digitaldust

Wow. It was over year and a half ago that I committed myself to writing a chapter for this and now it is finally published. As always there is an excitingly random selection of pages available on google book search. I don’t recommend you run out and buy it. At a staggering 1000+ pages it is longer than a Neil Stephenson epic and the £300 price tag is also a little steep.

Handbook of Research on Socio-Technical Design and Social Networking

Press Release for:
Whitworth, B., & DeMoor, A. (Eds.). (2009). Handbook of Research on Socio-Technical Design and Social Networking Systems. Hershey PA: Information Science Reference.

A state-of-the-art summary of knowledge in an evolving, multi-disciplinary field, distinctive in its depth and breadth of scholarship, variety of international authors, and combination of practical and theoretical views.

Socio-technical systems have both social and technical aspects. Examples include Wikipedia, e-mail, chat, text-messages, instant messages, social networks (Facebook), online learning (Moodle), job markets (Monster), blogs, twitter, social bookmarks (Digg), online multi-player games (World of Warcraft), online simulations (Second Life), bit-torrent media sharing, online voting, online news, reputation systems, recommender systems, collaborative writing, and many other forms. The socio-technical evolution has massively changed the Internet as we know it.

This book is a breakthrough. Not just social factors in technology settings, or the effect of technology on society, the Handbook of Socio-Technical Design goes a step further. It asks how social ideas can inspire new technology forms, and how technology can empower new social forms. While common approaches are social or technical, the socio-technical vision is that people and computers are more than people or computers. Social and technical are separate domains with different ideologies, but they must work together for higher performance synergies.

This book is multi-disciplinary. The socio-technical approach is not an easy path, as it needs people with both social and technical knowledge and skills. Yet it is the only way for society and technology to move forward successfully. A society that rejects technology will fall behind. A technology that ignores social values will run rampant. Only their combination can succeed.

This book is timely. The Internet was initially coded as a technical system. Today it is increasingly a social system. E-mail spam is what happens when technical systems ignore social needs – in this case the right to privacy. The socio-technical gap, between what computers do and what society wants, is why some argue we need a new Internet, as this one is “broken” (see www.nytimes.com).
We need to replace current technical designs by socio-technical designs.

This book is important. In the socio-technical vision, social values must enclose technical power. Just as atom bomb technology made us choose world peace over mutually assured destruction (MAD), so social applications ask us to choose social good. The Internet can be for freedom or state control, can benefit millions or cheat them. Unless social values like privacy and democracy are explicit, technology cannot support them online, where “code is law”. Technology advances force us to choose our future, and this book is about making informed choices in the new global information society.

The moose has left the building. Go play Moosehunt.

Moosehunt from Simon Evans on Vimeo.

An interesting quote that I just heard attributed to Arthur C Clarke (in a talk by Sugata Mitra) and something similar crops up in The Underachieving School.

My first thought was NO, technological determinism! But then after thinking about it, the answer is of course YES! Whether it was intended to be or not the idea is actually incredibly liberating. The role of a teacher is to do the things that cannot be replaced by a machine. If a teacher is doing something that can be replaced, then it is good for everyone to have it replaced. If a lecture can be replaced with a video, questions answered by the web or learning facilitated by a VLE then great. In fact if I can get a robot to do my job then I would be very happy.

It has been a year. What started as a bit of a dry spell turned into me choosing a whole year of blog celibacy. I had already slowed down blogging and reading RSS feeds, so I stopped doing it all. All sorts of things had got in the way and it is often better to take a big step back and take a deep breath.

A lot has happened, and now that I write this, I see that a lot of things have happened for the first time. It has been a rather eventful twelve months.

• Finishing my first full year of teaching
• Being published for the first time
• Presenting my first academic paper at a conference
• Organised my first conference
• Starting working with the Pervasive Media Studio
• Finished my teacher training
• Being a parent for the first time. Hello Noah

What is it? MicroDJing? Social mixworking? The love child of Twitter and Last.fm? Whatever it is, it is amazing and addictive.

I would try and say something smart or detailed about it, but Iain has already done that, and much better than I would. For an app that looks very simple it has had a lot of thought put into it, and it works like a well evolved piece of the web coral reef, hooking into last.fm, twitter and myriad of those other micro-blogging corals that are co-cohabiting the reef.

So here is the music that makes me want to shout, let me hear yours. http://blip.fm/invite/digitaldust

Not every tag cloud has a silver lining. The worlds first performance tag cloud will be digitally bodged live next Tuesday (28/08) at the Cube, Bristol’s own indie microplex. It’s time for the Grumpyman.tv night,a miserable mashup between the cube.tv events and the Grumpy Man DJs.

Ed and I will be doing miserable and annoying video surfing, supported by a real world participative tag cloud. It’s Grumpyman 2.0. And if that doesn’t get on your tits then we’ve got more that’s guaranteed to make you morose, tetchy and downright angry.

The rest of the night promises to hold melancholy music videos and angst film whilst we do the sad web weirdness. There’s a bar and music as well as pictures. So come along and drown your sorrows. We will be.

Art is the proper task of life.

Art and nothing but art!

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hai. our kittehz haz cheezburger fame. kthxbai.

While in Spitalfields over the weekend I saw an beautiful retro drafting desk. The kind with wires and pulleys so it can go from flat to vertical and be aligned just right for whatever you’re working on. It got me thinking about what the dominant ergonomic desk paradigm would be for the 21st century. The 20th century has been about desks to write, type and now compute on. Drafting or art desks were rare.

Maybe, just maybe, with the advent of all these multi-touch screens, drafting desks would come back. They are better for working on this kind of interface, neither upright like in the Minority Report or flat out would work for these things in a single user situation.

And the steampunk in me hopes that 21st century drafting desks’ll keep all the pulleys, gears and polished wood too.

It occurred to me as I read the Clay Shirky essay on Situated Software that he was seeing/experiencing the same things as Michael B Johnson said the other night, when talking about writing internal software for Pixar.

We make scalpels not swiss army knives.

Good tools, for the right person, in the right context. They don’t need to do more than they need to. More examples of Why? in design rather than Why Not?