Interaction with and through
I think that our discussion today in lecture about social production is relevant to the book chapter on Internet usage among Trinidadians. Miller and Slater explain (how their book will explain) how Trinidadian core values get re-enacted and performed through the Internet. That is that the Internet has meaning in and of itself, as a site through which to produce Trinidadian-ness (Trini-ness). In this way Trinidadians interact with the Internet as a part of a material culture. But the Internet is also a medium through which they interact with other people and materials, and through which they imagine futures. This blending of what at least seemed to me like material culture theory and media theory seems like a nice blending of the perspectives that we discussed in lecture. A question I have is where does media theory come in? Is it social shaping or social impact or social production or does it subdivide into all of these?
I think that another way of breaking down the articles for this week, that I had been thinking about, is different ways in which to consider the "local" as relevant to interaction. Local histories and cultures are relevant to interaction. And local surroundings that might not take into account the histories and cultures of the people involved are also relevant.
One issue that I think these articles raise is how to generalize from the local to the global or theoretical. If these articles show just how much local matters, then how are we to learn anything about interaction in a general way to be applied to design principles, other than the knowledge that we must design with the local in mind? Miller and Slater suggest that a comparative method of ethnography should reveal general claims about the Internet, but I am left unconvinced. Partly this is because they range back and forth between speaking of specifics and generalities without making a clear distinction about when it is appropriate to generalize. They discuss the issue of transcending the local but then their language is inconsistent. I didn't always know when they were speaking about the Internet in Trinidadian terms or general terms.
The same is true when we think about the participants in the Heath et al paper. They are not described as embedded in cultural histories or core values as the Trinidadians were by Miller and Slater. But the importance of the people within their surroundings are important. So we have a different sense of how to examine the local, but in each case I still have the question of how much we can generalize from these studies.