Post-cognitivist HCI: Today’s Information World as a Problem for HCI (Part 2)

From roughly the 1970s onwards, information technologies and new media began to play a fundamental role in modern society and contributed to the emergence of a new paradigm, that of the information society, which can be characterised by the significant role played in all spheres of society by information and by the technologies that process, transform, transmit and display it. In parallel, one can observe the growing influence of digital and communication networks, above all the global network of the internet, which organise social processes. There are several ways of naming and theoretically grasping today’s society: according to theorists, today’s society is an information, network, post-industrial, knowledge, flexible or cognitive society^1,2. As van Dijk³ writes, the information society and the network society are the most popular concepts used to describe contemporary societies, which are marked by a high level of use of information and communication technologies, where the intensity of information exchange leads such a society to organise itself on the basis of science, rationality and reflexivity, both in the labour market and in the cultural sector, which are dominated by formal knowledge, higher education and the creation, manipulation and consumption of signs, symbols and meanings. While for van Dijk information points to the content of society, the metaphor of the network describes the form or organisation of contemporary society.

The concept of the network society is taken up by Manuel Castells, who at the same time takes issue with the notion of the information society and rejects “information” as an adjective. He disagrees that the importance of information in today’s society is anything new, because in his view information has historically been important in all the societies known to us⁴. The Czech sociologist Petr Lupač points out that Castells instead uses the adjective “informational”, which „odkazuje k určité formě technické organizace, v níž se operace s informací stává hlavním zdrojem produktivity“ and, according to Lupač, also because information and communication technologies enable the transmission and processing of information, thereby creating a sociotechnical arrangement in which the relations between production, experience and power are very close⁵.

The sociotechnical relations between social elements and technologies create notional as well as real decentralised networks of relations, which give not only large and influential corporations but de facto everyone who has the necessary knowledge the opportunity to use them to their own advantage. These networks transcend the division into global and local, so they can be described by the neologism “glocal”, and they thereby also transcend the dimensions of space and time, for they can potentially connect, through technology and the internet and in real time, large conglomerates or assemblages of users, technological artefacts and systems.

In their more recent texts, both Castells and van Dijk write about the informational society as a society of networks, and although not all states in the twenty-first century take part in it to the same degree, they are affected by its logic and power, which take in the global networks of capital, goods, services, labour, communication, information, science and technology⁶. Let us recall that in this case it is not information as such that defines the core of the concept of the network society, but above all the digital communication networks that form the backbone and infrastructure of a new morphological form of social structure, that is, the network society⁷.

In the information and network society, filled with technological artefacts, the nature of interaction with technology changes, and so does the nature of interaction with the world. The more a society uses technologies for everyday communication, the more it is condemned to a mediated relation to the world, one dominated, in many different contexts, by the interaction of people and technology, a technology that has undergone a metamorphosis: from purely utilitarian machines for performing tasks in the static and controlled environment of the desktop, it has become an intimate partner with an enormous influence on literally all the processes of our lives.

After the adoption of personal computers, connection to the global network of the internet and the maturing of the web as a platform, we can regard as a milestone the products of Apple, which introduced the iPhone in 2007 and the first generation of the iPad tablet in 2010, devices that immediately became the most popular smart devices and helped to set off an explosion in the use of mobile devices and mobile apps. Their popularity was accompanied by a dramatic rise in the number of users of the popular social networks Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube, and by web and mobile platforms such as Airbnb or Uber, which try to offer users a modern alternative to some established commercial and public services. Cisco estimates that in 2014 approximately twelve billion devices were connected to the internet, and that by 2020 there should be as many as fifty billion⁸. In our everyday lives physical objects mingle with the digital, which allows us to be, anytime and anywhere, in real time, always online. Services and information are always available in the fluid and never finished stage of a “beta” version. Our immersion in technologies has brought new conceptualisations of the technical and social aspects of technology.

The concept of the Internet of Things (IoT), for example, exploits the potential of the fact that we are surrounded by technological artefacts that collect and generate enormous amounts of data about our lives and about the environment in which we live. As Greengard writes, the IoT “isn’t just about locating objects and using them to sense the surrounding environment—or accomplish automated tasks. It’s a way to monitor, measure, and understand the perpetual motion of the world and the things we do. […] The data generated by the IoT will provide deep insights into physical relationships, human behavior […]”⁹. The concept of ubiquitous computing¹⁰, similar in many respects, introduced by Mark Weiser, chief technologist of the well-known research centre Xerox PARC, and the concept of ambient computing depict a world in which at every step we are surrounded by embedded and invisible computing devices with sensors, internet connectivity and intelligent algorithms that use the context of the environment for the automatic recognition and autonomous handling of tasks with minimal human involvement.

For the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and for the design of technologies, the invisibility of these devices and their fullest possible integration into the everyday environment mean that, instead of the standard desktop graphical user interface, these devices have to enable new, innovative forms of interaction, which we see, for example, in the approach of what is known as “natural” interaction (natural user interface, NUI), which favours interaction by voice or the physical contact of the body¹¹. Friedewald adds that this new type of interaction must include the automatic capture of contextual parameters and the need to identify users’ emotional states and their intended actions, which is not possible without detailed knowledge of the context. Harrison agrees that ubiquitous computing heralds the importance of context for HCI, and at the same time stresses that this is a fundamental problem which what is known as the cognitivist approach in HCI, which I will come to later in the thesis, cannot cope with, because the cognitivist paradigm models context as one more source of information for information processing, whereas in the light of the philosophy of cognitive science, research in artificial intelligence, ethnography, design, art or the critique put forward by post-cognitivist theories, context is not only fundamentally unspecifiable and resistant to formalisation¹², but also indispensable for the interpretation of the emotional, social and semantic factors of human interaction with technology and with the world.

Besides the problem of context, another question must be mentioned, one that cognitivist HCI is at a loss with and to which HCI has to provide an answer: the development of ubiquitous and ambient technology is heading towards minimising the need to interact consciously with technological artefacts, and reducing interaction completely and automating it with intelligent algorithms is regarded as one of the goals of the movement of ambient intelligence and “calm technology”¹³, whereby technology and its activity will move to the periphery of our attention and become visible only when needed. Mark Weiser writes: “The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.”¹⁴

In such a case, is it still possible to speak of “using” technology and of “users”, if technologies cannot be seen and we are not even consciously aware of them? How will the world around us, and the way people perceive it, change if technologies fuse symbiotically with our phenomenological experience of everyday life? What approaches and ethical problems will arise in HCI and design if we begin to understand technology explicitly not only as an integral part of society, but also as an indispensable component of our thinking and of our relation to the world?

From these questions emerge problems that cut across many disciplines, and answering them calls for a transdisciplinary approach. That is why in this thesis I have chosen the “interface” of the fields of post-cognitivist HCI, the contemporary philosophy of technology and new media theory as suitable tools, in the Czech context, with which to shed new light on a body of theoretical and philosophical reflections on the relationship between humans and technology.

Notes

14 notes

1. 1↑

   CASTELLS, Manuel and Gustavo CARDOSO, 2006. The network society: from knowledge to policy. Washington, DC: Johns Hopkins Center for Transatlantic Relations. ISBN 9780976643456, pp. 4–5.

2. 2↑

   IMBESI, Lorenzo, Design for Post-Industrial Societies: Re-Thinking Research and Education for Contemporary Innovation [online]. [cited 2018-05-26]. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/1089486/Design_for_Post-Industrial_Societies

3. 3↑

   DIJK, Jan van, 2006. The network society: social aspects of new media. 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. ISBN 1-4129-0868-x, p. 19.

4. 4↑

   CASTELLS, Manuel and Gustavo CARDOSO, 2006. The network society: from knowledge to policy. Washington, DC: Johns Hopkins Center for Transatlantic Relations. ISBN 9780976643456, p. 4.

5. 5↑

   LUPAČ, Petr, 2015. Za hranice digitální propasti: nerovnost v informační společnosti. Praha: Sociologické nakladatelství (SLON). Studie (Sociologické nakladatelství). ISBN 978-80-7419-231-9, p. 45, my emphasis. In English: “refers to a certain form of technical organisation in which operating on information becomes the main source of productivity”.

6. 6↑

   CASTELLS, Manuel and Gustavo CARDOSO, 2006. The network society: from knowledge to policy. Washington, DC: Johns Hopkins Center for Transatlantic Relations. ISBN 9780976643456, p. 4.

7. 7↑

   CASTELLS, Manuel and Gustavo CARDOSO, 2006. The network society: from knowledge to policy. Washington, DC: Johns Hopkins Center for Transatlantic Relations. ISBN 9780976643456, pp. 4–5.

8. 8↑

   GREENGARD, Samuel, 2015. The internet of things. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0262527736.

9. 9↑

   GREENGARD, Samuel, 2015. The internet of things. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0262527736, p. 7.

10. 10↑

    FRIEDEWALD, Michael and Oliver RAABE, 2011. Ubiquitous computing: An overview of technology impacts. Telematics and Informatics [online]. 28(2), 55-65 [cited 2018-02-05]. DOI: 10.1016/j.tele.2010.09.001. ISSN 07365853. Available at: http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0736585310000547

11. 11↑

    FRIEDEWALD, Michael and Oliver RAABE, 2011. Ubiquitous computing: An overview of technology impacts. Telematics and Informatics [online]. 28(2), 55-65 [cited 2018-02-05]. DOI: 10.1016/j.tele.2010.09.001. ISSN 07365853. Available at: http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0736585310000547

12. 12↑

    HARRISON, Steve R., Deborah Gail TATAR and Phoebe SENGERS, 2007. The three paradigms of HCI [online]. Conference: Conference: Alt. Chi. Session at the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems San Jose, California, USA [cited 2018-02-02]. Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/215835951_The_three_paradigms_of_HCI

13. 13↑

    WEISER, Mark and John Seely BROWN, 1995. Designing Calm Technology [online]. Xerox PARC, December 21, 1995 [cited 2018-02-05]. Available at: http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/calmtech/calmtech.htm

14. 14↑

    WEISER, Mark, 1991. The Computer for the 21st Century. Scientific American. 265(3), 94–104, p. 94.

Literature

9 sources

• CASTELLS, Manuel and Gustavo CARDOSO, 2006. The network society: from knowledge to policy. Washington, DC: Johns Hopkins Center for Transatlantic Relations. ISBN 9780976643456.
• DIJK, Jan van, 2006. The network society: social aspects of new media. 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. ISBN 1-4129-0868-x.
• FRIEDEWALD, Michael and Oliver RAABE, 2011. Ubiquitous computing: An overview of technology impacts. Telematics and Informatics [online]. 28(2), 55-65 [cited 2018-02-05]. DOI: 10.1016/j.tele.2010.09.001. ISSN 07365853. Available at: http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0736585310000547
• GREENGARD, Samuel, 2015. The internet of things. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0262527736.
• HARRISON, Steve R., Deborah Gail TATAR and Phoebe SENGERS, 2007. The three paradigms of HCI [online]. Conference: Conference: Alt. Chi. Session at the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems San Jose, California, USA [cited 2018-02-02]. Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/215835951_The_three_paradigms_of_HCI
• IMBESI, Lorenzo, Design for Post-Industrial Societies: Re-Thinking Research and Education for Contemporary Innovation [online]. [cited 2018-05-26]. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/1089486/Design_for_Post-Industrial_Societies
• LUPAČ, Petr, 2015. Za hranice digitální propasti: nerovnost v informační společnosti. Praha: Sociologické nakladatelství (SLON). Studie (Sociologické nakladatelství). ISBN 978-80-7419-231-9.
• WEISER, Mark and John Seely BROWN, 1995. Designing Calm Technology [online]. Xerox PARC, December 21, 1995 [cited 2018-02-05]. Available at: http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/calmtech/calmtech.htm
• WEISER, Mark, 1991. The Computer for the 21st Century. Scientific American. 265(3), 94–104.