as i have been slowly gearing up for my summer writing projects, i’ve been trying to wrap my head around several things. first, i had previously briefly posted about the notion of information use to begin taking a closer look at the the things that people do in relation to the ways we make meaning of our lives. how we perceive the world is often informed by how we come to know the world. so in a digital-mediated-informational world, how has this altered how we exeperience and make meaning in our day to day lives?
i’ve been busy this academic year brushing up on the old social theory literature, which can really inform these questions. one primary question in this area has got a lot of do with exploring the relationships between structures and our ability to act independently (or not) of them. stuctures entails a wide variety of things, including: cultures, institutions, hardware, economics, language, government. unfortunately, what constitutes a social structure is ofen ill defined, but it’s often posited as a curtailing force on our ability to act independently, as freely thinking agents.
while that as a rather crude overview of social theory, i’ve been reading social theory in this lens in attempts to really get at that first question about how we make meaning in our lives. if we live in a network society now, how has our day to day and experiences in the world changed since industrial life, for example? clearly not easy questions and not easy answers. so, i’m kind of at a weird point in terms of summer projects where i feel like i have to choose between navigating down a information use path or an information structures path. what’s difficult is that i strongly feel that given developments in 2-point-duh applications, there is this kind of convergence between use-and-structures; a kind of explicit rendering and embedding between the two where use constitutes structures. structures have always constituted use, but it’s this second iteration that brings it all back together and makes it so fascinating. this relates to some of my earliers posts on the collapse of production and consumption in tagging and remix more largely, where acts of remixing or tagging actually are simultaneous instances of producing and consuming information.
anyhow, i will have to make a decision at some point and decide on what direction i need to go as it will require steeping my nose in books for the summer…that is, in between barbequing, reading fiction, travelling, napping, and being lazy. 
Filed under: STS
I came across this fascinating blog entry and subsequent comment thread on Bonnie Nardi’s blog on March 19th regarding Jannis Kallinikos’ book chapter criticizing ethnographic and constructivist approaches information and technology use. The jist of his argument is this: that ultimately these approaches privilege localized understandings and context specific work to the detriment of history and culture in shaping these activities. Now, given my understanding of constructivist frameworks, I always thought that in fact, history and culture were given a due role in these frameworks.
Bonnie reads Kallinikos as implying a general overemphasis on the role of individual action in shaping how information technologies are manifested and come to life, when in fact, technologies indeed are endowed with capabilities to shape activity and action, in and of themselves. It seems to me that Kallinikos’ perspective as generally more applicable to organizationally and institutionally rooted systems where some kind of predominant history and culture are bounded. Particularly in these environments (in contrast to the wild of everyday life, i.e. the Internet), technologies and systems come to represent and embody these histories and cultures in some fashion. And while I agree that we need to look at individual-level situated behaviors in relation to these overarching histories and cultures, I do not think this view to be fully discordant with constructivist frameworks. Perhaps the next task is to conceptualize just how history and culture come into play within these various environments.
