While I agree that the term "information" is unsatisfying in many ways, the
term "information technologies" is in wide use, and for the audience Vicki
O'Day and I are trying to reach, "information" gets us to the same verbal
ballpark. People are wondering about the impact of computers, cell phones,
pagers, Palm Pilots, and so forth, and we want to encourage them to
articulate their concerns.
I loved the discussion about bunnies and mice; however I think a state
change is quite clearly "information." Having recently had a mouse in the
house, the morning we woke up and found the mouse trapped (alive, in a
Hav-A-Heart trap), the state change was big family news! Certainly an action
was also performed; there are multiple perspectives here. (Red licorice is
effective mouse bait, as as an informational aside.)
I read with great interest the discussion about whether information
technology leads to democratization or the reinforcement of existing power
relations. Commentators like Jerry Mander and Neil Postman take the view
that information technology is, on balance, bad, because it is more
effectively used by the powerful.
However, if we try to retard the spread of information technologies, the
result seems likely to be that the powerful simply have an easier time using
such technologies to their own advantage. In Information Ecologies, we argue
that decisions about technology use be made locally, in local spheres of
influence. We find that technologies such as the Internet serve diverse
audiences; in Chapter 12 we discuss the use of the Internet by Burmese
exiles, Inuit women, Maya in Guatemala, low-income citizens in the U.S. and
so forth. While Internet use by such groups does not mean that the powerful
will not prevail, it seems that we should make such usage possible where
it's desired. In the U.S. we had success with the phone; thanks to universal
lifeline service, 99% of all households have a phone (1% higher than TV).
Would suppressing phone use be on anyone's agenda? Even Mother Teresa, who
was very low tech, had a phone in her mission house in Calcutta.
I don't see that computer use is for the young, white, etc. Internet use is
fully 50% female as far as anyone can gather reliable statistics. Free
services such as SeniorNet are wildly popular (Vicki O'Day has done
wonderful research in this area and will be publishing it soon). In the book
we describe a successful high school digital photo class that was 50% girls,
many low-income. There are countless other examples. I believe the problem
is access and training, but not cultural opaqueness.
I fully agree with Jay's comments that we should think about the
relationships between large and small-scale networks as they populate
information ecologies.
Re Jay's concern about customizability, I appreciate this perspective very
much. In earlier work, I researched and argued for end user programming as
a way to allow more people more access to computational power (A Small
Matter of Programming: Perspectives on End User Computing, MIT Press, 1993).
The issue of end user programming is alive within the HCI community; there
will be a workshop on End User Programming at the next CHI conference (the
premier HCI conference) in May.
I believe that if people do not engage with technology, if only to demystify
it, monitoring and control will be harder to fight. At a small invitational
HCI conference I just attended, there was a paper on "ubiquitous computing"
in which a researcher described a house being built that would monitor every
human movement and sound, right down to footfall. This was presented as
interesting, useful and unproblematic. To their credit, many in the audience
(led by a computer scientist who was discussant) suggested this was not such
a good idea for a variety of social reasons.
The researcher also described, in favorable terms, "affective computing" in
which the user interface is tailored to respond to the user based on
galvanic skin response, heart rate, etc. Never mind that this sounds like
science fiction now; it is quite feasible and there is a whole research
program at MIT on affective computing (complete with a video narrated by
Alan Alda).
My hope is that by equipping people with a straightforward vocabulary and
some sense of skepticism about technology, we will all be in a better
position to question such moves as ubiquitous/affective computing, and to
think through their implications more clearly.
--------
Bonnie Nardi
Bonnie A. Nardi
Research Scientist
AT&T Labs West
75 Willow Road
Menlo Park, CA 94025
(650) 463-7064
nardi who-is-at research.att.com
fax:(650) 327-3796
www.best.com/~nardi/default.html