This week’s reading, Information Ecologies: Using Technology with Heart by Bonnie A. Nardi and Vicki L. O’Day, challenges readers to recognize their necessary participation in the influence of technological advancement. The authors develop their argument around a concept they define as an information ecology, a “system of people, practices, values, and technologies in a particular local environment” (49). Such an environment focuses on the human activities served by technology rather than the technology itself as an isolated system.
Nardi and O’Day begin by discussing Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis, a 1927 classic in which a man brings to question the reliability of humans, creating a robot that brings the humans to react in a scene of self-destructive chaos. Upon recognizing the consequences of their behavior, the humans burn the robot at the stake and the film ends with the suggestion that the human mind and heart are the true sources of progression.
Consider the role of technological advancement in 2009. In what ways do such advancements pose a similar threat (in less dramatic fashion) to our own participation in civilization? (Do such threats even exist?) How do we attempt to weigh the advantages of such technologies against what is lost?
Nardi and O’Day describe change in an ecology as systemic, “When one element is changed, effects can be felt throughout the whole system” (51). They make the point that local changes can disappear if they’re incompatible with the rest of the system, using the example that establishing new learning goals in schools would also require creating new methods of evaluation so as to ensure the new material maintains the point of focus.
Throughout the text, Nardi and O’Day use examples that show the locality of ecologies, emphasizing spaces such as schools, library systems, or hospitals. With consideration to the fact that this text was written in 1999, how can we apply the same logic to the applications that exist ten years later, such as Twitter or Facebook? With world-wide access thru the internet, do boundaries within such systems exist?
As an extension of the above, Nardi and O’Day discuss a library as “a place where people and technology come together in congenial relations, guided by the values of the library” (49). What guides values in online systems? How is this sense of community established and how do we reconcile the vastness of users with varying backgrounds and goals that comprise these online communities?
Nardi and O’Day seem to suggest a sense of disconnect is required to achieve progress, “People’s activities and tools adjust and are adjusted in relation to each other, always attempting and never quite achieving a perfect fit. This is part of the dynamic achieved in healthy ecologies—a balance in motion, not stillness” (53).
As one who works virtually, much of my correspondence with co-workers is online, and we are frequently forced to adapt to system upgrades or new programs to enhance that correspondence. In the past year, we’ve transitioned from Netmeeting to Communicator to hold our virtual conferences. But when Communicator was recently replaced with Live Meeting, something interesting occurred: several people reverted to the old form of technology (Netmeeting) rather than embrace the upgrade.
>The response is a typical one when we find ourselves in unfamiliar territory. But, aside from the obvious solution of trying the tools, how do we make the transitions that have proven to be inevitable to ensure evolution and progression results?
To what extent are we participating in reverse adaptation to technology? Nardi and O’Day use the example of standardized test scores as a means to assess student progress, despite recent approaches to learning that go against the traditional “factory model.” In what other ways may technology influence us to think in such constructs, and how can we transcend this way of thinking?
