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| '''Adrian Chan is a researcher specializing in social software and 'relations'.'''
| | See [[Adrian Chan]] |
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| Information provided by the author.
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| =Resources=
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| '''Social software blog''' at
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| http://www.gravity7.com/blog/media/
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| '''Index to writings''' in pdf format, at http://www.gravity7.com/articles_investigations.html
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| '''Index to social software postings''', at http://www.gravity7.com/articles_observations.html
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| =Projects=
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| "My project Venn is:
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| --'''Proximities.''' The matter of technology is far more interesting than the
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| features, functions, and operations technologies are made of. Technologies
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| of communication are, for me, the most interesting frontier of technical
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| progress. Communication is the most profoundly human achievement, and
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| culture, what sets us apart. And yet we know so little of how technologies
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| might transform human relationships, social relations, cultural practices
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| and so on.
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| If you want to know what a communication technology does for your life, turn
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| it off. It's not the technical that's interesting; its the individual and
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| social practices into which the technical becomes embedded. Communication
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| technologies can only be understood in terms of practices: messaging,
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| talking, trading, dating, buying, selling, and so on.
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| I believe technologies of communication fundamentally change our proximity
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| to one another, meaning we now need a sociology of proximity based not on
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| spatial co-presence but on presence negotiation (access to people, obtaining
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| their attention, whether a person is there, and there for us)
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| Mediated proximity, proximity that is co-produced by these
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| technologies of presence, produces a continuity in spite of our physical
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| separation from on another. This continuity is a temporality. Proximity in the age of its
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| technical production is not spatial, but temporal. Communication
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| technologies connect us, spanning time and weaving a social fabric whose
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| consistency obtains from us "being there" for each other in time, not space.
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| The organization of time is well known to sociologists as routines,
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| "open states of talk", and durations (the persistence of relations, norms,
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| events, and communication over time).
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|
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| As individuals, we maintain our presence and proximity when we are
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| not in the same place through communication. Not through images, or
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| appearance, but by maintaining communication. TIME is the least understood
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| dimension of any connective technology
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| What does all this mean? What can we know and understand? Are there
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| implications for society? Do our relationships change? Are we losing trust?
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| The questions driving an examination of communication technologies are
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| serious. But it is not our purpose to answer them here. Rather, we want to
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| find out what happens when we use these technologies. When we turn to our
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| phones, when we log on, text and email. We can identify some principal
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| themes:
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| --'''Interaction dynamics.''' What happens when 2 or more people use a technology
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| together? We get more than user-computer interaction; we get
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| user-computer-user interaction.
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| Issues of communication (information capture, archiving, access,
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| search, persistence, privacy, public/private).
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| Issues of interaction (gestural and paralinguistic handling,
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| ambiguity, intimacies, timing, and of course self-presentation
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| --'''Social systems.''' Social software sites, and now Web 2.0, can be categorized
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| loosely as social systems. Culture, online community, groups, social
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| networks, P2P phenomena--these and more are attributes of social systems. To
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| understand them we have to think beyond the individual user experience and
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| along lines of social practices instead. All of these involve: action
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| coordination; in/formal communication; transactions; trust; boundaries;
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| rhythms; speech as text. For this I use anthropology and sociology, mostly
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| French, German, and British. Some ethno-methodology (as made famous by Xerox
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| PARC). I'm big on applying Niklas Luhmann's systems theory here. Also Erving
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| Goffman, Anthony Giddens, and Jurgen Habermas. A bit of Foucault and
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| Bourdieu. Local thinkers like Kevin Kelly and Nicholas Negroponte. Some SNA
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| (social network analysis) of course, though I find that its topological
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| orientation describes portrays traces of relations, not their nature, and
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| certainly not the experience of those having them.
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| --'''Talk systems.''' I profoundly believe that much of mediated communication and
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| interaction must be understood as "talk." It's linguistically-mediated
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| exchange. As such, I believe it is useful to consider Habermas' three truth
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| claims: facticity, sincerity, and normative rightfulness. How are each of
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| these tested when face to face interaction is displaced by a technical
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| medium? We need to understand the stretch of talk, span of activity, and
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| sequencing and seriality of activity in a mediated talk. Here I separate
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| communication tools and interaction tools, the former being about
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| capturing/archiving/searching/presenting contributions; the latter being
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| about handling meanings, implications, emotional expression, timing,
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| context, theme, and interaction dynamics of interactions. Communication tool
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| is a tribe discussion. Private message is an interaction tool.
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| --Socially structured content. This is a new project, inspired by Marc
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| Canter's structured blogging structured data formats. If Web 2.0 is going to
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| be useful in the social sense, we need a framework of content types, their
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| presentation modules, their sort by, filter by, link to organization. What
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| happens when a site displays "Who's online now?" In contrast with other
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| people content, such as "featured members," "most connected members"
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| "friends of friends," and so on. It's important to distinguish contributors
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| and contributions. Some Web 2.0 developments provide access to and flesh out
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| the contributor, or person. Others, their contributions. We take an interest
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| in people as well as in information, and each can provide a gateway to the
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| tother. So if Web 2.0 is going to be more social, how can it best engage
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| users in people and what they say. Designers should anticipate the phenomena
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| they help to build. Architects understand light, space, mass, and volume. We
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| need to do the same. All of this is based on idea that the designer can only
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| influence participation, using first order design to steer second order
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| effects. But any information onscreen informs what happens as populations
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| grow, over time. In a word, we all know what would happen if LinkedIn were
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| to allow member pictures.s
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| --We use our communication technologies alone. Our experience surfing the
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| web is still an immediate experience of a device. It only makes sense, then,
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| that we project the "other" (person) into this "world." So I have started a
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| project that I would like to be an A-Z of psychological experiences and
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| transformations. Using the DSM (psychiatric diagnostic and statistical
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| manual) and my own take on psychology, which is biased towards the British
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| School of Object Relations, Transactional Analysis, and group dynamics, I'm
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| interested in how SSNs, IM, chat, video chat, discussions, blogs, email,
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| because they are asynchronous or near-synchronous, screen back our
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| identities, defer confirmations and acknowledgments, permit the presence of
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| "unratified participants" (e.g. lurkers), disrupt episodic talk, disturb
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| turn-taking rules of conversation, undermine or inflate authority and
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| position, etc. Do narcissists love SSN's for a reason?"
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| [[Category:Individuals]]
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| [[Category:Research]]
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