Empowering Citizen Self-documentation: Re-inventing
the Diary
Kresten Bjerg, Retired,
Institute of Psychology, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
Tlf. (45)31770040,kresten.bjerg@psy.ku.dk www.phenomenalog.dk www.psy.ku.dk/bjerg
ABSTRACT
The paper outlines a series of assumptions about the
future of ICT in the global broadband society and presents the theoretical
reasoning behind a conceptual model, posing the notions of the “oikosphere” ( from greek Oikos=Home) and the “somasphere”, and the
formation of adequate reflexive tools as indispensable and necessary basis for
any farsighted user oriented developmental agenda.
It describes the background history and
prolonged development of an early prototype of a reflexive tool, and goes into
details concerning an instrumental innovation: Anticipated collaborative
development of a global nucleus of glyphs referring to typicality’s of events
and phenomena pertaining to the everyday life of citizens anchored in domestic
settings, - outside or inside the broadband society.
It places this developmental agenda in the
context of a wider vision of an upcoming free-ware information-economy, where
each person has a personal laptop, and challenges the traditional role of
research as conducted by professionals with the notion of Citizen Science, empowering any citizen to collect empirically validated data
concerning ongoing proximal phenomena
Advantages to be gained from this type of
approach e.g. in learning and healthcare are explicated, and a call for
collaborative cross-cultural efforts to elaborate and refine this type of
instrument is made.
Problem
We are, as we all know, situated in a
transitory historic phase, where conventional and habitual everyday life forms
are undergoing spreading and accelerating transformations.
In
force of global waves of demanding and complicated technological and
institutional innovations, citizens all over the globe are finding themselves
in new uncharted situations and life conditions, for which no adequate
precedence exists,
Citizens increasingly find themselves in
situations for which conventional tools and problem-solutions are obsolete, and
where relevant tools are difficult to recognize and evaluate, pay for, learn
and apply, - not to speak of: difficult to integrate with each other and with
the sedimented ground of familiar solutions to everyday problems
It is a safe assumption about the future
of ICT that more and more citizens will be ever exposed to new demands – and
new options - from technological innovations.
Granted such inevitable exposure it is
logical to look for ways to ”empower citizens in their
relationship to technology –and through this hope to increase the quality of
their lives”
Theory
My
approach to ”a human-centred point of view” (in contrast to a technology-,
product- or business-centric) builds primarily upon theoretical foundations in
the psychology of personal constructs by George Kelly (1), the works on the
phenomenological and social structures of the individual life-world and the
categories of relevance by Alfred Schutz (2), the theory of the self as a
reflexive project by Anthony Giddens (3) the theory of reflexive learning by
Philip J. Boxer (4), the notions of “the new diary” by Tristine Rainer (5) the notions of time-geographical description
by Torsten Hägerstrand (6) and clarifications about the domestic ICT by Ian
Miles (7) and Roger Silverstone (8)
The
further theoretical reasoning behind this approach is further explicated
(regrettably only in Danish) in "Principia Domestica" (9)
Fundamental conceptual structures
My
point of departure is the Kantian idea of a-priori given possibility-conditions
for all experience,
a)
A minimum of objectively valid concepts, which have to be based upon the
capacity of the subject to distinguish between what is the subject and its
state and what is not its self, i.e. a distinction between subjective and
objective, which again presupposes a minimum of order & regularity in the
world.
and
b)
The central importance of the fact, that the experiences of the subject are
integrated by a synthesizing consciousness into a uniting biographical
conscious personality
A
preliminary minimum of objectively valid concepts concerning the domestic a
priori conditions for the situated knowing/knowledge acquisition of the
habitating subject must acknowledge homes as open diurnal and annual,
climatically variable biological and geographical, biographical and historic,
ecological and cultural, economical and technological householding system.
As
subjects in homes, integrating and synthesizing our experiences, it thus
follows, that our knowing must be organized in diurnal cycles: that our
orientation must be diurnally organized.
This means, that it in principal ways must be understood as something,
which consecutively builds itself up through initial phases, as we, from
awakening from sleep move through series of cognitive and material operation,
toward a state of full, day clear consciousness, in the midst of our own
arranged operational frames and their embedding of subjectively significant
informative objects (sedimented and distributes from more or less intuitive
certainty & uncertainty of their probable relevance.)
The
real is not the single objects (e.g. tools) or the single experiences (e.g.
errors), but the context, within which they are understood. The real is not the
objects and events occasioning the experience, but the comprehensively
contextualized understanding (or misunderstanding) by the user.
The
order and relations of the objects in the home constitute a spatiotemporal
relational system, of central importance, as we shall locate the a-priories of
relevance for embedded orientation, understanding, reflection and
identification in the home.
It applies generally to inhabitated homes, that
the relations between their material order (structure) & life processes
(systemic state-changes) are dependant upon & consistent of sporadic &
periodic exchange & transformation of mass & energy & information
between lateral & subordinate & superior systems in the
individual(s), between cohabiting individuals, between the inhabitants
and the home & between the home and the outer system-world.
Our
understanding must acknowledge this multidimensionality of objective and
subjective meanings in the constitution of the subject’s life-world and its
culturally and socially conditioned processes of self-indication.
The
comprehensive coherent connection must be seen as
a)
The assembled personal life- history & life-plan realization and
b)
The personal relations to –and anchorage in – systems of socially
constructed meanings.
And
we must keep in mind that conscious life, in its progressive nature, by
interpreting events and conditions in the light of the world as known up till
then, in principle must come to see the world in a new light, becoming another
world.
By
describing our world, acting in our world, by saying something about our world,
we transform our world to something different from before we wrote, before we
acted, before we uttered.
Home Oriented Informatics & Telematics
We have all reasons to expect substantial
transformation of our experience of technologies allowing information and
communication technologies to be used everywhere, all the time and by
everybody.
I have extensively charted the area of Home-Oriented
Informatics, Telematics &Automation (10). I have there described the
polarity of extradomestic space and intradomestic space, and called for a
necessary focus on the view from inside, what I term the “oikosphere”.
Figure 1. A cluster of
related dimensions in the social construction of Home Oriented Informatics,
Telematics & Automaton.
The trends
of technological innovation which are converging in the field of Home-Oriented
Informatics, Telematics and Automation are linking and merging technical
developments within
a)
Broadcast
and point-to-point telecommunication
b)
Environmental
and physiological analogue and digital input and monitoring
c)
Controllers
for feedback regulation of sources and drains and motor-control of physical
events.
d)
Multimodal
sensory inputs, outputs and storage across the previously separate media-
cultures (text, graphics and animation, still- and live image, sound)
e)
Media
of individual information mass-storage in the gigabyte class
f)
Hardware
and software for information processing and output-generation
The list is
not meant to be exhaustive, but it goes to show, that the potential
resultant-space, when the immense variety of primary and secondary needs
emerging across the life-ages of a household are taken into account, must
exceed all imagination.
From outer space to inner space
In the industrialized
world, the last 2-4 generations have seen their habitat equipped with ever new
technical inventions, - each, in their time, adapted, adopted and integrated in
a new everyday life, at the very core of personal human existence: tap-water,
cold and hot, water-closet, gas and electricity, stove and sewing machine,
vacuum cleaner and electric iron, central heating, telephone and radio, camera,
record player, refrigerator, TV, freezer, washing machine, dishwasher,
coffee-machine, food-processor, microwave-oven, VCR, CD-player With the advent
of answering machines, DVD s, video cameras, home-computers and modems we first
experience these as "more of the same". But with cellular telephones
& SMS, lap-tops, memory-sticks, powerful domestic multimedia home
computers, wireless access, digital cash, digital TV, two-way video telephony,
access from homes to two-way traffic in new infrastructures of
telecommunication, virtual reality, optical character-recognition,
speech-recognition and speech-synthesis and an unexpected range of other
technical inventions, previously only conceived in terms of the needs of
professionals we are forced to consider the role of the private household in an
utterly new light.
With the presence already of a part of this array in the proximal interior
architecture of a totally man-made environment, the home is today, for a large
number of citizens in the western world and beyond, like a grounded spaceship.
As households we are as crews, in continuous intrafamilial and extrafamilial
cooperation, communication and navigation in a world of growing complexity and
incessant change.
Each home is in this sense a permanent construction-site, a vehicle in orbit, a
ferry to shuttle between morning and evening, evening and morning with
entertainment on board, and a cultural museum and warehouse.
Each home is a process constituted by ecological embedding, techno-cultural
heritage and human agency.
The home-consumer-market has stimulated a global competition to exploit an
ever-wider range of technological advances for purposes of profitable marketing
[3].
Paradoxically it has been the inventiveness of research in outer space, with
its focus on miniaturization, which has released the ultimate flood of consumer
electronics now trespassing all national and cultural barriers.
For the home-vessels, being grounded as they are, in place of navigable
geographical and extraterrestrial space a navigable cyberspace is expanding.
But peculiarly enough the target for all this inventiveness, the internal
spaces of the home, and the mental spaces of the crew, is not yet being
considered for over-all usability and navigability through weeks, months and
years of human co-existence by those, who develop the products. In fact one can
say, that we lack a valid paradigm for "the
domestic bridge", and its tools for reconnaissance in the travel of life.
What is so special about Home Informatics?
Even when
application-context is crucial, as in the construction of cars, airplanes,
space-ship-interiors, such applications can be developed through iterated
prototype testing with a small number of professional users in one or a few
sites.
One reason that this can be done with success is, that the work to be performed
with the appliances in such cases has a semi-public character, and therefore
can be monitored without significantly disturbing its inner coherency and
authenticity. Another is that the user can be conceived as relatively
impersonal: "anybody, with relevant formal qualifications", who
should find the application useful, user-friendly etc.
But these conditions do not apply to the private sphere.
Homes, households and life forms are extremely different. The subjects, the
selves, the needs, ends and endeavours, ongoings, states and events of the
household members are unaccountably varied and cannot be subsumed under a
unifying goal-structure, as can presumably those of a formal organization, be
it a commercial or a public enterprise. Already this puts the problems of
technological innovation for the home-sphere in a class of its own.
But this class of problems is even more unique.
The most basic private growth- and life-conditions and the sustaining cultural
life forms of the basic cells in the societal tissue (the private households)
have already been deeply affected and transformed in lasting ways by the
introduction of technologies. For urban citizens in western countries the only
reality we can be grounded in is one where a major part of these gadgets and
their use is taken for granted and woven into a major part of our endeavours.
Most of the technologies here involved are well described and analyzed under
separate headings, in this and other technically or policy-oriented
publications. This also applies to many aspects of the evidently relevant
questions of man-machine interfacing and interaction. But, whereas applications
for use in other settings than the private homes can most often be adequately
developed and studied in isolation, relative to demand-specifications related
to specific, goal-rational ends to be met by users in their professional work,
this does not hold true for the domestic applications.
Especially the new generations have, by adopting the commercial TV and the
cellular phone (including camera, SMS etc), and now even broadband Internet
access, as significant and time-demanding elements in everyday life, been
brought into a peculiar placelessness, and an exposed, receiving relationship
to external fiction, report and persuasion.
We assimilate and adapt through tapping and zapping, continuously reorienting
and updating, finding ourselves in a global flow of commercials and
contemporary and historical knowledge and fiction, heavily decentred outside
the home. Thus our senses are extended to reach from the home all around the
globe and beyond, and we are daily witnesses to events and narratives in an
inexhaustible wealth of natural and artificial realities in the multiversity of
the mass media.
Psychologically and sociologically all these many devices and their operation
are part of a modernity, which few of us would prefer
to be without. They are used as tools for sustaining social relations,
entertainment, knowledge-acquisition, orientation, identification and the
routines of the general everyday survival and recreation.
The future 'electronic habitat' and "the information highway"
No wonder, therefore, that
notions of the future "electronic habitat" are cultivated and that
model homes-of-the future are built.
Frame-programs and consortia are established to develop standards for
"Home-Information-Networks", which may eventually tie together the
interests of the producers of white-goods, consumer electronics,
telecommunication and entertainment.
No wonder that huge investments are put into ensuring more widespread general
access to information-highways and development of home-oriented information
services. And no wonder that these attempts fall far short of developing an
imagery of a future home, with which the private citizens can positively
identify themselves.
The effects of the invasion of technology into the home in terms of immediate
physical comfort, saving of manual labour, ease of communicative reach and
wealth of entertainment is indisputable. On the other hand its effects in terms
of information overload, external manipulation, rupture of sociocultural
patterns and extreme individualisation are equally apparent.
Evidently a coherent picture of the whole mess is difficult to frame and
present. "Home Oriented Informatics, Telematics &
Automation"(HOITA) as a cross-disciplinary, international field of
research has hardly come of age. And the rate of innovation is so fast,
that thorough empirical studies of the appropriation of these technologies are
more or less outdated before they reach the press.
Anticipating the expectable
To convey a coherent and sufficiently contextualised understanding of the
relevant dimensions of this field I have found it necessary in my publications
(11) to make a few conceptual extrapolations into the near future, In so doing
I have introduce 3 concepts: the virtual
home, the virtual body, and the virtual neighbourhood , - as logical
and necessary constructs for grounding a coherent notion of the demands to
future domestic information technology.
I shall not go into a
detailed discussion of these matters, as their unfolding as relevant for
ordinary users are still beyond reach
But they are thematically
relevant, because they can point us to the notion of a fully and coherently
contextualized interface, coming to making it possible to refer and annotate to
any location/area within ones home and any location/area on or inside ones body.
The Oikosphere and the Somasphere
From a psychological
viewpoint it is crucial, that by ensuring for the members of a household a
permanent reference to the solid ground-level of their own particular domestic
and bodily timegeography as a generic, archetypal virtuality, a personal
grounded and rooted stem of self-reference can be grown, that could be made to
function as a convenient core and anchor point of further personal orientation
and reality-testing.
It implies the emergence of
a new, coherent potential of demonstrative identifying reference to
re-identifiable individual things and event-types in the private life-world,
according to their personal relevance. This potential may provide us new means
of self-reflection, evaluation and ordination of actual and possible
identifiable and indexicable operations, states, informative objects and
persons.
Such a concept can be
cultivated for a variety of purposes. The above-mentioned potentials of
biotelemetry brings it so to speak "under our
skin", and highlights the potential intimate, bodily closeness of this
"personal level". Configuring body-state-representational tools for
personal state-reflection or expressive messaging is a little-noticed
potential, mainly cultivated in circles working with the concept of
biofeedback. But seen as the personalised foundation and key to a sane
health-education, such tools of self-knowledge may reveal a strong prophylactic
potential, and thus be worth adding to the domestic tool kit.
Development of a preliminary prototype
As a psychologist I have explored the
emerging representational tools within an experimental home through the period
1976 to 1997.
From this background I will introduce,
into the developmental agenda forward from this conference, the kind of basis
the domestic scene and the personal body must constitute, and the kind of
reflexive tool, towards the chronotopological documentation of proximal events,
which I think must have a high priority.
I present
a methodological innovation for users to investigate themselves as strategic
and tactical innovators. An
empowering innovation, which we should wish for prospective citizens to posses-
and for the further development of which I want to invite a cross-cultural and
cross-disciplinary collaboration.
The tools
we have developed are tools of citizen science, enabling users themselves to
pursue a sedimenting empirical logging of whatever they find relevant, around
the clock, around the week, the month and the year. It is a diary-tool while also being a
log-book-tool.
We are so
used to conceive of “the researcher” as an external observer, interviewer,
questionnaire-designer and statistician. But the time has come to admit, that
the only investigator qualified to examine the personal information-flow and
the user as strategic and tactic innovator is the user her- or himself
We offer,
with this method, a basic instrument with which users, for themselves, can keep
track of the personal ongoings and events, not only on the computer, but
throughout the everyday life, in an ongoing diary
Background history
I developed at University of Copenhagen,
Institute of Psychology an experimental home (1972-1997) where I explored ways
to help inhabitants represent their domestic everyday life & communication
processes for themselves.
This involved new options for monitoring
bodily states, representing domestic space and the time geography of domestic
events.
Since the introduction of laptops and
interactive programming I focused on the concept of electronic diary, where
time indexing of text-entries could be automated.
I have daily since 1997– myself – been the
main experimental subject, through generations of laptops and
software-programs, and been entangled in all possible ruses and ignorance’s,
shortcomings and frustrations, meanwhile always trying to put my self into the
seat of future users, - a kind of general empathy-state based on a still
updated stock of European senior knowledge.
As systems and software tools were
optimized I have strived to clarify how the substantial offer of interactivity
from the computer can best be brought to use in a tool like the one I had in
mind.
A tool which in fact is no more than a
further development of the traditions of logging in ships, of journaling in
work-protocols for the drawers and shelves of operating rooms, and of personal
diaries, in handwritten volumes.
Advantages of an electronic diary
I think it is important, that we enable
ourselves to hold on to our personal existence, whom
we were, whom we are, whom we shall become, and how we are using the shorter or
longer lifespan given us. Enable us, as regards matters of personal relevance,
to hold on to this, in order to be enabled to reflect upon it. And thereby perhaps getting a somewhat
better hold of this life and perhaps develop it in desirable directions.
The new conditions we all are submitted to pose new
demands, create new routines and tear us loose from the life anchors in
traditions, and the clear-cut roles, previously furnished to the individual.
Young or old, rich or poor, ethnic insider
or ethnic outsider, educated or uneducated, employed or unemployed: we are all
forced day after day to re-orient ourselves in relation to some of the old, and
in relation to all the new, ever coming our way.
It is my conviction that it is of
paramount importance that the single citizen in the broadband society, in the
midst of and across the information bombardments from mass media, and the
increasing involvement with the broadband society, gets equipped with a kind of
”tool of self documentation”, so that we can hold on to at least a bit of, what
happens to us, what we think about it, and what is practical for us to keep
track of: pin codes, passwords, usernames and –numbers, service providers,
tariffs, subscriptions, accounts, internet-addresses, e-mail addresses,
telephone numbers, birthdays, But also
which dreams we have, in all senses of the word, and the frustrations and disappointments
we meet.
There will be as many ways to keep
electronic diary, as there will be individuals that will do it, and with
different advantages
It is evident that nobody could nor should
use time to describe everything they do, are exposed to, think and feel each
and every day. This must depend upon richness or shortness of time and
subjective relevancies. Some may centre upon cooking, gardening, books, news, the Internet - or worries, symptoms, cures. Maybe keeping
track of the cigarettes, cigars and pipes smoked where and when, how may holes achieved on the golf course, about the arguments
one has, meetings, transportation-problems. or
lawsuits against telecompanies, hitting back on the half hidden and
disguised exploitations (and seductions)
of newcomers difficult to document,(as for example the economic and timing
conditions for adapting a g3mobile telephone to use for e-mail and internet
access)
I think with Tristine Rainer (5) that the
most important aspect of keeping a diary is the establishment of an
area/arena/platform – a breathing-hole of absolute freedom and autonomy, where
one can permit oneself to be honest, where one can make room for all of ones
ideas, feelings, secret thoughts and fantasies, grieves and worries, separated
from or contextually anchored in the more trivial, but perhaps quite as
meaningful banal occupations and rituals filling ones life.
Some keeping track of
what others do for you, and track of own reactions to others may help
you deal with more maturely with others.
And accounting, narrating to oneself in writing
may often help to clear the thinking, clarify the thoughts.
And the diary can be used to document
reactions, one receive from firms and authorities and reactions one receives
from hardware and software IT-tools and paid-for services, as well as media-contents
and event of personal subjective relevance.
In this way, being equipped with adequate
tool, the citizen is empowered for critical action on documentable observations
from a consumer vantage point.
But also: If you have habits, which you
hope to control: alcohol, tobacco, drugs, medicine, exercise, eating, you can
journal the patterns and circumstances of your focussed bad habit, in respect
to advances, temptations, relapses and replacement for undesirable fix.
Think of someone devoting 10 minutes of
thought-loudspeaking via the keyboard to the day’s first cigarette. Or the day’s last cigarette.
But not least for persons, hit by
illnesses like Sclerosis, Diabetes Alzheimer and/or submitted to stressful
treatments, e.g. for cancer, or fighting handicaps there should be a support in
a purely personal keeping track of the progress of the battle, both at an outer
and an inner level.
Writing a diary, journal or logbook by
handwriting, has advantages, for which the present model of electronic diary cannot
compensate. The expressivity in sizing and varying the handwriting,
ornamentation, mixing written and drawn, dried flowers newspaper-cutting glued
in, etc, is lost.
But the advantages of the electronic diary
compensates- especially as more and more of the information, which reaches us,
and which we can reach for, arrive to the computer in digital form.
A most central aspect is the automatic
time-indexing, organizing all inputs relative to the progression of the
diurnal, weekly, seasons and years of personal life.
Two special, related functions have been
developed, One enabling the user to ”write into” specified temporal addresses,
earlier in the day, so it gets into the correct slot in the chronology of the
day. And another, making it possible to annotate to lines
earlier same day, or any of previous days of current diary, keeping track of
when annotation was made.
By letting the user create shortcuts, around the
diary, to whatever programs or services they utilize and facilitating the users
name giving and access to presently 40 thematic drawers, to calendar and
contact library, integrated in the diary, we are providing the user a private
scene, relative to which the events and phenomena in their home, their garden,
their neighbourhood and their workplace can be contextualized and represented.
The advantage of the computer is that it is so simple
to copy words, names, paragraphs of what one writes, into the weekday slot of
the calendar, and not least: into any of pt. 40 hidden user
labelled thematic memo-fields for themes of personal relevance. E.g. One for each of ones children and
grandchildren, parents, best friends, theatre, movies, acquisitions,
subscriptions, books, music, chat-groups, sermons, medications, prayers,
treatments
I have tried to develop at set of demands,
to the types of information, which shall be equally easy to self-document.
I
think this is important for an understanding of the full scope of the
enterprise
_______________________________________________________________________________
We should collaborate to offer a toolbox
for citizens of any culture and age, helping them to keep coherent,
contextualized track of (alphabetically ordered)
