Disclaimer: I read The Social Life of Technology earlier this year. I found it to be a well-argued, thought-provoking book.
Home Alone is filled with perceptions about computer use in society, to the point that it's impossible to distill every valuable insight into one short blog post. Still, two overall themes jump out at me.
The first is that when technology collides with human nature, human nature always wins. It doesn't matter how cool, elegant, functional or worthy the technology is; if it doesn't fit into what people want and are willing to do, it will fail. Brown and Duguid's example of hot-desking at Chiat/Day is filled with examples of how workers found this innovation to be hostile to their working process, and how they fought back. (This section also demonstrates how stubborn and resourceful people can be when their accustomed way of doing things is disrupted by something that they have defined as "no good reason".)
The lesson libraries should take from this is that any successful technology initiative is rooted at its core in a deep understanding of the group(s) that will be using it. As Brown and Duguid say about Alexander Graham Bell's process of "socializing" the telephone, "Though the telephone was a transformative technology, Bell nonetheless worked with the social context of his day, not against it." Libraries should know their patrons and community well before they attempt to implement a new technology (even one that has been successful at other libraries), or they risk wasting time and resources (or, at worst, alienating their public).
The other point that I take from this reading is that it can be hard to perceive computer technology accurately. On one hand, there is hype about anything new and shiny (in the book, hot-desking, but it's pervasive when one considers Web 2.0). On the other hand, the home computer is such a ubiquitous and mundane presence that the "home office" would seem to be a simple thing to create. This idea assumes that the individual and his/her computer are enough, while totally ignoring the business infrastructure (both technological and social) that supports a worker sitting at a computer in a corporation. (I'm currently experiencing this firsthand as I slowly work through self-installing DSL at home!) This combined exoticism/mundaneity just complicates the task of those who are designing computer systems, especially if they are not IT professionals themselves (say, librarians trying to design a system that will work for their patrons). The socialization of the computer is a slow and bumpy process, and one that is far from complete.
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Class blog for Social Software fall 2008 at Rutgers.
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2 comments:
Arrrghhhhh!
I just wrote a long, thoughtful response and lost it because I forgot to do the "word verification" piece! I feel like a piece of spam.
Anyway, to summarize my lost thoughts....
I really liked your quote: "When technology collides with human nature, human nature always wins." It reminds us that new technologies come and go, but people will always be around (hopefully!) and they are what we need to focus most upon.
And I liked how you used your own trials and tribulations over the past couple of weeks with installing your DSL alone at home yourself. (I also feel bad that I wasn't able to help anymore last week other than offering sympathy via IM!) You show pretty much exactly what B&D were getting at: people don't like to be isolated when they're having problems (especially tech ones!) I wonder if the rest of their book will explore how current social software tools can help bridge these isolation gaps?
Hint for the future: if you start getting wrapped up in a good post, select all and copy it. You don't necessarily have to save it as a document, though that is probably safest; having it on the clipboard will usually be good enough. I've been burned by this many times myself!
Working on the DSL really has made the "Home Alone" chapter very relevant to my personal experience right now. As someone whose dream job would be to hole up all by myself and write novels, I certainly romanticize the home office myself (I also wonder whether, in the US at least, it has something to do with the frontier go-it-alone ideal). But there is a lot to be said for being able to walk two cubes down and say, "Dude, can you help me with my Excel spreadsheet? There's something I can't make work right," to the office Excel wizard. In fact, part of my home-based helpdesk these days tends to involve e-mails to friends who also happen to to be tech savvy at things I'm not so good at (in return, they call on me for editorial expertise^).
If there's a theme to this book, it's definitely that human nature beats technology every time, techno hype notwithstanding. The "social" in "social software is probably the best thing it has going for it, in the long run.
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