Just a pretty face?

In this post I’ll try to examine facebook from a viewpoint concerned with technological determinism and aesthetics.

Facebook, which is a “social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them” according to themselves. This is a pretty vague statement, and it should be. Facebook can be used to do a plethora of social actions.

Now, from a hard technoligicaly deterministic viewpoint, one would believe that since it can be used for all these tasks – it will be used for all these tasks. As Bradley writes in his facebook anecdote people don’t use it to judge or say controversial things. Bradley argues that this might be because of the highly public nature of facebook, but there are many other sites that are just as public where arguing and drama are central parts of the experience. When I was young and naive I was a member of an on-line community like that, and after I broke up with my girlfriend a following argument ensued and the whole string of “did you know that so-and-so said such-and-such?” that Bradley writes about followed. Yet, such arguments where pretty normal and did not seem to be a hindrance for anyone to argue.

There are different types of online communities, yet they pretty much start out as empty slates – just a framework for socializing with no members. My thoughts are that there must be some defining characteristic, or characteristics that set the social rules for such sites. I believe there are many factors that decide this but the two most important are, as I see it, transparency and aesthetics.

Facebook has one very special feature, most of it’s users are very transparently represented. They mostly use their real names, give out information about where they study and work and friends on this community are mostly people you have some connection to in real life. With facebook, I feel that my profile is me, not a distant representation of me. Since I am now on-line, I feel that I have to carefully manage what information I give about myself and what I say.

As I mentioned, another defining characteristic of facebook is it’s aesthetics. Facebook can clearly be said to have a clean, minimalistic and serious design. It has no disturbing graphical elements, it’s mostly white and has a very unobtrusive array of different shades of blue to separate content. If you compare this to a random MySpace profile, there are some drastic differences. MySpace offers it’s users the possibility of designing their own profile. Which often results in poor usability and extrmely flamboyant, cluttered and right out ugly profiles. MySpace also has it’s share of arguments, as can be seen in the Urban Dictionary, which has a definition of a “myspace drama whore.”

Aesthetics are often used to set the mood of something, and I believe that it also sets certain barriers of what one can and cannot do. In relation to technological determinism this means that aesthticvs can be used to limit the possible actions that a technological product may be used for. You don’t use a wine glass for milk even if it would functionally perform the task just as good. One could argue that this is simply a cultural phenomenon, but then again, does’nt aesthetics play a role in culture too?

Bells and whistles

In this post I will discuss how aesthetics and user interfaces affect what we create with them.

I don´t use any add-ons on this blog, and the theme is not my creation. Everything you see here, except the contents of these posts, is made by someone else – using whatever tools they prefer. The interface you´re supposed to use for writing in wordpress is a fairly standard interface made to resemble a wordprocessor.

I don’t think the interface I’m using right now (TextEdit) will yield different results that wordpress, Pages or Microsoft Word.

The theme I´ve chosen here is a very simple, sort of business like theme and I think the interface used to read this blog matters more than the interface I use to write it. I write what i want to write regardless of any bells or whistles present on my blog, but you are the one who as to live with al my useless widgets and unreadable themes. Not only do these choices matter from a usability perpective, but I tihnk they also matter in the way you interpret my posts. A certain theme can influence your interpretation of who I am, just as the widgets i choose will. If i add an RSS feed from the finiancial times, that would influence your thoughts on who I am in a totally different way that a feed from GreenPeace would.

Since blogs often are written from a personal perspective, the reader will often want to understand who the writer is and how that relates to what he writes. Widgets and themes are ways of projecting an image of who you are to the readers – and for me at least thats their main objective.

The limits of technology

In Writing as Technology Bolter argues that technology is not strictly limitied to physical objects, such as machines, that enable us to achieve certain tasks. A method or skill can also be a technology, and as the title suggests, Bolter focuses on writing. For Bolter, the practice of writing is a technology in that it’s a method for arranging verbal ideas in a visual space.

Writing does not constitute a technology in itself, but as Bolter points out, the technical and cultural aspects of writing combined is what makes it a technology, and these aspects are so closely bound together that it’s impossible to separate them. Bolter distances himself from technological determinism, and without using the term presents himself as a co-constructionist. He sees technology and culture as two things that influence and create each other.

The tools used for writing have changed considerably throughout human history, and each time one tool has replaced another, the technology has gone though a process of remediation. In these times, not only the tools have changed, but also how we use them, in this case how we write. He also argues that the current remedition process, from the printing press to the computer is perhaps the most radical one. This is both because it really changes the way we interact with the media as a physical object and the fact that computers arguably offer unprecedented opportunities for combining older media.

I’m not sure if this is quite done yet… Should i Summarize more or perhaps discuss these viewpoints?

Hello UiB!

This is my first day of HUIN206, today we’ve been walking around with these beautiful signs around our necks and interviewing each other. I’ve interviewed Hamdi, who also has to explain a few things each time anyone asks him where he’s from. He likes almond krokan ice-cream, but I suppose I can’t hold that against him.

Also in my class is Bradley, he’s Canadian, so I maybe he speaks French. When I was in 8. grade I had French. Which is not to say that I speak french, or understand it for that matter.

I think my next posts is going to be some sort of summary of an article. Or maybe I’ll write about my first experience with a computer.