Before leaving, I posted a message about the materiality of technology and made a distinction between material and virtual.I had many occasions to think of this post while traveling. I don’t have a blackberry or an Iphone or any other mobile device to check my email. I did not bring my laptop (and even if I had it, I was not in places with wifi access). The hotels where we stayed did not have internet access.While there were several internet cafes in San Cristobal, I decided not to check my email at all. I did not have my cell phone either.Hence, because I lacked all these material artifacts - tangible (such as the laptop, the cell phone, the blackberry) and intangible (such as wifi access), I was - or at least, I felt - “unconnected” and  in some ways I lost my “virtual” connections to all my friends, colleagues and family.

 This distinction between tangible and intangible, and the definition of materiality as not only “matter”, but also as “substance” and “significance” (according to the definition of materiality in the Oxford English Dictionary) is an interesting one which was pointed to me by a colleague, Paul Leonardi. It allows us to better understand how technology in a broad sense (not only the interface, the hardware, but also the software) can be said to be material. Moreover, Paul Leonardi pointed that such a definition of materiality might not only allow us to describe information technology as material, but discourse as well. Interesting distinction, yet I would argue that discourse can also be material in the first sense - when it’s written in a word document, in a memo, in an email, on a blog or a forum.

Furthermore, the materiality of the practice is also shaped by the space, or the space influences the social practices involved in the virtual interactions. As noted yesterday, the plaza is the space where people meet, discuss, interact but you don’t see people (like those observed by Laura Forlano in Brian Park) checking their email, skyping their friends. To be involved in your virtual interactions, one goes to an internet cafe: a public space which contains the artifacts (tangible and intangible) that allows one to interact virtually - through emails, blogs, forums. Yet, if one has a blackberry, one could sit on a bench of one of the plazas and check her email, or post on a blog. Cheers, al 

Hi again. Previously, I suggested that there are architectural features of the online environment that we adapt to and mould to our own purposes, cues that affect how we interact with each other on the blog.Here I’d like to return to the other kind of cue, which I had labelled interpersonal. First let’s take the e.g.s mentioned by Anne-Laure, so whether a poster is friendly and inclusive, or the poster engages in relationship management at the beginning and end of what they say. Note that the effects on behaviour and interactions of these particular kinds of examples aren’t restricted to online environments. The phenomenon described where an open message is replied to with a more colloquial style, conversely a terse one is responded to in minimal terms, is an instance of the widespread phenomenon of accommodation – it happens all the time in face to face interactions too. People accommodate accents for instance, and start to imitate patterns of speech of the person they are talking to, even if they are not conscious of doing so. And in the photocopier room you can imagine you will respond more chattily to someone who asks you how it’s going and makes small talk than you will to someone who just nods at you, starts to use the machine and seems distracted or in a rush to leave. In addition to discourse cues, other cues like tone of voice, facial expression and posture are also crucial to how we engage with people and the types of exchanges we generate. I am calling these types of cues interpersonal as well.

Now, when it comes to interpersonal cues in online environments, some of them are harder to render than others, and some of them are hard to render at all; because online we have only words to get across all of these nuances, and written words at that. So we need to find ways to express visually tone of voice, emphasis, smiles etc. mainly through alterations to presentation of the text. Meeting and greeting people at the beginning and ends of posts is a relatively straightforward way to translate certain kinds of relationship management to online contexts, though sometimes it can feel a bit stilted and contrived. Other ways of capturing particular emotions or attitudes have become almost conventionalised: italics for emphasis, asterisks for picking out an *individual* concept, all caps for SHOUTING, and of course smileys and other punctuation… It can be difficult to use these tools successfully though: writing colloquially is quite a particular skill [cf Al’s observations under reality vs realism: it takes a lot of work and editing to make your text read like a natural conversation].

I think there’s a lot more to say here but I’ve already gone on for too long, and it would be great to get some feedback before continuing. To sum up the story so far, distinguishing between architectural and interpersonal cues in virtual and physical environments gives rise to a four-way taxonomy: physical space architectural cues, virtual space architectural cues, physical space interpersonal cues and virtual space interpersonal cues. I’ve suggested examples in each of these categories; the characteristics of each environment form constraints on how each type of cue is realised but we can match up equivalent types of cue in each space.

Hope this makes sense. Looking forward to hearing what you think, cheers, milena.

Hello, this post grew as a response to paragraphs 4 and 5 of Al’s post of 6 December. I wanted to comment on how we translate from the physical domain to the virtual domain the question about changes to the environment affecting interactions. And I realised I had more to say than I expected, and decided it was worth trying to set it all out in a post of its own to clarify my ideas and to see if other people find this way of looking at things useful. Then the post grew some more and I split it into two… So here’s the first instalment:

I’d like to try and draw some distinctions that might be helpful in thinking about the different features of online environments that affect the kinds of interactions that take place in virtual space, and how we go about making comparisons with co-located exchanges.

In previous posts, Anne-Laure has mentioned examples of how the physical space in which an interaction occurs can change how people engage with each other. Take for instance her research on the photocopier room, where the kinds of things that affect exchanges and how the room is used might include whether it is at the end of a corridor or on a common landing, whether there are other machines there, whether people have other reasons to be there, how private or public the space is, etc.

Then we ask the question, What are the equivalent cues in an online environment?

One example Al discusses is a case where the different styles of two respondents to a question [one open and friendly and one more brief and direct] elicit different kinds of reply [discursive and chatty or dry and minimalist, respectively] from the same person.

Now, clearly the style and type of discourse used in online forums have an effect on interactions. In fact, style and type of discourse have an effect on face-to-face exchanges too, along with many other cues like tone of voice, facial expression, body language, etc. I want to call these kinds of features of exchanges that affect interactions, whether online or face-to-face, interpersonal cues, and will return to them later.

First, though, I want to consider features of the online environment that I will call architectural cues, which may affect virtual interactions in ways that seem to me to be more directly comparable with the sorts of cues discussed for the physical world in the examples of the photocopy room or museum.

For while it is true that when we interact online we are “Building space with words”, we are not doing so in a vacuum but within a space that is to some extent defined and shaped by the constraints and format of the software programme and blog template that we’re using. These features can affect interactions in the same way that location, size, other activities etc. affect interactions in the copier room.

If the blog is our “room”, here are some examples of the kinds of architectural cues it contains that I think affect interactions and can be manipulated to create different sorts of exchanges. This is just an initial list with some immediate observations. I hope as you read this you will think of more examples and instances of your own experiences online of how features of a blog have shaped your interactions with it and other users, and add them in the comments:

Links

- Whether a blog has sidebar links to other sites of interest relevant to its readers can affect usage and interactions directly and indirectly. Links to external sites make the blog not just a destination in its own right, but a gateway to other resources, a portal, an information filter. [Compare, whether a copier room is at the end of a corridor, or only has one machine in it, or whether it’s used by people from different floors or departments of an organisation.] Extra links mean there are more reasons to visit a blog, and varied links can ensure people from different backgrounds want to look at them or add to them, which increases the number of disciplines potential contributors come from.

- If the links are static and remain the same, eventually people may bookmark them and visit external sites directly without going through the blog. If the links change regularly [quick hits, or news related links with a particular slant, etc.] then the blog itself becomes the only place where that particular set of pieces of information is available, and the first place you’d look to find out certain kinds of things, which adds to the sense of community.

Comment options

- Ease of commenting affects exchanges, whether you comment at all, how you comment and what you say. Factors like whether you have to log in, whether you have to leave a name or are allowed to comment anonymously, whether you have a unique identifier so that you can maintain your online character without being impersonated. Or whether word verification or comment moderation is enabled [often on Blogger for instance I’ve seen people comment on the word verification sequence itself if there seems to be a random connection between the word that the letters sound like and the subject of the post or of their comment].

- Within comments, it may make a difference how easy it is to use html tags to make what you say clearer; whether for instance there is a blockquote tag that allows you to cite the section of the text that you are responding to so that you can focus on that part specifically and cut down on having to paraphrase what someone else said, or point to a certain paragraph or line to pick it out. [In practice where this feature is available comments  look more like when people do email replies by writing answers to individual points directly underneath the relevant bit of text which is more conversational than a whole load of text at the top of the message.]

Feeds

- Options of notification of updates can affect interactions, speeding up responses, alerting readers to new content, making them feel more connected to other users of the space across different timezones.

- The ease with which you can track which threads have been commented on, and by who [as we have in this Wordpress blog] facilitates joining in conversations rather than having to trail through old posts to see if anyone has said anything on a previous entry. A new widget on Blogger has a rolling headlines or recently updated feature that allows sidebar links to show titles of new posts and when they were put up, which gives you a sense of what is happening in the online community you are part of and what are the hot topics at any point in time.

More generally, it occurs to me that it might be worth talking to people who design blogging software to see what type of interfaces they are developing and what has been particularly successful in facilitating online interactions and what the current big stumbling blocks are perceived to be. All of this should give us more ideas about the features of online environments that help or hinder our interactions.

Part 2 to follow shortly. Sorry this is long. Please let me know what you think in the comments. Cheers, milena.

 Contemporary artists question our perceptions of affordances, interrogating the functions of objects and the meaning of situations. One might think of the extreme questions by surrealists’ works such as  Marcel Duchamp’s fountain or Rene Magritte’s “This is not a pipe”. A similar questioning is at the core of Claudia’s work on chairs: what is a chair? Is a chair an object that affords sitting? Then what does it  becomes when you hang it from the ceiling, when you put it on stilts and take a way the sitting part, or when you make a cascade of  chairs? http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/yourgallery/artist_profile/a/34724.html  I also interpret Sophie Calle’s Prenez soin de Vous as an exploration of the “affordance” of the phrase “take care of yourself” http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/jun/16/artnews.artWhat does this phrase afford to Sophie Calle? She does not know. She does not know how to interpret it and thus she asks 107 women to interpret it for her - to tell her what they read, what they understand, what they feel. Does this phrase affords “support”, “caring”, “affection”? For the author of the words, if you take the literal meaning it does, for all these interpreters it does not.Yet this might show the difference between texts and artifacts: artifacts afford in the sense that they suggest and/ or limit actions; affordances are not infinite. Text can be endlessly interpreted and in some ways there are no limits.Then you’d tell me does it make sense to talk about the affordances enacted through discourse? I guess it does as here we are not looking at the content per se, at its interpretation, but at the discursive practices and how they help creating a sense of space that trigger some type of interactions and allow the building of a sense of shared identity. As you can see, I am exploring here. Any thoughts and comments are welcome. Thanks. al  

We’ve been talking a lot about space, but not so much about discourse, about how we can do things with words - even such things as creating a space, a sense of place, where we can meet with others and share ideas and feelings. I “explicitly” learnt that language was performative - i.e. that language does more than describing things - in my courses on the philosophy of language, reading Austin’s How to Do Things with Words (1962) or reading Wittgenstein’s and working on my master thesis on the language games of colours.  Austin provides several examples such as the naming of a ship: if you say, “I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth” (and the circumstances are appropriate in certain ways), you not only utter a sentence, but you do something-namely, you perform the act of naming the ship. The pragmatist or discursive approach focuses on the use of expressions in speech situations and implies that discourse organizes experience and reality (Austin, 1962; Wittgenstein, 1963). It assumes that language is not only a tool to report and describe reality, but is also a tool to create a context within which we “know” reality and orient our actions.

As I was thinking about my research work on discursive practices on online forums, I re-read the introduction of Sherry Turkle’s Life on the Screen and what she said about the imaginary experience of people writing in MUDs, it made me think of my own experience as a reader.   Indeed, when one reads a novel, it is about entering in an imaginary world created by the novelists, and I am taking the metaphor seriously. It is really about entering another world - a world that is offered to you by the novel, but that you can also rewrite, reinvent.I remember my parents calling me for lunch or dinner and never getting an answer. I remember this situation in a very lively manner as I see my son doing the same, or when he bursts into tears because something sad happen in the story - that happened to me too; that still happens to me: the tears are real; the impact of words are real. Literature is a proof (if needed) of the performativity of language, and it was my first experience of it.

Literature includes not only novels, but also poetry - following the maze of emotions, perceptions and thoughts created by Mallarme or T.S. Eliot - and theatre. You might say, yes, but novelists, poets, playwrights are gifted individuals, not everyone can create these worlds where one can enter. You might be right, yet it does not take away the fact that words can create such experiences. Moreover, I have been working during the last two years with Anca Metiu on correspondences and our analysis showed the power of writing, its ability to allow people to share ideas, to build and maintain relationships. Our work focuses on correspondences of famous writers such as Descartes, Einstein, Virginia Woolf and Kafka. However, we also read correspondences by anonymous persons and there is this same power of words allowing people to share moments, feelings, thoughts, and maintain a relationship. My argument about the performativity of discursive practices in public online forums is very similar to some of the findings of Sherry Turkle’s of people’s interactions in MUDs. Hence, she mentioned a virtual rape that took place in one MUD and she wrote: “although some made light of the offender’s actions by saying that the episode was just words, in txt based realities such as MUDs words are deeds.” (Turkle, 1995, p. 15).

Most MUDs like online forums are purely text-based and people create a reality, and even a self, a multiple self, Turkle argues. My focus is more on how people co-create this sense of place, of belonging despite the absence of co-location. Hence my question regarding the possibility to enact some of the affordances of space through discursive practices. Of course, there are differences. For example, you can be part of several forums, MUDs, and engaged in many other activities as highlights Turkle (in fact her studies show that dedicated MUD players are often involved in several worlds at the same time thanks to the affordance of the computers - the ability to open several windows on their screen). This possibility to be in at least two places at the same time is illustrated by the possibility to have a virtual coffee break, chatting with a friend on skype (maybe both even drinking coffee). You could in principle have coffee at the same time with different friends - you in NY, another one in London, and a third one in Paris or a few blocks away… al 

I love this book by Alexander, “A Pattern Language”. Here are a few quotes that I found inspiring: ”In many modern building complexes the problem of disorientation is acute. People have no idea where they are, and they experience considerable mental stress.” (Alexander, 1977, p. 481)

•  I can’t prevent myself of thinking of criticisms about the web and how it has an impact on community, identity. Yet, there are also examples of great online communities (as great buildings). The question might be a question of design: both online and off-line. Alexander’s point is: we need to design buildings that “make sense” and afford social interactions. I guess any designers of websites and other online “applications” will agree.  

“The simple social intercourse created when people rub shoulders in public is one of the most essential kinds of social “glue” in society” (ibid, p. 489)

•  It’s back to our discussion about the need for co-location - either at the British library, Bryan Park, or a coffee shop. 
• When people feel like they are part of an online community, how do they enact the “shoulders’ rubbing”? by sharing information on themselves? by developing a certain style? by putting up photos, inventing nicknames?

“The setting gives you the right to be there” (ibid, p. 437) 

•  That’s the social part of it. It’s not enough to have the “perfect” physical space where you are likely to meet people but where you have enough privacy to chat. That’s what we found with John Weeks in our study of copier rooms. The location and the size of the room mattered but whether you had a “good reason” to be there and stay matter too. Hence, the type of resources you could find in a copier room (not only the copier machine, but also the supplies cabinet, bulletin board, or mail boxes) mattered as it gives you more reason to go. The nature of the copying activity also mattered: you had to be around but it did not require your attention.
• al

I mentioned in an earlier post the dissertation work of Laura Forlano “When Code Meets Place: Collaboration and innovation at WiFi Hotspots” on the use of mobile and wireless technology, and more specifically on the role of users in the innovation and development process. More information can be found in an article she  co-authored in  the Situated Technologies Pamphlet on Situated Advocay by the Architectural League of New York ( http://www.situatedtechnologies.net/?q=node/88). In this article Laura made several comments which are very relevant to the questions at the core of BSWW (all quotes below are from the article “When code meets Code”). 

• She looks at “the emergence of a socio-technical format in which digital networks, information and interfaces are integrated in the physical spaces of our homes, offices, and public or semi-public spaces.” (p. 7) 
• She created an interesting concept: “codescapes to help capture the integration of digital and physical realms, and the sociality, collaboration and innovation that occurs at the seams of these realms” (p.8)
• She refers to the work by Lawrence Lessig’s book, Code (1999) where he compares code and architecture: both regulating and constraining human behavior. Yet, she highlights the difference between the affordances of physical space and virtual space, of architecture and software. She notes that there are “likely to be conflicts in the ways in which digital networks and physical structures regulate social behaviors. For example, I might be able to enter a door, but not access the digital network, or it might be able to access the digital network but not open the door”. (p. 8/9). 
• In a WiFi use survey, she found that the majority of the people (58% in NY) use wireless to get out of their home or office, while others (about 23%) used wireless to fulfill a social need: “to see familiar people or feel like they were part of a community in the places where they use it”. (p. 16/17). 
• She makes a very interesting distinction between the community of wireless networks (online chats, listservs, etc.) and the (local, geographic) communities using these networks (see p. 22/23). 
• Laura also highlights the importance of the context of use: the location of the network you are using influences, shapes your interactions. (see p. 32/33)
• She describes her own experience in building and sharing a WiFi network with her neighbors and how she started interpreting the actions of the users (she does not know) through the speed of the router’s flickers (very slow probably emails, very fast audio, video or large files). She also tells how she feels connected, part of a community, when she sees the number of people connected on her network. (p. 26/27)

Laura’s work highlights the intertwining between the physical and the virtual space, showing how even virtual interactions are always situated, embodied. She also leads us to think in different ways of the affordances of the code and the physical space, in a similar way to which we are exploring the affordances of the virtual space and the physical space.I really like the example of entering the door and accessing the network and I’m wondering: how do we build a door online? It reminds me of studies of the use of media spaces (video networks which connect different spaces) which shows how people recreated “face-to-face behaviors” in these video spaces, such as closing one door, knowing at a door, peeking if the door is half open, etc. Yet, in that context, people built new features so that the technology could support their social practices. In the context of online forums or blogs, it’s about creating discursive practices, rules and norms of behaviors that can “act as a door”. al  al 

Hi, I’m not a game player but I’ve always been amazed by people who can go and take on roles in games (e.g. MUD) like World of Warcraft. Second Life is also an interesting example: how to create a virtual world, recreate one’s identity and a “second life”?I am not an expert but what I find fascinating is that people seem to reproduce what they do in the “real world” in this Second Life environment. Our project with Aileen concerns different types of environment - text only, yet I find it interesting that people seem to recreate similar environments when they are online instead of imagining completely different environments? It would be interesting to do an ethnography of public (or semi-public spaces) in Second Life and see what are the affordances of these spaces that trigger informal interactions?See this article in NY Times from 2 years ago: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/19/technology/19virtual.html?_r=1&em&ex=1161489600&en=128963ee911b8e6c&ei=5087%0A&oref=slogin    Any thoughts? I’d like to hear the experiences of people who go and spend time in these online environments. Thanks! al 

Hi, I like this installation by Natalie Jeremijenko, the “Dangling String”. It’s a long plastic spaghetti attached to a small motor on the ceiling and the motor is connected to an ethernet cable. Depending on the business of the network, the motor vibrates more or less. It’s located in a corner of the hallway and people can hear “in the periphery” how busy the network is.  http://interactionthesis.wordpress.com/2007/02/14/dangling-string/ “Dangling strings” aims to make visible, or better to say audible, the virtuality of the network. Sitting in your office, you can hear how busy the network is, i.e. how many bits of information are sent to, transferred to on the network. This attempt to make the virtual  visible and audible is also at the core of  Hansen and Rubin’s work.  In  ”Listening Post” (presented at the Whitney in 2003) they present on a multitude of little screens the content from Internet chat’s rooms. Sounds and voices are also accompanying the presentation of text.  Hansen and Rubin highlight the “cacophony” of the web but also create for the visitor an experience where the individual is surrounded by the multiple voices going on online. http://www.columbia.edu/cu/museo/6/hansen_and_rubin/index.htm  Discourse is more central in their recent piece, ”Moveable type”, an installation in the lobby of the NY Times focuses on discourse - the discourse of the news produced by the NY Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/25/arts/design/25vide.html  In this interactive installation, Rubin and Hansen present on a multitude of screens the “memory” of the  NY Times as excerpts from articles, letters, blogs, etc. collected from 1851 are displayed on the screen. The material is discourse and this discourse is made visible…”Moveable type” embodies the “organizational memory” of the NY Times and displays it. As for “Dangling Strings”, the aim is also to show the “live” nature as many of the excerpts come from real time comments of readers from around the world. Our project, Building_Space_With_Words, also aims to “make visible” “the virtual” by materializing a virtual space with the maze and by creating “walls of words”. We also aim to make audible as the visitors will be surrounded by a soundtrack composed of sounds from physical and virtual spaces - making us reflect on the “silent and solitary” experience of online interactions. Yet, our purpose is not to show “real time” how much discourse is created and shared (although the discourse projected in the installation are searched “live” from our blog); our project is more “symbolic” as it focuses on the “fabric” of which online interactions are made of - words- and explore the metaphor of the virtual space. We also wonder how language - through the development of discursive practices and language games - can allow us to reenact some of the affordances of physical spaces. Hence, it’s not only about making the virtual visible, audible, but it’s also about exploring the relationships between the material and the virtual.al  

I would like to follow up on Aileen’s post on art and research. I’d like to discuss the possible dialogue between art and social sciences with a specific example. I became aware of the possibility of such a dialogue during my discussions with my artist friend, Claudia Conduto. At that time, we were both in Singapore and she was starting doing installation works, more specifically using chairs (for some pictures, see http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/yourgallery/artist_profile/a/34724.html ).

As she was telling me about her work and her aim to question the functionalities of objects, I could not help thinking of Gibson and the concept of affordances. I told Claudia about affordances and lent her Gibson’s Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. She gave it back to me a few weeks later, very excited about the possibility to theorize in a different way about her work.

More recently, as I was visiting Claudia in Brussels, she told me about some of her work on technical objects and their agency. Immediately I thought of actor-network theory and the work of Bruno Latour, and human and non-human agents. What Claudia was telling me specifically reminded me Bruno Latour’s text on the door opener (http://www.bruno-latour.fr/articles/article/050.html ). Claudia smiled and went in one of her folders and picked up Bruno’s article! 

These two instances are two lovely proofs of how art and social sciences (in a broad sense) can interact. Yet, in these two examples, it was the social sciences discourse offering a theoretical framework to the arts: putting words around the work; aiming to verbalize and theorize the meaning of the art work.

In this current project with Aileen, the approach is reverse: can art as a language provides social sciences a way to embody, materialize ideas from the social sciences’ realm? An attempt in that direction can be seen in the exhibitions organized by Bruno Latour http://www.bruno-latour.fr/expositions/index.html.

Moreover, can we create an environment where one can scaffold her ideas and then reintroduce them in the social sciences’ discourse - i.e. maybe writing an academic article, at least providing new theoretical insights on the relationship between physical and virtual space and their impact on interactions and discursive practices? 

Any thoughts are welcome. 

al