The politics of design and use of digital media and ICTs

Completed

Project leaders: Tone Bratteteig and Sara Kalantari

Digital electronic technologies are part of young people’s everyday life. In this project we focus particularly on the effects of digital technologies on society, at the individual, organizational and societal level. We are particularly interested in how the technologies influence how the young people see their capacity to act and participate in the community they (want to) identify with.

Designing digital media

From an informatics basis, digital media are interesting because they are designed by both informatics people and users – but in very different ways. Informatics people design and build technical systems: they design the structures that the data will have to fit in, and they design the processes that transform the data. In social media, users generate the content within the structures set up by the informatics people. The value of a social medium is a combination of its technical characteristics and its content. Some new media allow more user customization than others, and we can compare the digital systems with buildings that are modified and customized to the inhabitants (see Brand 1995). Users design-after-design.

It becomes less clear when design ends and use starts? Users can influence the design before it is finished – like when they select the color of a car or put together a new kitchen. When the user-generated content is what creates value (e.g. web news) use is intertwined with design in a new way. How do we understand these weaving together of form and content? Some new services (Google, Amazon, net news) include social behavior in their technical solutions: people’s googling practices affect the google search content by influencing the page rank of web pages (Orlikowski 2007).

Designing for tinkering and design-after-design is very difficult because the design result will not be a finished artifact, a piece of work. Designing an artifact meant to be open to other meanings and functions than the designers' own interpretations requires an even deeper understanding of use and design.

These questions will be discussed theoretically and empirically.

References:

Brand, S. (1995) How buildings learn. Penguin Books, New York
Lambert, J. (2002). Digital storytelling: Capturing lives, creating community. Berkeley, CA: Digital Diner.

Orlikowski. W.J. (2007) Sociomaterial Practices: Exploring Technology ay Work. Organization Studies, vol. 28. No. 9. 1435-1448.

Involuntary political behavior

This study addresses how digital electronic technologies (like the Internet and mobile phones) are handled in an authoritarian regime aiming to maintain power and political stability. The project particularly addresses the non-activist users: the users without a political agenda, who constantly find themselves in a position countering or challenging the government imposed restrictions on access to and expression of information, not because they intend to have a political gain, but rather due to a desire (or need) to merely keep in touch with friends and be part of the social world of the cyberspace. By installing and using a proxy to simply be able to get on Facebook or YouTube, these users in effect bypass government controlled Internet filters on a daily basis.

The aim of this project is to further investigate the perceptions of these users around technologies of control and surveillance and to grasp an understanding of their intentions in bypassing ICT regulations. We are specifically interested in exploring trends of a collective identity formation and patterns of identity expression among such users as related to their unintended but regular acts of 'delinquency', or what we prefer to call "involuntary political behavior".

We will study how the use of ICTs has developed over a two year time period, based on interviews with non-political ICT users. For the self-representation three specific cases of Internet use stands out: an artist's Facebook profile, a software entrepreneur's popular music video on YouTube, and a graffiti artist's blog. Through a combination of document analysis of these sites and interviewing these subjects, we wish to address the following questions:

• How do these users perceive technological affordances of the Internet (including limitations such as censorship and surveillance)?


• How and why do they negotiate use and an online presence in the face of such technological limitations?


• What could be some of the consequences of using these technologies for self-expression?

• Are the users aware of such potential consequences and do they take any measures to secure anonymity?

Publications

Bratteteig, T. (2008) 'Does it matter that it's digital?' In K. Lundby (Ed.) Digital Storytelling, Mediatized Stories: Self-representations in New Media. New York: Peter Lang.

Wagner, I; Bratteteig, T. & Stuedahl, D. (Eds) (2010)  Exploring Digital Design. London: Springer Verlag CSCW Series

Bratteteig, T. (2010) ‘A Matter of Digital Materiality.' In Wagner, I, Bratteteig, T. & Stuedahl, D. (Eds): Exploring Digital Design. London: Springer Verlag CSCW Series.

Presentations

Bratteteig, T (2010) IKT som fortellerverktøy.Presentation at PUBLIC SEMINAR with presentation of research results from the Mediatized Stories project. Forskningsparken, Oslo, 14 April 2010.

Kalantari, S. (2007): 'ICT use in an Authoritarian Regime: A Curse or a Blessing?' Poster at the closing conference of the Competence and Media Convergence (CMC) research programme at the University of Oslo, November 2007.

Bratteteig, T (2006): 'Inventing use: on complexities of design-use relationships', paper to the DREAM conference on 'Informal Learning and Digital Media: Constructions, Contexts, Consequences', University of Southern Denmark, 21-23 September 2006.

Published Oct. 12, 2010 12:34 PM - Last modified Nov. 22, 2011 3:53 PM