From MediaFranca

Contents 1 Introduction 2 Part 1 2.1 Perceiving Information, the Infocloud 2.2 Irrelevancy of the Near: Disembodyment and Death of Distance 2.3 Designing for Motivation 3 Part 2 3.1 The Network of Artifacts: the New Social Record 3.2 Irrelevancy of the Other: Networked forms of Communication 3.2.1 Radical Individualism 3.3 Designing for Opportunities 4 Part 3 4.1 The Public Forum: the Promise of Democracy 4.2 Irrelevancy of Actions: Feeling Powerless 4.3 Designing for Ability 5 Conclusions 5.1 Further Questions

Introduction

During my formation as a graphic designer, I had the privilege to experience the outbreak of the digital medium as a new communication paradigm. Its emergence produced deep changes in my education at many different levels. Students started formulating new questions about the reach and scope of design while struggling to understand the implications for information in this new realm. We also had to change the way in which we understood our design assets, besides learning the new means of production demanded by the dissemination of personal computing in the design industry. But one of the most important challenges we experienced as designers was the fact that we had to redefine the meaning of publishing as we raised our awareness of the increasing interconnectedness and visibility of the new medium, namely the Web.

In graphic design (or communication design), the concern for producing meaningful, rhythmic and consistent sequential continuities was displaced into a different set of considerations by the emergence of hypertext. Hypertextual structures required a different design approach, much more focused in the value of the discreet communication units and their potential ability to reassemble in different possible ways, conforming every time a different sequential result determined by the interaction of the reader. Our mental model of a publication shifted from the stream or musical score metaphor —appropriate for print medium— into a topological space of semantic connections, a space of arrows and boxes; we designers started organizing content through hierarchical taxonomies, we had to implement site maps to help us design the navigation structure for our websites. These two mental models were wildly different one from the other. Suddenly, the reader was provided and empowered with a whole new different aura, he could articulate his own sequence every time, he was the author of his own reading and digital design supported and celebrated this new idea. Our former focus in the poetics of form had to consider the new complexity of reaching the reader —now the user— from a stronger rhetorical perspective, embracing a user–centered design approach. Preliminary design research had to shape the inquiry around the needs, cognitive skills and embedded behaviors of the end user. Furthermore, the act of the user shaped and determined the final form.

As years passed, web services became more robust and were primarily concerned about fulfilling the expectations new users had for the Internet. New information structures allowed specific reader communities to organize their own content in more sophisticated collaborative systems. People where now able to share their personal organizational criteria. Former centrally–determined taxonomies where now re–implemented as folksonomies. We witnessed the birth of semantic architectures entirely determined by the people who used the system . The act of reading, formerly understood as a personal consumptive activity, was now transformed into a productive and shared enterprise. Readers, by the mere act making sense out of their selected resources, could modify their shared information landscape. By these means, Internet services allowed the raise of a new voice, the voice of its own community of use. The resulting interaction from these dynamics was the natural swarming of people into communities that share same vocabularies, interests and practices.

Today, even more services are available to us. At a steady rate, digital media is offering new forms of participation, collaboration and new ways of establishing social relationships. In the near future, network computing will be fully mobile and embedded; it will be everywhere, and its ubiquity will reduce all distance between people and their information sources. All of this is accompanied by the current trend of empowering people even more by assigning them more protagonist roles in the shaping of information. The former communication model used by mainstream media of ‘one to many’ is shifting towards a new ‘many to many’. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are continuously pushing towards a more connected networked society.

Nonetheless, we must distinguish between enhanced connectivity and enhanced collectivity. Merely because digital media is making people more connected does not mean it is increasing the degree of their social engagement. According to Robert Putnam [2000], there is evidence of declining civic and social participation in modern society, which has become less cohesive. He argues that intertwined with this declining civic involvement there’s a decline in collective and social activities, from family dinners to participating in clubs. Symptomatically, nowadays young people feel less inclined than their elders to engage as citizens in the rituals of voting and following news about world events and public affairs, people feel less commitment for contributing in their communities and engage in more consumptive attitudes for self-satisfaction. As a whole, society appears increasingly depressed, where most indicators of ill-being, such as suicides, psychic disorders, divorce, loneliness and the like, are widespread and increasing [Hunout, 2003]. The current paradox consists that while western societies are getting more economically and technologically prosperous, social capital keeps declining.

On the other hand, we have extreme sharing networks, where people give away information, expertise, and advice without monetary compensation. People submit documents, code, music, images and video files in settings that allow for such contributions . Still, the openness of virtual space reinforces narrow group identities as archipelagos of disconnected islands [Terranova, 2004]. This extreme form of social filtering fosters micro–territories of interest–based communities. The world seems to be dividing between a enthusiastic and interconnected minority and a nihilistic, more passive and manipulated, mass of TV consumers. Can Design help transform increased connectivity of social networks into increased socialization, civic participation, and a greater sense of individual and collective agency? Can we take advantage of the connective and associative power of communication technologies and inject it into social communities? These are the questions I pursue in this paper. To anticipate my argument, I will answer that design CAN perform these transformative functions on the majority of users of communication technologies today. However, to do so, the design community must itself have consciousness in the complexity of designing social interactions by understanding the potential that is already embedded in the ICTs as well as the integrative and ethical norms that must be applied if new media is to reach its full potential as a positive social force.

The present paper is structured in three consecutive parts:

/* I’ll be able to write this part when I finish the main parts*/ The first part analyses the nature of the Web as a unifying medium that has distorted our perception of distance and physicality, by making our immediate surroundings more irrelevant to us. Here I’ll argue that different design strategies are needed for taking advantage of ICTs in order to reconnect us with our environments.

The second part describes two different modes of networked communication. In this part, I’ll analyze which interaction schemes have been more successful that others and what dynamics are more likely to transcend the digital and engage people with their surrounding communities. The third part will analyze what are the current barriers that are keeping people from participating and how we see the consequence of our action. Here I’ll describe design strategies for conversational environments where people have the political power of reshaping their environments. 834668672224155519236186

Part 1

Perceiving Information, the Infocloud

Interfacing with a computer several hours a day has become very common to many people. Intense interaction takes place in front of the computer screen; furthermore, the screen has become a very important part of our lives. There we work, we buy our goods, we get informed, we communicate with others and we can even have fun and procrastinate. Our cultural framework has adapted to the information milieu provided through our networked screen. On our daily routines, we are exposed to an enormous amount of information that varies in depth, quality and veracity. Our perceived informational space is shaped as a fuzzy and evolving information cloud, as defined by Thomas Vander Wal [2005]. This infocloud operates as a framework for priorizing, filtering, managing and sharing information with others. It consists of what we organize, retain and would like to keep and access across devices, across contexts and across life.

Dean Barnlund [1979] argued that we, human beings have a basic necessity for meaning, and from this need, we develop a personal and subjective structure of categories and symbols that we overlay to the world, as a way of overcoming the rawness and meaninglessness of the world we live in. He called this cognitive survival kit our assumptive world different pieces of software, system preferences and different kinds of subscriptions . Our individuality of point of view is aided —and somehow augmented— by the reach of this self-constructed tool. Our daily interfaces provide us with a personalized framing for monitoring what we consider to be relevant in the world through data-mining and filtering services . We see trough our particular languages and through our particular metaphors for representation; the resulting knowledge is embed¬ded not only in documents or repositories we gather, but also in our personal organizational routines, processes, and frameworks that we acquire by interacting with the system. In that way, the system also learns from us.

Irrelevancy of the Near: Disembodyment and Death of Distance

Interfacing with a computer several hours a day has become very common to many people. Intense interaction takes place in front of the computer screen; furthermore, the screen has become a very important part of our lives. There we work, we buy our goods, we get informed, we communicate with others and we can even have fun and procrastinate. Our cultural framework has adapted to the information milieu provided through our networked screen. On our daily routines, we are exposed to an enormous amount of information that varies in depth, quality and veracity. Our perceived informational space is shaped as a fuzzy and evolving information cloud, as defined by Thomas Vander Wal [2005]. This infocloud operates as a framework for priorizing, filtering, managing and sharing information with others. It consists of what we organize, retain and would like to keep and access across devices, across contexts and across life.

Dean Barnlund [1979] argued that we, human beings have a basic necessity for meaning, and from this need, we develop a personal and subjective structure of categories and symbols that we overlay to the world, as a way of overcoming the rawness and meaninglessness of the world we live in. He called this cognitive survival kit our assumptive world different pieces of software, system preferences and different kinds of subscriptions . Our individuality of point of view is aided —and somehow augmented— by the reach of this self-constructed tool. Our daily interfaces provide us with a personalized framing for monitoring what we consider to be relevant in the world through data-mining and filtering services . We see trough our particular languages and through our particular metaphors for representation; the resulting knowledge is embed¬ded not only in documents or repositories we gather, but also in our personal organizational routines, processes, and frameworks that we acquire by interacting with the system. In that way, the system also learns from us.

This information-centered perception of the world has deep consequences in how we understand and assign meaning to space and distance. It is commonly said that modern communication technologies have supposedly brought the death of distance. While this might be true in the context of synchronous communication technologies and ubiquitous Internet, it may be slightly more complex when we think in the distance between people and knowledge. Since we have a unique interface for engaging with people, knowledge repositories and media in general, we have overlaid and confused physical distance with epistemological distance. This different kind of distance refers to how “knowable” something is in relation to our infocloud. Epistemological nearness is conformed by those artifacts that can be reached easily through our personal information network defined by our newsfeeds, trusted blogs, subscribed tags, social network, etc. Epistemological nearness is represented by those artifacts that we are familiar with and we’ve been conditioned to understand well. On the other hand, objects that are epistemologically far are those foreign and completely irrelevant to us.

Ulises Mejías [2005] argues that modern ICTs have transposed the degrees of relevancy between the near and the far. Things that are epistemologically far can be physically right next to us. Similarly, things that are physically far can be epistemologically near, and appear relevant. In other words, ICTs have brought the death of distance of the physically far by making our immediate surroundings more irrelevant to us.

This argument elucidates in part why enhanced ICTs may have a negative impact in the promotion of physical communities, such as strengthening the relationships between friends, neighbors, relatives or workmates. The Internet may be keeping people from engaging in true communities because online interactions are inherently poorer than face-to-face —or even phone— interactions. Online ties may be less capable than off line ties to cultivate rich friendships, provide intangible resources such as emotional support, and provide tangible material aid. In this sense, although ICTs support strong existing relationships they fail to foster new connections based on physical proximity.

Disembodiment of interaction in the digital space is pushing towards a divorce between the digital and the physical. In a normal day, we surf the web searching for relevant information, send emails to colleagues and relatives, use IM to reach peers and even publish content in our blog. The anxiety derived from this intense interaction may not be determined by the large quantities of information and data we need to process but might be caused by the missing connection between physical and online experiences. What this at stake, then, is our ability to turn the information we cope with in the digital realm into something that we can apply meaningfully in our regular interaction with our physical surroundings. Even further, we could portray this watershed as an ontological disintegration between physical and digital. Our physical interactions don’t have any repercussion in the digital realm and vice versa. What we do online, tends to stay online: actions begin, unfold and conclude entirely divorced from physicality. Also, the lack of physical awareness of the Web diminishes the heterogeneity of our local settings, while homogeneous disembodiment prevails as a conventional stance in our networked lives.

Designing for Motivation

The power of the observer lies in the creation of consistent personalized context, in the way in which he models the process of acquiring information. This process is of symmetrical importance with the way in which information is produced afterwards: in this sense we could say the impression shapes expression. What I described earlier as our infocloud resides in the system’s plasticity for generating a highly personalized framework for our perceptions about our surrounding reality. Why? Because the evolving context generated by our infocloud is what finally shapes the world in front of us and determines how the get meaning out of it. Early cartographers didn’t invent maps. Instead, what they did invent was the ‘flying point of view’ and the technique associated with inferring how the world would appear from such a celestial standpoint. In this sense, the desire to witness the wholeness of the world removed the spectator from his body and placed him in the omnipresent ether.

Modern visualization techniques follow this idea of disembodiment. There are multiple web services where we can visualize our favorite concepts and how they relate, visualize the connections between our Flickr contacts, navigate through our record collection or even visualize the whole web as a graph representation. All the artifacts from the web cam be reduced to nodes and all other metadata can be translated into a graphical attribute. But what also needs to be considered is that our infoclouds are in fact a gateway for understanding our personal context and are potentially subject of visualization as well since they exist as formal digital constructs. What I’m trying to argue here is that our infoclouds —even if they contain private information we don’t want to share with others— are probably the best communicable artifact from which we could leverage deeper empathy for stronger relationships. Interpretation of communication can be illuminated by the context of the other’s point of view because we can experience what is influencing the other.

/* this idea needs to be developed */ The physical place is no longer relevant in the context of ubiquitous computing since what we are experiencing now is person-to-person communication instead of place-to-place. Wellman [2001] defines this social model the networked individualism, were people have become the portal.

Undoubtedly face-to-face communication is the richest possible interaction among human beings: its situated in a dynamic environment that constantly generates the context necessary for understanding if we are joking, being emotive or sarcastic. On the other hand, the Internet’s lack of communicative richness can foster contact with more diverse others, but the lack of physical cues makes it difficult to find out if other online community are similar to us. Asynchronous communication gives participants more control over timing and content of their self-disclosures. This allows special relationships based on shared interests rather than being distracted from social differences or status.

Part 2

The Network of Artifacts: the New Social Record

The proliferation of information and communication technologies has created an ever–expanding space of interconnected resources that are quickly absorbing and converting older means of communication into the digital standard. Practically every physical medium of communication has developed its digital equivalent. People are enthusiastically adopting them by incorporating new digital products or services into their lives. But beyond media, human interactions in general have found a satisfying correspondence in the digital realm; from banking to vacation planning, from political activism to gossip, from e-commerce to e-learning; every single interaction that takes place in the Web is apparently fulfilling the need that physical interaction addressed earlier.

The Internet was conceived (and has evolved) as a network of networks, a topological formation of interrelated protocols that have survived scalability and changes of hardware over time, but its core principles have remained the same. These basic principles are characterized by a tendency towards supporting differentiation of artifacts (formats) as well as a divergence of purposes, raising the problem of standardization and striving for the production of a common space that is ready to absorb and articulate media resources as well as the operations we can do through and over them. In this sense, the Internet is more than a medium among many but a kind of global meta-structure that can support global communication in a unified frame. In this sense, we can talk about the convergence of technologies in a paradigm that is based on flexibility, reconfigurability, reversibility and fluidity. Nonetheless, not everything in this realm is having a positive impact in our collective agency.

Irrelevancy of the Other: Networked forms of Communication

From the design perspective, we need to determine whether our online experiences can be evaluated as having a positive or negative impact on our lives as members of specific communities, understanding and valuing the continuity of action between the physical and the digital.

As described in Part I, our personal informational construct (namely, our infocloud) provides the access points necessary for establishing communication and for using our digital resources: contacts, bookmarks, newsfeeds, calendars, blogs, besides providing us of possibilities for discovering new things as well. This part will describe how our communication is mediated and what attitudes emerge from networked interaction.

Things are made more or less relevant to us, epistemologically near or far, through the way in which we engage in communication with them. In this sense, we can distinguish two general modes of networked communication: communication with and communication about.

Communication with takes place in the form of a dialogue, where we recognize the counterpart as we make it relevant to the course of communication by engaging it in the discourse. On the other hand, communication about takes place in the form of a monologue where the main focus is the mediating artifact rather than it’s creator, any other possible counterpart will be merged as subject of the communicative act and will remain secondary. To make this distinction clear, let me pick two examples from the Web:
Wikipedia primarily takes place as a form of communication about because the contributors of a specific article don’t address each other in direct conversation in order to elucidate which would be the best for the article at stake but instead, place and overlap each other’s contributions in a such a way that they are constantly mediated by the construct itself. The article at stake operates as a boundary object for consensual agreement. The main focus of the conversation is not determined by the emerging relationship of it’s contributors but by the quality and accuracy of the resulting article. Communication with, on the other hand, can take place in settings such as blogs. While the starting point is clearly still about something, the conversation quickly unfolds from the subject presented by the blog post into a public discussion were the participating voices recognize each other, were readers and authors merge as a dynamic and evolving community and where personal points of view are addressed and commented.

According to Barry Wellman [2001], the Internet engages people primarily in asocial activities that follow the about mode of communication, which are mainly focused in satisfying individual needs. Although online communities can be very specific, like rare martial art groups, comic fans or cancer survivors, their ties are socially weak as they interact simultaneously with many other interest groups with no explicit geographic connection. In concrete terms their social agency is not likely to transcend their narrow group. This is what Wellman defines as ‘networked individualism’. Extensive involvement with the Internet apparently exposes participants to scattered situations that weaken their sense of community because interacting with a range of different groups make people feel more matchless.

On the other hand, when people use the Internet to communicate and coordinate with friends, relatives, and organizations, —near or far— then its used as a tool for building and maintaining social capital. Communication with, turns into a more logistical and strategic activity that tend to project further consequences. If we can project these consequences into the real world, we can re-inject relevancy to our immediate surroundings. At this time of declining social participation, the Internet can provide people already involved in online communities with more efficient tools for increasing their participation.

As the Internet is extremely self-referential, it’s intertextuality is tightly woven among all the existing documents, resources and repositories. People come and go in the flow of a particular dialogue, and in this way, their individual and subjective motivations are superfluous to the communicative dynamic that remains consistent along time. This communicative dynamic privileges content over people, therefore, communication about prevails as the normalized behavior. The protagonist is the shared record instead of individual conversations. It’s more relevant to keep a rich and open social record than to emphasize individual connections. Nowadays, space of the screen is conceived primarily as a viewer of content than as a gateway for human connection.

Radical Individualism

The lack of feeling of belonging to a community has been supported (if not celebrated) as one of the contemporary values. These values encourage people to think that they can find happiness and self accomplishment without the community:

• seek your own bliss
• do your own thing
• challenge authority
• shun conformity
• don't force your values on others
• assert your personal rights
• be self-sufficient
• expect others likewise to believe in themselves and to make it on their own

Designing for Opportunities

Openness of the Web can be read as an extremely positive and essential value because it allows the improvement of the democratic process by removing ossified and centralized structures, cutting out the middleman, and rejuvenating the architecture of participation by providing public channels for expression. Although openness is not an end by itself, it pursues the creation of a collective and democratic record that will potentially serve a tactical and political interest in situations in which official memory may not be sufficient [Braman, 2006]. In this way, essential cultural memories and community identity is protected from being manipulated or erased. With this at stake, commitment for collaboration in the creation of the shared record emerge naturally, although not massively.

I must emphasize that the construction of this public record is accomplished by the flow of mediated conversations. The nature of this flow will determine the manner in which the conversation evolves. This means that the way the system was initially designed will condition it’s future evolution and will restrict in a way the openness of the interactions (the system mandates its own rules).

Social systems are by definition open-ended, ill-structured and internally complex. They live in the dynamics of their continuous flow of interactions; they have a life of their own. Any snapshot we take from them won’t grasp the complexity of it’s internal struggles and invisible dominating forces. Therefore, consequences are difficult to anticipate, if not impossible. It is clear that when designing a system, we can’t anticipate all the possible uses people will make from it. It has been recognized and demonstrated that the problems of ill-defined disciplines, such as Design, need to develop in a dialectic manner of trial and error in several iterations and in close connection with the community of use in order to meet the planned with the real. An ethical strategy would be to assure ongoing modifications as problems appear.

When we design a specific system, for example a CMS or a blogging platform, we are fixing the system’s affordances into a small, manageable number of features. Along time and through repeated use, the system will produce a normalized behavior due to the finitude it’s possibilities. By normalized behavior I mean that, over time, people will realize how to get the most beneficial outcome. Initial experimental behavior will be replaced by more efficient procedures. People become players of a game, where “gaming the system” provokes undesired behaviors that may conduce to distorted results (forms of spam mail, for taking advantage of the existing reward systems, such as Google ads with fake clicks, spam blogs, fake posts, etc).

Let's take the blogosphere as an exemplary medium for social conversation that has been provided with a simple set of rules. Here, the relationship between bloggers and blog posts is modulated by the affordances that the medium carries from its initial design; its conception as an interactive communication platform with a specific set of rules and possibilities will condition a resultant "normalized behavior" of bloggers. This behavior is the product of the mutual adjustment between the user and his environment in the form of continuous feedback. With this I mean that the continuous circularity between user action and system feedback will amplify the initial conditions up to a stable normalized “code of action” . Some of these adjustments convey the adoption of beneficial dispositions among users, but others deserve a more critical approach.

Since blog posts are discrete units in a intertextual and connected network of nodes, the development of these networks dictates that some of the older nodes will be more important that the newer ones and the most cited will be the most popular ones. Contrary to what is believed, the blogosphere is not very flat or democratic, on the contrary, it holds dramatic differences of popularity —therefore, visibility— between the established and influential and the emerging and unknown ones. The way a new blogger gains visibility is by being recognized by more established bloggers that would link him back, in the same way an irrigation system works. So, we can understand a deep sense of rankism that tends to autoregulate and distort the blogosphere with its own and self-referential structure . Obeying this tyranny for popularity, bloggers try to gain attention by writing on specific topics that are considered to be popular, i.e. technology is the premier topic that gets people's attention. If the blogger discusses the latest technology, he can get more attention points. This may lead to a self-censorship practices that would privilege certain topics among others.

This quest for visibility in the economy of attention is bounded by the idea of being observed and responded by an audience. The permanent feeling of being observed —by a real or potential audience— clearly modifies the way the blogger behaves because he ends up being his own observer and contemplating his own actions. What is especially significant in this medium is that computers are part of that audience and they have the power of repositioning them along the ranking. This leads to a special use of language that need to fit both humans and machines; humans who read and interpret natural language and computers that parse the code of our post . Of course, writing for machines is a way of gaming the system, of tricking the indexing algorithms in our favor.

Designing for structural malleability that can serve the construction of an ongoing process that can modify itself without the intervention of the designer but from the beginning allowing users modify their environments. Instead of actions that emerge from specific conditions (people acting according to their environment) we can plan for actions that can modify the environment (empowering people’s agency to modify their environment). For example, Croquet , a prototype OS, empowers people with the ability to modify it as people use it, through the process of interacting with it. People are not consumers of a given structure system but can modify it (free software movement) so the concept of consumer is switched to co-creator in a convivial environment. The anticipatory approach of ‘design as planning’ moves to a different strategy of production and engagement with the community of use; it recognizes it’s limitations and leaves the door open for further modifications. The design product is left open.

Complex social networks have always existed, but recent technological developments have afforded their emergence as a dominant form of social organization. Just as computer networks link machines, social networks link people. When computer-mediated communication networks link people, institutions and knowledge, they are become computer-supported social networks. Often computer networks and social networks work in coordination, with computer networks linking people in social networks, and with people bringing their offline situations to bear when they use computer networks to communicate.

Households and worksites became important centers for networking; neighborhoods became less important. This shift has been afforded both by social changes – such as liberalized divorce laws – and technological changes– such as the proliferation of expressways and affordable air transportation.

When Claude Shannon developed the mathematical theory of information, he borrowed the idea of entropy from Boltzmann theory of thermodynamics. The idea of entropy and communication is difficult to grasp given the nature of the numbers involved in the equation. What I consider to be the most distinctive characteristic of digital media the fact that it supports a dialectic relationship among its users. That is to say that we can envision this medium as the continuous flow of conversations between individuals, where everyone can potentially be aware of what any other member is communicating and can reflect upon the given argument with an equivalent expression.

Part 3

The Public Forum: the Promise of Democracy

Alexander Galloway [16] argues that Internet protocols are architectures of control - ones that have, from the very beginning, been implicated in various power struggles between military, government, university, industry and citizen interests. Closer to the topics at hand, we can acknowledge how the NAVSTAR Global Positioning System (GPS) is inextricably connected to military complexes and its increasing commercial ubiquity — including availability to locative media practitioners - can be understood as part of the broader 'civilianization' of technology. At the same time, access to maps and cartographic data is not universal and GPS use is constrained by technological, political and even commercial 'protocols'.

Irrelevancy of Actions: Feeling Powerless

Designing for Ability

Let’s think of the Internet as a tool. If we think that it has the power to enrich or corrupt our lives is because we are thinking in specific uses we make of the tool but not about the tool itself. Deterministic thinking about technology (or tools) leads to the belief that the tool itself has the power to change our lives but forget the open opportunities for human agency in the appropriation that can result in unexpected uses, finding new affordances of the given tools.

Ivan Illich defines conviviality as the opposite of industrial production; the “creative and autonomous intercourse among persons and by persons with their environment”. A concept he extends to technology, stating that the bicycle is the high point of convivial technology. Ivan Illich [] defines convivial tools as those tools that give autonomy to the user in a way that won’t make him dependant of it over time, tools that allow people to administrate their own energy and that allow people to adapt them into their own needs. But tools can also be made overefficient in quite a different way. They can upset the relationship between what people need to do by themselves and what they need to obtain ready-made. In this second dimension overefficient production results in radical monopoly.

By radical monopoly I mean a kind of dominance by one product that goes far beyond what the concept of monopoly usually implies. By “radical monopoly” I mean the dominance of one type of product rather than the dominance of one brand. I speak about radical monopoly when one industrial production process exercises an exclusive control over the satisfaction of a pressing need, and excludes nonindustrial activities from competition. We should not forget that a medium is precisely there mediating our relationships; its sitting in between us, filling the distance that might have emerged.

Openness, in this space, is designed as the natural and continuous flow of conversations within this medium, in a way that strives for auto-organization and self-regulation ¬—at least, this appears to be at the surface level. This means that the Web is always open to receive new insertions, new resources and new contributors, but it is closed in the sense that the circularity of its internal flow of conversations remains self referential; the hypertextual structure aims to connect all of its loose parts. In this sense, we must distinguish between its open structure and its closed organization.

What is egalitarian? What happens when people ... Blogs also offer an example of voluntary exposure (personal ideals, principles or beliefs) that is intentionally intended to counter perceived biases in media reportage about important political events and barriers to information flows about political realities, activities, and preferences on the ground.

Some advocates of folksonomies have recognized that a democratic approach to Web cataloging also contributes to the abundance of irrelevant or inaccurate information, usually referred to as "Meta Noise". Meta Noise can be inadvertent (spelling white horse as with horse), inaccurate (tagging White Horse when the image is of a white cat), or irrelevant (using an esoteric tag known to very few). Overall, many will view folksonomic classification of the Web, as Weinberger does, as "messy and inelegant and inefficient, but it will be Good Enough" [10]. If Weinberger means that it might be good for allowing individual users to supply their own tags, he might be correct. However, if he means that it will be good for the average user, his claim is questionable, since folksonomies will not produce an efficient index. Some of the problems with folksonomies (trying to build an objective reality where everybody contributes and that is constantly evolving) can be traced to problems inherent with relativism. The first is that folksonomy tags are not merely "messy", they can be inaccurate. Because they assume a non-Aristotelian stance, the tags allow contraries to exist. If I tag an article with the subject "white horse" and you tag it "black horse", that is all right since both can coexist in a folksonomy classification scheme. The problem with relativism is the question: "relative to what?" Each Internet user is bringing to bear on the item a different linguistic and cultural background. Although this is an inherent strength of folksonomies (since it recognizes many valuable individual perspectives), it can also lead to the existence of contraries. A folksonomy advocate might reply that this is not true since the tags are relative to each user. Yet, within the database itself, tagging allows an inconsistency to exist.

This situation is, perhaps, the strongest criticism one could make of folksonomies. A dissertation displayed on the Internet could be assigned subject headings deemed true to some groups of readers, but those same headings could deemed false by other readers. Therefore, a folksonomy universe allows both true and false statements to coexist. Because tags are relativized, personal, idiosyncratic views can coexist and thrive in the form of tags, in spite of their inconsistencies. Readers of texts on the Internet become individual interpreters, despite the document author's intent. nut most interesting is that he can serve as a reference for others like himself.

From this standpoint, we can understand individuals as creative transforming agents, where reflective conversations redefine their own medium by opening new possibilities for reaction, pointing towards novel usage of language available in the medium and also, by creating new narrative structures. The observer transforms what he observes by his mere act of understanding and reflecting upon it. The kind of interaction that affords formalizing responses and reflections in the same medium, as building on top of the shoulders of others, is what I consider to be the dialectic principle of the Web.

Conclusions

When I asked the initial question: “Can Design help transform increased connectivity into increased social agency?”, I was aware that this would fall into the category of a wicked problem, according to Horst Rittel. In these kind of problems, the way the problem is initially framed is determined by the pre-conceived idea we have for solving it; what possible solutions we can envision ahead of time. In this case, I developed a framework for escalating in complexity: from the material (Part 1), to the interpersonal (Part 2), and from there to the social (Part 3). Since wicked problems have no true-or-false, but rather ‘better or worse’ solutions, the nature of the argument tries to avoid normative statement, but rather suggests a general framework for the design itinerary. Also, understanding the problem of how to empower people’s social agency is so general, concrete design problems addressing this question in different realms, such as ubiquitous computing, community organization or web services, will be entirely different and unique. I’m also aware of the falsity of trying to define a class of wicked problem, that’s why I must emphasize that I’m not portraying a solution, but presenting a very general framework.

What I’ve learned during the process, is that Interaction Design is concerned about the relational settings between individuals and It aims to support existing social networks and to design new relational spaces for them to exist in new possible ways. It is based on the assumption that people interact with and somehow inhabit the computational space that is opened up by the interface and constitutes a sort of objective reality. Such space is not simply determined by technology, but it is a dynamic relational system, in which human beings experience and negotiate in relation to technology itself. Actually, while analyzing the different causes for social disengagement, technology, as pointed by many authors, appeared as one of the main responsible causes. Considering approaches embracing even more sophisticated and advanced technologies appeared to be solving a crisis by escalating even more in the causes. Of course, nothing is so simple and technology hasn’t a pre-assigned value (it remains as a tool).

From a different perspective, (more ‘techno enthusiastic’) technology can be seen as an agent that triggers structural social change, or as a powerful intervening agent into the active relationship between human agency and organizational structures, which can alter roles and patterns of interactions.

If interaction design is fundamentally concerned with the mediation process, an opportunity for enabling greater participation is to overcome the idea of design as a problem-centered discipline, it more like a creative mode of existence. In the same sense, our subject matter is not exclusively addressing human needs in general but pursuing an answer for our creative endeavor. We need to be aware of human condition as a poetic way of being and that we live in the vigil of recreating the world every time, in the dialectics of our interactions.

Further Questions

The way in which ICTs are currently evolving indicates a strong tendency towards augmenting people’s agency in building their informational medium, in decision and even policy making. I can see in the near future that they’ll be extending these affordances to more politically significant areas such as government itself.

Following this idea, in November 2005, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair commissioned the publication Transformational Government: Enabled by Technology. This document described the strategy for delivering public services in the next years, taking more advantage of ICTs. Its core transformative ideas are:

1. “Services enabled by IT must be designed around the citizen or business, not the provider, and provided through modern, co-ordinated delivery channels.”
2. “Government must move to a shared services culture – in the front-office, in the backoffice, in information and in infrastructure – and release efficiencies by standardization, simplification and sharing.”
3. “There must be broadening and deepening of government’s professionalism in terms of the planning, delivery, management, skills and governance of IT enabled change.”

Besides the obvious benefits of bringing modern and more efficient mechanisms to the existing bureaucracy, by incorporating more standardization, simplification and sharing, general administration costs will be reduced and will increase government professionalism at the moment of planning. this new political architecture will initiate a movement from deliberative citizen participation to a plebiscitary mode of direct representation. Sooner or later, the existing model of indirect representative democracy will be questioned due to the raising control people are gaining over the flow and content of information. What will be the role of design in such scenarios?

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