Focus 580; Information Ecologies: Using Technology With Heart

Good morning this is Focus 580 our morning telephone talk show. My name is Jack Brighton glad you could listen today during this our focus 580 we will continue to explore the impact of information technology on the ways we work and live our guests our two scholars and researchers who call themselves critical friends of technology critical in the sense of trying to make thoughtful and deliberate choices about using technology in light of human practices goals and values. Bonnie Norty is an anthropologist and researcher at AT&T labs research in video day is a computer scientist formerly with the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center now pursuing graduate studies in anthropology at the University of California at Santa Cruz they are both co-authors of a book we'll be discussing today entitled information ecologies using technology with Heart published by the MIT Press and out now in paperback. In the book information ecologies our guests argue that our adoption of new technology is really in our own hands when we buy into the notion that adoption of a given technology is inevitable. We give up important choices about how that technology is adopted. They say only by examining

any given technology in the context of our own values. Practices and as they term it ecologies can be well-prepared to make the best choices. We'll talk about that during this hour. And as we do so we invite your phone calls questions and comments are welcome on the topic around Champaign-Urbana. You can call us at 3 3 3 9 4 5 5. That's 3 3 3 w a will that makes it easier to remember. We also have a toll free line anywhere you hear us that includes on the Internet in the United States if you're listening on the web you can use our toll free line and call us at 3 excuse me 800 2 2 2 9 4 5 5. Again around Champaign-Urbana 3 3 3. Well anywhere you hear is 800 1:58 oil well. Vickie and Bonnie good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Great great great to have you both on the show. Yeah thank you. Just to start as you do in the book with Fritz Lang's Metropolis this great film is interesting because I actually had never seen that until I got your book and it started

with references to the film so I before I proceeded I went out and rented it. And it's just a wonderful film that sort of it's sort of illustrates this cleavage between technology and humanity in a very stark way. We found it just amazing to watch again. We were recommended to the film by a friend who thought it was resonant with our themes I guess that we were talking about. And we went out and watched the film together and we just found it visually breathtaking and also amazingly prescient about some of the issues that we're still talking about today. This is a film that was produced in the 1980s so it's you know maybe one that a lot of people aren't familiar with but maybe I could ask you to it's as you know a sort of a thumbnail sketch of that. The basic theme. Well the movie is about a world in which there's beautiful stunning technology that

that manages the city above ground and then underground. There are workers running machines who basically make possible the life of the Masters above ground who live in this stunning city. And it's a really simplistic and idealized characters but it sounds familiar but it sounds familiar. And I guess that the images to us brought home some of the technologies that we use today. You see desktop video conferencing. You know machines in this case that are physically beyond the workers reach that the workers are stretching to be able to move the dials and levers and wheels that they're required to move. But for us. Consistent with our experience as office workers were also you know feeling like aren't aren't machines are sometimes a little bit beyond our reach. There's also this theme of time that the machines are operating at a pace that requires

people to speed up. Yeah and I think we all recognize that feeling. The technologies that we use though the the plot of the movie continues with. You know and explosion underground you know kind of a worker rebellion and destruction of the city goes on from there I really recommend that it's impossible to describe the impact of the film and you know and there's an overall theme of trying to unify heart head and hands that I found a really really compelling and spoke to me about our relationship with technology and how we need to be need to try to unify those forces more completely. Yes it is it wraps up with a nice bow at the end. And presumably they're going to you know that particular dysfunctional society is going to work out its kinks and you know to move on. Inspirational moment. But your point about the workers. Every all the controls are just larger than they can actually recently have to stretch and they have to

you know work faster and faster just to keep up it it does sound really familiar in these days that we have to adapt to the technicians particularly computers. You know we're given these marvelous tools but we find ourselves modifying our work practices. That's right drastically just to deal with them and getting or risk being constantly interrupted by email and or balance on. Yeah I think people experience a lot of emotional stress just from feeling that they're not keeping up that their technology is obsolete that they don't really know how to use it and they're always kind of behind the eight ball instead of feeling in control and feeling comfortable and congenial with the technology. Yeah. Well and again you know it's a sense I think we as we saw in Fritz Lang's film and I think is many of us feel in working in our offices in shops and wherever it is we work that the tools we're given we must use them we must learn them and we simply have to adopt and adapt to these tools as a sort of matter of inevitability. And this is something that

you call attention to early on the book that I want to ask you to talk about the rhetoric of inevitability whether it's good or bad whether it's a hype or a nightmare that we're describing. If we buy into that rhetoric we give up important choices. Yeah I think the problem with that rhetoric is that it's really disempowering because it says the technology is coming it's coming in the form that big companies deliver it to you and you have to take it and adapt to it and there's no sort of opening for people to say well this is how I would like to use the technology. And I would like to have more human support for the technology is just kind of thrown out there and we're supposed to pick it up and use it and be technically proficient immediately and people just are not like that and as I said it leads to stress and to people not using the tools to their fullest capacity as well. We hear often in the press about how the information revolution is just accelerating and of course it is. And it sort of gives the sense of this.

This accelerating iceberg that is just going to level you know that the ground and it's something that is larger than us and that we really can't control it's just going to happen. Is that perhaps putting it to a little bit too simplistically. I think there is there is rhetoric along those lines and that's part of what we want to draw attention to and read this in the book because while it's certainly true that there are global market forces and global technology decisions that affect us in ways we can't directly control. One of our main points is that we do have choices about whether and how we take technology and how we appropriate it to use it for our own ends. It's not true that everybody have all the choices all the time. But if our point is that if we pay attention to the local settings that we belong to to schools that we

attend to that we tender that our children attend to the offices we work in to the places that we go. We have choices on a very local scale where local means different things for different people in different situations. And so we want to shift perception. For a moment anyway away from the global forces and toward the local decision making that people do because we think that there's a lot of opportunity there that's where activism can happen that's where creativity can happen and help people take up technology. So it was you would argue it's not just a matter of policy and politics. No I mean certainly that's present and and. And it's present at the local level as well as at the larger levels. But it it is debilitating to believe that you can't speak up and ask questions and if there's surprising effect when you do it it turns out that people can have a tremendous impact in their local environment.

Yeah I think it's a mistake to always say well that's a policy issue that's something for the politicians to deal with. It's really not something that I have control over because as like you said you're surprised sometimes that you actually say well let's try to make this technology fit into our local setting and see what we want to do with it I think people can do more than they often think they can. This is a situation where I can't direct questions to looking at each of you with eye contact so I have to sort of maybe ask you to maybe identify yourself as you just did Bonnie thank you. And feel free to say whatever you want to say in response to my question you can either or both of you jump in. Im not sure quite how to direct other than that so just to get that out of the way. You are free to speak. But following up on your last point I think many of us or most of us sometimes buy into the notion that when it comes to discussions about technology especially computers and you know this whole digital revolution the only role an individual can really play is as a consumer you buy either this product or that product and thats what decides which products

survives the battle of the fittest in the marketplace. You know is this a way of disempowering ourselves or what. I mean how how. I mean we have many roles not just consumer. I think its important here the perspective that we bring in people who go out and do workplace studies. Usually as part of the technology design teams but the point is that we go out to where people work with technology and use it in schools and in offices libraries and hospitals and other places and we pay attention not just to the people on the keyboards and the screens but to as much of the surrounding context as we can. And by that we mean the other technologies including low tech technologies such as you know pencils and paper and white boards and telephones. We pay attention to the social interactions between people. What's getting done. In and around the technology. And I think that when you look

with that perspective you see just and a vanishing diversity even in supposedly similar settings in schools an astonishing diversity in how people have positioned technology. Where they put computers how they schedule access to them what kinds of help in the port systems are in place and in our view those decisions of how technology is efficient in use are just as much a kind of design process as whatever it is that packaged the hardware and software for sale in the first place. And so if we think about design in this broader way we can see that the consumers are also designers of technology and have many positive decisions to make about it. You are right and we also wanted to offer the ecology metaphor as an alternative to the consumer metaphor which is the one that we're typically presented with to get people to. Think systemically to think about if I place a

television in my living room how will it affect me and my family if I bring this computer into the school. What will happen to the teachers and the students and everybody else involved. If I bring a new word processor into the office it's not just what are the features that this particular software program has. It's how does this affect the entire setting that we're working and so what Vicky and I really would like is for people to think about those questions as well as the more narrowly focused consumer questions as they approach technology. This is the area I wanted to talk about next because I think that the metaphors that we use to describe the things that we do are important in the way that we think about those things and as you point out the metaphors tick for technology vary depending on one's perspective. We often describe computers in particular as tools and maybe I could ask you to talk about you know these these different metaphors and how they affect our thinking the tool metaphor in particular is something that is very

common. This is Vicki Yes. OK thanks. Thanks I remember that time. Absolutely in fact we grappled a lot with the material that we wanted to talk about and finally realized that what we were talking about a metaphor. You know some of our writing process was definitely discovery as people who lived and worked in design settings and technology settings for a lot of years were so used to talking about technologies as tools that it really feels like a synonym. I mean what else could it be. Of course I'm too old. And we don't think about the metaphorical properties of that image and where it leads us. So we tried to step back and take it apart a little and I must say that when I talk about with to this this metaphor idea with technology friends you know the same reaction that we did initially that you know it is what it is it is not a metaphor at all. But but when you step back and look at the notion of tool as a metaphor. One of the places it leads is

to thinking about individuals. Holding onto a singular object. You know we think about car keys and screwdrivers and you know Ice Cube tongs and all sorts of everyday tools and we think of then a computer or a piece of software as a as a similar kind of thing something that we can pick up and put down at will something that has useful properties that extend what we can do in interesting ways and that's good in technology design settings one place that leads is thinking hard about what properties the tools have what makes them useful. What can make them more useful. It leads to good testing a bit between users and their tools. But what it doesn't do is it doesn't encourage us at all to think about broader social and political and organizational questions. It just doesn't go there. The one thing that we want to do with very very close attention to the language that we have

about technology and to try and direct the language that we use to encompass other metaphors and see where they go. So we've talked also about technology as a system for example. But you know where Fritz Lang's film Metropolis takes us it's really something that is so vast and so pervasive and so entwined in everyday life that it controls rather than the other way around. And this too has some resonance with our experience as we've discussed before. The problem is that we see only the global and not the local. So that that's what took us in the direction of ecology it was to try on another metaphor in a kind of a purposeful way and see where it might take us. So the ecology metaphor kind of sits between the tools and the system. So with the tools we're perfectly in control and we're holding the hammer in our hand and we know what we're doing with it and with the system there are these large global forces that we know are important but we are sort of a cog in a larger

system. And the ecology is a local setting in which individuals are still important but it's not a single individual it's an individual with other people and with other tools and that's where we feel there's a lot of leverage for everyday ordinary people to say okay what is my personal relationship to technology in this particular setting and to be more reflective and to take some action. As anthropologist does that help you look at a given setting in a different way. Yeah as an anthropologist that's kind of what we're trained to do from the get go and so it feels very natural to us and what Vickie and I wanted to do was find a metaphor that we felt would convey a lot to the general public and most people are familiar with ecology from biology and so forth and there are a lot of nice systems concepts behind the ecology metaphors. So it's not one that we would maybe typically use as anthropologists but it fits very nicely into our training and experience. Let's talk about the aspects of this metaphor of information ecologies

and you break it down several ways of sort of exploring what this is what this concept is co-evolution being. One of those. By. Well let me just back up for sure and say that we we should clarify that we don't intend for the visit of this a college a metaphor or any of the metaphors to be taking completely literally. So we want to borrow from it liberally but it is still a metaphor and we want to pick up things that will suggest useful avenues of discussion. So the co-evolution idea is just the observation that in a system of related and interacting things when some kind of change is introduced to different aspects of the system respond. So if we introduce a change for example in the technology that's present in a classroom some of the other related practices in the classroom will need to respond. Such

as the scheduling of time during the day. Such as. Teaching practices such as reorganization of the physical space such as perhaps curriculum perhaps perhaps assessment that there's there's no way of thinking about the technology in isolation from the related features of the ecology. So we want to point that out because there's a very natural tendency especially when people are either making technology design decisions or technology deployment and implementation decisions to think about it in isolation because it's simpler it's much much easier to get your mind around a technology if if you're thinking about it separated from its context and we want to point out that while that is at times convenient there are other times when you need to look specifically at the relationships of the technology to its context. I just want to say that Vicki and I defined an information ecology as people practices technologies and values. So what we wanted to do was kind of raise

consciousness about how values come into play how practices come into play and again to go back to your point about consumerism is not just the individual and a set of features that they're trying to assess or they buy a technology there's much much more to it than that. We're almost at our midpoint let me just reintroduce our guests this morning during this hour focus 580 We're talking with Bonnie Norty and Vicky O'Day They are co-authors of a book we're discussing information ecologies using technology with Heart published by the MIT Press and out now. In paperback if you would like to join our conversation you can call us around Champaign-Urbana at 3 3 3 9 4 5 5. Or toll free line anywhere you heard 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5. In any given setting where you mention schools where computers have been introduced obviously that that is going to change a lot of things especially if there's suddenly a mandate we're going to start using these computers and then suddenly you have to have technical support and you have to have some training for the teachers

and the students have to learn and you studied several situations where this was in fact happening there was a very interesting sort of virtual space called Pueblo and also the Lincoln High School in San Jose California. And I want if you can talk about your observations in either or both of these settings where computers are being integrated with with traditional school activities. Right yeah the schools are really interesting and Vicki and I were really fascinated to see how much the kids got out of the technology which is certainly not always the case. And I think the secret of why it worked so well in these two particular schools was that the teachers who brought the technology into the schools knew why they were doing it. So one of the points that we make in information ecologies is that we need to ask more know why questions not just know how how do we get these networks you know into these classrooms but

why are we bringing these computers into these classrooms and why are we wiring the school. What do we hope to accomplish. So at Lincoln High School which is where I did research this is Bonnie. The teacher really wanted to improve her art regular. She is a very talented amateur photographer and she thought there's a wonderful opportunity here for the kids to do something with digital photography and learn about technology at the same time. So her focus in the class was always on art and the technology just came along to support the digital photography but it was not the main focus of the. Laugh and so I think that was why the class was so successful and that's what I would like to see more of in the schools the people asking the know why questions because once those are settled and of course they change over time but once they're settled at least initially decisions get made that support the use of the technology and much more fruitful way. But often we just say we have to have computers in the schools. And it leads to a lot of frustration and computers sitting on desks and kids going to typing classes instead of using computers in

really creative interesting ways which they can be used in. What was interesting to read about that scenario is one of the students son of the class because they were they were you know we had no interest in computers in particular maybe they got interested in computers but they wanted to photography. Yeah exactly right and I thought that was really the right thing is that this is really an art class it's a photography class and we can we can get the students who have those interests and then if they learn some technology along the way that's excellent. But we're not just throwing the technology at them. This is Vicki and I read about the public experience yes was different. This was a project that was between Xerox Park the research center in Palo Alto and low income. Setting Elementary School in Phoenix Arizona with a very large population of kids many of whom were learning English as a second language when they came to school. And probably as you mentioned was a an online community which brought

together kids across different grades and ages in the elementary school senior citizens in the Phoenix area who were interested in learning to use computers and who were interested in interacting with children brought them together plus other adults including the researchers and teachers in an online space in which they created fanciful environments and did a lot of writing because this online space was entirely constructed out of text. So it was fundamentally a reading and writing activity but it was also a very social one. And there's there's much more to say about it was a very interesting community to be part of and to observe. But. What made it work for the school where were several key things. One was that it was very much from the very outset a joint project between the outside computer science researchers and the elementary school decision making

about what the space should be and how it should be used with completely shared. This was a lot of overhead in some sense for the computer scientists since they were not used to people are much more used to going off and being able to design on their own and then deliver something that's already fully designed and it required an enormous time investment. And you know substantial sharing of responsibility and design creativity across the team. Another thing that made it successful was that this online space was conceived as an extension of the school in the same sense that you know the library was part of the school this online space was conceived as an extension of the school in a very profound way so that the values of the school were explicitly reflected into Pueblo the the guidelines for behavior the guidelines for what they called in the school rights and responsibilities which was lingo that they used in the classroom was

as much a part of Pueblo as it was of the classroom setting. The students were asked to help one another they were asked to you know be cooperative and generous and and all of the things they were expected to do in their everyday student life. So it wasn't thought of as a technology that was prepackaged it came with its own rules and regulations. But it was thought of as something that the school must shape to fit its own style. Well Vickie let me ask you to talk a bit. More about how the students responded and what they got out of Pueblo. I assume this is still ongoing. Well it's quite absent now and that draws attention to one of the things that crucial understand about technology in schools and you've already pointed it out and that's the ongoing support. Yeah you mentioned technical support. In addition there's an important kind of social support that has to happen there have to be people who are excited about the technology and knowledgeable about teaching and can build bridges across those two disciplines and in the case of problem.

Some of those people you know left school and went on to other jobs for reasons of their own. Also we were grant funded through you know generous government grants but grants naturally end and when those grants ended the teachers lost some of the support for doing summer workshops and for release time during the year. And this may seem like you know sort of mundane nitty gritty stuff but it's lifeblood of a technology implementation effort in the school. The teachers have time to experiment with it to learn about it and to make teaching decisions about it. So probably with questions now as to what people learned Well it's hard to put your finger on it we. We did various assessments about reading and writing and they were rather inconclusive. My own very strong personal feeling from spending lots of time at the school and with the kids was that there was an impact. But it may not be measurable which is the kind of impact that CO and the kind of impact that I saw had to do with this particular

population of kids. These were kids who were not going to have access to technology at home and for whom. To use a very overworked word. This was just extremely empowering. I mean this technology was there. It belonged to them. They could do with it things of their own invention. They quickly became more knowledgeable than their teachers. It was there was just tremendous excitement from the kindergartners on up. The school opened its doors at 6:00 in the morning and the kids would run into the library and on to Pueblo. So I don't know how to measure that kind of thing but I certainly believe it's real and I think it was an important feature of the project. So it sounds like in this particular ecology a hurricane came through or something. Where the the oxygen got sucked out of it because you know the funding dried up or something like that.

I mean funding dried up and it could it could have continued. It actually had a history that predated the funding so it began as a grassroots effort on donated equipment from local companies and so on and then got an influx of funding and then the funding left and I think I mean it might be more accurate to say that many of these kinds of technologies and experiences have their own life cycle and they don't have to be the same everywhere but it may have been just kind of a natural time for it to wind down because it does take a tremendous amount of work to keep that kind of thing going. The teachers were meeting regularly on their own we were having design meetings once a month we were doing lots of writing about our experiences and in the thick of an every day teacher's life. That's a very demanding thing to take on. It seems to me as we talk about computers in the classroom in this big effort to get computers in the clean rooms like the politicians and I'm not knocking any. And here perhaps. But you know simply the solution to education in technology is to throw

computers in the classroom. A very simplistic way to go about it. Yes I completely agree I think that's what Vickie and I both saw in the classrooms that we studied was that it does take a tremendous effort. In terms of designing a curriculum that makes sense for the students and in terms of keeping the whole thing going it takes a lot of commitment and a lot of money and a lot of time and if you don't have those ingredients you're just going to have computer sitting on the desk and maybe the kids will play a few games and maybe they'll log onto the internet but it's not a rich wonderful educational experience as it can be when you have those kinds of commitments. And the thing is those commitments can come just once at the outset. They have to be there on an ongoing basis. The technology is changing the teachers are learning more about what the technology is and how it's good for their students as they go and they need to be continually modifying their curriculum as they go. So it's it's an ongoing time commitment at every at every level. Right and another thing is that the teachers themselves need a lot of support one of the things that I did after we had done that study of the digital photography class was with some colleagues at

Apple we created an online course for teachers of digital photography where they could come and talk to other teachers in other places who were trying to do the same kinds of things. Because often there's only one or maybe two teachers in an individual school and they feel isolated and I don't know how to solve certain problems and they just need some support from from other people so the online course we thought was really successful in bringing teachers together to talk about the issues and use the technology more fruitfully within their own schools. We have just about 15 minutes left with her guess bonding already in Vicki O'Day co-authors of the book information ecologies. And we welcome any phone converse calls that you like to make in the remaining time. Otherwise I'll just keep firing away. 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 around Champaign-Urbana. Anywhere else 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5. When I ask you talk about this concept in the metaphor. Of information ecologies you use the term keystone species which is you

know again a term from biology but perhaps is an important one to to think of in these other contexts. Right Vickie and I both have studied reference librarians and we were really struck by how much value they provided to their clients. So there's all this information out there and we're always talking about how we're drowning in information and we don't know how to find it how to wade through it once we've got it. And the librarians that we studied were just extremely helpful to their clients in getting them the right information in a timely manner and weeding out things that they knew were not going to be useful for their clients and being very very helpful and. Kind of overcoming the frustrations of trying to deal with the glut of information and so we see librarians as what we call a keystone species in the Information Age. And yet we talk about getting rid of librarians because now we have the Internet and everything is just out there. You can just do a search if a search is a very

simple thing to dad just you know you know go to Yahoo or whatever and you can find what you're looking for but of course that isn't really what information finding is all about. And so we feel in any ecology it's good to identify keystone species and try to understand precisely what their contribution is and how you can keep it in the system even Of course things are always changing. So now that the Internet is is important I think you know I look at librarians and we say OK or what how can we take advantage of their skills and knowledge with this new set of information resources that we have not how can we throw them away but how can we make them even more useful than they have been in the past. The librarians that I to talk with here at the university are some of the people on the cutting edge of research into computers in. Organizing information completely I mean I think librarians you know may go into their work because they're curious and interested and wonderful at learning about and communicating about many many different kinds of

disciplines and fields of information and it's just such a terrific skill that we need more than ever on the Internet. A general point about keystone species and librarians is that Bonnie and I have noticed not just in the library but in other settings. People who we think of as keystone species are often people who can bridge the gap who can mediate across boundaries who have a leg in different worlds and you know such a thing may not show up on somebody's resume it might not be part of their job description. But in a thriving ecologies such people are present and often their work may be invisible to you know the average participant in the ecology and the library example is a good one there because while librarians know among their community what they do. One of the things that was very interesting about bias in my research in libraries was how how clearly their clients did not know what librarians did. Even the closest most

regular clients who have their favorite library and they went back to time and again. Didn't really have a picture of of how much expertise and knowledge including knowledge about the client's own particular interests and businesses. The librarians were bringing to bear and doing searches and what that points to is the danger of making decisions about technology based on the visible work. I think it it reminds us that when we're making decisions about technology we should also look you know around the edges and across the borders and and try and probe and see what's going on here. That's not anybody's job description that may be relatively invisible. But in fact is crucial to the successful running of our of our ecology. You refer to these people as gardeners. Yeah that was I had done some research many years ago actually on how people support others in their office using spreadsheets and CAD systems

and because these are big complicated software programs especially CAD systems and one of the local terms that people use and one of the companies I studied was gardeners and so they had their favorite people who were as Vickie said they were Bridger's so they had a combination of social and technical skills. They were domain experts themselves so they weren't consultants or trainers brought in to help you learn how to use the software they were people who knew. I'm trying to design that flange Now what do I do with this darn program now to get it to do what I want so they understood the domain and they were also very conversant with the technologies and they were tremendously helpful. And in the settings that we studied finally the managers had started to realize that and they had started to reward people so as he said often this kind of work is invisible this kind of work had started to become more visible and managers have started to say OK great you can spend 25 percent of your time supporting everybody else in the office and that will be considered in your performance review and thanks for doing that. That's great. And so we would like to see a lot more of that kind of thing where people with these are wonderful

combinations of social and technical skills get rewarded for that. And I think it would make technology use much more congenial for everybody. I think we've all. All experience are probably most of us especially if we work in offices with computers that there are certain people who you just know you go to if you're having a problem with a particular program or an operating system or whatever whatever it is you're using. And I think a lot of times those people as you say aren't appreciated. Their work is more or less invisible perhaps to management but maybe that's one of the things that needs to happen is that greater recognition be given to the people who as you say cross those bridges or have feet in both worlds the technical and the actual implementation of the technical in the subject matter. That is the purpose for being there. Yeah yeah exactly that's the kind of thing that can come out of looking at your setting ecologically so focusing on the particular practices and trying to make them visible and bring them to light so you can see how people really are managing to use the technologies that they have

and then rewarding people accordingly. Well there are a bunch of the things I wanted to ask you to talk about. Among them was the example of the dysfunctional. Ecology at a teaching hospital which you describe in one of the chapters of the book and maybe I could ask you to talk about you know what was the setting there and what what happened that made it kind of go wrong. Right. OK so this was a teaching hospital and there was it was that neurosurgery was the setting and there was an interesting very innovative video system that was being used so that the operation could be broadcast to other parts of the hospital so other surgeons or other interested parties didn't actually have to be in the O.R. to see it. The operating room to see what was going on. And often the surgeon was looking through a microscope and so even within the hour he was nearly He was the only one who could see what was going on down in the brain or the spine during the neurosurgery. And so this is video

view of the surgery people. A sense of what was actually going on and what the surgeon was doing or about to do and so this was all fine and dandy until it turned out that the audio from the operating room was also being broadcast to remote parts of the hospital and the people in the operating room didn't realize that in particular the nurses and the neurophysiologists the neurophysiologists are people who monitor all kinds of bodily things like your heart rate and so forth and make sure that everything is going OK during the surgery and so any you know are there's a lot of banter there's a lot of jokes. There's a lot of very informal talk that to an outsider sounds like these people aren't really doing their job you know they're here is this is brain surgery and they're and they're telling a joke that they heard last Friday. And so there was a lot of potential for misinterpretation as the audio got broadcast outside of the operating room and people became very very upset about this. The nurses were worried about often their students in the operating room and they thought you know these students are

not going to feel comfortable learning this very difficult skill if what they say is broadcast and they don't know who is listening. So this led to a big brouhaha in the hospital and it was because I think people didn't say this is our local setting we're introducing a new technology. Let's sit down together and think about all the ramifications of broadcasting both the visual image and the audio so that's where the. Just kind of took off on its own without people being so elaborate and reflective about how the technology would impact different players. So what happened is that the positive value of the system for the neurosurgeon or the person monitor I forget exactly the physiologist monitoring that the video and audio new devices that were introduced in these operating rooms. That was a positive value for the neurophysiologist but it was not ever presented to the people in the operating room who often they really stress it was a very difficult circumstance for them to be

working in and just you know casual banter is one way people have of relieving that. And so there it became a negative value for those people. Right exactly and part of the problem was that people just simply didn't know what was happening and so they felt there was a new technology coming in with very profound implications. And I have no control over it. I have not been asked about my opinion and so there were actually some interesting technical work arounds that came to light once these discussions took place. But the cost was that people became very upset and I felt that the process was not as smooth as it could have been. Well let me ask you then to talking about the five minutes we have remaining about how you go about evolving healthy information ecology what what are the things that you should think about and do before you know before while implementing some new arrangement. Well this is the key one of the key things that Bonnie and I think is important is opening up a space for asking questions.

One of the things that we talk about is strategic questions questions that have leverage and in particular opening up a space in which many different kinds of people can ask questions. So in the hospital setting for example if nurses and anesthesiologists as well as neurophysiologist have been able to ask questions there might have been a very different outcome in the brouhaha might have been averted. There are questions that just allow the participants in the ecology to describe to themselves what are their values here. What are they after. Why are they contemplating a technological change what it. What do they hope to achieve. Just putting that out on the table can allow people to discover differences that they might you know have had might not have understood where their they might have different assumptions going in that can be exposed just by asking powerful questions.

Questions about motivations or good questions about strategy. You know what. What do we need to be successful in in this endeavor and and this can expose different kinds of experience that people bring from very different settings where for example they saw the positive impact of a gardener and can can bring that to light in a new setting and just just the notion of asking questions and what this implies that can be awfully hard is taking time. We talked already about how Rush we might feel and responding to our technology and of course on an institutional level people feel just as rushed I mean they feel like they have to get the technology in. Now they have to make good decisions now locking prices now and to do this well really requires time and reflection and revisiting decisions and not making just once. So I think that what Bonnie and I suggest is a measured and open and. You know fluid approach to technology that allows people to discover and revisit their decision.

Yeah it's a kind of a nutshell I would say. Seeing our relationship with technology as a social process and not just as a consumer decision. That's a really interesting way to put it. The end in the two minutes or so remaining maybe three minutes of the most the Internet is an area we haven't talked about but this is you know you lead right into that body because this is something that is increasingly considered mandatory for organizations and maybe even individuals to be engaged in is OK we've got to have a website you know now where part of this huge system and you know and we don't have any choice we have the rush we have to do it. Right well I'm certainly all in favor of Web sites but I think again taking a more measured reflective ecological kind of approach will probably lead to better websites if nothing else so that people think about why do I want to have this website whose niece is serving who's input do I need. There are often many voices that come together and ecology and that's part of what Vicki and I have been trying to say is that it's not just an

individual it's a group of people in some particular setting with some particular values and goals. So again thinking more reflectively about how the Web site will serve those who create it and those who would be using it. You mentioned the idea of strategic questioning in any of this. How do you go about that. I think that depends on the local setting in. I think it's Chapter 6 thinking I present a set of questions that we think might help people get started but of course in every setting people have their own processes and I think reflecting on do we have a process that might work to get us talking about technology and if not how could we invent a new process. I think often people don't think about inventing new social processes or their local settings. We think a lot about bringing new technologies and we're very focused on that that's very salient. But we don't always think about maybe something that is lacking here maybe our mission is not a particular technology but a particular social process. And going back to the point about co-evolution maybe the introduction or potential introduction of a new

technology is a great time to evolve a new social process so that people think about. How can we come together around this technology and maybe get some community building out of it at the same time. Well that's a wonderful place to leave it and since we're here at the end of our time we'll we will leave it there and I will suggest for folks if you like to read more I've run ins by the way a lot of people from The Graduate School of Library information science who are familiar with this book. You I'm sure you can find it in bookstores in probably the libraries as well. The book is information ecologies using technology with heart. The authors are bonding already in the day who have been our guest for this hour. It's published by MIT Press in Bonnie Vickie thank you very much for talking to be very interesting. Yeah thank you Jacqui appreciate it. OK bye bye. I.