Nardi’s metaphors of tool and system appear relatively familiar and unproblematic, and relate reasonably well to the utopian and dystopian concepts as well as the categories of technological determinism and social determinism. However, Matt Maunder directed me to a new proposal to tag air passengers. At first sight this seems to fall under the tool or system metaphor, but clearly text or ecology will surface different perspectives.
The metaphors of text and ecology are complex and interesting. The text metaphor can have a very modern interpretation and relates well to Web 2.0 particularly its read/write/remix aspects and the growth of social software.
Andrew Chadwick has made the excellent point that technologies as ‘complex ecosystems’ have parasitical elements that contribute to their vibrance. He uses Cory Doctorow’s argument is that relatively ‘open’ technologies attract innovation, continuous improvement and development because they encourage parasitism. People pick up a technology, twist it, borrow elements from it, and hack together something different, better and newer. If technologies are relatively closed, they are resitant to this form of parasitism. Thus, it’s better for all of us to have open technologies.
Doctorow gives the example of the DVD format, which
is very tightly restricted compared with the CD. Thus, one of the
reasons we have lots of innovation around the digitization of music is
that the CD is an open format; it’s easy to extract the data, compress
it, move it, mix it, and republish it. Compare this with DVD, which has digital rights management and has not encouraged parasitism. Doctorow writes:
CD has a rich ecosystem, filled with parasites — entrepreneurial organisms that move to fill every available niche. If you spent a thousand bucks on CDs ten years ago, the ecosystem for CDs would reward you handsomely. In the intervening decade, parasites who have found an opportunity to suck value out of the products on offer from the labels
and the dupe houses by offering you the tools to convert your CDs toring-tones, karaoke, MP3s, MP3s on iPods and other players, MP3s on CDs that hold a thousand percent more music — and on and on.DVDs live in a simpler, slower ecosystem, like a terrarium in abottle where a million species have been pared away to a manageable handful. DVDs pay no such dividend. A thousand dollars’ worth often-year old DVDs are good for just what they were good for ten yearsago: watching. You can’t put your kid into her favorite cartoon, you can’t downsample the video to something that plays on your phone, and you certainly can’t lawfully make a hard-drive-based jukebox from your discs.
The text version is “All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites”, or listen to the podcast from the excellent IT Conversations site.
