[From Many-to-Many]

I had the awesome privilege of attending the Intimate (Ubiquitous) Computing workshop at Ubicomp this year. The attendees grappled with issues of intimacy, the relationship between people and the impact of technology on intimacy. These issues are so relevant to social software, but so rarely addressed. For example, what is the impact of social software on intimacy? How does it affect our mechanisms of relating to people?

It’s so easy as social software developers to think about people’s hypothetical needs and design towards them, without really processing what impact we’ve had. Yet, the structures we create fundamentally affect how people interact, both offline and online. How are we changing people’s ability to engage offline because of their digital presence? How are we changing our understandings of the public sphere?

Ubicomp made me reflect on how easily we slip into a technocentric point of view. It’s so easy to assume that there is a perfect set of technologies, that they will solve all of the world’s problems and that they will produce nothing but good.

My take-away from the whole thing was to remember that we must think about the domains that we impact. We as social software developers/designers have the opportunity to dramatically impact social behavior. But we must approach this cautiously because if we fail to consider our impact, we could cause more harm than good.

[Remember: guns don’t kill people; people kill people. But they *use* guns and those guns were designed by people, and designed to kill.]

Tonight, i listened to a well-known software designer articulate his view of usability, ubiquitous computing and interface design. He spoke of usability as a burgeoning science. From his worldview, it would one day be possible to truly test what was the best way to do something. This conversation reeked of technological determinism* – one correct way… universalist notions of science… eek!

Now, i take issue with usability tests in general. When you run a usability test, you assume that 1) people will use it in the intended way; 2) people’s use won’t change over time; 3) people’s in-lab use will be identical to their social use at home. All of these are fundamentally WRONG. Thus, i just don’t believe in usability testing for social software because the goal is not to see if some feature works better than another, but to see if they “get” it.

Oh, my other favorite quote from the discussion concerned cell phones and their hideous user interfaces (which are worse in Japan from his perspective). “In Japan, it’s a social mystery that people buy these tools.” The connotation was that the social factor was superfluous and without value. ::shaking head::

* Technological determinism has been on my mind lately because it’s been a topic on one of my classes. My professor stated that no one would admit to being a technological determinist nowadays. I argued back stating that most of the technological determinists that i know know so little about social critiques of technology that they wouldn’t know that term so as to label themselves accordingly. I told her not to worry – there are plenty of people who still believe this problematic philosophy.

There’s a Sucker Born in Every Medial Prefrontal Cortex is a terrifying NYTimes article that discusses the convergence of branding / product addiction and neurological science.

These are the kinds of articles that remind me to be wary of academic science being sponsored by industry and cranky that psychologists and other trained professionals use their knowledge to help corporate control of people.

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