In class this morning, one of our professors was talking about geographical information retrieval. Information is stored in association with a given place and thus by searching for that place, one can find information. [Note that while the professor was talking about documents, and professional ones at that, i immediately translated everything to think about social information, as that’s my bent.]

There are two ways to think about information. One is simply through the lens of the material; the second is through the lens of the experience of that material. Most material is associated with an event. Even along the lines of document creation, there is the location of which the material is created and experienced in addition to the location in which it might reference.

This made think that much information is actually expereienced along three axes: place, time, person. For any given set of information, it may be experienced in multiple places, times or across multiple people.

Information impacts place; it is not just situated there. It impacts the history, the vibe and perhaps scars the space itself (marks on the wall).

Information is often felt to be ephemeral in time, as we cannot return to a given time to experience it.

Information fundamentally impacts the people who experience it. They store that experience, that information and incorporate it into their identity. Also, they are likely to recall versions of that information/experience later, regardless of its accuracy.

When we talk about information retrieval, we’re talking about reconstructing the history, removing a set of information from the time/place/people who experienced it into a current situation. Time fundamentally changes. But what does it mean to have data stored with place and people instead of in a collected repository removed from those contextual bits? Should what be retrieved simply be the factual elements of information, or the more experiential? Can we have impact retrieval?

In class today, we were introduced to the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) framework/methodology. I am certainly not an expert on this approach, but i’m quite curious to learn more as it’s the first direct methodology that i’ve seen to address the socio-political impacts of technology creation and adoption. All too often in tech-land, we think of efficiency and desire as our metrics of the success of a piece of technology and its adoption. But there’s so much more to how and why these items are created and popularized.

Update 11/06/03: Ack, given that this is way too high on Google’s search for SCOT, i thought i’d give some proper references on the topic. Anyone who is interested in knowing what SCOT is (not just my version) should read:

Bijker, W. E. (1995). King of the road: the social construction of the safety bicycle. In Of bicycles, bakelites, and bulbs: Toward a theory of sociotechnical change (pp. 19-100). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Pinch, T. (1996). The social construction of technology: a review. In R.Fox (Ed.), Technological change (pp. 17-35). Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers.

Early anthropologists belkieved that distance is equivalent to the past. Thus, the further away someone is to the European central, the more likely they are to represent the past. This is embedded in the notion of “otherness.” Of course, we no longer believe that people far from us are that (biologically) different than us, but those early thoughts fundamentally framed some of our thoughts about difference.

For most people, those far away or in a distant past feel so still fundamentally different.

What is interesting about the web is that it starts to collapse time and space. In theory, this should eliminate the notions of “otherness” but somehow, in reality, i think that it will just create confusion. I’d hypothesize that people will continue to judge others along their local notions of similarity and create new barriers to time and space that did not previously exist. Of course, perhaps i’m just being pessimistic today.