Equal Voices in a Digital World

I’ve been working on an exercise to develop a mission statement for my research.  I think I’m settling on the following.

Helping communities have an equal voice in a digital world.  To accomplish this mission, it is important to:

• inform communities on how emerging technologies and trends are opening up new possibilities for community action;
• enable communities through access to, and education on, appropriate technologies; and
• collaborate with communities, giving them an equal voice in my own research and helping them have an equal voice with others.

As technology becomes increasingly ubiquitous, to fully participate in this digital world it is important to have the literacies needed to harness technology when appropriate, and to judge when technology is a hindrance instead of a help.  But while there is a significant economic and technical hurdle in achieving full digital inclusion for everyone, I think at the core this is a social problem.  Achieving an equal voice requires new understandings regarding the value and indeed necessity of diverse voices in all aspects of our society.

But too often we as researchers do not practice what we preach.  For in research many would argue that what we do is too specialized to engage citizens, or is contaminated through subject involvement.  I take an opposing view.  While it is helpful to regularly take a 10,000 foot view of communities, it is also critical to utilize a scholarship of engagement approach in which citizen scientists participate as equals with academic researchers.  In so doing, it becomes possible to gain unique, deep perspectives to important social issues.

While it is important to inform the community regarding the possibilities of harnessing new technologies, and to also enable them to utilize those technologies effectively, the cycle isn’t complete until there is also meaningful collaboration.  We must practice what we preach lest we live our professional lives as blind men who only percieve the full shape of an elephant through the touch of its trunk alone.

Technology is NOT the focus

I attended an interesting talk today by Dawn Nafus, an anthropologist working at Intel.  She presented on a mixed methods study that explored notebook and ultra-mobile PC use.  As part of the research, she and her colleagues observed that rather than facilitating work to minimize busyness, technology was actually used more often to intentionally add to our activities, filling gaps, expanding and shrinking until interupted.  Users prized the small form factor because the technology more readily defered to external contingencies — it was easier to look over the screen to see what was occuring on TV and to also attend to the activity of family members.

I found two findings particularly interesting.  First, activities using technology often did not tightly integrate with other activities occuring at the same time.  Thus, while various TV programs might pop up onto the screen URL’s to gather additional information, people weren’t surfing to those sites.  They were instead doing unrelated research to fill the voids when the TV broadcast was of minimal interest.

Second, 50% of activity on notebooks and Ultra-mobile PCs were 2-3 minutes in length, with the time on ultra-mobile PCs shorter than on notebooks.  The shortness wasn’t because the screens were smaller and harder to read, but because they were easier to ignore.  The suspicion is that computing is becoming ubiquitous, but in so doing, it was becoming less the point of activities, and more a support to the rest of our lives.  I find that highly comforting in an odd sort of way!

But more than just being a comfort, I think it provides an intriguing suggestion that we need to be developing community technology centers (CTC) differently.  Right now, they are developed with the idea that people are coming to the CTC for the technology.  As such, traditional desktop or tower cases and larger LCD monitors dominate.  Maybe the CTC of the future instead needs to be a place with lots of tables and chairs that can easily be rearranged, and laptops for checkout.  Stop making the technology the point and instead turn the places back to COMMUNITY centers with access to technology to facilitate community work.