Divining a Digital Future: Mess and Mythology in Ubiquitous Computing

“Instead, accountability is a multi-directional relationship: there may be accountability to superiors, to colleagues, to participants, and to the public (Dourish & Bell 2011).”

“I am aware that cloud computing has severe implications for privacy, labour and the environment (Mosco, 2014) and it embodies its own specific dominant narratives infused of power dynamics (Dourish & Bell, 2011); hence, it is not the best metaphor to describe contemporary protesting.”

“As a matter of fact, narratives and myths act as ‘organizing visions’ (Dourish & Bell, 2011) embedded in specific cultural and institutional contexts.”

“…authorities who authorize interventions…, committees that resolve conflicting demands in the process of setting standards, governments that set policy, bureaucrats who implement it, marketers who shape our views of the role of the infrastructure in our lives, and more’ (Dourish & Bell, 2011: 4–5).”

“As Dourish and Bell (2011, 51) observed for the Internet, a “naive orientation towards social impacts frames the relationship between the social and technical too narrowly”.”

“the myth (now 25 years old) of the ‘smart home’ [11].”

“Dourish and Bell (2011) observed that “the creation of cul-”

“Such fields have been fruitfully patched before, notably in the work of Suchman (2007), Ribes and Lee (2010), Jackson et al. (2011), Dourish and Bell (2011), and others.”

“…and other technological visions might actually play out in a world that social science research has shown clearly is characterised by digital ‘mess’ (Dourish and Bell, 2011) and will not approximate anything like that advanced by smooth visions of technological innovation accompanied by…”

“Any questioning of the narrative or technotale/myth is made out to be ‘ against progress, a Luddite or worse ’ (Dourish and Bell 2011).”

“For example, Dourish and Bell (2011) discuss the ‘ centrality of [ubiquitous computing ’ s] proximate future ’ , and argue that ‘ the framing of ubicomp as something yet to be achieved allows researchers and technologists to absolve themselves of responsibilities for the present ’ (22).”

“…of order by inciting new conceptualities, we might see them, in sum, as alternative means of establishing sentience based on new kinds of legibility, literacy and legitimacy (Dourish and Bell, 2011), representations that double as pathways to different waves of outstinct and to an errant sociality.”

“In current human – computer interaction (HCI) research there are today proponents for reducing or at least questioning the level of interactivity in our everyday environments (Dourish & Bell, 2011; Hallnäs & Redström, 2001; Odom et al., 2014; Pierce, 2012; Sengers, 2011).”

“As assemblages of heterogeneous sub-systems, IIs contain internal seams and disconnects [14].”

“Dourish and Bell (2011) bring myth and mythology to their anthropology of ubiquitous computing (a technological forerunner of the smart city).”

“[27]) provides a context for one’s own potential activities in later stages [10], even when people decide to refrain from any engagement.”

“Greenfield’s work is part of a broader trend in research in ubiquitous computing, such as in Dourish and Bell (2011).”

“Although a meta-analysis of the various approaches to civic tech is beyond the scope of the work here, we noted an often implicit assumption that new technologies will, in some way, shape, or form, be desirable and advance social progress [12].”

“…as being mainly interested in how ethnography can work within and aid design and studio projects—a relationship that has long been established (esp. in Scandinavia) and has continuing currency in a number of design fields like architecture, and especially informatics (see Dourish and Bell 2011).”

“I engage with the speculative quality of SSI head-on and seek to examine not its technical features but rather the imaginary horizons on which it operates (Dourish and Bell 2011; Nagy and Neff 2015).”

“…discuss how representations of technology influence broader perceptions, reactions, and debates, and how collective processes of imagination are expressed through and facilitated in part by processes of cultural production (Jasanoff and Kim 2009; Dourish and Bell 2011; Harmon and Mazmanian 2013).”

“The idea that computational artefacts are the solution for a wide range of human flaws is stronger in some sub-communities of the field, while others recognize that forms of living and societal issues can be (partly) rooted in the way certain technologies are designed and spread in everyday life [18, 29].”

“Furthermore, industry and consumer fantasies for smart wives do not re fl ect the myriad ways in which these emerging technologies are taken up and integrated (or rejected) into diverse households through messy processes that Dourish and Bell (2011: 92) refer to as ‘ fl ex, slop and play ’ .”

“…into being, I take into account both infrastructures ’ planned effects as well as its unintended consequences, such as unexpected human and non-human alliances, for instance, technological problems or frictions between different communities of practice (Cubitt et al. 2011; Dourish & Bell 2011).”

“(things already present in the home or passed on secondhand from friends or relatives) to make them work in new ways and/or for new purposes.(68) Bricolage, as applied to living with multimorbidity, is an underresearched area.”

“(Dourish and Bell 2011, p. 113) We see in these fieldwork extracts how ageing in place is collaboratively realised, co-produced by the efforts of a range of informal carers.”

“These were (a) a specific system to focus group activity [30], (b) a series of user groups [30], drawn from groups from the ‘edges’ [10], and (c) a series of potential constraints for each system.”

“Although these fears are real, it is important to keep in mind that perceptions of privacy are often contextual (Solove, 2008), and frequently cultural (Dourish & Bell, 2011).”

“As Dourish and Bell (2011) have pointed out, “The technologically mediated world does not stand apart from the physical one within which it is embedded; rather, it provides a new set of ways for that physical world to be understood and appropriated” (p. 132).”

“Dourish and Bell (2011) wrote “[t]he technologically mediated world does not stand apart from the physical one within which it is embedded; rather, it provides a new set of ways for that physical world to be understood and appropriated” (p. 132).”

“Instead, we suggest that both ‘critical’ and ‘GIS’ evolve in unresolved tension, as geospatial technology and information becomes ever more present in daily life (Dourish and Bell, 2011; Greenfield, 2006; Kitchin and Dodge, 2011), as new fields both claim and extend spatial inquiry and visualization (Drucker, 2009), a…”

“Recognizing how industry is capitalizing on technologically-facilitated availably, and rendering this capacity part of economic exchange, provides direction and theoretical traction to recent calls in the HCI community to look beyond these anytime/anywhere assumptions in designing mobile and ubiquitous tools and servi…”

“Cultural probes have been criticised by some authors as lying within an ‘uncritical’ set of methodologies, comprising short-cut ethnographic tools oriented towards the superficial goal of ‘implications for design’ [13].”

“Surveillance of household members with smart technologies is well documented as an emerging form of inappropriate control and domestic violence (Dourish and Bell, 2011: 179; Lopez-Neira et al., 2019; Strengers and Kennedy, 2020; Tanczer et al., 2018).”

“These included an overwhelmingly rationalist frame of reference; a prevailing belief that innovation and change represent progress; a perception that expert systems (see Chapter 1 for definition) will almost inevitably increase efficiency and save human labour; a failure to think seriously about the possible negative…”

“Furthermore, technologies deeply embedded in a western epistemology implicitly replicate and enact the very same biased cultural logics (Dourish and Bell 2011; Christie 2004; Winschiers-Theophilus et al. 2012).”

“” Navigating between technophilia and dystopia (Dourish & Bell, 2011; Nardi & O ’ Day, 1999), then, we draw on work by feminist technoscience scholars such as Donna Haraway, Annemarie Mol, Lucy Suchman, and Adele Clarke to articulate an approach toward the study of personal data that draws…”

“It is crucial to note that the partioning of the sensible also functions as generative matrices (Gaonkar 2002), ‘organising visions’, ‘technovisions’, ‘technotales’, and a ‘technomythscape’ (Dourish and Bell 2011: 1-2).”

“This was further inspired by how Dourish and Bell [6] illustrated the importance of ethnographic inquiry for understanding the design of future technologies.”

“More attention needs to be paid to how these operate and are delivered, billed, and regulated; and to the ways they routinely fall, are thwarted, subverted, hacked, and repurposed; and, perhaps most importantly, to the ways in which they are imagined (Dourish and Bell 2011).”

“On the one hand, their visions of future interoperability and data and sensor driven forms of automated services offer us ways to understand how the digital ‘mess’ of the everyday (Dourish and Bell 2011) is emerging in a context of competing apps, car companies and platforms.”

“Doubt highlights the translation-work that must occur between ideologies and the ‘messiness’ of everyday life, which may not always conform to ideological norms [16].”

“For example, Dourish and Bell (2011) make a case for infrastructure as an object of study, and, when exploring mess and myths associated with ubiquitous computing, they adopt an ethnographic approach.”

“Indeed, as Dourish and Bell (2011) assert in their book concerning the ‘mythology’ of ubicomp: “by many accounts ubicomp has been tremendously successful.”

“This concern builds on a burgeoning literature on the future-oriented visions of ubicomp and locative media (Dourish & Bell, 2011; Galloway 2010b; Kinsley, 2010, 2011, 2012; Reeves, 2012), as well as established practices such as technology demos as ‘‘theatres of proof’’ (Simakova, 2010) and…”

“Importantly, Dourish and Bell (2011) point out that infrastructures are messy and in constant flux— ‘‘thinking of infrastructure as stable, uniform, seamless, and universally available is clearly problematic’’ (pp. 28–29).”

“…human-computer interaction research has long adopted an awareness that the profusion of mobile technologies in everyday life stands to reshape sociotechnical interactions (see Dourish & Bell, 2011), HIB research has been slow to address these issues in depth, particularly on the level of theory.”

“Dourish and Bell note that Weiser’s vision of a world where the technology fades into the background still centers on technology use in the office, imagining new technologies but extending familiar social norms and forms of workplace organization [9].”

“…that made the values of early hacker culture so resonant, and could all benefit from some “troubling” [49] in order to plumb the smooth veneer of their utopian mythologies [4,7,34,72] and understand better how they play out in “the mangle of practice” [96], both historically and contemporaneously.”

“One critical aspect of this turn towards significance and interpretation is a transformation in the topic of culture itself, from what we might call a “taxonomic” view to a “generative” view (Dourish and Bell, 2011).”

“As alluded to earlier, Africa is not immune to commercial ‘technomythscapes’ (as coined by Dourish and Bell 2011) and Africa is encouraged to make ‘“bold choices” or to take hold of its “great responsibilities”, in which its desires are expressed as crying out for partners with solutions’…”

“…social networking, and privacy protection, while men, on average, are more likely to embrace innovations in IT hardware and autonomous driving (Berliner 1 3 Profiling early adopters of blockchain‑based hotel booking… et al. 2019; Dourish and Bell 2011; Harris et al. 2003; Hwang et al. 2019).”

“This difference helped us to reflect on a possible future of “seamful” messiness in immersive contexts [33].”

“Put simply, design is not a major concern for these disciplines (we do not want to make too much of a contrast here because it is evident that there is a degree of overlap, visible for instance in the work of Dourish and Bell 2011).”

“By closely attending to the messy realities of day-to-day use (Suchman 1987; Dourish and Bell 2011) and the meanings developed on the ground, this research balances and contextualizes both utopian and dystopian discourses about OLPC by accounting for children’s agency in deciding how to use their…”

“Grabill’s (2010) understanding of infrastructure is, like that of Dourish and Bell (2011) and Swarts (2010), defined in terms of the relationships between material and nonmaterial objects, or actors, including humans as well as technical, social and cultural objects, norms and standards. This relational theory of infr…”

“A perspective on culture as generative , changing, and arising from multimodal practice (instead of taxonomic , fixed, or static) is increasingly familiar in HCI (Dourish & Bell, 2011; Irani, Vertesi, Dourish, Philip, & Grinter, 2010).”

“In this way, commercial actors conveniently “absolve themselves of responsibilities for the present” (Dourish and Bell, 2011: 22) by placing emphasis on innovation, efficiency, and resolution of societal challenges through the application of cutting-edge technologies.”

“Indeed as anthropologists frequently argue, contingency (Irving, 2017) and messiness are fundamental to everyday life with technologies (Dourish & Bell, 2011; Pink et al., 2016) and need to be considered in relation to human tendencies to improvise through the world (Hallam & Ingold, 2007; Ingold,…”

“Impor-tantly, and like many technology visions, this de fi nition is still yet to be realised, remaining a proximate future (Dourish and Bell 2011).”

“Genevieve Bell, a cultural anthropologist at Intel explored the social and cultural aspects of ubiquitous computing with Paul Dourish [6], significantly shaping ubiquitous computing research methodologies.”

“Mobile technology emerges as a new “lens” through which to read urban space and becomes implicated in the production of urban experience (Dourish and Bell, 2011).”

“As dynamic sociotechnical systems, all information technologies are in fl ux and brought into local stability only through active engagement and coordination by the users (Dourish and Bell 2011; Star and Bowker 2002).”

“Further, as Dourish and Bell (2011) observe, “thinking of infrastructure as stable, uniform, seamless, and universally available is clearly problematic” (pp. 28-29).”

“…the concept of imagination in a cultural direction, exploring how imaginations of ubiquitous computing are embedded, expressed, and reinforced through the actions and products of researchers and practitioners in the field [12] and through sociotechnical visions expressed in the media [23 ] .”