Lately, a lot of my intellectual energy has been devoted to issues that one way or another pertain to the notion of the hermeneutic circle. The following is an effort to develop some clarity on it. Defining the Hermeneutic Circle Just so everyone knows what I am going on about here, let me first attempt…
One problem that is likely impeding the development of critical approaches in HCI is equivocation. Equivocation occurs when different meanings or uses of the same word are used interchangeably. “Criticism” appears to be just such a word, and the origin of this post was to offer some fundamental distinctions among different uses of “criticism” in…
Readings: Going Off on Your Own Continued from Part 6 of the Interaction Criticism series, which starts here. Acknowledgment: Many of the ideas and readings cited throughout this series and particularly in this post reflect the research and contributions of my colleague and spouse, Shaowen Bardzell. I certainly have enjoyed composing this series of posts,…
Last week, I conducted some user studies to learn about music libraries. One of the participants commented on how cool mix tapes were yet how rarely he creates playlists in iTunes. I started to wonder about the differences between old and new music media formats. In particular, I was interested in the differences between mix…
Read more mix tapes vs. digital playlists (mediation, meaningful objects and sign values)
I did a structural and phenomenological analysis of Facebook’s people tagging feature. Just today I was able to create a semi-coherent argument from the analysis. I am curious what you all think of this: My overall thesis for the paper is that the way that a social networking community (Facebook) is designed fundamentally changes the…
Read more Does Facebook’s design change the way we take photos?
So this morning, for the second time this year, my high school graduating class lost one of our own. She wasn’t a close friend of mine, but she was definetely someone who I loved talking to, always seemed to be smiling or laughing loudly, and had a close group of friends that loved her very…
Goffman’s Presentation of Self in Everyday Life was published in 1959 with the intent of establishing a description of meaning in social interaction. Goffman said that people present an “idealized” version of themselves in public (front stage). People present more consistent versions of themselves to coincide with norms and societal laws. When not in public…
Read more My Paper: Goffman’s Presentation of Self and YouTube
This article posted today to CNN speaks to the impact of technology on culture in a big way. When I was a teenager, many moons ago, you were considered rude or “chicken” to break up with a girlfriend over the telephone. You had to “face the music” as they say. But now things are much,…
Mingxian posted an excellent question late last week about the problem of intention. If we look at camera angles in Bleu or La Strada, and we perceive that they relate fortuitously to narrative themes (etc.), and we attribute that coherence to the “director’s intention,” are we leaving structuralism/semiotics and heading back to phenomenology? My answer…
Read more Structuralist versus Phenomenological Notions of “Intention”
I know that today we were trying to find the code how to interpret those movies. We were talking about one detail give us clues about what would happen later, and the camera positions tell us blablabla. However, David mentioned that the director forced us to see the focuses and the next screen, we have…
Interaction Culture 