Position paper for the workshop:
Designing cross Borders:
The Community Design of Community Networks
CSCW ’98 / PDC ’98


Technology Matters in Virtual Communities


Erik Stolterman
Informatics
Umea University
901 87 Umea
SWEDEN
Erik@informatik.umu.se


The purpose of this position paper is to pose the question of the role
of technology in the study of virtual communities and community
networks. I will argue that even very small technological changes can
radically change the space of possible actions for the users. I will
also argue that a prerequisite for a more developed understanding of the
social and societal use of this technology depends on how well we
understand the technology as artifacts that inscribes behavior. An
underlying assumption is that technology matters more than most of us
seem to be willing to accept.

In most of today's writings on virtual communities the approach taken is
a psychological or sociological or maybe cultural. This is in the long
run a good thing. I believe that this is the only way we can create
lasting understanding about these new phenomena.  We have to see our
designed artificial artifacts in the context of a social reality. A
virtual or network community is, of course, a social entity -- it is a
community. But we also have to recognize that the fundamental
prerequisite is a technological artifact that creates the possibility
for this community to emerge and evolve. This technology can be dealt
with in many different ways. Often it seems as if the technological
artifact is understood as a given -- that is, as something existing with
given properties and with a design not possible to change. This can, at
least in some cases, be fully acceptable. But it also seems as if
technology is considered to be easily understood and also possible to
understand only in one, and often a quite straightforward, way. This
simplified notion of the importance of the technology is a major
problem in a lot of the writing concerning virtual and network
communities today.

In a very simple way the technology is easy to understand. It is not
possible to imaging virtual or network communities without the presence
of the present technology. But when it comes to understanding the
relation between technology and the social reality they are used in, we
have to have a much more detailed understanding of the role of
technology. Small changes in the design of the technology, or small
changes in our understanding of it, can lead to radical changes in the
way technology influences how it will be used.

The theoretical key concept is inscriptive behavior (Ackrich, 1992).
This concept has been developed and used within the framework of
Actor-Network Theory, as presented by Bruno Latour, Michelle Callon, and
John Law among others. The idea is that all technological artifacts
create a space of possible actions. It is not possible to use the
technology in every possible way we want to or can imagine. The
technology restricts and enables certain behaviors. This is done in ways
that sometimes are visible and maybe easy to understand, but sometimes
very subtle and easily missed.

The way technology restricts or enables certain behavior has a strong
impact on how we will use the technology and how we will create a
social entity around it. A small example: with the use of email we have
by the simple function reply, which means that you don't have to know
and remember the address of the sender, enabled our willingness to
reply, and also reduced our possibility to find excuses for not
returning a message. A space of possible actions has appeared where
some are more likely to be used and some less and all this as a result
of the technology. This is an example of inscribed behavior. It should
obviously be a mistake to analyse our social structures and our
willingness to respond to other peoples messages without relating that
willingness to the space of possible actions inscribed in that specific
technology.

This example is probably too simple to function as a good argument, so I
will go on by giving some small, and also probably too simple,
illustrations of how small technological changes can lead to radically
different social structures and use. And my purpose is still to show
that good analyses and studies of netbased social behavior has to be
related to the technology used. Technology matters even in the virtual
world.

Illustration 1: In a small study on how people relate to virtual
communities we found that when new functions are added to email
programs, not only new type of use patterns emerged but also new users
entered the stage. Today we can find new applications that allow users
of email programs to, in real-time and on their screen, see who of their
friends are online (for instance the popular ICQ). When these programs
are used, other net users appear and disappear on the screen as small
icons as they go online or offline. Of the people interviewed, some had
created a small community of their closest friends; some had a large
community of friends, relatives, and people they knew more or less well.
The technology allows each user to create his/hers own community by
choosing who they want to be part of their list.
This is a quite simple technology. It is easy to understand and very
easy to use. It allows people to have a “here and now”-relation to other
people on the net. Instead of sending letters (email) to them, you
“talk” to them in real-time. The most obvious change is that the net
becomes socialized. It becomes a place where people are. And they are
there -- right now -- together with me. As a user I am no longer looking
into a space full of information but empty of people. Now there are
people around, and only people I like. My own virtual community.

This very different understanding of the net is made possible through a
few new functions in programs similar to traditional email programs. It
is in this case quite obvious that peoples whole perception and
understanding of what it means to be on-line is radically changed. As
one of the interviewed persons said “finally there is a reason to be
on-line, for us who doesn’t like to chat with anonymous strangers but
want to have a real social life”. The important change is that the whole
perception of the net as a place for anonymous strangers has changed a
place full of friends.

One conclusion from this study could be that it shows the importance of
how a small addition of a technological function radically changes the
space of possible actions for traditional email users. If studies on how
social relations emerge on the net do not take into account possible and
realized changes in the technology, the observations and interpretations
can easily miss a radical new situation.

Illustration 2: It is often stated that one of the most obvious
characteristics of virtual communities is that they are not framed by
time and place. Internet is a global net (at least in its design and
intent) and makes a virtual community not limited by restrictions caused
by geographic or time "borders". This is both interpreted as something
pushing the world towards true internationalism but also something
causing fragmentation of present communities and countries.

ISWorld is a virtual community built by and inhabited by information
systems researchers and practitioners. It consists of a substantial
amount of webpages, and listservers (ISWorld, 1997). ISWorld is an
international community with the goal to create a "single entry point"
to information in the field of information systems. It is almost fully
based on volunteers and does not exist as an entity or organization
outside cyberspace (until very recently).

In this truly international environment members at one time agreed on a
design called "Country pages" (Valterson, 1996). This can be understood
as the "real" world slowly making its way into cyberspace. What happens
is that this design inscribes new possible behaviors in the community by
changing the structure of the system? Behavior related to physical
location and also to time is suddenly part of the possible actions in
the virtual community. With country pages it is suddenly possible to
introduce the use of different languages. Time, as a sense of “now”, is
also entering its way into the virtual community. It is possible to have
a very different kind of conversation within "Country pages" since they
are mostly situated in the same time zone.

Valtersons study shows how place and time easily can be recreated in
virtual communities. It also shows that the space of possible actions
related to time and place is not a necessary consequence of the
cyberspace technology as such. It is not a consequence of cyberspace at
all; instead it is a consequence of what kind of inscribed behavior that
is designed into the specific technology used to make the virtual
community going.

Conclusions

In the illustrations above I have tried to show how apparent small
changes in the used technology in a very radical way changes the way the
technology can and will be used. Technology creates a space of possible
actions that in many ways totally changes the preconditions for any
social or societal use.
The purpose with this position paper is to make the case that technology
matter in virtual communities. This apparently simple claim has radical
consequences. First of all it leads to the conclusion that the net, as
it presents itself to us today, is designed, and thereby always possible
to change. Second, we have to accept that all social aspects of the use
of the net must be related to the structure, function and appearance of
the technology.

It is not easy to find writings where people’s behavior is more closely
related to the functionality and structure of the technology they are
using. In most cases it is only stated that Internet and most virtual
communities make it possible for people to become anonymous or to adopt
a new identity or to communicate without being dependant on time or
location. This is a very limited view on the technology and can in many
cases lead to very strange interpretations of people’s behavior and also
of what causes this behavior. The technology becomes a "black-box".
Studies like these are still very important since there is always a need
of descriptions and interpretations of people’s behavior even if the
causes behind this behavior are not known. But these studies need to be
complemented by other studies.

The study on how inscriptive behavior creates spaces of possible actions
to the user of a particular technology is a question of careful
analysis. In the same way as a researcher has to unfold the structure
and processes in a traditional case study it is necessary to in a very
detailed and cautious way unfold the inscriptive behavior in the
technology. This unfolding must be done based both on a certain level of
knowledge of the technology itself and on a suitable conceptual
framework. Bruno Latour and his followers have created a philosophical
framework that can be used for this kind of studies. The attempts to
apply actor network theory are so far promising and will maybe lead to a
new and different way to approach systems consisting of both social and
technical actors (see for instance Hanseth 1996). The network of social
communities is probably one very suitable target for this theory.

The important thing with these small illustrations is that they are
focused on attempts where someone tries to create technical solutions
that will change the use of the technology into something else.
Technological changes like these can radically change the inscribed
behavior present in the net technology today. Every net user’s space of
possible actions will change and the whole sociology concerned with the
way people handle and experience the net might have to be changed. Small
technological changes might therefore change the preconditions for the
use we label virtual and network communities today.

In the debate on the possibilities of creating sustainable virtual
communities these aspects are often overlooked. Instead the net is
studied as if it is no longer changing. The underlying technological
structure and functionality is not considered to be a result of design,
and therefore not something possible to redesign. Instead cyberspace is
very often viewed as a new kind of nature -- there to be discovered and
explored in the same way as the real world has been explored and
studied. The net and virtual communities are not something only to
explore. It is still very much a question of design -- of forming
technology to support our needs and dreams.

References

Akrich, M. (1992). The de-scription of technical objects. In Bijker,
W.E. and Law, J. (eds). Shaping technology/building society. pp 205-224.
MIT Press.

Hanseth, O. (1996). Information Technology as Infrastructure.Gothenburg
Studies of Informatics, Report 10. Department of informatics, Gothenburg
University.

ISWorld. (1997). http://www.isworld.org/isworld.html

Latour, B. (1991). Technology in society made durable. In Law,J. (ed). A
sociology of monsters -- Essays on power, technology and domination. pp
103-131. Routledge.

Valtersson, M. (1996). Virtual Communities. [in Swedish]. Master Thesis
at the Department of Informatics. Umeå University.