Category: social shaping

my computer is just like me (not)

Just in case I was too subtle last time about the race and gender politics of the personification of technology in the ‘Get a Mac’ ads, here are two new ones (one, two). I’m speechless. Thanks Anne.

There are about a bazillion spoofs of these ads, of course – in fact, they positively beg to be parodied (as in, on purpose). Has anyone seen any good/funny/clever videos that do a good job of taking on the cultural politics? I mean something other than the ubiquitous geeky hilarity of introducing a Linux character and/or having the computers be secretly gay and in love with each other? I am so not allowed to be trawling YouTube all day, so recommendations would be most welcome.

freedom and control in social media

From Deleuze via Glen Fuller:

“Control is not discipline. You do not confine people with a highway. But by making highways, you multiply the means of control. I am not saying this is the only aim of highways, but people can travel infinitely and ‘freely’ without being confined while being perfectly controlled. That is our future.” — Gilles Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, pg 322

(Yes, I have finally and for the first time in my life reproduced a Deleuzian quotation longer than the word ‘assemblage’)

From a longer post by ideant that is well worth your time:

This is the paradox of social media that has been bothering me lately: an ‘empowering’ media that provides increased opportunities for communication, education and online participation, but which at the same time further isolates individuals and aggregates them into masses —more prone to control, and by extension more prone to discipline.

And a sneak peek from something much more prosaic that I said in a conversation with Georgina Born last month, which will be published soon in a new initiative of M/C called ‘M/C Dialogues’:

So there’s a sense that at the design end you’re creating an open, configurable system that the users will come along and do anything they like with, but on the other hand, that ‘anything’ seems to be taking quite a similar shape over and over again.

Kind of obvious, but worth unpacking in the light of ‘control after decentralization’, as Galloway puts it.

hackability and adaptive design

I sometimes talk about a tension between ‘usability and hackability‘, and somewhat pessimistically about how, most of the time, technology (in the broadest, most social sense of the word) teaches us what we should do with it, and how we should do those things. I need to get more across current thinking in interaction design/critical design theory though. This patient, careful post by Dan Hill, a transcript of an interview where he outlines his contribution to a forthcoming book on the subject, is a big help:

The discourse around hackability is often littered with “hooks, sockets, plugs, handles” and so on. With adaptive design, drawing from the language of architecture more than code, we have a more graceful, refined vocabulary of “enabling change in fast layers building on stability in slow layers”, “designing space to evolve”, “time being the best designer” and so on. This suggests that there could be a distinction; that adaptive design is perhaps the process designed to enable careful articulation and evolution, as opposed to hackability’s more open-ended nature.

However, they still draw from the same basic concepts: of design being an ongoing social process between designer and user; of products evolving over time; of enabling the system to learn across an architecture of loosely-coupled layers; of not over-designing.

[...]

My favourite sentence:
In adaptive design, designers must enable the experience/object to ‘learn’, and users to be able to ‘teach’ the experience/object.

Current thesis word count: 27,117.

The cultural politics of flickr tags




This is from the preliminary stages of a little textual analysis experiment I’m thinking about designing. It’s to do with the way that ‘architectures of information’ invite particular forms of subjecthood, particular constellations of values, and particular kinds of participation, and those forms of participation in turn work to shape the architecture in their own image.

See also race, age, work, identity, ethnic and gender.

There are obvious limitations to which of these terms ‘make sense’ as flickr tags in the first place, and in what ways, but still, interesting results so far. ‘Identity’ and ‘work’ to my mind are the most interesting – and the least silly in terms of what we might reasonably expect users to tag their photos with.

And more deterministically, Truscello says: “architecture, whether it refers to buildings or databases, constructs subject positions through the spatialization of power.”

Anyway, what other forms of ‘clustery goodness’ should I try?

[update]: speaking of the construction of subject positions and the spatialization of power and GoogleZon/Silicon Valley values (and the vanity of following your own incoming search strings): earlier today this Google search string spat this post out as the top-most result. My apologies to the searcher, who stayed for precisely 0 seconds.