Hi there, I've come in at the end of this thread I think but the two sites in my signature might be of use to anyone looking into the areas of e-Learning, Social Incusion / Exclusion, Diversity, The Digitial Divide, Research in the Virtual Realm etc. Sociopranos has a whole section in which there are many good topics already running, with in some cases researchers discussing their as yet unpublished work. ODELUCE is headed up by the same woman that runs similar sections on Sociopranos. She's based at Storling University and a nice lady to chat to. --------------------------- Sociopranos - Society Redefined: All new members welcome! www.sociopranos.com eLearning, ICT and Social Inclusion Discussion Forum http://bbs.odeluce.stir.ac.uk ----- Original Message ----- From: "Robert Luke" <robert.luke@utoronto.ca> To: <air-l@aoir.org> Sent: Thursday, January 30, 2003 1:06 PM Subject: Re: [Air-l] key terms/concepts for understanding the web

This perhaps betrays my own bias, but what about learning? There is a rather significant focus on the web as a locus of and for learning, lifelong learning, formal and informal education, etc. This could perhaps be included in other aspects of your chapters...

I would also include accessibility, digital diversity and digitial divides as important concepts for understanding the potential impact(s) and in/exclusion of all things webbish. Accessibility in particular has expanded the meaning of the web exponentially. "For people without disabilities, technology makes things convenient, for people with disabilities, it makes things possible."

Robert

"swiss@uiowa" wrote:

...

Hi, all,

Am considering a new edition of a book I edited a few years ago for NYU Press: UNSPUN. The book looked at key terms/concepts/tropes in re: the web. In chapters written specifically for this text, the authors explored the key terms and concepts -- gender, community, and so on -- that help shape our understanding of the World Wide Web and its wide-ranging influence on contemporary culture. Each chapter highlighted for students both continuities and conflicts in the meanings of the Web by focusing on the language surrounding key terms. In doing so, the book asked: what are we talking about when we talk about the Web?

Below: the TOC. What I'm wondering about is this: what key terms do you all see as missing from this list? Clearly there are many. But developing such a list would be helpful to me, and I'd appreciate your feedback on what terms should be added, along with essays of about 20 pages on the terms?

thanks for yr help. Contact me at <thomas-swiss@uiowa.edu>

best, Thom

------------------------------------------------ TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: Unspun: The Web, Language, and Society

1. Community Jodi Dean 2. Identity Jay Bolter 3. Gender Cynthia Fuchs 4. Race Lisa Nakamura 5. Political Economy Vincent Mosco 6. Cyberspace Rob Shields 7. Governance Timothy Luke 8. Ideology John Sloop 9. Performance Dawn Dietrich

10. Hypertext Matthew Kirschenbaum 11. Narrative Joseph Tabbi 12. Authorship Russell Potter 13. Multimedia Sean Cubitt

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There were two terms listed so far, literacy and user experience. I'm suggesting to use "competency" instead. In order to use Internet technologies (competently), you have to have literacy, but go beyond literacy, which is too text-bound. And you have to go beyond mere experience as in, how long have you used it, and which of the following 5 things have you done. Competency really implies a much broader array of skills, knowledge, and even attitude. I also suggest adding technology-mediated communication. CMC as a termis really, in a way, not quite all-encompassing anymore. Some of my students read their email on their cell phones. No computer involved. Still mediated communication though. Technology-mediated communication. So, I suggest adding both terms individually, or at least together as technology-mediated (TMC) competence. If there is interest, I can provide a detailed discussion of how TMC competence has developed out of computer literacy. Ulla ---------------------------------------------------- Ulla Bunz Assistant Professor Department of Communication Rutgers University 4 Huntington Street New Brunswick, NJ 08901 Email: bunz@scils.rutgers.edu ----------------------------------------------------

Okay, I see how the term "user experience" can be interpreted in two ways. I'm familiar with usability. I do think that there is a link between usability and competency. Actually, some of my research has shown that if you reach a certain level in one (so, decent usability, or medium level competency), it doesn't matter if the other one is low/bad. You'll make do. I'm delighted that we are having this conversation. I bet some people would interpret "user experience" like you did, and some would like I did. So, Thomas needs to make sure he clearly defines it in his book. Thanks for the clarification. Ulla ---------------------------------------------------- Ulla Bunz Assistant Professor Department of Communication Rutgers University 4 Huntington Street New Brunswick, NJ 08901 Email: bunz@scils.rutgers.edu ---------------------------------------------------- -----Original Message----- From: air-l-admin@aoir.org [mailto:air-l-admin@aoir.org] On Behalf Of Louise Ferguson Sent: Thursday, January 30, 2003 9:35 AM To: air-l@aoir.org; air-l@aoir.org Subject: RE: [Air-l] key terms/concepts for understanding the web At 09:21 30/01/2003 -0500, Ulla Bunz wrote:

There were two terms listed so far, literacy and user experience.

I'm suggesting to use "competency" instead. In order to use Internet technologies (competently), you have to have literacy, but go beyond literacy, which is too text-bound. And you have to go beyond mere experience as in, how long have you used it, and which of the following 5 things have you done. Competency really implies a much broader array of skills, knowledge, and even attitude.

I beg to differ. User experience (the old-fashioned term was usability) has nothing to do with 'competence' and everything to do with the quality of what is provided to the user in terms of the user's needs and wants. I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding here - user experience is not about 'what - past - experience the user has', i.e. it is not part of a learning process. It is widely understood as a term that represents the idea: 'what is the user's experience?'. Totally different concept. Competency is not the issue at all (how competent does one have to be to use the Habitat website? - well, not event the most competent person in the world can use it satisfactorily i.e. the user experience is diabolical. Competency, in fact, has to do with that old chestnut 'intuitiveness' or 'intuitable-ness', which is fundamentally to do with previous experience. Louise Ferguson

Ulla

---------------------------------------------------- Ulla Bunz Assistant Professor Department of Communication Rutgers University 4 Huntington Street New Brunswick, NJ 08901 Email: bunz@scils.rutgers.edu ----------------------------------------------------

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Leaping groundlessly into Louise and Ulla's discussion of "user experience"

At 09:47 30/01/2003 -0500, Ulla wrote:

...

Okay, I see how the term "user experience" can be interpreted in two ways.

Louise responded:

But I think there's really only one accepted use of the term in the profession itself.... My own field is 'user experience', which these days incorporates ideas such as information design, interface design, information architecture, navigation design, visual design, interaction design, content specification, user needs, requirements definition, etc etc.

It seems to me that part of what we are seeing here is that Internet Research spans many professions, so a term that has a clearly accepted standard meaning in one profession is used in a variety of ways in others. As an ethnographer/social constructionist in Communication, I associate the term "user experience" with any number of possibilities most of which are far more social and less technical than what Louise includes (which is not to say I wouldn't include what Louise does, but I would also want to look at the social history of a persons exposure to and use of the Internet -- i.e. relevant experiences people have had that shapes their use). This is not just my idiosyncratic ignorance, but accepted use of the term in my profession. This speaks to the need for us to be clear about our own definitions and to recognize that terms with seemingly standard meanings may mean different things elsewhere. When Louise says "user experience," I now realize she is referring to a very explicit set of ideas, and that when people in my field say 'user experience' to mean what we take it to mean, Louise and others in her field may view us as having mis-used the term. Don't even get me started on the use of the term "communication" in some other fields! We need these discussions, if not to find common language then at least to better understand one another's. 2 cents from the Peanut Gallery -- ________________________________________________________ Nancy Baym http://www.ku.edu/home/nbaym Communication Studies, University of Kansas 102 Bailey Hall, 1440 Jayhawk Blvd., Lawrence, KS 66045, USA Association of Internet Researchers: http://aoir.org

Are we down to a problem of semantics here?

Louise

Yes. People studying the internet who are not User Experience professionals use the same term to mean different things. Now if we're talking about a term like "hegemony" or "subaltern" or one which clearly emerges from a very particular intellectual tradition or was coined by one particular theorist, I think we can agree that there are right and wrong ways to use the term. When we have words like "user" and "experience" we are talking about words that may have long traditions in different fields and even if everyone within one field believes the term to be theirs and the definition to be clear, it doesn't mean that others outside the field will or should relinquish rights to use the term to mean the things that they have always taken it to mean. Louise makes the contrast between 'what the user experiences' and 'what experience the user has', but grammatically the term 'user experience' does not priviledge one interpretation over the other, so we have to rely on disciplinary convention to make that distinction. My discipline would recognize the importance of that same distinction, but we wouldn't rely on the phrase "user experience" to capture it. Google searches tell us what sources that are on the web and use that phrase prominently mean by it, but I hope we haven't reached the intellectual point where we use Google to resolve questions of theoretical meaning and conceptualization. There are a lot of academic ways to use a term that Google won't catch till it starts indexing the content of all our publications. -- ________________________________________________________ Nancy Baym http://www.ku.edu/home/nbaym Communication Studies, University of Kansas 102 Bailey Hall, 1440 Jayhawk Blvd., Lawrence, KS 66045, USA Association of Internet Researchers: http://aoir.org

To me, cyberslang is the language that comes out of written electronic communication. It started with lol, or IMHO, as abbreviations. Other examples are ppl (for people), or txt msg (for text message), or cul8r (for see you later). This last one in particular I consider a prime example of cyberslang. These are written examples. But there are also words that are created through or about electronic communication, such as IMing (sending an instant message) that are then used both in written interaction, and in spoken interaction.

this brought back a memory - at the time when i was spending about 12-18hrs a day online 'performing' my ethnography in a cybercommunity - i had great difficulty moving between the two 'modes of interaction', and i often used to say lol out loud in my 'other' everyday life! family and colleagues often asked me what i meant - and it was difficult to explain, because i was finding that lol was the exact expression that i wanted to use, and nothing else would suffice. denise Denise Maia Carter, School of Comparative and Applied Social Science, University of Hull, UK http://www.denisecarter.net denisecarter@denisecarter.net