In my last post I mentioned that, in response to this post from Doc Martens, I went and read the following:
Kaptelinin, Victor and Boonie Nardi. 2007. Chapter 9: Postcognitivist theories in interaction design. In Acting with Technology: Activity Theory and Interaction Design. MIT Press. Accessed at First Monday.
First off, I should admit that I’m one of those perverse folks who actually enjoy theory, which does not seem to be a common trait among library students. Theory-making, which appears to be the aim of the authors of this chapter, is particularly exciting. My undergraduate English education was fairly theory-rich, so while I can not and will not claim to understand everything in the chapter, I do have the advantage of four years experience with having my mind blown on a regular basis. Like broccoli, it’s good for you even if it doesn’t agree with you.
Secondly, the following is primarily a compilation of notes I made while reading. Although I’ve expanded on abbreviations, complete thoughts are still occasionally lacking. All quotes are from the text.
Lastly, because I read only this one chapter and not the eight leading up to it, getting into the text was a bit difficult at first. In media res may be a satisfactory fictional device, but it fails miserably when dealing with a theoretically-based academic text. The authors are discussing four theories: activity theory, distributed cognition, actor-network theory, and phenomenology. Since they skip around a bit, sorting the four out without prior knowledge is a bit tricky. But that’s what the intertubes are for, ennit?
The thing about these four theories is that they’re all concerned with how technology fits into people’s lives, and they all “claim that individuals are not defined by the boundary of their skin.” Now that’s interesting. Kind of cyborg feminist (speaking of, I need to reread that). “Thought is bound up with the use of equipment.” Instead of remembering, we tag, so the tool becomes an extension of our knowledge. Would this be an example of “concrete analytical tools developed to move beyond dualism and to explain the fundamental unity of the mind and the world”? (very Buddhist, that)
Differences among the theories come down to intentionality (defined here as the ability to look toward the future) and “fissures in routine activity, namely creativity, reflexivity, and resistance.” Authors argue for a theory of the individual, not the supraindividual (network, organization, culture, etc.) because they “cannot mirror, represent, stand in for, or subsume the particular ways in which individual subjects may act.” They also argue that human-tool interactions are inherently asymmetrical, that there are “differences between what a system does and what a person does.” A systems can have “a culture or a set of functional properties,” although it cannot have cognition. del.icio.us does not think, although we can look at the information on the site and draw theories and conclusions from it — do people using del.icio.us make developmental transformations? They no longer need to store the information internally, handing that function over to a tool. Have they participated in a “redistribution of internal and external components”?
Authors argue that “analysis of human embeddedness in the world, of communication and collaboration within the social context, is of fundamental importance for understanding our relationship to technology.” Theory 2.0? See apophenia. Also, embedded does not equal embodied, so can account for the non-physical as well.
Creativity (manifested in insight), reflexivity, and resistance are “part of the culture change of technology” and are “crucial to understanding technology.” Through these three things, individuals create “fissures that may lead to new ways of framing problems.” Wartofksy: “human beings create the means of their own cognition.” “Creative activity means we are not limited to ‘reacting’ to the environment…we have the possibility to design the environment through creation of tertiary artifacts.”
Three levels of collaborative activity: coordination (common goal carried out individually), cooperation (individual adjustment to actions to others working toward overall objective), and co-construction (“when collaborating individuals not only cooperate to accomplish a prespecified common object but can also collectively redefine the object — and the collective activity — itself”). Wikipedia seems to lie somewhere between cooperation and co-construction. Although the object as a whole will not be redefined by the contributors, the content which contributors choose to add/subtract/modify does redefine the object, or at least the reliability and comprehensiveness of it. Is Wikipedia the frame or the text?
“‘Selecting what others see’ is a social process that shapes scientific research. Examining what a theory leaves out may be just as important as understanding what it brings in.” This holds true of many web 2.0 sites as well as individuals make choices about what to put in and leave out of their blogs, MySpace and Facebook pages, etc. “Where is the locus of control in culture? Does it lie in the system or in the enactment of activity?” Ilyenkov: “a phenomena that later becomes universal originally emerges as an individual, particular, specific phenomenon, as an exception from the rule.” The individual does not have control in an authoritarian sense, but can create consensus-through-action, such as migrations of users from one application to another.
