Some of this has to do with how we think about ‘technology’. The technologies of reading, book printing, automobiles, vaccinations, telephones, ovens, canned food, etc. are so naturalized as to appear as part of the ‘given’ environment. All the tools, Windy and her husband would use to run a 21st century farm, etc. Or the invisible technologies of information markets that shape the demand and conditions of what they produce, etc.
In this light, it’s a false question. Or, to your point, when it starts to be really useful, it stops being ‘technology’ and just melts into a daily life object. Somewhere in here is the line about great design being invisible.

@Brian, yes, it’s funny how almost everything we use is technology, yet we can have these weird conversations about it as if it’s all new stuff. Somehow our brains are wired weirdly in that way…the moment we take something for granted our worldview changes.

Josh,

Perhaps the context is more of a personal journey than it is a struggle, with each user coming to terms with their own sense of a contextual comfort. For instance, if we look at the context of a microwave, it is clear to most that leftover pizza and hotpockets make for good context of the microwave. Preparing entire dinners, maybe not the best idea, but it is still a valid context of the microwave, just not one that most people embrace.

Our use of technology, while inherently different, still has plenty of contexts which we have not yet found the optimal use of. The slideshow by Randy at the end of the post had a good example about a TV site using ratings and reviews (similar to a movie site) instead of message boards and wikis, something that the users could have used more in context with the subject matter of the TV show.

The fact that you brought up Ravelry.com to your friend unbeknown to whether or not she had come across the site shows that there are contexts for our subjects which have not been discovered. The context of this conversation alone is still so new, who’s to say that in another year I won’t be doing this over an aggregated commentstream to get the maximum ‘face value’. My point is that our use of context is not only a fragile term, but what we deem proper contextual use today, whether it be to what means or to what degree, is on such loose ground that our best stance to take in the matter might that of an explorer rather than a tyrant.

-steve

Using a word like technology is like using a word like race, or politics.

Politics build the Hoover dam, and provided electricity for decades. Politics are a tool Hitler used to start WWII.

Technology is the invention of tying twine around bundles of hay – to make hay bales.

Back when they first filmed Mayberry in the Andy Griffith Show, in rural America you didn’t visit the neighbors after 8 PM on a school night – that was wind-down, bed time. So when telephones came out you didn’t call after 8, either. If the phone rang while you were sitting to dinner – you let it go.

Sitting with your family at Pizza Inn, and taking a phone call – that is just wrong. Unless someone just died, it won’t change your plans, so that cell phone – let along the call – just distracted you from living with your family.

Yes, your phone call on vacation was a 15 minute call, and made a customer happy. But think about that – instead of a week or two deliberately chosen to separate you from business – now you have two broken halves of a vacation. You didn’t spend 15 minutes – you also had all the time spent considering the information, planning what future impacts that information might have. And you have to make, again, the mental trip from the office to the vacation. Most cell-phone related accidents, one report I heard, occur within the first 10 seconds after ending the conversation. It is the distraction, not the action, that causes the most loss.

Talk to me about texting. I work odd hours at a local theater. We check the auditorium during the presentation. The movie studios and distributors are very concerned about someone using a cell phone to capture screen images or clips. The theater is concerned about cell phones going off. I am concerned because cell phone screens light up – acting as a flashlight. During a movie, a family of four – and Junior was texting. I asked Junior, as I am directed to, to please turn off the cell phone. *Mom* asks me what he is hurting. Now explain to me how technology that distracts from a public presentation that you – and those around you – paid to attend, isn’t disruptive.

Blogging, twitter, watching TV, talking on the phone, gossip face to face or over the wires or broadcast – any activity that distracts from safety, from goals, is a trade off.

I think you missed Windy’s point completely. Watching Winnie-the-Pooh with her youngling on YouTube wasn’t about using technology. She could instead have used a coloring book, or read from a book, with the same result – share a story with her child.

Windy used indirect connections and applications, and appears to have taken a conservative approach to adapting. That is, she uses what doesn’t interfere with what she was already doing.

Not everyone I know, including the boss that makes me carry the cell phone he provides, considers whether the opportunities outweigh the distraction value.

When you think of the term “distract”, think the way President Bush (the first one) “distracted” Saddam Hussein with an invasion of armed forces. Things never really settled back to the way they were before our troops hit Iraq.

I agree with your comments about the dichotomy of how technology is viewed, but there are certainly also other scenarios than the two you outline. I’ve seen groups of teenagers sitting together at a table at a restaurant or tea house, but each one was occupied with his or her own cell phone rather than engaging in any kind of meaningful social interaction. They came together for face-to-face time because it’s valued, and yet spend at least some of that time being “apart”.

It sounds like your hosts follow much the same logic that the Old Order Mennonites have for something like a hundred years: they don’t casually adopt new technology, but nor do they reject it out of hand.

My understanding is that a technology is judged based on whether it would have a positive or negative effect on their community as a whole (and even then there are situations where a compelling need will dictate use of an “undesirable” technology).

Your friends appear to do something similar; rather than accepting technology without thought, they evaluate the positives and negatives for their lives each time, rather than making a global good/bad decision.

Joining a knitting and crochet community online may have a positive impact on Windy’s life, but that doesn’t mean that Facebook necessarily would. Rather than deciding whether “social networking” is useful to her, she decides whether this specific instance has a positive effect for her.

@zvi agreed. I remember being at SXSW in 2007 and groups of people were standing around in circles each looking at their own cellphone…but they are interacting socially, just not f2f.

I can easily imagine a science fiction tale of the future in which people never touch each other, all they do is communicate through thinking…

Think about mobile phones. We all have relatives who have said they would never buy a mobile and then realized it could be useful for their lives.
They needed time to see how this tool could fit in their context.

For young people, the mobile phone is a great way to increase the rentability of their time: you do not need to interact with the physically person you are with. You can interact with an distant one (1to1).

The mobile we goes further: you do not need to interact with the physically *group* you are with. You can interact with an distant one (NtoN).

I think that we (the geeks) are not really understanding the context of 98% of the population and we should try to learn it to build better products.

I think there is a deeper issue here – ever since the beginning of the cybernetics movement post WWII, an underlying theme has been floating around that cyber reality is the same as what we perceive as as face-to-face reality. The observe of this has created roadblocks for on-line collaboration in conventional organizational settings (aside from people at the curb of the wave). John Perry Barlow has published some interesting stuff in this area.

Use context is something that that UML (Unified Modeling Language) people get as do librarians and social anthropologists. Good book in this area is Information Ecologies – Using Technology with Heart by Nardi and O’Day