Values in Design Day 5: Nancy Van House

Social Networking and Its Sites: Discovering/Uncovering Values

what are people DOING with new technologies - not what technologies are designed to do
thinking about activities in terms of persistence
what are the values people implement in other ways -
taking the technology and
1) using it do things they'd done before
2) using it to do new things
3) subverting it to their needs

description of what Flickr

Values in social networking
what do we mean by "values"?
whose values?
how do we identify/discover values?
again, whose values?

Lilly I: Values are committments that have some social or political dimension that you would like the artifact to affirm
Morgan A: Personal emotional dimension

What do we mean by values?
"Values as purposes, ends, or goals of human action and attention" (Flanagan, Howe, Nissenbaum)

Whose values? An array:
"users"
"non-users" : why are the non-users non? is there something that could be of value? are they refusers?
designers
other decision-makers
"experts"
the profession/field at large
culture; popular culture; marketers
specific cultural/population segments

silverstone: appropriation of tech
different value systems
values that are inconsistent

How do we discover values?
ask people directly
observation
discourse analysis
artifact analysis

Discovering values in social networking
asking people directly or indirectly
public debate/discussion
artifact analysis
observation: how people use sites/functionality
how they appropriate, repurpose, etc
and how they don't use sites/functionality

values in social networking include
privacy and publicness
friendship
sociality
communication

Flickr photos used for
memory
identity
relationships
self-expression

discourse analysis: users
system/site
requirement: must
preference: should
personal obligation
strong: "I must" "I have to" (like obligation to children to document growing-up)
weak: "I ought to"

Privacy (Ahern et al CHI 2007)
security: safety
social disclosure: whereabouts and activity (not just who, but when)
identity: self-representation
convenience: how easily people can find and use one's images

Users and privacy: issues we expected
not wanting specific others, groups, types of people/relationships to see some activity
care with posting photos of children
not posting pictures that subjects or others would not want posted

unexpected privacy issues
universally wanted more nuanced control over visibility: privacy is situational (but no one knew what they wanted)
relationships are in flux: viewing rights may change over time
feeling uncomfortable looking at others' images "it doesn't feel right"
private = emotionally intimate
nuanced decisions about what photos go where - balancing affordances of sites with desire to do different things

social networks, friendship, obligation

photos and the display of relationships
we give photos to people who want to see them, "who should have been there"
we take photos of people we care about
we display photos of people we care about
we arrange people in photos in ways that show our relationships
we arrange photos of people to show relationships (ex: photos of the dead)
we display photos on social networking sites to show relationships - not just people in image but other people looking at images

photographers' feelings of obligation
photographs invested with emotion
photography has been phenomenally successful as a technology - it must be important to people!
to subjects: respecting their wishes
to viewers: not to bore them, or overload them, or post self-indulgent photos
re kids (esp the 1st kid/2nd kid division of photos)
to our future selves
to ??? - to organize and edit according to imagined expectations

obligations?
to ideas of authenticity

richard chalfan: looking at photoalbums
- only allowed to show children crying - otherwise, only happiness pictured

Shay D: differences between film photography and online photography?
Nancy VH: digital photos can be more short-term, used for communication, with "indexical value" - ie, only meaningful in context of
Morgan: bigger discontinuity between digital cameras and cameraphones than digital cameras and still cameras
Nancy VH: "lifeblogging" - continual low-level image making with some peaks of more consciously composed moments
Cory K: interaction between digital photography and digital editing software
Nancy VH: we avoided that topic
Ingrid E: professionalization of the amateur - creation of self-identity as photographer
Helen N: thinking about a Neil Postman talk bemoaning word processor - digital photos giving opportunities to people to do what they could not previously do, esp camera phone
Jill C: everyday people can tell their stories, but there's a technical channeling (like the way Word makes it hard to draw things)
Nancy VH: things you could once only do in the darkroom you can now do online
Nassim J: photography as social action in countries where they restrict photography, the cameraphone has changed the face of social interaction
Karen: labor protest in Quebec where police were accused of trying to incite violence and cameraphones were used to identify the boots of fake protestors as police

friendship and obligation
Blustein, The Moral Demands of Memory
Linde, Life Stories

Flickr means keeping in touch
"distant closeness"

signal of values: evaluative language
what's a good photo: sometimes it's the context of the photo
the value of taking photos: sometimes a compulsion, there's a valence to it

another signal: language of discomfort
"creepy," "weird," "gut level," "not a good idea"
strong emotional reactions indicate that something is important

non-users: refusers
privacy - not wanting to make images public
no one they know uses Flickr
don't want to ask friends/relatives to have to sign up for yet another site that is actually temporary (how does purchase by Y! affect perception of persistence)
not wanting to look at other people's photos
their own images are not good enough

other values
memory
seeing the world as others do
aesthetics: art images, the creative experience
the artistic process
generosity

whose values?
who are the technology makers? who are they responsible to?
demographic of designers
cohort (ie, generational position in history) and lifestage

age effects
history, for example, of baby boom generation - in America sensitized to privacy and safety concerns - mccarthy, FBI surveillance

Alice W: younger people may just conceptualize privacy differently - not as invested in idea of separate private and public sphere - look at Helen's work on contextual integrity
Judith S: maybe also European vs American
Eliz G: Flickr in the UAE
Jina H: Singaporean bloggers and political constriction - comparing to Korea about 20 years ago
Nancy VH: we can't answer finally but need to keep asking - how does life experience feed into decisions about technology - more complex