+ Page 41 + --------------------------------------------------------------------------- ####### ######## ######## ########### ### ### ## ### ## # ### # Interpersonal Computing and ### ### ## ### ## ### Technology: ### ### ## ### ### An Electronic Journal for ### ######## ### ### the 21st Century ### ### ### ### ### ### ### ## ### ISSN: 1064-4326 ### ### ### ## ### October 1996 ####### ### ######## ### Volume 4, Number 3-4, pp. 41-48 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Published by the Association for Educational Communications and Technology Additional support provided by Georgetown University University of Maryland Baltimore County Northern Arizona University This article is archived as SALVADOR IPCTV4N4 on LISTSERV@LISTSERV.GEORGETOWN.EDU -------------------------------------------------------------------------- A MATTER OF GOOD PRACTICE Tony Salvador, Ph.D. INTRODUCTION In the ongoing discussion about technology and social responsibility, many people argue the notion that technology is inherently neutral, while others argue that technology can be inherently 'good' or 'bad.' But rarely does anyone argue that, for instance, the tomato is inherently good, bad or even neutral. There's a reason for that: such discussion is absurd. The tomato is not inherently good, though there are many folks that simply relish a good tomato sauce and the Italians refer to the tomato as "pomo d'oro", apples of gold, which when last I checked, meant a good thing. On the other hand, there are many people who are highly allergic to the mild neurotoxin (solamine) contained in the tomato; these people might actually think that the tomato is inherently bad. And then there may be people who literally have no feelings at all about the tomato -- but that does not make the tomato inherently neutral -- it just makes that person's feelings about the tomato neutral. Practically, if not philosophically, tomatoes and technology adopt qualities of good, bad or neutral depending on the local context. With the tomato, that context may be a specific physiological response to solamine. With firearms, some communities value their possession, whereas others do not. The same is true for smoking cigarettes or marijuana. Note that in any of these situations, the item itself is not neutral, nor is the item, per se, inherently good or bad. Rather, the quality of good or bad associated with the artifact derives from the local culture. Therefore, the technology, per se, may not be inherently good or bad - but it necessarily becomes so in light of the culture. In the context of a culture, technology does possess some positive and negative attributes: it cannot be neutral. Considering the cultural context explicitly renders immune any meaningful discussion of technology, per se, along a continuum of responsibility. Rather, when technology is seen in context, it becomes clear that there is an implicit partnership between business and consumer, creator and context, that is not recognized, and that should be explicit. In the case of the tomato, recognizing the relationship between consumer and producer is easy - if the tomato makes you sick, you don't eat it; you don't buy more; the farmer has a lot of canned tomato sauce for winter. A responsible and reasonable tomato farmer should not -- and most likely would not -- produce tomatoes for people with solamine allergies; nor should or would a responsible farmer produce tomatoes just because he can or just because he's the only produce farmer in the local area. Rather, the responsible, and prudent, tomato farmer would grow a different crop more in harmony with his customers. However, in the case of technology, the situation is not so simple. + Page 42 + Technology introduced to any context will affect behavior patterns for individuals, families, communities and nations. Adopting some new technology more often than not requires some change in the current cultural context - you have to change what you do or change how you do it to use the new technology that's supposed to make what you do obsolete or how you do it easier. Change not only affects you, but also the other people around you. The others, for whatever reason, may not wish to change. However, if the impact is too great, or if the technology for whatever reason is not accepted, it will not be possible to blend this new technology into the current cultural context and that technology will quickly acquire the awesome status of the CB radio (recalling its wild popularity in the 70s). Meanwhile, the company that produced that technology has not succeeded in having you, the consumer, adopt and come to rely on that technology. That's bad for business. Because the company best understands the technology, the resources and knowledge to produce it and the intended uses of it, the onus is on the business to make the first move, to create the best possible product - not necessarily because of some moral responsibility, but simply because it's good business. There are eminently practical benefits of explicitly considering the cultural context of the target market that relegate responsible technology development to good business practice. One goal of this essay is to demonstrate exactly how this can be done using a particularly relevant technological example: the personal computer, and a particularly relevant cultural context: the family. The second goal of this essay is to discuss the role that consumers and what I offer as a new conception of consumer advocates can play in fashioning their own cultural contexts, thus fulfilling their part of the business - consumer partnership. Paying serious attention to the appropriate cultural elements of the target market is not only responsible, but more importantly, is sound business practice. Here's a simple argument: Businesses exist to make money by selling products or services. Some products or services exist at the fringes of one's life, a "casual" product; some strike to the core of one's daily life, a "kernel" product. As a product strikes closer to the core, developers require an increasingly greater understanding of the cultural context of individuals in the business's target market. This section considers this argument in more detail. For the purposes of this essay, culture may be considered as an emergent relationship of actor to environment. An actor may be some active entity, such as a person, a family, a community, a team of coworkers or a nation state; the more inclusive the actor, the larger the cultural context, from micro culture (e.g., an individual) to macro culture (e.g., a nation state) The relationship of the relevant + Page 43 + actor(s) to the relevant aspects of nature, space, time, artifacts, activities and others defines the cultural context. The domain of technological progress, per se, is merely one aspect of human endeavor that informs these relationships. The issue for businesses is to consider how the introduction of a particular technology will impact these relationships, and thus impact the cultural context. I think an example would be a valuable way to illustrate the concept of cultural context and product definition. In the spirit of this investigation, we will consider the personal computer as the product and a typical young family as the actor. The example of the young family is derived from actual, recent ethnographic work with young families. The personal computer was chosen both for its current relevance as well as being an illustrative and topical example of a kernel product. (Ethnographic work in this case implies the following: a visit to 10 representative family homes, three hours spent with the parents and three hours with the kids using a variety of methods for eliciting relevant information, intense video tape analysis of the sessions and the construction of a detailed model, a part of which is described in this essay.) We will define a "young family" as a two parent household with one or more children between the ages of infancy and twelve years old, inclusive. Furthermore, let's focus on a typical weekday for this family. The relevant cultural dimensions for this discussion are the relations of the actors to space, time, and other people in the household; secondary relations to artifacts, activities and nature and are not discussed here. The model generated by analysis of the ethnographic data reflects the complexities of space, time and social home life. Spaces in the home are not equally significant but rather exhibits behavioral clusters. For example, families spend most of their time in the Command, Control and "Hang-out" space (often corresponding to family room and kitchen complex). This is where family members greet each other, discuss their day, use the phone, share the same space while performing different activities, etc. It's where they spend a lot of their time when in the home. In fact, even when these rooms are not contiguous, there are observable traffic patterns between the two room. The PC is designed to be used in large, uninterrupted blocks of time; time, however, is definitely not structured in large blocks of free time surrounded by non-free time. Rather, the day consists of a large number of small blocks of time, each of which is constrained to varying degrees, with frequent transitions from one thing to another. For example, in this research, we identified 8 different types of time, experienced in a variety of orders throughout the day, each with various levels of constraint on the actor, e.g., the "fixed in time" type is one that occurs at a specific time of day, e.g., school starts, a heavy constraint, or the "dependent time" type is where a parent may have nothing to do (free time) but his/her child is dependent on + Page 44 + him/her. In short, an attempt to insert a product with the intent to colonize all that free time is a myth. Throughout most of the day, some form of external constraint affects the structure of time. Finally, most communicative activities take place between collocated family members (families sharing the same physical space, e.g., in the kitchen, as opposed to families living in the same house) supplemented by contact with remote family and friends, e.g., over the phone or by visiting each other. Within the family value system, this collocated time is highly valued. That is, for a young family, there is both a lot of "togetherness" and a high value placed on the retention of that togetherness. Let's consider the personal computer as it currently exists. The modern personal computer still carries the design inertia of its evolution in an office environment. It is designed to be used in one particular location within a larger equi-partitioned space (no space has greater or lesser significance), and in large time blocks with unproblematic transitions between use and non-use. When used for communication, it supports communication with "ghosts in the machine" (strangers), providing no special support for collocated and remote family and friends. In fact, the collocated family members must be actively ignored while using the machine. Note the observed discrepancy between the individual's actual relations to space, time and social home life and the ecological design inertia of the personal computer. In every home where there was a personal computer (PC), we found it in the Work Space. Even when the PC is physically in the family room, it's in a remote corner of the room, facing a wall, with a single office chair in front of it and is behaviorally in the "work space" as opposed to the hang out space - mostly because the family did not have a spare room to call an "office." The PC was used primarily by one person at a time, in series. There was no interaction among family members. Use of the PC alienates other family members and alienates the user from the rest of family life. There is some current use for the PC in the home - people are buying them and companies are making money. But could they make even more money? Might consumers come to rely on personal computers as much as they rely on the phone? Such questions must be the stuff Chief Executives' dreams are made of. The "office appliance" view of the PC assumes that the PC is used in one place, in large blocks of time, by a single user concentrating on instrumental (or "get things done") sort of tasks. However, family activity is distributed throughout multiple spaces of varying significance. Much of this activity can be characterized as communication to support emotional bonding rather than the carrying out of instrumental tasks. Most of the time members of the family are collocated rather than alone. Finally, most communication outside of the home is with family and friends, rather than strangers. The current personal computer does not support this model of young family life. + Page 45 + Incorporating the personal computer as currently configured requires the family to disrupt some of its key cultural relationships. First, the family unit has a value and desire to interact together, in the same physical space. This is both an expressed value of the parents and a behavioral trait of the kids. For example, young kids doing their homework consistently and frequently seek out their parents for advice, help or to just show what they've done. Homework is much more of a group activity than one might imagine unless one observes the culture of the young family in the home. However, as we've seen, the PC tends to isolate folks one from another even though all are in the same house at the same time. The TV is another socializing example. In young families especially, kids can watch TV in the same room as a parent reading a magazine, who might also "watch" with the kids. Similarly, the kids can interact with others in the room during TV watching. Watching TV in a family is mostly not limited to being the quintessential couch-potato. The TV affords social activity; social activity is valued; the PC does not afford social activity. Thus, introducing the PC as currently configured in the home disrupts the family's cultural context in the form of a relationship of the actors to each other. Secondly, the personal computer as currently configured violates the family's relationship to their space. In fact, even in homes where the "family room" and the kitchen were separated by a staircase or a hallway, thus splitting up the synchronization and hang-out space, one could easily observe the worn carpet paths and the ongoing traffic between these two spaces. Even in the face of physical barriers like the floor plan of a home, the behavioral patterns persist. The majority of the time when the home had a room set aside as an office or den, that's where we found the PC. Thus, since the bulk of family time is spent in the family room and kitchen, but the PC is in den, the currently configured PC breaks this cultural relationship as well. Thirdly, time in the home is anything but a large block of "nothing to do". In fact, the kids are often as "busy" as the parents; albeit in a different way. They take piano lessons and play sports to a greater extent than ever before. They stay after school, they visit friends, they need rides, they only play during specific openings in their day; parents who both work must work out all the transportation details and handle last minute changes. The PC, as we've seen, requires larger blocks of devotional time. So, again the currently configured PC is not amenable to the reigning cultural relationship of these actors to time. All of this is, of course, not to say that these cultural relationships are stable. Rather, let us assume that these relationships express the families heretofore extant life pattern. Furthermore, assume that the PC has indeed evolved as an office machine. One might imagine some sound business reasons of distribution, manufacturing, etc., to inject the current personal computer form + Page 46 + factor in the home and attempt to disrupt and eventually change the current cultural context of the young family. A tall order indeed. If one assumes that broad scale change in family life patterns is something difficult for families (we know it's difficult for businesses that are forced to change ...) then it becomes ever more apparent that matching the personal computer to extant life patterns is simply prudent business. If one values these existing life patterns, then such business practice also may be considered responsible. But this is merely an unintended side effect of doing good business by attending with appropriate depth to the cultural context of the customer base and making business decisions commensurate with that. (And it is difficult for families to change their life patterns; we and others (Vitalari, Venkatesh, Gronhaug,1995) found for example, that families actively sought what we refer to as `homeostasis,' that is, they wanted a certain stability of family interactions within some tolerable levels. They sought to reduce ongoing levels of uncertainty, which was quite clear in a family with very high uncertainty about family interactions.) What this means is not that families are rejecting computing power; rather, they are less inclined to accept computing power in the current personal computer format. One potentially prudent business decision is to consider a very different format for injecting computing power anywhere in the home. For example, peripheral devices distributed throughout the home (family room and kitchen to start), that allow multiple users simultaneously all integrated and tirelessly connected to a home centric source of computing power seems a very viable format for use of home computing power. I'll leave it to the reader to consider the myriad "applications" that would be valuable to the cultural context of the home given this format for computing power. That's good business. CONSUMERS OF TECHNOLOGY NEED A WAY TO THINK APPROPRIATELY ABOUT THEIR PURCHASES Perhaps even more controversial than what you've just read is the notion that the rate of technological growth has now exceeded the rate at which people can effectively integrate new technologies into their lives. First, consider the now common phenomenon of "information overload," due in part, to technological growth in computing and communications, which has made it possible to store, access and transfer a wealth of data with effort ill proportioned to the amount of information. Second, the ever accelerating proliferation of technology products (e.g., Sony introduced more than 500 new products in one recent 6 month period) has generated a phenomena, which Herbig & Kramer (1992) refer to as "innovation overload," where there are so many new products that people cannot evaluate or even collect all relevant information as related to a particular product or service before making a purchase decision. + Page 47 + In short, new technology is actually less accessible to the population than one might imagine due to the sheer volume of technology and related evaluative information. Yet for a product to be successful, customers and users must clearly perceive the value of the product where a product's value is based on its perceived utility. In this case, utility may be defined as the perception of how easily a person can incorporate that technology into their daily life practices. Thus, it follows that the more readily a technology matches the current cultural context of the customer, the more easily a customer can evaluate the product. Much of this evaluation occurs subconsciously -- at least without an explicit or exhaustive consideration of theirs or their family's relationships to nature, space, time, artifacts, activities and each other. Yet, why not? Why should consumers not be more versed about the impact of technology on their lives? Why not evaluate their own personal relationships to these elements of culture? Consumers need to identify what it is that is most important to them. But consumers are plagued with limited time and resources. That's why there is a huge business in consumer advocacy. Magazine editors, Consumer's Reports, Ralph Nader and various other consumer advocates have a lot more work to do. Technology review articles need to focus not only on the bits and bytes of some new whiz- bang technology, but rather on the impact of that technology. They need to consider the relationship of technology to the lives of the consumers; they need to open lines of dialog with those that have started a critical examination of science, technology and society. It's not that there is a right or wrong answer to the incorporation of technology; it's that the decision to invest time and money in some product is woefully ill informed. I dare say the entire national conversation about technology is flat out wrong. It's not about the number of pixels on a monitor; it's about how many people can share in the experience of the content of the monitor at the same time! The business consumer partnership should be a harmonious relationship - businesses making technology that fits the culture and the culture adopting it. Businesses however, are driven by such things as profits and they want to make profits with whatever idea or competency they posses. So they, quite reasonably, will go to great lengths to "sell" their products and concepts. In response, consumer advocates should peer through the hard sell to examine the actual intended or unintended effects of the product on the target culture, giving the consumer real information about whether the item might be a "good" purchase -- independent of whether the technology actually works as advertised. Thus, would businesses and consumers once again achieve a certain harmonious relationship. Consumers and consumer advocates can influence the national debate. These folks can consider evaluating new products in terms of the potential impact on the relevant micro or macro cultural context. They don't even have to be right; they simply need to steer the public + Page 48 + debate toward a relevant topic. The relationship of the intended human target of the technology to nature, space, time, artifacts, activities and other people provides an easy to think about framework for doing just this. CONCLUSIONS By considering the cultural context of technological adoption we must recognize that there are no right or wrong answers; there is not 'good' technology and 'bad' technology; or `responsible' and 'irresponsible' technology; all technology is developed with an intended use, a potential use, or even the recognition that the eventual use is unknown, but there is always an assumed interaction between the technology product and the consumer. Businesses that attend closely to the cultural context relevant to their products will succeed more strongly than businesses that fail in this regard. Consumers that can be well informed about the real impacts of the technology and that become aware of their current cultural context will lead happier, less stressful, richer lives. They won't necessarily feel plagued by the onslaught of new technology, and they don't have to ignore it. It's about time we recognized that good business means considering our culture. It's about time we, as Americans, as communities, as families and as individuals recognize we have a culture. It's about time we recognize that we have the privilege -- indeed the right -- to preserve and change our macro and micro cultures with more consideration than simply purchasing the latest vehicle for delivering bits and bytes into our lives. REFERENCES Herbig P.A. & Kramer H. (1992) The Phenomenon of Innovation Overload, Technology in Society, 14, 4, 441-461. Vitalari, N., Venkatesh, A., Gronhaug, K. (1995) Computing in the Home: Shifts in Time Allocation Patterns of Households. Communications of the ACM (28) 5. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Biographical Notes Tony Salvador (and Michael Mateas) co-founded GEAR, Garage Ethnography & Applications Research, a small group in Intel's Architecture Laboratories, Hillsboro, Oregon. Prior to this, Tony lead the design of ProShare Personal Conferencing Release 2.0, and managed the human factors team responsible for requirements, design and testing of several Intel communications products. Prior to Intel, Tony worked at GTE Laboratories,Waltham Massachusetts, in operations support system requirements & design. He has a Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology and Human Factors from Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts. Tony Salvador, Ph.D. 503.264.6455 tony_salvador@ccm.jf.intel.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Copyright Statement Interpersonal Computing and Technology: An Electronic Journal for the 21st Century Copyright 1996 University of Maryland Baltimore County and the Association for Educational Communications and Technology. Copyright of individual articles in this publication is retained by the individual authors. Copyright of the compilation as a whole is held by the UMBC and AECT. It is asked that any republication of this article state that the article was first published in IPCT-J. Contributions to IPCT-J can be submitted by electronic mail in APA style to: Susan Barnes, Editor IPCT-J SBBARNES@PIPLELINE.COM or BARNES@MURRAY.FORDHAM.EDU