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tion must be relinked through some sort of judgment of equivalence or comparability. This occurs at all levels of scale, and we all do it routinely as part of everyday life. |
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None of this is new in theories of information and communication: we have long had models of signals and targets, background, noise and filters, signals, and quality controls. We are moving this insight here to the level of social interaction. People often cannot see what they take for granted until they encounter someone who does not take it for granted. |
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A radical statement of this would be that information is only information when there are multiple interpretations. One person's noise may be another's signal or two people may agree to attend to something, but it is the tension between contexts that actually creates representation. What becomes problematic under these circumstances is the relationships among people and things, or objects, the relationships that create representations, not just noise. The ecological approach we have taken in this volume adds people as active interpreters of information who themselves inhabit multiple contexts of use and practice (Star 1991b). This multiplicity is primary, not accidental nor incidental. |
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Consider, for example, the design of a computer system to support collaborative writing. Eevi Beck (1995, 53) studied the evolution of one such system where "how two authors, who were in different places, wrote an academic publication together making use of computers. The work they were doing and the way in which they did it was inseparable from their immediate environment and the culture which it was part of." To make the whole system work, they had to juggle time zones, spouses' schedules, and sensitivities about parts of work practice such as finishing each other's sentences as well as manipulating the technical aspects of the writing software and hardware. They had to build a shared context in which to make sense of the information. Beck is arguing against a long tradition of decontextualized design where only the technical, or narrowly construed considerations about work hold sway. |
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We lack good relational language here. There is a permanent tension between the formal and the empirical, the local and the situated, and attempts to represent information across localities. It is this tension itself which is underexplored and undertheorized. It is not just a set of interesting metaphysical observations. It can also become a pragmatic unit of analysis. How can something be simultaneously concrete and abstract? The same and yet different? People are not (yet, we |
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