While reading the first half of this paper, in the back of my mind was the thought: “2000…what technology did we have then…I wonder what this Babble is going to be?” When I actually got to the section on the prototype: “Oh my G**, were these authors the first ones to conceptualize modern chats?! Holy moly!” My entire life, I’ve taken timestamped, sequential, persistent conversations completely for granted.
Still today, nineteen years after this paper by Thomas Erickson and Wendy A. Kellogg, there are countless digital systems that are opaque in many ways. I had an experience in an online class at my workplace that illustrates this opacity nicely. We were in a “breakout” session, about five of us, where we were jointly editing a word document. There’s no way to see whose cursor is where like there is in google docs. Since no one was taking the role of secretary and we only had a few minutes to do the exercise, I started editing the document and spoke into my microphone to explain what I was doing. I could hear them, so they can hear me, right? In face-to-face communication we have this assurance of communicative symmetry, as the authors coin it.
For the remainder of the exercise, five or ten minutes, I get increasingly frustrated because someone keeps changing things in the table that I just changed and repeating things I just said. It’s as if the rest of the team can’t hear me. I pawn it off as just another case of men talking over women. A few seconds from the buzzer, I realized: my microphone was on mute the entire time. What a stupid mistake, right? A stupid mistake that I would have been much less likely to make had the situation been more translucent: if we could have seen each other’s faces (my team-mates probably thought “Molly,” whoever she was, was out to lunch, since she never talked the entire time), or seen whose cursor was where, for instance.
One thing I think the authors got wrong, in a way, is that knowledge communities had to be small:
Our experience suggests that knowledge production and use will proceed most easily in a semiprivate environment—a relatively small community where knowledge workers feel “safe” enough to venture tentative interpretations and conjectures. […] (69)
Stack Overflow, as an example, has the same affordances they describe, for the opposite reason: it’s so big that people aren’t afraid to ask questions, because is their friend or colleague likely to see? Or maybe it’s more owed to the community feeling that Stack Overflow has nurtured through its encouragement of newbies and reward of thoughtful answers. I’ve heard that it’s possible to do “private” Stack Overflows for intra-organization Q&A, but I’m not sure how popular this is… It’s probably better than SharePoint for many answer-seeking needs, but I doubt that anyone whose job deals with software goes looking for answers on their department’s private Stack Overflow more often than the normal Stack Overflow.
The anecdote about the thirty text-book co-authors surprised and delighted me. They were tasked with collectively deciding the order that the chapters would come in, in a physical room, moving physical pieces of paper, one per chapter. My first thought was, this can only go poorly: everyone will only care about their chapter and no one will make sure it all hangs together cohesively. Not so! This room full of co-authors accomplished the task by organically organizing themselves into (my interpretation):
- Defenders of their chapter – who were protective of the chapter they wrote and felt strongly about where it should go.
- Flitters – who moved around the room and getting a broad-strokes sense of the whole.
- Section experts – who hovered around a group of chapters and guided the organization of that group.
In the course of a paragraph on privacy, they gave the example of elections, where it is paramount that certain things be very private (e.g. casting your ballot with no fear of repercussions), and certain other things very public (e.g. the ballot counting). Having grown up here in the States, I sometimes take these things for granted, but they are the bedrock of democracy! I believe it’s also vital that people see, whether physically or digitally, their friends and role-models participating in democracy, as well as have access to data on the make-up of their district, and be able and empowered to contact their representatives. Democracy is certainly threatened by some consequences of the digital age, but I am heartened by the ways in which the public aspects of democracy are becoming increasingly translucent.
… So, if you’re reading this and you can vote, be sure you’re registered!