A few weeks ago I managed to get along to 'When Designers Become Social Scientists', Phil Ely's staff research seminar - the only one, apart from my own, that I've managed to attend. I always seem to have teaching scheduled Wednesday at 12.30...
Anyway, I meant to post about it back then, as a way of reminding myself to download the literature review at Phil's Home Entertainment site and look at his 'ethnoview' and analysing field research data. I thought Phil's focus on users of technology that have previously been marginalised - extreme users, non-users etc - was potentially very productive.
With the user-driven web stuff I'm interested in (for example, blogging) extreme users play a key role in determining how people think about the technology. Early adopters and advanced/extreme users establish a set of default assumptions about what something like blogging 'is supposed to be about'. And afterwards, everyone sort of follows their lead...
But the weblog is a flexible, open-ended tool - the assumptions coded into it by early extreme users are only one set of possibilities. There are other ways to use it, uses that are beginning to emerge as different groups of people play around with the tools.
For example, it's been pointed out - by the net researcher/writer Will Davies, in a piece her wrote a while back, called 'The Sunshine Teens' (unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be online any more) - that it's mainly older early adopting users who have tended to see blogs as a publishing tool, as something that lets them 'talk back' to Big Media. For younger users, in particular, teenagers, blogging is a social networking thing, a way to communicate with friends.
Comments