As part of the activity for week 9 I read a few papers and was thinking about the concept of 'affordance'. While I am not sure I fully understand this concept I wanted to make a couple of comments on 2 of the papers that I think were related but were written on different topics and I think might have helped fill the gaps?
The papers were:
Walther, J.B. and Boyd, S. (2002) ‘Attraction to computer-mediated social support’ in Lin, C.A. and Atkin, D. (eds) Communication Technology and Society: Audience Adoption and Uses, Cresskill, NJ, Hampton Press, pp.153–88; also available online at http://www.msu.edu/~jwalther/docs/support.html (Downloaded on 2nd April 2009).
The second was
Weisband, S. and Kiesler, S. (1996) 'Self-disclosure on computer forms: meta-analysis and implications', Proceedings of CHI '96 [online] http://portal.acm.org.libezproxy.open.ac.uk/citation.cfm?doid=238386.238387
(downloaded on 2nd April 2009)
The papers talk about what they say they do really. The Weisband and Kiesler paper about why and what people disclose about themselves when asked questions via a computer as aposed to face to face. And the Wlater and Boyd about the amount and diversity of support there is online and who uses it and what it is used for again in relation to face to face support.
Both these papers related to why people feel safer when they meet people on-line than they do face to face. This despite the fact so much importance is placed on social cues (dress, gender, facial expressions etc), because of the computer somehow people are more willing to disclose personal information and ask for support, help and make friends as the computer is used as an some kind of an intermediary (that is if I understood what they were talking about!). I think this is a really interesting area and a reflection on society as a whole really (not making any grand theory statements, but thinking out loud).
As society becomes more individualistic and as people become more focused on image they maybe place less importance on long term relationships and connections. It takes time to make good friends and I think that if one is lucky one will make a handful of good friends in a life time. Yet look on face book and there is a social competition to have 1000s of friends. Similarly problems that were discussed and dissected with friends made at primary school and carried on over a life time or with family who live in the next village are now it is thought discussed more readily online within one of the 1000s of support sites.
Where I think this is a reflection on society is not only within the individualism, I think is lays also in the areas of people movement and perhaps in the fact we like more to consume than to give. By this I mean, we no longer have a job for life and live in the same place all our lives (of course people do, but it is a fact we move more now, houses and jobs). This makes sustaining long term relationships more difficult, work is not after all not only about wages. Making friends takes energy, why put in all that energy when you can get them online with no strings attached? The brother, sister or cousin who you knew as a child may be a stranger in adult life as they may live too far away to meet beyond the occasional wedding.
The movement of people has perhaps made us more unwilling to invest, more cautious about our neighbours or perhaps just lazy? So we consume our friends online….
The other paper was about how much and why people are more willing to disclose more about themselves online than face to face. This is a different social situation but what I think relates to the 2 is the individualism in relation to anonymity. As with friends etc, the computer acts as a gate keeper in a way, we tell the computer, we are not really talking to the other person in any depth. Our secrets are safe in the little box, we can turn off the screen and the friend we made will not bother us, the support we gave (or received) will not be scrutinised and the information we gave can not come back to bite. We can change computer or email and the chances are we will not have to think about that again.
I think one of the concepts introduced last week was about affordance of IT. I am not 100% sure I understand this concept fully, I made a note saying I thought it was referring to both the action of say typing, but also what it is allowing to be done. So typing is allowing us to communicate. Taken this concept then perhaps one of the many affordance(s) of IT is that it allows us to be anonymous consumers of social interaction? So in this way perhaps the concept is useful in considering how IT has shaped social behaviour?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment