Part of this surely has to be a somewhat overdue critical reflection by us
'technophiles' to be sure that we are not lapsing into foolish
technological utopianism and diverting attention from more basic social and
political concerns. People who feel optimistic, or just "pro" technology
(meaning here specifically the new information technologies), really need
to sit back a moment and ask ourselves how we came to be so positioned. I
don't just mean autobiographically, but in terms of our more general social
positioning and interests. If we take Bourdieu's approach, we need to be
reflexive about how our own interests, our own class and gender etc.
positions, dispose us to be positive toward these technologies.
We can say, and believe, that infotech offers opportunities for greater
democratization, but within existing social-political structures it is
probably also true that it represents an ideal tool for maximizing the
caste advantages we already have (e.g. in the use of standardized
communication codes and genres, in approaching programming or scripting in
terms of abstract logical operations, in being aware of global scale
processes and issues, etc.).
I think this critical perspective is relevant to the HCI issues that have
been brought up. Our enthusiasm is not just for infotech as such, but for
the particular forms it has taken (the logic of its interfaces, the forms
of its multimedia genres, the habitus that informs its programming
languages, the assumptions embodied in its material forms), and all these
forms are almost certainly subtly exclusive of categories of people who
culturally differ most from its designers and their core constituencies. We
have heard this said about gender, and perhaps about euroculture, and it is
almost certainly true of social class habitus as well. In fact it is
actually rather interesting and anomalous in this respect that no one has
managed to design infotech to repel young people and mainly appeal to the
mature and middle aged. (Complex market and culture issues here.) In this
perspective, which is of course still only a partial one, infotech is just
the latest clever trick of hegemony, the newest strategy for keeping those
on top, on top.
Mike asks about the semiosphere, and Luiz' original question was about the
compatibility of eco-social activity network theories with 'information
ecologies'. Bonnie's reply emphasized local ecologies of people using, or
refusing, technology, and she included the issue of scale in comparing Al
Gore's more comprehensive 'local' infotech-ecology with a student's.
In one sense all ecologies are local, both Gore's and the student's. But in
another sense Gore's are mediated by semiotic artifacts and activities that
link him more directly and interactively to much larger-scale social
networks ... think of the vast networks that gather the data that he sees
in a report, think of the large numbers of organizations that are
influenced by policy statements he makes at conferences (or in backrooms)
... compared to the student's more one-way and more limited connection to
the writers of the software manual or the designers of the program s/he's
using.
The semiosphere is a totality of potentially available cultural meanings,
but we each have access to only some part of that totality. Our personal
totality, the semio-Umwelt that our activities mediate for us, is
restricted by the kinds of activities we engage in, and by the semiotic
artifacts that are our actant partners in those activities. The social
division of labor connects class positioning to the distribution of access
to and participation in activities, and so to connectedness, via semiotic
artifacts that mediate links to larger-scale processes/networks, to wider
worlds and wider influence. The semiosphere is socially structured; it
follows the logic of heteroglossia or heteropraxia ... different social
groups/categories engage differentially with different possible meaningful
and meaning-making activities. The semiosphere is not just an unstructured
set of possible meanings; those meanings only arise in activities, and who
engages in which activity is structured exactly as society is structured.
Bakhtin pointed this out for discourse activity; Bourdieu shows it for all
value-based activity (matters of preference). The semiosphere _is_ the
eco-social-semiotic system (its full but cumbersome name). The semiosphere
is the semiotic totality of the meanings made in the activities which are
linked to one another in networks of cross-dependence and which intersect
in actants/artifacts/agents. The local semiotic ecology is the part visible
to us, seen filtered and re-shaped through the mediation of the activities
and networks in which we participate. Our semio-Umwelt.
I assume that Bonnie did not project anything quite this grand for the
notion of an information ecology, but the two notions intersect when we ask
how one person's info-ecology relates to another's, or when we have to say
just how Bonnie's observation about the difference in scale between Gore's
and the student's comes about. Then I think it is useful to reason in terms
of scales of networks and how large-scale ones intersect with smaller-scale
ones. She also seems to want us to expand our terms of discourse from
thinking just about the info-tech in our local activity networks to the
bases for our attitudes toward info-tech ... and this problem, I think,
inevitably leads us to questions about how engagement with technology is
socially structured on a larger scale.
The goal of course is that we act, thoughtfully and reflexively, to
re-adjust our engagement with the technology ... but if we are also to be
able to re-adjust the technology itself, then we still have to solve the
problem of influence-across-scales ... how does the student get the
technology re-designed to be more comfortable/useful for his/her purposes?
How do people not positioned as Al Gore is (or even Al himself, or Bill
Gates) act in their local, always small-scale activities in ways that can
influence large-scale social processes/networks in which tech design gets
constrained and determined? One solution that has been proposed, very like
my ideal of freedom (smaller scale) within constraints (larger scale), is
that infotech be designed to offer more radical degrees of choice, of
customizability, so that there is LESS coercion-from-above. But what has to
be done to promote movement of the large-scale networks in which design
happens in that direction?
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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