Response to the readings - Smith, Dourish, Hallnas and Redstrom

59 W 12th Street . October 10, 2007 . 9:37 pm .

Technology is becoming not just our connection to the world but the world as we know it. Marshall McLuhan wrote in 1970's Culture is Our Business that "fish don't know water exists till beached" meaning that, in other words, media effects and new environments are as imperceptible as water is to a fish.

Indeed, as I read through Dourish's What we talk about when we talk about context I couldn't stop thinking, not about fish necessarily, but about that chicken and egg paradox we've all discussed at least once in our lives.

We're already wrapped around ubiquitous computing as it is and it appears that its presence is a) in itself and b) almost beyond us. There are unending, invisible and virtually omnipresent networks all around us already - from economic markets to transnational cellular wirings.

Contexts are unstable precisely because they're so dynamic. Not only do they respond to the needs of those within them (McLuhan's fish) but they too mold accordingly. Context is occasioned by activity and activity is at the same time induced by context. This represents the so-called embodied interaction mentioned by the authors.

So...

Chicken or egg?
Use or presence?

Following this same chain of thought, Experiences with the Alternate Reality Kit points out that the ones who give meaning and enhance the content of new technologies are just so the users and not the designers. They do it literally by following a physical metaphor, or magically, by acquiring the knowledge to do so otherwise.

The expression of computational artifacts, as Hallnas and Redstrom would argue in their own text, creates identities that nowadays construct our lifeworlds. Lifeworld is actually a great word to use here. Luckily enough though, human-computer correspondence still goes both ways.

T

PS: And for those of you interested in more about ARK.