Centre for Social Anthropology and Computing

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Email: M.David@ukc.ac.uk
Tel.: +44 1227 764000 (ext. 3982)
Fax: +44 1227 827289

i. Introduction.

This paper is based on research carried out by the University of Kent at Canterbury Centre for Social Anthropology and Computing “British Library Ethnographic Research on Bibliographic Services” (BLERBS) project (see David 1996 and David and Zeitlyn 1996) into new information media and their social and political implications. The immediate research focus is on access to bibliographic information (broadly, how people find what is available to read and how they may obtain it. This raises the issue of creative and strategic uses of the internet which exemplifies the contradiction between communication as commodity and communication as cultural exchange. The project is empirically based upon ethnomethodological, ethnographic and conversation analytic studies of the uses and usefulness of new electronic media in higher education. We will discuss aspects of this research and draw out the relevance of these findings to the question of new electronic media and democracy.

Conversation Analysis can be used to point out key misconceptions in equations between Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and intersubjective communication. Failure to differentiate the two leads to individual user break-downs, while at an institutional level it may have wider ideological significance. Ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (CA) highlight the importance of the orientation of each speaker to the understanding of the other. As such “communication” involves meaningful rule following. However, it also involves negotiation among the speakers over interpretations of both the rules of delivery (of most interest to CA) and the content of speech acts (of greater interest to ethnomethodologists). “Communication” involves a unique form of attention to the other.

Human Computer Interaction operates according to different principles. A machine cannot orient itself to understanding the intentions of the user, in the manor of partners within a conversation. A machine is able to perform procedures upon command. The distinction between communication and command is crucial to this discussion, so some attention must be given to classifications. By “command” we refer, in the first instance, to the limited sense of commands given to a computer. In this context the use of “command” is based on a metaphor taken from interaction between sentient creatures. However, it should not be taken to imply the idea of “domination”, “force” or “imposition”. To begin with we shall demonstrate how a failure to distinguish between the principles which govern how people interact with other people, and those that limit interaction with machines devoid of intentionality can lead to misconceptions over the extent to which the latter can substitute for the former in educational contexts. Machines are ineffective and inefficient substitutes for humans in achieving certain educational goals.

One response to this may be to change the goals of education to match the functions that can be achieved in HCI. A conception of education in which it is thought that HCI can substitute for intersubjective interaction between people, or where HCI is taken as a model for instruction and learning, could indeed produce a very undemocratic and submissive form of education. In this regard, the second and literal sense of “command” as a form of monological interaction premised upon power relations and dominance, as opposed to dialogical “communication”, becomes relevant. ¹

Ethnographic study with an ethnomethodological orientation, reveals the key role of cultural networks in the formation of the skills (criteria of selection and interpretation) that enable information to be translated into knowledge. The democratic potential of new electronic media lies in their ability to enhance intersubjective communication between human beings and to facilitate knowledge production, dissemination and negotiation. Dangers lie in the spread of new electronic media in the attempts by those keen to commodify these media to equate communication with command and reduce collective knowledge production to atomised information accumulation.

ii. Information as culture or capital? Electronic Communication and Exchange in the Academy.

Sharing library catalogues on-line has already taken place. The development of “Metropolitan Area Networks”, linking colleges, in the U.K., for instance, via the Joint Academic Network (Janet), and in the future by “SuperJANET”, will enable far greater access to learning resources. Yet while enabling an explosion of communication, this transformation is accompanied by economic pressures toward the commodification of intellectual activities and resources. Cooperative relations between neighbouring institutions over resource sharing are increasingly being replaced by formal and contractual relations which constrain or inhibit such sharing.

Universities and colleges are under intense financial pressure. While it is attractive to imagine institutions sharing resources in a grand virtual library, the likelihood is that access will be charged for. Smaller, newer colleges, unable to compete with old university libraries established “capital-stock” of books and journals, will be forced into dependent exchange relations with established institutions, buying access to their shelves, both physically and virtually.

Increased student to resource ratios create pressures to restrict access to outside users. While on-line catalogue searching can locate a book or journal, this is no guarantee of seeing it. Virtual proximity does not ensure actual access. In fact unlimited catalogue accessibility is used to justify “smart” library cards not only enabling you to take books out, but also enabling the bearer entry in the first place. This is occurring in institutions now worried that their students are being deprived by hordes of alien researchers, fresh from scouring the internet for accessible resources to plunder.

Journals, paper or pixels? Average academic journal costs in Britain have risen by 300% since 1985 part of a vicious circle of decreasing subscriptions and higher prices. Smaller, less prestigious, college libraries are hit hardest and have no option but to reduce the number of titles they subscribe to. Readers have to turn to current awareness services and other bibliographic aids in order to find out what is being published.

In the UK access to services like BIDS (Bath Information Data Services), and use of data-bases on CD-Rom has only increased pressure on such smaller institutions to rely on Inter-Library Loan services, as access to information on existing materials falls out of step with in-house stocks. For institutions whose staff undertake relatively little research I.L.L.’s. may be more cost effective than expensive journal subscriptions, but choosing external service provision means library resources are not available to build up in-house resources, perpetuating low research scope in the future.

The British Government’s Joint Funding Council’s Library Review Group recommended academics travel more and that institutions collaborate in sharing costs through regional consortia. However London’s “M25 Consortium” gives little comfort. While the Consortium’s Web site http://www.m25lib.ac.uk/m25/ enables subject searching the best field specific collections within 110 London academic libraries, increasingly these very libraries are barring entry to students other than their own, unless an inter-library financial agreement has been formed or the individual pays. ²

BIDS-ISI annual subscription service gives access to numerous on-line services without additional per-session cost. However BIDS own data on cost per session shows that while large research universities pay as little as a few pence per search, low research institutions, are paying anything up to three pounds fifty (from East et al 1993, p. 20). The subscription system, for all its potential benefits, maps existing institutional disparities. Smaller institutions face great difficulties justifying subscriptions on the basis of present research activities, while dropping out offers the prospect of relegation to the academic slow lane.

The emergence of increasingly large numbers of full-text online journal services will again raise the question of whether smaller institutions can keep up. The same dilemma faces smaller colleges in relation to updating internet band-width to join the SuperJANET (Joint Academic Network) network.

iii. Ethnographic and Conversation Analytic approaches to the ethnomethodological study of cultural and technical networks.

Ethnomethodology centres attention upon the study of the methods by which the members of an intersubjective relationship maintain the sense of a shared understanding, and of the orientation of each participant towards the understanding of the other that is central to communicative action (as opposed to other forms of behaviour (human or otherwise)). Break-downs in communication can yield a better understanding of what maintains communicative action, and what distorts it. Such work contains implications for the understanding of “democratic” interaction and communication. ³

Habermas offers ethnomethodologists, such as Garfinkel an escape route that would enable a critical orientation towards relations of domination and power within social life, while, at the same time, maintaining ethnomethodology’s valuable orientation towards the unique features of intersubjective communicative action as a central foundation for social life. Habermas suggests that (1986, p. 130):

“Garkinkel could escape this dilemma... only if he would take seriously the claim to universality implicitly built into the ideas of truth and rightness as pointing to the validity basis of speech . The social-scientific interpreter, in the role of an at-least virtual participant, must in principle orient himself to the same validity claims to which those immediately involved also orient themselves; for this reason, and to this extent, he can start from the always implicitly shared, immanent rationality of speech, take seriously the rationality claimed by the participants for their utterances, and at the same time critically examine it. In thematizing what the participants merely presuppose and assuming a reflexive attitude to the interpredandum, one does not place oneself outside the communication context under investigation; one deepens and radicalises it in a way that is in principle open to all participants. In natural contexts this path from communicative action to discourse is often blocked; but it is always ingrained in the very structure of action oriented to reaching understanding.”

The questions of accountability and control, discussed in ethnomethodology in terms of the normatively self-regulated orientation towards understanding the other, of maintaining shared meaning through intersubjective exchange, and in the rules of such exchanges (turn taking, adjacency pairs etc), become radically altered as production and reception are separated. Liberal and critical media theorists differ in their reading of this separation, and the power relations they see embodied in it. Radicals suggest such a separation (with the concentration of ownership and control that goes with this) enables the distortion of media output in an ideological fashion. From an ethnomethodological stance such a separation, with one side able to dominate with little orientation to the recipient, scarcely constitutes communication. It is monological rather than conversational. Liberals suggest that mass media producers are forced to orient themselves to the consumer preferences of their audience. However such a commodified and silenced conception of the other, where the audience is not asked to articulate a response, but simply to choose between different messages on offer, still fails to resemble intersubjective communication. As such they represent at best stilted, or distorted, forms of communication at best.

So what of new electronic media? We are thinking here of the networked computer and the electronic mailing services, search engines, data-bases and home-pages to which it can connect its user. Networked computers enable dialogic communication, but also access to a vast array of information and information about how to get information. Unlike the telephone, much of the interaction is with machines, rather than through machines to people. To the extent that “direct” person to person e-mail (either in real-time or when stored) integrates features of the letter, the telegram, the telephone, and the answering machine its originality may only lie in its speed, though this may have significant effects.These, however, are not what we want to focus on here. Rather we want to address aspects of HCI and their relation to cultural networks. Interaction with a machine (such as accessing a data-base or home-page) should not be confused with communication with a person, however that communication is mediated (telephone or letter). Machines enact instrumental commands. A machine is incapable of understanding anything, and has no normative orientation towards understanding the user. Failure to differentiate HCI and intersubjective communication at the level of individual users leads to frustrating interactional break-downs. At the level of policy making and marketing such a failure is bound up with deeply ideological misconceptions

As multi-media systems advance the interface between telephone, computer, television, video and audio reproduction will blur giving a large (practically infinite?) choice of combinations to those able to gain access (able to pay). With infinite choice also may come the opportunity to disseminate information through personal homepages, giving the world access to the individual, for better or worse. What we want to suggest below is that it is necessary to make clear a number of essential distinctions, between conversation and command, between knowledge and information, between liberation and enablement, and between the cultural and technical networks by which “communication” is effected, if we are to understand the possibilities and actualities of new electronic media. We will deal with four particular intermeshed relationships below.