Texture: Human Expression in the Age of Communications Overload

Texture

Texture

Human Expression in the Age of Communications Overload

Richard H. R. Harper

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

© 2010 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

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This book was set in Engravers Gothic and Bembo by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited. Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Harper, Richard, 1960–

Texture : human expression in the age of communications overload / Richard H. R. Harper.

   p.  cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-262-08374-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-262-28865-1 (retail e-book)

1. Communication—Technological innovations—Social aspects. 2. Communication—Social aspects. 3. Personal communication service systems—Social aspects. I. Title.

HM1166.H37 2010

303.48'33—dc22

2010003176

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

d_r0

Contents

Acknowledgments  vii

1    Introduction      1

2    The Communications Paradox      9

3    Absence to Presence      59

4    Paradoxical Delights      109

5    Something to Tell      153

6    The Seams That Bind      193

7    The Texture of an Expressive Future      229

Index      273

Acknowledgments

Three people helped enormously in the writing of this book. All three I have had the pleasure of meeting through work—Lynne Hamill, at the Digital World Research Centre in Surrey; Dave Randall, at Lancaster University; and Rod Watson, at Manchester University. Each offered rather different kinds of assistance: Lynne insisted on the facts, Dave insisted that I get it right, and Rod made me read properly and more comprehensively. Even so, they would all deny any responsibility for the book—and quite rightly. If they had had their way, it would have been better. Alas, what is here is the best I could do. Nevertheless, it is for them.

All books derive from the tender tolerance of friends and colleagues for the vain obsession of the author. This book is no exception. As its author, my debts are varied and great. Beyond those to whom it is dedicated, a special thanks go to Leopoldina Fortunati and Ronald Rice for their extensive and detailed comments on the manuscript that led to major improvements; to Gary Marsden and Matt Jones for more general comments; to James Katz, for introducing me to John Durham Peters’s Speaking into the Air (Chicago, 1999) and Ernest Becker’s The Birth and Death of Meaning (Glencoe, 1962), both of which altered my thinking on the topic of the book. Others provided various bits and pieces that were invaluable. Phil Fawcett, for example, provided data about Microsoft email volumes; Paul Dourish, information about some early applications used in Xerox EuroPARC; and Dave Kirk, some grumpy comments about the definition of ergonomics.

Some of the materials presented in the book were derived from research studies that I conducted with colleagues. Of these, the most important debt is owed to three people: Alex Taylor, who worked with me on studies of mobile phones (discussed in chapter 4), Stuart Taylor, who built the Glancephones (discussed in chapter 5), and Phil Gosset, who has for many years worked with me on various aspects of the social shaping of mobile telephony. His influence shows itself throughout the book. Other work that has suffused the book has entailed collaborations with Sian Lindley, Tim Regan, Shahram Izadi, Laurel Swann, Simon Rubens, Mark Rouncefield, Wes Sharrock, and Jane Vincent.

Beyond this, there is also a debt of gratitude due to all my colleagues at Socio-Digital Systems (SDS) at Microsoft Research, Cambridge. They have had to put up with me being an absent member while the scribbling for this book was done. Of those not previously mentioned, I would like to note Richard Banks especially and, outside of SDS, many colleagues and friends in the lab. Thanks all.

Lastly, I must share my gratitude to my closest colleague of all—Abi Sellen. She hasn’t helped in the writing of this book, and I made a special effort not to turn to her for help because she helped in the writing of many other books in the past. But without Abi and her constant presence, the world I inhabit would be much smaller—indeed, would lack what makes it worth being in.

Sections of chapter 1 appear in Absence to Presence: A Vision of the Communicating Human in Computer-Mediated Communications Technology Research, in J. Höflich, G. F. Kircher, C. Linke, and I. Schlote, eds., Mobile Communication and the Change of Everyday Life (41–57) (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2010). Sections of chapter 3 appear in "From Tele Presence to Human Absence: The Pragmatic Construction of the Human in Communications Systems Research," in Twenty-third Annual Conference of the British HCI Group (HCI 2009) (London: British Computer Society, 2009), copyright the author. Parts of chapter 4 appear in A. Taylor and R. Harper, The Gift of the Gab: A Design-Oriented Sociology of Young People’s Use of Mobiles, CSCW: An International Journal (2003): 267–296, copyright Elsevier. Parts of chapter 3 appear in Are Mobiles Good for Society?, in K. Nyiri, ed., Mobile Democracy: Essays on Society, Self and Politics (185–214) (Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 2003), permission from Professor Nyiri. Parts of chapter 5 appear in Glancephone: An Exploration of Human Expression, Eleventh International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (Mobile HCI 2009) (New York: ACM Press, 2009), copyright the authors. Much of the evidence in chapter 5 derives from a study by my colleagues published as A. Sellen, A. S. Taylor, J. Kaye, B. Brown, and S. Izadi, Supporting Family Awareness with the Whereabouts Clock, in P. Markopoulos, B. de Ruyter, and W. Mackay, eds., Awareness Systems: Advances in Theory, Method and Design (225–242) (London: Springer-Verlag, 2007).

1

Introduction

Preamble

In my own company, Microsoft, each employee sends and receives about 120 emails every day. Many also receive alerts from really simple syndication (RSS) feeds; and most run Messenger, our own instant messaging client. At Microsoft, we like to think that we are busy, efficient, effective, and knowledgeable enough about the communications technologies of the twenty-first century to leverage them for our own benefit. After all, we like to think that we helped invent some of them, and if not, we certainly have a business interest in most. We should know about these things. Yet my colleagues complain that they are constantly interrupted, that they can’t keep up with their emails, that they find it difficult to say goodbye when instant messaging, and that they don’t have enough time to get their work done. Somehow the balance of things seems to have gone wrong, they explain to me. The tools designed to let them work better seem to have had the opposite effect. And it is not only at work that this malaise seems to be appearing. My colleagues say that when they leave work, their personal cell phones start bleeping as text messages arrive. There are voice messages, too, they complain. Worse, when they get home, there are traditional letters—not many, to be sure, but always some—and these also have to be dealt with. So they say to me that at work there is no time for work and at home there is no time for being at home. The point of their complaints is that their world (which is my world and the world that most readers of this book occupy) seems to be getting harder to live in. It is busier than ever and fraught with more things said and communicated than ever before. It is no surprise, then, that each morning over coffee my colleagues assert to me, Surely a threshold is being reached. Enough, already. No more communication!

In corporate and academic settings, this issue—the idea that some kind of tipping point beyond which the balance between what is practical and what is excessive has been or is about to be reached—is well known. The phrase communications overload is commonly heard. So it is hardly surprising that many researchers are devising tools and techniques that can reduce this problem. Various kinds of solutions have been proposed. Some researchers are devising machine learning applications that assess whether a change in the content of a Web site is sufficiently interesting to alert (via RSS feeds) a user. Others are devising filtering mechanisms that can let users triage their in-boxes more effectively. Yet others are designing ways of integrating messaging channels to reduce the burden of dealing with them all. Some of these solutions are, by their authors’ own admission, forms of fire fighting. Assessing the degree of change in an RSS feed seems to be a case in point. All this does is put off to the future the moment when a user says, That’s it. No more feeds. Similarly, new ways of filtering and triaging only delay the day when the limits of time press down. One can hear future users grumbling: When does one deal with the less urgent if all one ever has time for is the urgent? and What about the simply important if not urgent? Other ideas have more merit, even if they are evidently not permanent solutions. Allowing people to easily access their messages at any time and place comes to mind. This certainly is one of the appealing properties of BlackBerrys (although making access 24/7 might increase email volume).

Despite all their protestations about communications overload, many researchers who are undertaking projects to find these and other solutions are doing something else that, at first glance, seems perplexing. For one thing, these attempts at solving the communications overload are not the primary focus of their research endeavors. Indeed, between their continuous emailing and instant messaging, these researchers spend much of their time adopting new ways as they arise. As I write this, for example, I find my colleagues keeping their newly acquired Facebook accounts up to date or creating short messages via Twitter on their cell phones. And as their goal at work, they devise new ways of communicating. They seek ways of conveying tactile experiences, for example, as supplements for the audiovisual messaging that they have spent much time refining over the years. They devise new social communications systems that let people vote, comment, and express to large groups.

Their delight in seeking new ways of expression is reflected in their home lives, too. When asked, they do not say that they are fighting off the torrent of messages and communications that they claim are terribly irksome. Instead, they have been writing and reading blogs and uploading files to YouTube. They also say that they have been emailing friends from university, for instance, with whom they had lost contact but whose details they found on a Web site. In other words, they have not been seeking peace and quiet and the solicitude of private reflection but have been adding to the volumes of communication. They have been actively creating that content and seeking new ways of producing it. In other words, they have been delighting in the very thing that they seem to complain about: they gleefully produce the content that at other times they say weighs them down. At work and at play, they fill up their lives with the thing that they say stops them from working and playing. They communicate yet complain about communication. They express themselves in new ways yet berate the fact that there is not enough time to listen to others’ expressions.

This doing of one thing and saying of another might seem to be an amusing albeit lamentable fact of modern lives. The evocation of this world, as illustrated with my own workplace, could be merely a flavorsome way of conveying what it means to be someone engaged in contemporary existence, professionally and personally. Life is busy, but people are getting on with their lives, leveraging what they can to be in touch and keep in touch in the frenetic, networked world of the twenty-first century. We are all too busy these days, but what more can one usefully say?

I think one can say something about where we have come from, how we got here, and where we might go in the future. I think that what needs to be said has to do with our desire to communicate and express, a relationship between this and our ability to devise and exploit new technologies that foster and enable that same expression, and a philosophy about what it means to be human in this day and age. The purpose of this book is to explore these issues. It seems to me that there is a conundrum to be explored that has to do with the tension between communications overload and the desire for communication, between the boredom that older technologies of communication induce and the fascination that exploring the properties of new ones cultivates, and the possibility that communication imposes on us a need to respond, to act, to answer the expressions of others. This tension lies at the heart of our current circumstances. Analysis of how we got here, how technological innovations and socially creative ways of exploiting technology interact, how the delight experienced in using new expressive forms of communication is counteracted by the vexation that the resulting moral burdens place on us—all of this can provide the basis for insights into what it means to be alive, connected, and expressive and into where we might want to be at the end of the next decade and in the years thereafter.

The conundrum at the heart of this book is not simply whether we have reached a point of communications overload. We have worked hard over the past century or so to create different ways of communicating and expressing ourselves, and we have wrapped ourselves up in a social universe of communicative obligation. In seeking new forms of expression, we don’t seek an end point where we have expressed all that there is to express. Rather, we define new acts of communication that lead others in various ways and with various consequences to their own acts and their own responses. To communicate is to foster communication.

These ideas did not necessarily drive the inventiveness that helped create the current landscape. What motivated technological inventiveness, was (and still is for some, no doubt) partly a presumption that more, richer, or quicker communications technologies will replace older, slower, and less rich means of expression. It is also partly a result of the inventions in question (some of them, anyway) being appropriated by people desiring (and fostering a desire) to indulge in and exploit new channels of communication. The desire here (one that in its satiating creates greater intensity) is not one that seeks to replace older technologies or to make communications more efficient as if the aim of this desire were to make the human machine optimal. The desire is for supplementing and enriching the expressive vocabulary of human experience.

The result of these two countervailing tendencies—one to create substituting technologies and the other to delight in diversity and an aversion to substitution—is that we now live in a world where there is a texture to our communicative practices that is manifest in the different ways we experience and exploit our communications technologies. We choose one means of communication over another because the expression that it enables is taut and quick and brings those we communicate to via that channel closer to us in that order—tautly and quickly. We choose another because it is loose and slow—gentle—and so treats those we express to gently in turn. We select a third because it is permanent and inviolate: however much those we are communicating to try to avoid that missive, they will find it cannot be undone. We choose a fourth because it is ephemeral, although we offer it as a token of regard. Our ways of expressing are strategic and are binding us together in different ways. As we move forward and orient to ways of creating a different future and a different texture, we must recognize that there is no end point to such endeavors. We would do better if we saw that the future we are creating is one that is more social and in which human expression is becoming ever more central to what we are about and how we understand ourselves. We need to recognize too that this self-regard might—and indeed, probably does—come at the cost of reducing other forms of human action.

I do not suggest, however, that this is an analog of Jean Baudrillard’s dystopia, in which the media corrupt the essence of things as they are (as he argues, for instance, in his 1970 book, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures). Nor do I suggest that the new communications-rich landscape should lead us to reconsider or redefine what we understand as the thing doing the communicating—the human. This is certainly the view that some commentators take, such as Kenneth Gergen in his book Relational Being: Beyond Self and Community (2009). His view is that we have constructed our society on an eighteenth-century premise that there is an essence—a fixed concrete thing that is us, ourselves. In his view, this has diminished the potential value of dialog and the importance of interaction and communication in human praxis (human doings, in more prosaic words). Although he does not claim that the technologies of our current time are forcing a reconsideration of this premise, he does say that our practices are encouraging us to reconsider whether this starting premise is helpful, even leading us to ask whether it might be wrong. He suggests that we might renew our social relations if we made central our conversational or dialogic identity, not our inner, fixed soul. Again, as with the consumer dystopia view, I will argue that our experience of communications richness and variation does not lead us to redefine the metaphysics of human nature in just this way, although it ought to lead us to reflect on what our communicative performances achieve.

This book allows me to comment on these concerns without coming to a fixed judgment. My reflections are designed to enable readers to form their own views. My purpose is to explain how the technologies of communication are the means whereby we invigorate, shape, and alter the very experiences of what it is to be human. In this view, we are, to some degree, what we say, but we change as we invent new ways of doing the saying. Whether we ought to condemn our choices (as the consumer theorists imply) or whether we should reconfigure our sense of self (as the social psychologists say) is not a question that I answer directly—although I hope to offer reasons and evidence about what the answers (if answers are to be found) might require. It is for readers to make judgments. If my thesis is right, then they are casting themselves in new light as they express. It is for them to ask who they want to be and, beyond this, what kind of society they want to help create.

References

Baudrillard, J. 1970. The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures. Trans. C. Turner. London: Sage.

Gergen, K. 2009. Relational Being: Beyond Self and Community. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

2

The Communications Paradox

Preamble

When my mother admonished me to write home as I was leaving for university, I had no idea that the moral implications of this phrase would still be resonating twenty-five years later. I left home full of enthusiasm and certainty, not philosophical doubt. Nor did I think that communication would be a concern of my professional life. The word itself is a veritable catchall for all sorts of acts and forms of life. Computers communicate to each other, and so do snails. Poets communicate to other poets, and cars traveling through an automated toll booth communicate to a toll meter. They are all passing information. They are all communicating. But the fact that we can use the same word to describe these actions is misleading. What each entails is different in all these examples. One of the most celebrated philosophical rows of the 1970s took place precisely over the meaning of the word. As Jacques Derrida, the French literary theorist, asked in the first line of his essay Signature Event Contest (1972, 1), "Is it certain that to the word communication corresponds a concept that is unique, univocal, rigorously controllable, and transmittable: in a word, communicable?" His concern was to make a mockery of any attempt to say that it did, and his target was speech-act theory, derived from the ordinary-language philosophy of John L. Austin (see How to Do Things with Words, 1962). Without getting involved in any similar sort of deconstruction, I acknowledge that human communication is a slippery topic and has become all the more so in the age of communications overload. I started this book by asserting that each of my colleagues at Microsoft receives 120 emails per day, which was accurate when I started this book about a year ago (since then, the number has increased substantially, I am told). That figure reflects the millions of emails that Microsoft receives (according to our computer postmaster in Redmond, Washington) divided by the number of employees (95,000). The only way to make such a measure is to count emails in and emails out at the junction or interface between my organization and the outside world, not to ask all 95,000 of my colleagues. This means that some people receive more than 120 emails and some fewer. My ultimate boss’s email address name, BillG, receives many times more emails than anyone else. When people want to complain about Microsoft’s products, rail against the cruelties of capitalism, or ask for a charitable contribution, they send an email to Bill Gates. He gets considerably more than 120 a day, just as most days I get considerably fewer.

Even within these obvious differences, other factors occlude an accurate measure. Huge numbers of emails are junk (junk mail), and at Microsoft we have filters that stop most (indeed, millions) of these. But filters filter out the good and the bad, which means that some emails sent from a real person with a genuine need are trapped and filtered. And individual users can set their own filters to remove certain emails from their Outlook accounts and Exchange servers. The figures that I used to calculate the per capita distribution of emails to my colleagues did not include the emails removed by corporate or personal filters. According to some estimates, junk emails are a major proportion of the traffic sent to Microsoft employees each day. This means that my figures for personal email volumes at Microsoft are distorted since they don’t include junk mail deleted automatically.

It is not easy to quantify how busy all this email makes us. We are convinced that we are busy and that we receive too many messages. We assume that email is the main villain here, however many words we send and receive via our instant messaging accounts or other channels. Indeed, email overload (and the associated technologies that make that overload worse—BlackBerry devices, for example) is the main focus of our complaints. Many newspaper opinion pieces and entire books are now available on this topic. But just as I have problems calculating just how overloaded my colleagues are, so do these books seem to have similar problems. Christine Cavanagh, for example, begins her book Managing Your Email: Thinking outside the Box (2003, 2) with the curiously vague assertion that the average daily volume of email is 50 per day, but she doesn’t say whether this is for the entire North American continent, for the average professional worker, or for all users of the Internet. No one doubts that we email too much or that how-to books can be valuable (see, for example, David Shipley and Will Schwalbe’s 2007 Send: The How, Why, When and When Not of Email).

In this chapter, part of my topic—even if it is a slippery one—is what we mean by volume, amount, and overload. Another part has to do with the idea that messaging is good for you. Presumably this idea led society to make the technologies that induce us to make too much communication and hence to complain about overload. So part of my topic in this chapter has to do with a question that is prior to the one of volume—the idea that communication is good for you. Where did this idea come from? Who said it, when did they say it, and why? Just as it goes without saying that we have reached a point of communications overload, the idea that communication is good for you almost goes without saying. When my mother said, Write home, I did not think that it was a good idea. But today, I almost doesn’t query whether it is good to email to friends or to work colleagues. How did that change happen? Did my attitudes simply alter over time? They often do as you get older. If so, why? Or does the change have something to do with the differences between hand writing a letter and typing an email? I might look back and think that I didn’t want to write home because it was too much effort, compared to how much easier emailing is today. But if the value (communicating) is worth only a minimal degree of effort, then how great is that value? Writing home with pen and paper was not worth the benefits that might accrue, but emailing is? Well, apparently yes.

Twenty years ago, the excitement was about methods—email in contrast to pen and ink (see, for example, Lee Sproull and Sara Kiesler, Connections: New Ways of Working in the Networked Organization, 1992). But today, the excitement is about new channels—blogs and Twitter being the latest