Undoubtedly, the Internet of the future
will not be only a medium for nice or useful information. Neither
a way of doing commercial activities in a new manner. Already,
the net is used to computer-mediated person to person communications.
The usefullness and utility of the mail, of the chat, and of all
sort of forums get an higher and higher recognition. But we are
at the beginning of these new ways of communication. Still oriented
towards one-to-one links for the mail, let aside the mailing list,
or mainly oriented evanescent and not goal-oriented relationship
for the chat, these first techniques in the history of the web
are going to be overcome by new generations it is important to
think about.
At the same time, in our "modern" planet,
there is an increasing need of social netmeeting. From the friendship
to new political activities, a large amount of our non-working
life is going on in collective activities. "It is not only a modern
feature of social life: it is a sounded theoretical one, conceptualized
in Simmel or Goffman works for instance. We, as social beings,
are not assigned to one substantial identity; we are able (we
have the competency) to belong to many world at the same time"
(Dominique Boullier, working paper 12/99)
In the same time, a clear design stream
for ICT products continue to be performed in an atomistic way.
The mass market oriented studies aim to identify individual consumers
and are seldom oriented towards understanding of collective usability.
On the other side, the social oriented leaders have not a very
insight approach of how new technologies could be relevant to
foster their field of interest (i.e. mainly in areas of public
rather than private/commercial interests), today and in the future.
That is to say we have front of us a large opportunity of research,
at the crossroad of social sciences and computer ones, tightly
adapted to the network COST269.
We are not starting from the scratch.
For many years, a very useful direction of research has been taken,
strongly influenced by the Computer Supported Cooperative Work
Community (CSCW). However, as we write above, collective activity
over Internet illustrates the need not to limit the scope of this
research to " work " environments only, but to enlarge it to include
the multiplicity of observable computer-mediated activities. A
need exists to build a coherent conceptual, methodological and
technical framework for examining what we are starting to call
in France, for instance at LIMSI, "distributed collective practices"?
Distributed collective practices cover a wide range of organizational
situations and it seems increasingly important to identify, describe
and explain the social, cognitive and technical traits which are
common to them.
We can make a very useful distinction between three
main topics:
- Associative/cooperative activities:
Social networks, Civil Society (e.g. consumers, ill persons
networks, cultural interest-centered groups...)
- Politic society: (e.g. political parties,
trade unions, political movements, organizations, government
and its institutions, citizens...): E-Democracy
- Public institutions (e.g. of municipalities,
regions, state, social services, etc.)
E-Administration
In these different worlds, we can easily
find similarities and oppositions, very interesting to work on:
length of life-cycle; informal vs legalized status; trend towards
virtuality vs the basic need for face to face encounters; the
predefined size of the group or the changing size; the formal
allocation of roles or the informal mode of regulation; the sharing
of a common background previous to the membership or not; the
goal oriented groups vs the only convivial ones etc....
Generic solutions would have to be designed; but also adapted
ones, for the main aspects of the so active living world of membership
world. :
Building a general frame of the research field on Membership/Community.
There are three original aspects in this field :
-
- Many
recent experiments are currently on-going. We don't have
the resources to anlyse all of them. We have to concentrate
on the "research work" done about .
- mainly for the political and administrative
issues, there is a lot of "celebrative" literature, which
is necessary to drastically draw aside
- the ICTs themselves are giving
new tools to study the collective activities; all the acts
of each person can be put in a memory on a collective server.
This memory has to be structured. It's a marvelous line
for new research in social science.
- Mapping of the on-going research on
these items all over the Europe on this field. How to handle
with?
- Technology assessment of the existing
products and technical systems. What sort of "dialogue" could
be set up for bridge-building between the enormous needs of
membership in society and the technical design world.
We have to start on the three levels
at the same time.
Claude HENRY, 29th of March 2000 (from
the minutes and remarks of a special group in Brussels, with Leopoldina
Fortunati and Samuel Mauch)
Brussel Meeting March 2000