Charting a Course for Fun!

To the right is a link to a model of a Socio-Technical Network. Each participant in the network (Designer, Content Provider, User, and Manager) and his or her related ICT is in a corner. The arrows represent the flow of information between participants. This model was created in Macromedia Fireworks (Macromedia was bought out by Adobe), a vector graphics editing program. The image itself is a PNG because PNG is the W3C's standard image format, because PNG is an open source format, and because the PNG format has lossless compression, which means that the image is compressed but doesn't lose any data (unlike a JPEG image, which loses quality as it is compressed).

Way back in 1995, a plan was presented to the Texas state legislature to do away with textbooks and instead rent laptops to students. This seems like a good idea at first; laptops cost $10 per month while textbooks cost $37.50 per month. However, this ignores several hidden costs. What happens if a student drops his laptop? The school must rent a new one. Now the school is paying for two laptops. A dropped or defaced textbook can still be used the next year. Plus, the school will need to update the laptops often to protect against viruses and spyware, as well as provide technical support. This requires hiring IT professionals. Surely that will cost more than $37.50 a month.

Also, one must look at the plan from a Social Informatics standpoint. What will the social impact of the laptops be? How will they improve the education of K-12 schools? Many, if not most, families have computers in their homes. What will the addition of a laptop provide? Research and essays can be done on the family computer or in the computer lab. Reading textbooks on the computer is not very convenient. For what would the laptops actually be needed?

Social Informatics questions are very useful and very necessary when making decisions about ICTs. After asking these questions, the Texas legislature turned down the plan that had once seemed like a good idea.

Works Cited

Kling, Rob, Howard Rosenbaum, and Steve Sawyer. Understanding and Communicating Social Informatics. New Jersey: Information Today, Inc., 2005.

Remember I was talking about Internet Explorer?

As I mentioned in my last post, coding for IE is a bit of a joke; one never knows what code will work and what won't without doing a bit of research. Unfortunately, I can't easily test any of the new features I add to this blog in IE (I'm on a Mac -- the best Microsoft will give us is IE 5). I've tested it extensively in Firefox and Safari (the Apple browser), but I have to log onto a PC to test in IE.

So, if you notice anything not working in IE, please comment or send me an e-mail (or just tell me when you see me). Thanks a lot.

Internet Explorer icon courtesy of Aaron Burrows.

Thought Answers

Computing has come a long way since its start back in the early twentieth century (although some may argue that computing actually began in the early nineteenth century). Even so, one of the main goals of computer engineers has always been to make their systems configurable. This is because an ICT's use is not fully defined by its design.

When a computer user is given a new piece of software, for instance Mozilla's Firefox web browser, he has expectations for the software based on both previous software products he has used and his current needs and job requirements. He may decide to customize and configure Firefox to fit his particular needs by installing extensions for the browser. While other software products may not support extensions as Firefox does, their users still have needs not exactly met by the current version of the product. In this case, the software's developers must listen to their users and try to release a new version of the product that more properly meets the requirements of the users.

One of the most well known examples of software whose developers that did not listen to the user base is Microsoft's Internet Explorer (which you may be using to view this page right now -- if so, I must encourage you to take a look at Firefox). When IE was released, Netscape Navigator (now the Netscape Browser) was the browser of choice, if only because it was the first graphical browser of its kind. For the next decade, Microsoft and Netscape competed in what has come to be known as the First Browser Wars, where both companies rapidly released new versions of their browsers, with little or no input by the users of the browser. Each release had new features which were either incompatible with or not supported by the other browser, which meant that any website that worked in one browser would probably not work well in the other. While all these features were being added, many bugs in the current versions were ignored.

Eventually, IE emerged from the war victorious, and Netscape was bought out by AOL. Since then, IE has been notorious for its poor support of many of the standards set by the W3C, the organization responsible for standardizing the different protocols used on the World Wide Web. Web developers have been pleading Microsoft to improve its standards compliance for years, but IE 7, the latest release, is still lacking many key features, including full CSS 2 and DOM support, both very important in creating dynamic web pages. Also, IE uses its own version of the JavaScript programming language, JScript, which is markedly different from standard JavaScript in several key points. This means that web developers have to spend more of their time writing code to support IE than developing the actual web site.

To solve this problem, Microsoft would need to support the full standards set forth by the W3C in IE. They would need to have more minor releases to fix bugs and implement the latest standards. They would also need to listen more to not just their users, but also the web developers who depend on their software. Most end users would not even know what DOM or CSS are, let alone know that their browser has substandard support for both. They might even blame the web site developers for sub-par performance. Therefore it is in the best interest of all IE users to improve standards support.

One of the most tragic examples of poor interaction between users and designers was the incident between the USS Vincennes and Iran Air Flight 655. In a combat situation, the Vincennes mistook the passenger jet for a fighter plane and, after attempting to communicate with it on several military frequencies, fired two missiles, destroying the plane and killing everyone aboard. After an investigation, the US government said that, due to combat stress, the crew of the Vincennes were unable to properly read the computer displays. The government also said that the crew could have been suffering from a psychological condition known as 'scenario fulfilment', which caused them to act out a training scenario while ignoring sensory input to the contrary.

Experts who examined the incident say that, while the crew may have been panicked, they should still have been able to use the computer systems properly. Whoever designed the systems should have anticipated that they crew may have been been under considerable duress during use; after all, the Vincennes was a combat vessel. According to an article in The Nation in August 1988 (about two months after the incident occurred), the Aegis combat system was never properly tested. What tests it did undergo tended to eliminate the element of surprise. The designers and developers should have understood better the conditions under which their systems would be used.

When it comes down to it, users depend on the ICTs they use, sometimes for their livelihood and sometimes for their lives. It is the job of the developer to make sure that the ICT is easy to use and does what the user needs, not what the developer thinks the user needs. Customization and configuration are ways for the user and the developer to reach a compromise; the developer does what he thinks is best, then the user requests changes in the parts he needs to in order to work properly. As Alan Kay, a professor of computer science, said,

The general precept of any product is that simple things should be easy, and hard things should be possible.

You can read more about Iran Air Flight 655 in its Wikipedia article. I don't know if this link to the Opposing Viewpoints article will work; you might need a membership for that. The document number is A6604712. When searching for information on the incident, I found that the Wikipedia entry was more helpful in getting a neutral overview of the event. The articles I found in the university's databases, which come from newspapers and magazines, tended to be more opinionated. Even so, they still had good insights and information.

Works Cited

Biddle, Wayne. "Testing charade". The Nation. Opposing Viewpoints 27 Aug 1988. 5 Feb 2007. <http://galenet.galegroup.com.libproxy.albany.edu/>

Kling, Rob, Howard Rosenbaum, and Steve Sawyer. Understanding and Communicating Social Informatics. New Jersey: Information Today, Inc., 2005.

Blog the First

There is a difference between the ways in which the popular media and scholars discuss technology. There always has been, probably ever since popular media was invented. Newspapers of the time probably glossed over the technical aspect of the light-bulb while the scientific community marvelled at it. But why does this difference exist?

The popular media must appeal to a wide range of viewers, both educated and uneducated. This limits the extent to which the media can examine technologies. News stories rarely talk about the programming or engineering that goes into any new technology, because frankly most people would not care. Instead they focus on how the technology impacts the lives of the viewers. Movies show computers as complicated and mysterious. This article on Drivl.com has a list of what computers do in the movies that does not (and should not) happen in real life.

Scholars, on the other hand, can assume a certain intelligence and understanding when discussing technology. They very often discuss the behind-the-scenes aspect of new technologies. The best example is the open source software movement. There are open source projects and communities springing up all over the Internet -- Linux and Mozilla Firefox are among the more well known. These communities are groups of programmers and software engineers who get together to design and build new software. If one were to visit their forums, one would notice the maturity and knowledge displayed compared to other more popular online forums. They discuss code and debate different algorithms, and generally talk about the "nerdy", less popular side of technology.

Maybe the average man does not care about the latest technology because it never really changes his life. After all, how revolutionary can new ICTs be? The answer is pretty darned revolutionary. The printing press was one of the most revolutionary inventions of its time; it allowed the middle and lower classes to afford books, which meant that they could have access to information previously only attainable by the rich. In more recent times, there are the radio, the television, the computer, and of course the Internet. The last is one of the most revolutionary of all, because it is still evolving decades after its creation. Search engines like Google and Yahoo bring information directly to the seeker, instead of him or her having to go out looking for it. Community sites like Youtube and DeviantArt allow members to share and discuss videos and artwork from almost anywhere on the globe. These capabilities didn't exist even 10 years ago. According to Michael Rothschild, a published economist,

Since the invention of the microprocessor, the cost of moving a byte of information around has fallen on the order of 10-million-fold. Never before in the human history has any product or service gotten 10 million times cheaper — much less in the course of a couple decades. That's as if a 747 plane, once at $150 million a piece, could now be bought for about the price of a large pizza.

That is an impressive figure. Remember that a byte is eight bits, that is the answers to eight yes or no questions. But the most impressive part is the fact that it has never happened before. Is that not what being revolutionary is all about? Surely, therefore, it is a little too cynical to say that ICTs never cause social transformations.

Works Cited

Kling, Rob, Howard Rosenbaum, and Steve Sawyer. Understanding and Communicating Social Informatics. New Jersey: Information Today, Inc., 2005.

One small step.

The first post of in a blog should be something meaningful and deep. This is not.