purpose, but not everyone has a facebook account.  What we really need is a universal language for social networking applications, and an interface for social networks to communicate with each other.  After researching this, it seems Google is aiming for something like this.  Check it out here.

So there is hope for my home improvement social network!

Email and social networking for international events

I work full-time in the office of international services and part of my responsibility includes assisting in technical aspects of international orientation. This past international orientation, we invited admitted international students to a facebook group as a medium to communicate prior to arrival to the United States. Our intent was for facebook to be a place where the students can choose to network and participate in a single forum for answering questions. We had an amazing number of responses with an estimated half of the new international population joining the international student orientation group. Several students proactively participated in the group forum and wall as well.

Despite active participation by some, however, based on an anonymous survey, most students do not appear to have benefited greatly from the invitation. For many it was their first introduction to a social networking site. Some others had experience with social networking sites, but they did not find the group useful. For some, the ‘social’ aspect of social networking sites was not desired and in some cases the site didn’t appear to work or caused confusion. Privacy was another concern preventing some from registering. We concluded that the aura of informality associated with social networking sites clearly transcends international barriers.

Based on anonymous feedback surveys, email was the most informative form of communication for over 80% of the international population. This makes sense because the code which includes the sender, formal recipient, addresses and addressee, are so standardized across cultural barriers that email is much more effective than websites or social forums.

In contrast, use of facebook by our office for advertising social events has been very effective for existing members of facebook because of the viral effect of attendees and participants inviting their friends.  Last week, weinvited 280 students to the IU World’s Fare event, and now over 1,500 students have been invited to the event.  Clearly, medium plays a major part in the code.

Interaction Culture: the Study of Non-Linear Systems

So i’m reading a paper today by Chris Langton on the subject of Artificial Life (available online at http://www.aec.at/en/archiv_files/19931/E1993_025.pdf), in which he points out the fundamental differences between approaches to studying linear and non-linear systems.  I would say that in researching Interaction Culture, we must more fully understand ourselves to be dealing with non-linear systems, and adjust our epistemology accordingly.  I’ll leave it up to Chris to elaborate (from the paper, pgs 12-13):

“..the distinction between linear and nonlinear systems is fundamental, and provides excellent insight into why the principles underlying the dynamics of life should be so hard to discover. The simplest way to state the distinction is to say that linear systems are those for which the behavior of the whole is just the sum of the behavior of its parts, while for nonlinear systems, the behavior of the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Linear systems are those which obey the principle of superposition. We can break up complicated linear systems into simpler constituent parts, and analyze these parts independently. Once we have reached an understanding of the parts in isolation, we can achieve a full understanding of the whole system by composing our understandings of the isolated parts. This is the key feature of linear systems: by studying the parts in isolation, we can learn everything we need to know about the complete system.

This is not possible for nonlinear systems, which do not obey the principle of superposition . Even if we can break such systems up into simpler constituent parts, and even if we can reach a complete understanding of the parts in isolation, we would not be able to compose our understandings of the individual parts into an understanding of the whole system. The key feature of nonlinear systems is that their primary behaviors of interest are properties of the interactions between parts, rather than being properties of the parts themselves, and these interaction-based properties necessarily disappear when the parts are studied independently.

The process that we call “life” is a fundamentally nonlinear process, emerging out of interactions between non-living parts. Life is a property of form, not matter, a result of the organization of matter rather than something that inheres in the matter itself. Neither nucleotides nor amino acids nor any other carbon-chain molecule is alive — yet put them together in the right way, and the dynamic behavior that emerges out of their interactions is what we call life. It is effects, not things, upon which life is based — life is a kind of behavior, not a kind of stuff — and as such, it is constituted of simpler behaviors, not simpler stuff.

Thus, analysis is most fruitfully applied to linear systems. Such systems can be taken apart in meaningful ways, the resulting pieces solved, and the solutions obtained from solving the pieces can be put back together in such a way that one has a solution for the whole system.

Analysis has not proved anywhere near as effective when applied to nonlinear systems: the nonlinear system must be treated as a whole.

A different approach to the study of nonlinear systems involves the inverse of analysis: synthesis. Rather than start with the behavior of interest and attempting to analyze it into its constituent parts, we start with constituent parts and put them together in the attempt to synthesize the behavior of interest. Analysis is most appropriate for the understanding of linear systems, synthesis is the most appropriate for the understanding of nonlinear systems.” (pages 12-13)

I will illustrate this idea here with an example.  Seeking to understand MySpace is similar to understanding the genesis of life in an important sense.  Studying one user or one page on MySpace (the approach appropriate if it were a linear system) could not have predicted that the site would gain 100 million users any more than studying one amino acid could have predicted that i would exist as a quasi-intelligent life form who writes posts for a professor with strongly idealistic hockey affinities.  But once i realize that MySpace or quasi-intelligent life has a non-linear relationship with the behaviors of their requisite parts (millions of users and millions of profiles are what create the macro-level behavior of MySpace), i have made the first step toward being able to understand  MySpace and, if i’m very clever in my “synthetic” approach, i might be able to guess at how i might create a competing social network for sub-intelligent life.

Another point made elsewhere in the paper is that the only way to understand non-linear systems (since their underlying mechanics can’t be predicted by looking at the final system)  is to create models of the systems and see how they behave.  I believe that this concept also supports a design methodology that puts at least prototypes, if not artifacts, out into the real world iteratively and often, since the effects, the meanings and the uses of artifacts in an Interaction Culture are probably too complex to predict ahead of time.

Identity as Advertising

Without getting into the deeper philosophical concept of identity as performance or sign, i find the recent news of MySpace founder Tom Andersen’s alleged age-shifting mildly amusing.

“Tom Anderson, the co-founder of MySpace and the first friend to anyone who creates a MySpace profile, isn’t really 32 like it says on his MySpace profile. His Wikipedia entry, which says he was born in 1975, is also incorrect. How old is he really? We first heard 40. We dug a little online and came up with nothing. But then we got a senior person at MySpace to talk to us about it off record at the Web 2.0 Summit last week: this person confirmed that he’s really “36 or 37″ and that MySpace has been trying to keep this quiet for some time.“
(Source: TechCrunch)

In considering identity, and its perhaps often fractured online nature, i had never given much thought to the idea that the identities of higher-profile folks would be knowingly and grossly manipulated as a branding move. As the first mega social networking success story, MySpace has been a lightning-rod in the past for the criticisms that people in social networks lie about their identity. It is usually treated as though dishonesty on MySpace is a violation of its intended use. The funny fact here is that every MySpace/user relationship begins at the outset with false identity when a 40-year old Tom Andersen, claiming to be 32, becomes everyone’s first friend, so perhaps it is the people who are truthful about their identity in MySpace who are transgressing its intended use.

Q&A: Pierce @ Bardzell

Jimmy has sent me a deluge of questions, and I’ll do my best to answer them here. Some answers I am more confident about than others.

AMM
>What are the defining characteristics of AMM? What is it NOT?

I think the defining characteristic that I am settling on is creativity practiced by populations, rather than the individual or a small team of homogenous professionals (e.g., professional designers). It typically involves the following clusterings of technologies: low-end authoring tools (e.g., iMovie), or high-end authoring tools used in narrow ways (e.g., 10% of Flash; 5% of Lightwave); a Web 2.0 environment. New multimedia releases come out with blazing speed. Works with impact are copied and iterated on. They usually aren’t made for corporate profit or any deliberate “mainstream” use, though they are sometimes appropriated that way.

Platforms v. Products
>Why is this distinction important?
>What does implications does AMM have for the design of platforms?

The distinction matters, because with platforms, the thing produced by the Big Company or mainstream publisher is incomplete; it offers the capacity for completion, but not the content. Examples include Second Life, Facebook and MySpace, GirlSense, SlideShare, blogs, Twitter, and anything with an API (from WoW to Flash itself). Users create the content with the platform.

As for implications, that is harder to answer. I think they need to do better to support social production, criticism, and interaction; quick authoring (especially with prims); accessibility (anyone can pick it up and do basic stuff with it in a couple of hours).

“unfinished aesthetic” & “aesthetic of crap”
> Can you elaborate on this?
> Is it an aesthetic of products, process, tools?
> It makes me think of some notion that there is not final product…

“Unfinished aesthetic” comes from an essay by Peter Lunenfeld. The idea is that rather than delivering finished media (like a traditional film or a published novel), publishers instead offer incomplete media, which are completed by the end user. Video games and Web 2.0 are examples of this. I guess really all software with an end user is.

The “aesthetic of crap” is my term for the value expressed by Neil Cicierega and others that bad animations (e.g., animutation) is better than good animation (e.g., Disney). There is a severing of the notion of “high quality production” and “effective message.”

Mass collaboration and the role of the individual

> Does AMM collaboration reduce the role of the individual in some sense? Or enhance?
> MAss collaboration and authoring leads to multiple identities?!
> Creates microcommunities? more domains/cultures?
> What IS the role of the author in this setting?

I think the role of the individual is lessened. This is a philosophical predisposition that I have to begin with; that is, I always think that the individual as a unified, coherent agent is overrated. This will come up later in the class, but the short version is that the structuralist and especially poststructuralist traditions vigorously question the individual as a single, coherent entity. Phenomenology does too, by the way, but not to the same degree.

The idea of multiple identities is simply that in each software interface, I have a different identity (set of permissions, set of capabilities and limitations, and representation or construction of my self). That is, my avatar has a blog, a Second Life friends list, a MySpace page, etc., but each of these is distinct from the others, and very distinct from my Facebook or Oncourse identity.

We will talk lots and lots about the role of the author. I personally do subscribe to the poststructuralist “death of the author” concept and that is reflected in everything I do. A recent reviewer of a journal article I wrote asked me if I left any room for the designer, or if I killed the designer off too. I guess I probably killed the designer, too, but only in a special, technical sense, which deserves elaboration that I don’t want to offer here.

HCI creates culture
> Does HCI accellerate the production of culture?
> What do you (JEff) exactly propose as ethical or moral responsibilities of HCI, given your understanding of AMM and argument that HCI produces culture?

I don’t know about “accelerate,” since that implies a measurable amount of production that can be increased or decreased. I definitely don’t know how to do that. But I am comfortable saying that culture is being produced primarily with technologies today, and that means it is mediated by interaction design. To what extent are interaction designers cognizant of this? My interactions with Adobe and Macromedia designers suggest the answer is “not very much.”

I think of ethics and morals as two different categories. I think of ethics in the Greek sense, about the practice of living the good life. I think of morals as a codification of rules that are collectively designed for an ethical life. Ethics is a philosophical practice; morality is policy, implementation.

HCI has an ethical obligation to stem the effects of technological nihilism, which is what happens when technology (and the rhetoric of technological “progress”) replaces human agency in the design and development of new software, interactions, practices, institutions, and social arrangements. This is a difficult force to resist. One way to do this is to critique interfaces and interactions (and the social practices they effect) in terms of the major categories of the humanities: enlightenment, self-transcendence, social justice, bliss, etc. Digital technology mediates practically every aspect of our lives. It’s not just in the workplace anymore, and it’s not good enough for it to perform well and be usable.

HCI must examine the extent to which our interactions with technology and with each other through technology adds value to human life.

knowledge/info v. affect and experience
> Can you clarify this distinction? Why is it important?

> Is the distinction between reflective and experiential cognition?

Knowledge and information are not the sum and total of human existence, though looking at information science and HCI, you might think they are. People who celebrate technology often promise that it will lead to a knowledge society, where people have more access to better information, and thus are able to make better decisions (e.g., democracy). These are laudable goals.

But we also need to be entertained and loved; we laugh, fear, have sex, feel bliss and rage, cultivate our tastes, play, speak nonsense, dress up, pet cats and walk dogs, miss our parents, mourn, wax nostalgic. So much of life isn’t about acquiring more information to make decisions; it’s about experiencing the fullness of life, the decency of our fellow humans, dealing with the fears that threaten to paralyze us, the joy of our senses. When technology mainly helped professionals do their jobs, knowledge/information was obviously a priority. Now that technology is a part of every part of our everyday, everywhere lives, we need to expand the desired outcomes of interactions to include more than just information/knowledge, and I use affect/emotion and experience to get at this more robust notion of human life.

My Fair Lady

You’ve probably heard of or studied the Pygmalion Effect. Basically that peer expectation leads to either improvements or decline. The famous quote from the George Bernard Shaw’s play “Pygmalion” (the movie My Fair Lady):

“You see, really and truly, apart from the things anyone can pick up (the dressing and the proper way of speaking and so on), the difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves but how she’s treated. I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins, because he always treats me as a flower girl, and always will, but I know I can be a lady to you because you always treat me as a lady, and always will.”

I have been thinking about culture’s perception of the interaction designer vs. the film maker. This Pygmalion Effect seems to fit with my initial thoughts. As interaction designers, I think we are seen as the simple “flower girl”. In contrast, I think the film maker is definitely considered a “lady” in our culture, living in Hollywood and living the good life.

Why is this so? There was a short time there in the late 90’s when the programmers in Silicon Valley were getting close to becoming the “lady”. Hell, they were almost rock stars. But then the dot-com crash and shazam… we are seen as simple “flower girls” again. And we definitely have molded ourselves in this image. Where once we were gaining invites to parties everywhere, now we are back to our 9 to 5 jobs making computer applications for the common good. Simply providing a public service. We seemed to have lost our luster, the public perception gone. Now you might say that companies like Apple are seen as hip and cool, the “Fair Lady”. I would agree, but I don’t think it translates down to the actual interaction designers.

So how does this fit with creating a language of interaction design? Well, we all play the signal game. Meaning that we all have our prejudices and expectations. You can only relate to someone in your genre through language (signals), and understanding comes from the correct interpretation of the signals we pass between one another. That is how we can read the articles Jeff gives us and actually interpret them in the correct way, the way that relates to our culture as information scientists or informatics peeps.

To create a language for interaction design, we don’t only need a shared vocabulary between ourselves. We need a public perception that can relate to our cultural subset in a way that people now have begun to relate to technology itself.

As an example, my parents had no idea what I was studying at SLIS while I was getting my Master’s degree. But I could speak a shared language with them that they had picked up via their own cultural influences. I could say that I was interested in studying the way information was organized and shared on the internet using computers. They could understand that, they got it. Their expectations increased based on our shared vocabulary and therefore they expected me to do great things and have an exciting job. Therefore my own expectations increased and I was then (somehow) able to get a good job. A simple kind of Pygmalion Effect.

So, I think that we need to be cognizant of this effect while we are trying to define our language of interaction design. Although we may walk and talk like a “lady” with our new, fancy language, we may still be seen as the “flower girl”. And as it goes, the expectations of the culture may lead us to our continued, hidden existence.

I have no idea if this makes sense… it was in essence a mind puke.