Pers Ubiquit Comput (2010) 14:171–180 DOI 10.1007/s00779-010-0281-0

EDITORIAL

Theme issue on social interaction and mundane technologies Paul Dourish • Connor Graham • Dave Randall Mark Rouncefield

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Published online: 26 February 2010 Ó Springer-Verlag London Limited 2010

1 Introduction In ‘‘The Man Who Fell To Earth’’ [1, 2], a university professor Dr. Bryce, is stunned by the rapid development, adoption and deployment of a number of technologies— including, for example, ‘‘self-developing’’ photographic film. Bryce is shocked by the fact that these advances have passed him by, become mundane artefacts in everyday use, without him noticing, in a field, a discipline, where he is supposed to be an expert. For many of us, it is not only the sheer pace of technology change that is so bewildering but also the impact of new technologies on how different social interactions are performed [3] and orchestrated [4]—such as relationship behaviour, family obligations and the etiquette of social interaction. The call for papers for this theme issue on Social Interaction and Mundane Technologies was

C. Graham is an independent researcher. P. Dourish Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697-3440, USA e-mail: [email protected] C. Graham (&) Department of Information Systems, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC 3010, Australia e-mail: [email protected] D. Randall Department of Sociology, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester M15 6LL, UK e-mail: [email protected] M. Rouncefield Computing Department, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YW, UK e-mail: [email protected]

particularly motivated by this desire to examine, document and understand how everyday social interactions are effected by, inhibited by or facilitated through the use of a range of mundane technologies and applications. By mundane technologies we mean technologies and applications that are commonplace, which lots of people use, such as mobile phones, texting, email, word-processing applications (e.g. MicrosoftÒ Word), presentation software (e.g. OpenOffice.org’s Impress), electronic spreadsheets (e.g. Apple’s Numbers) and so on. As Michaels [5] suggests, ‘‘the term ‘mundane technologies’ connotes those technologies whose novelty has worn off; these are technologies which are now fully integrated into, and are an unremarkable part of, everyday life. To study mundane technologies is thus to explore how they mediate and reflect everyday life, how they serve in the reproduction of local techno-social configurations.’’ Thus, when we discuss mundane technologies we are not necessarily talking about what Hillman and Gibbs [6] in their book ‘‘Century Makers’’ describe as ‘‘things we take for granted which have changed our lives’’. For Hillman and Gibbs these are devices—like the ring-pull can, the Post-it note or the pocket calculator—that have played an important part in much larger social and socio-technical changes despite now appearing trivial, everyday and commonplace. What the full range of long-term impacts the various technologies documented in these papers might be we cannot, as yet, ascertain. The technologies do, however, share the ‘cleverness’ of Hillman and Gibbs’ clever things in ‘‘their capacity to be unnoticed, to quietly mediate, that is reproduce, what have become the commonalities of everyday life’’ [5]. Mundane technologies have also been the focus of other earlier work—both in organizational and domestic settings. For example, Michaels [7] has studied walking boots as a

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mundane technology and Tenner [8] has examined eyeglasses and sandals. Joanne Yates’ [9] historical studies also chart the rise of various mundane office technologies such as memos, typewriters and filing cabinets while Martha Banta’s remarkable book, ‘‘Taylored Lives: Narrative Productions in the Age of Taylor, Veblen, and Ford’’ furnishes a number of illustrations of the spread of technology into homes. The papers in this theme issue of Personal and Ubiquitous Computing examine the everyday, mundane, or generally unremarkable use of different mundane technologies and applications in a range of settings. In so doing they attempt to put some empirical flesh on the barebones of an argument about the impact of new technologies on aspects of everyday social life and interaction. The papers reflect a number of interesting and interlinked themes. These themes and the methods for investigating them, for teasing apart their complexities, are interdisciplinary issues, falling on the boundaries of the social sciences, computing and design, highlighting a range of methodological issues and choices. Plummer’s [10] ‘‘Documents of Life 2’’ suggests that new technologies have the potential for re-ordering the forms in which our everyday lives are assembled, displayed and stored and, indeed, how we present and display ourselves through these technologies. Plummer talks about how expressions of personal life are hurled out into the world by the millions and can be of interest to anyone who cares to seek them out; through the examination of social interaction and mundane technologies for example. We see this kind of examination of the technology-in-use through the media they generate occurring in previous work in ComputerSupported Cooperative Work and Ubiquitous Computing [11, 12] and in several the papers here. For example, Cheverst et al. [12], drawing on Hutchinson et al.’s [13] notion of ‘‘technology probes’’, examine the social interaction supported through situated display technologies, regarding logs of text messages sent and received through the displays as a form of document. Thus, the availability of life documents generated through mundane technologies promotes new ways of investigating social life. This theme issue also addresses how new technologies— ICTs and media—both permeate our everyday lives and play a crucial role in everyday interactions and living. The issue presents and discusses new research about everyday ICTs such as mobile phones, camcorders, cameras, paper and media such as text, photographs, documents and their role in supporting, impeding and transforming social interaction. The issue is a response to the increasingly pervasive use of these everyday, mundane technologies in people’s lives throughout the world for many different purposes. A simple measure of such pervasiveness is that in 2008 mobile phone penetration, for example, was at 131% (http://www.ida.gov.sg), 88% (http://www.cellular-news.

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com) and over 84% (http://www.deloitte.com) in Singapore, USA and the UK, respectively. These mundane technologies, such as mobile phones, as well as supporting various mobilities [14] also support numerous facets of everyday life—staying in touch with friends and relatives [15], shopping, banking transactions and so on. These technologies are also key components of the infrastructure supporting the digital economy, and their impact is not restricted to particular affluent populations in ‘Western’ countries. Mobile phones, for example, are being used to reconfigure social and work relationships between farmers in Uganda, cutting out unscrupulous middlemen [16]. Yet for all their ubiquity and pervasiveness we still have much to learn about these technologies—the process by which they are incorporated into people’s lives, the gamut of interactions variously maintained across different mundane media over time, the everyday social interactions, the nastiness as well as the niceness [17] they support, their role and impact in particular communities and society at large, and the limits and extent, both ethical and practical, of their ability to provide insights into particular lives in particular places. This issue represents a selection of papers documenting technology use across a unique collection of settings. For example, Khalid and Dix [18] examine the use of photologs among expatriate Malaysian students in the north of England, while Bury et al. [19] discuss sociotechnical issues of security and trust in very different context in the same region—a small village community. Kristoffersen and Bratteberg [20] consider the use of ‘public’ IT systems by train travellers in Norway, while O’Connor and Fitzpatrick [21] shift the focus of mundane technology use from the fully able to intellectually disabled adults. Despite this apparently eclectic clutch of settings, interactions and technologies, three powerful themes pervade this issue. The first addresses specific examples of what certain mundane technologies—old and new—do, engrained as they are in the fabric of our lives through being made ordinary. The second theme concerns how such technologies come to be in the place that they are and the different and particular interactions they have supported along the way. Real world, real time, lived data from naturalistic settings is often lacking in conceptual schemes describing this process of transformation, a lack the authors try to address here. The third theme concerns what it is for a technology to be mundane or ordinary and the degree of necessity, sufficiency or contingency in association with social interaction that this requires. As authors explore these themes here, they probe the approaches and methods best suited to the examination of ordinary technologies and the social interaction associated with them not only for supporting description but also for making forays into design. Our use of the word ‘‘design’’ here embraces both

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the notion of developing new and often surprising inventions responding to the playful [22] and sentimental [23] aspects of people and the introduction of often more subtle, apparently predominantly functional assemblies and artefacts that inhabit our lives. Our focus on ICTs and media is not accidental. We are not only concerned with the material form of technologies (or lack of it), how they are placed in our lives and how they support and even help determine social relations, but also with what these material objects produce and, in turn, allow us to consume. Thus, the range of technologies described in the papers in this theme issue varies from a home network to photologs to camcorders to mobile phones to pens and paper. The papers here consider these mundane technologies as supporting ongoing social accomplishments (e.g. of a home), particular cooperative arrangements (e.g. in making a group presentation), achieving particular sentimental orders (e.g. social support networks) and engaging in ongoing, longitudinal social engagement (e.g. microblogging).

2 Paper themes: instances of mundane technologies This theme issue attracted two main types of submission: articles describing empirical examinations of the use of mundane technologies and papers which mark new developments and, perhaps, mundane technologies of the future. Two articles—Kanis and Brinkman [24] and Satchell and Graham [25]—focus on newly developed extensions to mundane technologies not yet in widespread use and the kinds of existing social interaction provoking their development. These papers encourage speculation concerning the possible future directions of social interaction in the realms of ‘‘face-work’’ [3] in existing social networks and anonymous exchange in ad hoc groups. The other papers, while focusing on a range of existing technologies, from the new (e.g. Oulasvirta et al.’s study of Jaiku [26]) to the more established (e.g. Luff et al.’s study of pens and paper [27]), generally focus on detailed studies of use that provide various levels of insights into mundane technology design. We have tried to reflect this emphasis on use or design through the ordering of papers in this issue. Tolmie et al. [28], O’Connor and Fitzpatrick [21], Khalid and Dix [18] and Bury et al. [19] conduct in-depth analysis of the use and process of domestication [29] of mundane technologies in domestic, care and community settings. Oulasvirta et al. [26], Satchell and Graham [25], Kanis and Brinkman [24], Kristoffersen and Bratteberg [20] and Luff et al. [27] focus on the impact of new technologies on social interaction and, while not neglecting a detailed examination of use, consider particular design concerns in some detail.

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Tolmie et al. [28] extend previous work on ‘‘digital housekeeping’’ [30] to describe the often avoided detail of the work ‘‘keeping the roof up’’ in a home network and, more generally, technologies that, because of their form (or lack of it) and subtle dependencies, challenge being easily handled, manipulated and even reasoned about. Although a research setting centring on an ‘‘expert’’ technologist’s home, their work reminds us of the importance of considering everyday technologies as situated in a constellation of existing infrastructure, practices and assemblies [31, 32], the often contingent process by which new technologies are ‘‘made at home’’, and the importance of considering the processural character of the work involved in achieving even a compromised, negotiated technological order. They focus on the detail and challenges of installing and configuring technologies pre-assembled for a research lab setting in a real, albeit ‘sympathetic’ home. They also describe the ‘‘preparatory work’’ and ‘‘assembling [of] parts and tools’’ involved with working with a new ubiquitous computing infrastructure layered over and intertwined with existing home infrastructure as well as the ‘‘contingencies of installation’’ and the ongoing need for ‘‘coordination and awareness’’. They use the notion of ‘‘digital plumbing’’ to draw attention to the process of how technologies are worked out, made ordinary and absorbed into existing domestic routines and technical and physical infrastructure. O’Connor and Fitzpatrick’s [21] longitudinal study of the domestication of camcorders by people with intellectual disabilities considers key barriers to initial acceptance and appropriation, how these barriers were overcome through support by a proxy and how the camcorder supported particular incorporation by these particular users, supporting ‘framing’ of particular objects and even the negotiation of particular role allocation. This engagement with a ‘‘sensitive setting’’ [33] reminds us of the value of close examination of particular ‘‘perspicuous settings’’ [34] to elaborate and refine existing models describing how mundane technologies transform our lives and are transformed in the process. Again this work alerts us to the need to consider the processural and temporal character of technology use and, in this case, how considering users as being ‘limited’ in cognitive terms fails to acknowledge both the social possibilities offered by mundane technologies and how they might be ‘‘repurposed’’ to become, for example, a new, even ‘‘artistic’’, way of seeing the world or a means of supporting or provoking performance. Khalid and Dix’s [18] study of expatriate Malaysian photologgers illustrates issues with interacting and dwelling longitudinally with a technology that becomes part of the fabric of a particular community. In their paper, they respond to Urry’s [35] call to ‘‘investigate not only presence and absence but also ‘imagined presence’ and the way

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that diverse objects carry imagined presence across, and into, multiple kinds of dwelling’’. They discuss intricate webs of interactions across different technologies and media and the ongoing ‘‘face-work’’ [3] and management of personal identity sustained through the simple act of photo sharing through the Web. This ‘‘work’’ is variously positioned in as an individual memoir and a window in for immediate but geographically displaced family in photologgers personal lives and, correspondingly, as a community archive and means of developing friendships in their local community. Their work reminds us of the different strata of experience involved in networked technology use: actions and interactions through simple technologies not only permit the visibility of mundane action to oneself and others but also sustained reflexivity. Bury et al. [19] argue for a socio-technical approach to security, particularly security for wireless mess networks in community settings, an approach that directs attention to notions of trust, including the ‘‘the perceptions, knowledge and fears of users’’ in settings with ‘‘timeless time’’ characterised by ‘‘space and flows’’ [35]. They borrow a derivative of the operationally critical threat, asset and vulnerability evaluation (OCTAVE) method [36], OCTAVE-S, to support the design of appropriate security measures in the village community reported on. This method is usually deployed in organisations and businesses. Their approach, which identifies assets at the initial stage of the OCTAVE-S process through a focus group, seeks to understand security and trust as an influence in the appropriation of new measures aimed at securing technical security and engendering the experience of security in the community. It also marks an attempt to, like Dourish and Anderson [37], place technological privacy and security concerns within social and cultural contexts. In the first of the next batch of papers, Oulasvirta et al. [26], again draw on Goffman [3] in a study of the microblogging client, Jaiku. They argue for microblogging, like Weblogging, as a particular form of self-disclosure, albeit self-disclosure of a conventional nature, that is centred on making current activities (e.g. moving) and experiences (e.g. an emotion) visible. They analyse a random sample of microblog postings and comments through Jaiku and, drawing on Sack’s [15] work, show that microblog postings and comments are a form of conversation insulated from the usual temporal obligations. They also show through their analysis that the cycles of interaction are more rapid than with Weblogs and that a ‘hard core’ of users account for almost half the comments, placing microblogging between SMS and Weblogging as a genre. They also argue that postings both operate in the shortterm, as a form of momentary self-presentation [3] and longitudinally as a means of developing an identity and even a personality online. Finally, they point out that the

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short form of postings and the limitations imposed by input mechanisms, particularly via mobile phones, actual mitigate against ‘‘prudent calculation’’ [26] and instead support mundane disclosure. The next two papers focus on mobile phones. They describe new, simple applications potentially supporting new forms of social interaction. Kanis and Brinkman [24] describe lightweight microblogging technology supporting the posting of positive messages through the mobile Internet and Bluetooth. The two versions of PosiPost they describe support communicative mobility through particular objects carried while people are physically mobile [14]. Kanis and Brinkman relate how the vast majority of messages they examined relate everyday events or describe feelings of pleasure of some kind. Their work illustrates that minimalist media with limited functionality support expressive interactions and that the anonymity supported by these media can encourage rather than inhibit such interactions. Satchell and Graham’s discussion [25] of the rationale for ‘‘The Swarm’s’’ design shows the importance of ‘‘face-work’’ [3], awareness, obligation and boundary control in a new breed of mundane technologies supporting continuous connectivity and ongoing social interaction. They argue that technologies like ‘‘The Swarm’’ that attend to these concerns through their design support the exchange of ‘‘rich social goods’’ [38] across different mobilities, physical and communicative [14] in particular. Kristoffersen and Bratteberg [20] focus on (at times unintended) social interaction in a public setting, where mundane technologies form part of the environment. They consider technology design issues with public spaces where, in contrast to the community described by Khalid and Dix [18], people are generally not known to each other but are co-located in space. These same people are forced to put their actions—successes and failures alike—on display for all to see. The design problem in this setting, then, is one of designing to facilitate performances by ‘‘unknown strangers’’ for ‘‘unknown strangers’’ [20]. Through examining a ticketless travel system they discuss problems with its social aspects, namely difficulties with making people’s intentions visible and people’s issues with ‘face’ when things go wrong. They also consider more design-specific issues and alternatives, arguing that the ticketless travel system at times actually supports a feeling of opposition to commuters often through poor feedback and ill-considered affordances. They argue for more subtle notions of privacy through considering situated interaction with IT systems in public spaces as an ongoing reflexive encounter, where people are accountable to variously known others. In contrast to others in this theme issue (e.g. Satchell and Graham [25]), they suggest that drawing on Reeves et al.’s [39] work on the spectator experience is likely to be more

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profitable for teasing out concrete design recommendations than deploying Goffman’s [3] work. Luff et al. [27], quite aptly for the last paper of a theme issue on social interaction and mundane technologies, examine interaction around one of the most mundane materials of all, paper. They remind us that insights into use and, by implication, potential designs, can only be achieved through examining the detail of provisional and evolving socio-temporal and spatial arrangements around the artefact and the important trajectories [40] involved in these arrangements. They consider how these arrangements are reconfigured when new, even if only subtly new, technologies are introduced. Their paper suggests that ‘‘innovation’’ not only describes paradigm shifts in how people interact with technology but also how these provisional arrangements are reconfigured and revisited. Their work also points to problems caused when ‘old’, mundane technologies with well-understood affordances are subtly redesigned with these new features being rendered invisible. They describe the potentially profound impact of these redesigns on collaborative arrangements when redesigning interaction with paper.

3 Four insights regarding mundane technologies In ‘‘The Man Who Fell to Earth’’, it transpires, the technologies that startle and perplex Bryce have been patented and developed by an extraterrestrial, Newton. Yet despite this otherworldly scientific and engineering genius, the story does not have a typical, Hollywood ending, finishing instead in drunkenness and despair. This ending, and the papers here, remind us of Sacks’ [17] cautionary comments about an over-romantic view of new technologies and the changes they will bring; as somehow making us a lot nicer and not as nasty as we currently are. However, the papers here remind also us that, at least when considering mundane technologies, we need to be careful not to engage (or at least over-engage) in the self-indulgent pessimism and negativity that is akin to what Kling [41] critiques as antiUtopianism. In addition we need to take due care not to ignore or disparage such ‘ordinary’ technologies—the notion of the mundane, in some people’s minds at least, is commonly associated with being boring, emotionless and without imagination. We hope the technologies authors describe here and the richly layered social interactions around and through them are sufficient to dispel this conception. We believe these papers, while marking specific treatments of specific technologies, also contribute to at least four, inter-related ‘‘empirically grounded insight[s]’’ [42] regarding objects and affordances, transformation and time, social interaction and community, and visibility and accountability.

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3.1 Objects and affordances In this theme issue we are somewhat guilty of focussing on ‘‘the biography of the thing (or object)’’ [29, 43]. This description of particular technologies’ material form exposes the importance of their social affordances [44, 45]. ‘‘Affordance’’ as defined by Gibson [46] describes a set of ‘‘action possibilities’’ that are somehow both in the environment but determined by the physical capabilities of the actor. Norman [47] focuses on ‘‘perceived affordance’’, i.e. ‘‘action possibilities’’ that are perceived as available to the actor. Anderson and Sharrock [48], drawing directly on Gibson’s work, argue for affordances not only being defined in terms of the environment and physical capabilities of the actor but also as being ‘‘organised by virtue of the task at hand’’ [48, p 148] and ‘‘regulated within any culture’’ [48, p 149]. Bradner et al. [44] have since coined the phrase ‘‘social affordance’’ or ‘‘the relationship between the properties of an object and the social characteristics of a given group that enable particular kinds of interaction among members of that group.’’ In this vein, Wellman et al. [45] describe how the Internet supports ‘‘new forms of interaction and community that cannot be measured using standard indicators of social capital’’ or ‘‘social affordances’’. What these different treatments of affordance point to is the importance of considering action and interactions within and across particular social groups when considering interactions through and around mundane technologies, i.e. situations where the technology is a channel for social interaction and situations where the technology is a less obvious and perhaps unnoticed part of social interaction. Taking a different perspective, that focuses on the intention of the design of objects, Shove et al. [49], quoting Latour [50], point out how artefacts, by their very form, help shape human agency and ‘‘make social relations durable’’ [49]: ‘‘They are in large part the stuff out of which socialness is made’’ [50]. The importance of the physicality and materiality mundane technologies is evident in many of the papers here: Tolmie et al. [28] point to the importance of ‘‘assemblies’’ while Luff et al. [27] remind us of considering subtle relationships between spatial and social arrangements. While the technologies described in this issue may not be car seatbelts, door hinges [51] or hotel key fobs [50] this perspective is useful when reflecting on the work that ‘new’ mundane technologies do. For example, Oulasvirta et al.’s study of Jaiku microblogging [26], Kanis and Brinkman’s study of anonymous Bluetooth messages [24] and Satchell and Graham’s [25] paper on mobile avatars show us that mundane technologies represent ingenuity and effort in both translation and prescription [51] in social life, where a major effort is transformed into a minor one, and how this entails

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corresponding expectation of the ‘user’. Thus, the enormous effort of keeping scores of variously known people informed about personal current state through phone calls, letters, face-to-face chat etc. is transformed to the minor effort and expectation of punching out a short piece of text on a mobile phone keypad. These papers also remind us that as social networking tools with microblogging functionality become more ubiquitous, stable and even sensitive to changes in current state so they become more durable. However, Kristoffersen and Bratteberg [20] show that this translation is often not entirely durable and can break down. In all cases people allow effort to be delegated to these mundane technologies and, to some extent at least, allow them to discipline them. The consequences of this perspective for technology design is something we wish to take stock of here through these papers—the impact of conceiving the materiality of technologies, placed as they are in-the-world, as shaping and reshaping action [52] on notions of agency and freedom [53] for example. 3.2 Transformation and time The articles in this theme issue also point to the transformations that once ‘magical’ technologies undergo to become mundane. As one participant at one of the workshops that have fuelled this theme issue1 has pointed out [54], as with scientific discoveries no longer new, the magical can be mundane and, conversely the mundane can be magical when the work creating and constituting the mundane is considered: ‘‘we moderns have taken for granted our own technoscientific marvels that we have let them sink into the mundane.’’ Thus, just as the life of a magician or rockstar can appear exotic to observers so it is also mundane in the sense that there are particular, ordinary practices, objects and technologies that comprise the work of being a magician or a rockstar. Smith and Lewi [54] remind us that although here we may have reports on a collection of technologies that are mundane for some they are far from mundane for others. They suggest that ‘‘Technology is concealed in a fabricated version of the mundane and is not entwined in an ongoing everyday life’’. What this points to is a difference between the momentary nature of certain, perhaps magical, technology’s display (e.g. in a demonstration) against the ongoing and ingrained use of more (mass-produced) mundane technology. Indeed the frequency with which Goffman’s [3] work on social encounters is referenced in this issue does indeed point to the importance of considering expertise of the consumer, the intention of the designer and the level of availability of

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the technology when reflecting on mundane technologies. What we see with the studies of microblogging (Oulasvirta et al. [26]) and Web-based digital photos (Khalid and Dix [18]) described here is some expertise and indeed calculation in the way these media are used. What we also see is that technologies which are intended and developed for mass use, if appropriated, are doomed to become unsurprising, mundane and perhaps even disparaged, like the trick that an audience has seen one too many times. On the other hand, what is less available and cloistered in secrecy is not mundane (except to those ‘in the know’). What Smith and Lewi’s [54] discussion of the mundane and the magical also suggests is that there is a process of negotiating, working through and agreeing about the use and meaning of technologies through which they become mundane. Indeed, as already noted, this issue can be considered as a series of ‘‘object biographies’’ providing us insights into the transformations that technologies undergo in order to become mundane. Silverstone et al. [29] suggested a transactional system involving exchange of commodities and meanings that is at play both among members of a household and between the household and the public sphere. They describe a series of notions—‘‘appropriation’’, ‘‘objectification’’, ‘‘incorporation’’ and ‘‘conversion’’—that capture the spirit of the transformations that a technology undergoes in becoming ordinary. For us, becoming mundane means that a technology, such as a once new technology that required working out, fades from view in interaction. O’Connor and Fitzpatrick [21] show how, over time, a camcorder is transformed into a means for artistic exploration and social performance. Tolmie et al. [28] describe how particular work—what they refer to as ‘‘digital plumbing’’—is a critical part of this ‘fading from view’. Bury et al. [19] describe the role of particular attitudes to security and trust in the process of a technology becoming accepted by and ingrained into a small community. This is not to denigrate the importance of particular qualities and affordances, but merely to, in Latour’s [51] terms, point out the importance of a process of a technology becoming more durable or moving from being ‘‘provisional’’ and ‘‘less reliable’’ to ‘‘longer-lasting’’ and ‘‘more faithful’’ and, in the end, becoming ‘‘blackboxed’’ or ‘‘made invisible by its own success’’ [55]. Nor are we glossing the particular phases in people’s lives that these technologies may have passed through. Instead we are arguing that mundane technologies are owned in some way, placed, perhaps physically, in the topology of the owner’s life, absorbed into his/her rhythms and routines, and stabilised in their use2 so that they become both ingrained and, to borrow Don Norman’s [56] term,

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Two workshops, one in 2007 and another in 2008, have motivated this special issue and each has resulted in a set of proceedings [72, 73].

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2 Here, we both consider and deviate from Silverstone et al.’s [74] elements in their notion of ‘‘moral economy of the household’’.

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invisible.3 That is not to say that there is unremarkable work required to make this happen and to sustain this transformation, as Tolmie et al. [28] point out here. 3.3 Social interaction and community Particular mundane technologies may well be talked about and referred to in various economies and in society at large (e.g. through other media), but the technologies themselves are rarely the focus of the talk when in use. We can argue that, at least when fully operational, in making action and interactions visible and available these technologies have themselves disappeared. The argument we make then is that the use and display of these technologies, in them becoming mundane, has become less important than the display and engagement of the self that they support. This need not mean that this ‘display and engagement of the self’ is always ideal or singular: Kristoffersen and Bratteberg [20] show how this can involve exposing incompetence as well as competence; Luff et al. [27] show how electronic paper can be a resource for collaboration. In being mundane in use, the focus has moved from the technology’s materiality to the interactions and relationships it engenders and sustains. What Silverstone et al. [29] suggest through their notion of ‘‘conversion’’ is the importance of considering domestic technologies (and the households in which they are embedded) in terms of the outside world. What we see in this collection, for example through Oulasvirta et al.’s [26] study microblogging and Khalid and Dix’s [18] investigation of photologging tools, is the importance of the role of ordinary technologies in ‘‘reaching out’’ [57] to reconfigure social connections and the role of the same technologies in, sometimes uncomfortably as with some of Khalid and Dix’s [18] digital photos, ‘‘reaching in’’ to people’s lives [58], exposing particular details. Several papers in this issue have shown that these mundane technologies are surprisingly powerful at ‘closing the gap’ through a network of different interactions, making propinquity no longer a prerequisite for the creation of local systems and a sense of communion [59]. For example, Kanis and Brinkman [24] alert us to the potential use of Bluetooth messages to share positive thoughts with, given the limited range of the technology, a group of people within a constrained Cartesian space. Khalid and Dix [18] show that relatively simple photologging technologies enabling the sharing of photographs can support embeddness in a ‘local’ system with particular expectations and rules and a ‘‘dwellingness’’ [35] through which the 3

By invisible we mean, not the focus of the interaction, i.e. a conduit as opposed to something that needs to be worked out. This is distinct from Norman’s [56] and Weiser’s [75] use of the term.

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photologger feels a sense of belonging and personal connection. This is despite the photologgers being expatriates and some of the audience being extended across at least two counties. They also describe how there are gamuts of interactions around the photologs that extend from digital to face-to-face interactions. These photologs are also pivotal in ‘‘this construction of localness’’ [35], reifying the community through a self-referential ‘code’ of practices and symbols [60] particular to this community, i.e. the production and consumption of digital photographs. Indeed, what both Khalid and Dix [18] and Bury et al. [19] describe exhibit the features of what Mynatt et al. [61] describe as a ‘‘networked community’’ where mundane technologies help to support the continuity of different kinds of participation (across media) from lurking to producing, particular conversational rhythms, specific membership and certain participatory boundaries and conventions. 3.4 Visibility and accountability Mundane technologies, we argue, also help make ‘visible’ (i.e. available, ready for observation), action and interaction, the kinds of actions and interactions that have been practically quite hard for the observer of human behaviour to access, not because of any conceptual impossibility but because of practical and ethical concerns. There is, as Luff et al. [27] show here, also the problem of taking seriously and making visible what may seem obvious (e.g. norms regarding paper use) and the opportunities provided by the ‘breaching’ [62] brought by slightly reconfigured artefactual arrangements. One of the appeals we make in this work is to consider these ‘ordinary technologies’ as producers of ‘‘life documents’’ [63] that provide us with unique insights into human life. With the encroachment of mundane technologies into many facets of individuals lives, including very personal and private acts (consider the intimate uses of texting for example [64]), and with the social affordances of and social etiquette around these different mundane technologies being worked out, we have the potential to access aspects of people’s lives that have, in the past, been quite difficult to access (e.g. ‘in-themoment’ thoughts about daily life). With this working out we believe that we are seeing notions of what private and public mean being reconfigured. So the argument that a mundane technology is boring, emotionless and unimaginative does not hold any water—O’Connor and Fitzpatrick’s [21] study of camcorders surely refutes this. Instead we see how people are, as ever, social creatures with social needs such as those regarding a certain level of trust [19], which the different technologies they place in their lives variously support. What we suggest is that it is precisely the mundaneness of mobile phones, computer games, office computer applications etc. that supports the richly layered,

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multi-purposed, sophisticated actions and interactions— from parenting in the household [65], to leadership in the office [66], from intimate acts of love [67] to outbursts of vitriolic anger. In addition, because of the availability of mechanisms to make these expressions visible via mundane technologies and their ability to expose us in certain ways there comes both certain obligations to exploit them in particular ways and a craft in using them so that we appear reasonable, nice, intelligent etc. as Satchell and Graham [25] argue. Mundane technologies force upon us interactional work [23], making us bring into play taken-forgranted understandings about what it is to be a decent person [62]. Thus they, like Chomsky’s [68] ‘‘second superpower’’, world public opinion, have the potential to become devices for regulation (and even deception) as well as a form of expression.

4 Conclusion The four empirically grounded insights described above regarding objects and affordances, transformation and time, social interaction and community, visibility and accountability are developed through this theme issue’s authors’ attention to the lived aspects of technology use. We believe these insights draw our attention to the need to consider, attend to and question the position that everyday, mundane technologies inhabit in different sets of people’s lives. These insights point less to necessary and sufficient conditions for a technology to be mundane than to certain enduring features of mundane technologies. They, as alluded to at the beginning, possess social affordances that are well-worked out (this is not to say these will not ever change). They are ingrained in people’s lives to the point they become unnoticed, unless they break down of course. They suffer a process involving belonging and being worked out in order to become mundane—for some of the technologies in this collection that process is continuing. They have the opportunity to expose certain social arrangements, configurations and rules. They, in sometimes surprising ways, can also support a persistent sense of community. In presenting these papers we suggest that that which is mundane in name, need not be mundane in use. Like Tevis’s [1] alien’s first experience of Earth these technologies, when given the time to be seriously reflected on, can be quite different in use from what we have been persuaded to expect. We then invite readers to reflect on a whole raft of technologies and assemblies that some take for granted that deserve to be given at least a second critical (if unprejudiced) look and not be glossed over in the rush to invent, produce and consume more. The papers here suggest a way ahead in terms of analytical approaches that hopefully mark a departure from ‘harmful ethnographic

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practices’ likened to research tourism (Crabtree et al. [69]). They also invite us to embrace more aspects of use and users that extend beyond what we might want and expect [70, 71] while carefully considering and weighing the various new forms of evidence and analytic approaches available. Acknowledgments The work on this editorial was supported by the Microsoft European Research Fellowship ‘‘Social Interaction and Mundane Technologies’’. Thanks to all the theme issue reviewers for their time and input and to all the authors for their patience and diligence. A special thanks to Martin Gibbs for his thoughtful critique of an earlier version of this editorial.

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