Redesigning and re-instrumentalising activities (Task #13)

Among the activities that our civilization has been carrying out until now in rather “traditional” ways, there is one that is constantly driving my attention for a strange peculiarity.
The world of photography has in fact changed in the last 20 years in significant ways due to the introduction of digital camera sensors and processors. Sincethen new, more sofisticated cameras have been produced with the purpose of constantly delivering new and more accurated reproductions of the reality.
What has changed since then in DSLR and compact cameras has always been a matter of more and more precisereproduction of pictures, higher resolutions, faster chips and less noisy sensors.
What i think is truly, deeply missing in this equation is what Smartphone producers have been so cleverly (perhaps even a bit unconsciously) doing since they allowed a camera to exist on the same device that can connect to the internet: a true possibility of sharing the taken pictures right away from the camera to the internet.
In fact what i’m proposing here is to re-instrumentalize compact cameras and DSLR cameras with the same possibilities that are offered by smartphone cameras. The step seems so small but it is not. Traditional cameras have been always perceived as an instrument on its own, capable only of capturing the light and giving the chanche to the photographer to reproduce it on printed paper. This was and is partially true, because in our digital society pictures have gained a different role and their main location is now the screen of laptops televisions and mobile phones. If we consider this it doesn’t surprise to know that applications like Instagr.am have been downloaded more than a million times in less than a month and that flickr, one of the most important photosharing social network, has declared that most of the pictures they receive each month are now being produced by mobile devices.

Most popular Cameras in the Flickr community as from May 3rd, 2011

The use of traditional cameras could (and should) be changed by adding a digital “social” layer to them, that would allow the user to instantly share pictures over the web, perhaps through a 3G/Wifi connection. In this way users won’t need anymore to download their pictures on the computer all the time, but will be able to manage them on the cloud.

ACTIVITY THEORY* As one of the possible frameworks to analyse human activities in digitally mediated environments

The Activity Theory is a framework for studying human interactions that has its roots in the second decade of the last century in Russia by Leont'ev, and Sergei Rubinstein; used since then to study human activities, it has been considered by many essential to understand them from a broader point of view than the one of psychology or even social psychology.

The Activity Theory takes human activities as a basic unit for analysing individuals and contexts: every human action is, in fact, studied in relation with others and other elements. In this way, humans are contextualized in a stronger way than the one offered by the most traditional psychological disciplines.
Not only it considers the environment of the actions, but also their temporal relationship with previous and future actions. In this way, human activities are being contextualised in a web of narratives, allowing a deeper understanding of the motivations that move the individuals.

Another essential focus of the activity theory is on the artifacts and their mediating role. As interaction happens within the limitations of instruments, the activity theory tries to define what is the role of those. How are the instruments that we use influencing our actions?
When considering the deep effect that limitations can have on our actions a very interesting example comes from the new generation of social networking platforms born with Twitter. The popular social network (which has at the present time about 200 million active users) has gained momentum thanks to its extremely restricted blogging space. While other blogging platforms were allowing their users to write "as much as they wanted", Twitter restricted its user's space to 140 characters, less than a usual text message.
By doing so, it disrupted the precedent status quo of the blogosphere and created a new genre, a new language and a whole new way of communicating through the internet. It seems to me a great example of how limitations in instruments can not only influence our behaviour but also create brand new genres. What described here is, obviously, not the only example: in all the history of technology limitations have deeply influenced our usage of tools and instruments.

Another major contribution to the activity theory comes from Enjeström. In his writings he says that "humans are able to control their behaviour through artefacts". ( Enjeström 1999:29)
He also adds some elements to the basic framework created by Leont’ev.
While Leont’ev uses a structure that includes a subject, an object, an used tool and an outcome, Enjestrom adds some elements which more connect to society and culture.

It is interesting to consider how the activity theory becomes extremely relevant nowadays while we look at the interactions that happen online, especially when we think of the social dynamics that happen in the sphere of social networks. People who have access to the statistics of big web portals, for example, know clearly how much simple changes in the digital environment influence the behaviour of their users. It is extremely relevant nowadays to study the role of the limitations applied by digital interfaces, because these are the artifacts that carry most of the communication in today’s life. Little changes applied to an instrument used by millions of people can make a great difference in the way we use our devices, and as a related consequence, to our lives.

Studying interactions with digitally mediated environments seems a bit hard when thinking of the actions that we perform on the web: if we agree that most of our actions are “diffused” in different locations (email, chats, social networks and real life), the narratives that we produce demonstrate to be, in fact, extremely complicated, almost impossible to track down, if not with a deep, accurate study.
Thus, this holistic approach could help us to better understand the real dynamics that drive the interactions between humans and computers. In this sense it’s interesting to see that most of the usability tests performed consider only the use of one piece of software at the time, and not the real usage of computers in everyday life (which normally includes strong multitasking)
It seems to me harder to study the usage of digital devices through the activity theory because of the strong tendency to multitasking that we have, possibly even stronger than the multitasking we perform in the analog world.

Task #7

While the keyword "interactive" hits 151 million results on Google, the legitimate question we give to ourselves is wether the semantic behind it is reshaping due to a change in technology and society. It is an exceptionally hard task (the sole frequent association of the word with the term "buzzword" easily leads us to think that way-too-many are confused about it) and in order to avoid confusion it's essential to find relevant literature.

The two -about 10 years old- papers previously analysed try to sum up the characteristics of modern interactivity from the point of view of different scholar disciplines and subsequently create definitions which could be exhaustively descriptive of interaction itself, but in my opinion fail to give an -even lower level- explanation of what interactivity means.

Kristo Vaher in his blog points out the english origin of the word Interactivity from the word interaction. I would like to go even deeper and trace what interactivity means to me by tracking the latin origin of the word.

Interaction derives from inter (in between) + agere (to act, to do) and it refers to an inter-mutual action between two elements, or in other word, to the space (in a figurative way) between the action of two elements. Wether we talk about human communication mediated by technology or the communication between a human and a machine through a UI, interaction is the act that is being carried and inter-activity is a characteristic of any of the two parts.

Said this, I do not mean to extremely simplify my vision of the concept itself, but to try to distinguish the concept of interactivity itself from the dimensions of interactivity.

In fact, Spiro Kiousis' paper well defines those in 3 categories in "structure of technology", "communication context" and "user perception".Those categories, which in my opinion well describe the main dimensions of interactivity, seem to be enough technology-neutral to describe also contemporary scenarios. Afterall, one side of the interactions (the humans) will most likely keep most of their characteristics for still long time and machines will have to shape (and re-shape) themselves around them.

Task #6 - New interactive Environmenrts

Interactivity: a concept explication by Spiro Kiousis is the result of a research over different explanations of the term interactivity.

The author tries in his work to describe what are the main characteristics of the concept of interactivity by analyzing the existing literature from different points of view and perception. In the beginning of the paper, while explaining what is the framework that he will use, he makes a point of all the existing visions of the concept of interactivity, spacing from the view of different schools of thoughs.

He then creates a table which will be used to map those different views. On one axis, the different intellectual perspective of communicators or non communicators: he divides the studies belonging to media studies and those that come from other "more independent fields" such as psychology or sociology. Another axis on the table is the one of the object emphasized: wether it's the technology, the communication setting or the perceiver.

What follows this is the work of the author to categorize and briefly analyze all the different texts and author's views, in order to organically put them in the table. The work exposes different approaches and some common directions over the basic properties of the definitions treated. The "blended" definition of interactivity given by the author includes 3 different dimensions: the structure of the technology used, the communication setting and the user perception. It is clear here how different approaches from different academical fields merged to identify one concept.

The final definition (that you will find at the end of this post) tries to be technology-neutral and ready to be used to measure "in real life" the level of "interactivity" of a certain technology.

This paper, congruent and well organized defines academically a concept often used as a buzzword in many different fields and essential to understand whenever one has to deal with new technologies. It's surprising how interaction design plays an essential role in the life of most people's lives and understanding how this delicate process happens seems like a challenging and extremely interesting task.

Here the definition of Interactivity given by Spiro Kiousis (2002):

Interactivity can be defined as the degree to which a communication technology can create a mediated environment in which participants can communicate (one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many), both synchronously and asynchronously, and participate in reciprocal message exchanges (third-order dependency). With regard to human users, it additionally refers to their ability to perceive the experience as a simulation of interpersonal communication and increase their awareness of telepresence.

New interactive environments Task #1

My personal experience with publishing (or social) tools is built upon different platforms.

Media i use for getting information and sharing news / status updates:

I use Google reader as an aggregator of feeds from various blogs (always too many to be checked manually, the counter in the reader is almost always on 1000+ ;) ) There i follow various feeds connected with my interests, but my main focus is on marketing, social media and photography. I normally check my google reader page once a day if i have enough time for the news.
I use twitter more often, i check my contacts' streams about 4/5 times a day through mobile. There i have more contacts with people i know in real life and many other streams from similar topics as my google reader. I tend to retweet often, but publish little.
I also use Facebook on daily basis. mainly for personal networking and work; there i also administer few business pages where i write contents, mainly with the purpose to let people interact with the brand. I'm not a big user of Facebook apps.
On Flickr i publish pictures and use the forums and the tools of the platform to search for tips about photography.
Last Fm collects silently data about my music usage. i login on their page about twice a month to find new music
Foursquare: just got a new badge. I often write tips for locations and try to use the ones i find.

Generally speaking, i would consider myself an half-engaged digital user. I use internet and social networks for many purposes (study, work, social activities, leisure) but tend to publish little "public contents" compared to what i read. I did not mention in this post other social networks i often use but consider less relevant in my media diet such as youtube, vimeo, tumblr, Google Buzz (although this last one is connected with my Google Reader), myspace, and even "old school" websites.

Digital tools:

Google Docs: for creating and editing documents. their collaborating capabilities showed to be very useful.
Prezi: a presentation tool.

Battle of wesnoth

The Battle of Wesnoth is a multi platform free videogame of strategy distribuited under GNU GPL
The game is based on a 3d fantasy scenario where different elements allow interactions and battles.
The game is based over the idea of campaigns and some of them are distribuited together with the game itself, while others can be downloaded or even created with the game itself.
As not a really passionate player of videogames i have to admit that in the first moments of playing i had some difficult time getting into it, but in a second moment i started appreciating the graphics and finally the game itself, which reminds me somehow of one of the few other games i've been playing in these years - Final Fantasy -. After a while the game becomes fluid to play and pleasant, although some details could still be perfectioned (the italian translation is still lacking some important part)

FSF Vs OSI

What is interesting to consider when looking at the history of open source and free software is the passion that lies behind the two schools of thoughts and how much those who believe in one or another "side of the force" defend passionately their points.
It's indeed also interesting how can developement methods can become source of inspiration for social movements or lifestyles.

Comparing open source software and free software then becomes a way to look at two different positions towards intellectual work that consider each other "wrong".
From my point of view, especially after reading and considering the texts of "why free software is better than open source" and "goodbye free software, hello open source" i believe that the position of those who stand for open source software is simply more marketing oriented and somehow realistic over the dinamics that exist in the market.
It is indeed important to consider ethical positions but in my opinion in order to change the way the world looks at things, changes have to be done gradually.
"why free software is better than open source" gives different reasons why it would be better to use the term free software but they all seem to me inconsinstent and sometimes less realistic (an example of this is the paragraph "would a trademark help" which talks of possible general mis-uses of advertisement, and could be applicated to any trademark)