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Folk Computing: Revisiting Oral Tradition as a Scaffold for Face-to-Face Communities Abstract The concept of Folk Computing appropriates the patterns and processes of oral tradition as a starting point for designing technology to support face-to-face communication and community building. While technology has already played an important role in supporting communication and community at a distance (e.g. email, online discussion groups, chat rooms, instant messaging), much less research has been done on the role it can play in supporting face-to-face gatherings. Such gatherings have very different requirements than their “remote” counterparts: while technology that supports distance communication must mediate the entire contents of the conversation, technology that augments face-to-face communication can leverage the existing conversational bandwidth that such interaction already affords. This frees the technology to address other “meta-conversational” challenges faced by members of face-to-face communities, such as: “How do I meet people outside my core group?”, “What do I have in common with this person?” and “What defines this group as a community?” There is no need to start from scratch in conceiving of a communication system that works on a meta-conversational level to support face-to-face community. There is a large research literature that highlights the role of folklore – games, jokes, and legends that circulate among communities via word of mouth – in building community, including its role in providing common ground to strangers and in helping communities develop a sense of themselves. Folk Computing attempts to preserve the key dimensions of the folklore process – such as its traditional, informal, and bottom-up nature – while also taking advantage of the unique affordances of technology to enhance folklore’s community- building efficacy. This dissertation will synthesize a design framework for Folk Computing, and it will argue for the value of this approach. To do this, I will draw on relevant folklore theory, on my experiences with three Folk Computing devices we have built over the last six years, and on analysis of data collected during activities where hundreds of people used each of those technologies. The technologies I will focus on are: Thinking Tags: Computationally augmented nametags that give two speakers a simple measure of how much they have in common.
Transcript of Proposed Solution: Folk Computing - MIT Media Lab€¦ · Web viewFolk Computing attempts to...
Folk Computing: Revisiting Oral Tradition as a Scaffold for Face-to-Face Communities
AbstractThe concept of Folk Computing appropriates the patterns and processes of oral tradition as a starting point for designing technology to support face-to-face communication and community building. While technology has already played an important role in supporting communication and community at a distance (e.g. email, online discussion groups, chat rooms, instant messaging), much less research has been done on the role it can play in supporting face-to-face gatherings. Such gatherings have very different requirements than their “remote” counterparts: while technology that supports distance communication must mediate the entire contents of the conversation, technology that augments face-to-face communication can leverage the existing conversational bandwidth that such interaction already affords. This frees the technology to address other “meta-conversational” challenges faced by members of face-to-face communities, such as: “How do I meet people outside my core group?”, “What do I have in common with this person?” and “What defines this group as a community?”
There is no need to start from scratch in conceiving of a communication system that works on a meta-conversational level to support face-to-face community. There is a large research literature that highlights the role of folklore – games, jokes, and legends that circulate among communities via word of mouth – in building community, including its role in providing common ground to strangers and in helping communities develop a sense of themselves. Folk Computing attempts to preserve the key dimensions of the folklore process – such as its traditional, informal, and bottom-up nature – while also taking advantage of the unique affordances of technology to enhance folklore’s community-building efficacy.
This dissertation will synthesize a design framework for Folk Computing, and it will argue for the value of this approach. To do this, I will draw on relevant folklore theory, on my experiences with three Folk Computing devices we have built over the last six years, and on analysis of data collected during activities where hundreds of people used each of those technologies. The technologies I will focus on are:
Thinking Tags: Computationally augmented nametags that give two speakers a simple measure of how much they have in common.
Meme Tags and Community Mirrors: A next-generation nametag that tracks interactions, allowing a community to visualize some of its own dynamics in real time.
I-balls: Key-chain-sized devices that allow kids to create, trade and track simple computer programs that take the form of children’s folk games and folklore.
Introduction
Establishing Folk GroupsMost people have some experience with the concept of folklore: “tradition-based communicative units informally exchanged in dynamic variation through space and time.” (Toelken 1979) This may come from hearing the latest “urban legend” about the person who bought a Porsche for a dollar from the philandering owner’s angry spouse (Brunvand 1981); or remembering the games they used to play as children – such as “Four Square,” “Marco Polo,” “Sardines,” “One Potato, Two Potato,” and the many variants of “Tag” and “Marbles” – that they learned from older peers and passed on to younger ones (Opie and Opie 1959). These experiences may leave one with the sense that folklore is something fun, but frivolous. Therefore, it is surprising for some to learn about the important role scholars believe folklore plays in helping to create and maintain the community it circulates within, called the “folk group.”
The folklore researcher Jay Mechling defines “folk groups” as “face-to-face human groups wherein people use stylized communication to create the sense of a shared, meaningful world” (Mechling 1986). The “stylized communication” he refers to is folklore. Note that Mechling considers that the folklore is what gives rise to the sense of a “shared, meaningful world,” not the other way around. Other researchers also emphasize the reciprocally reinforcing nature of folklore and the folk group.
One of the key features of a folk group will always be the extent to which its own dynamics continue to inform and educate its members and stabilize the group. Because the members share so much information and attitude, folk groups are what Edward T. Hall would call High Context Groups… whose members all see themselves as parts of a single community that ‘knows’. (Toelken 1979)
The goal of Folk Computing technology is to help a group of folks become a folk group – “a single community that ‘knows’” – by giving them a medium to easily create, circulate and reflect on their own computationally-enhanced folklore. Our research has focused on two very different contexts where community building is important: conference-type gatherings and primary school settings. Folk Computing focuses on several ways in which folklore helps establish and support folk groups, according to the research literature:
Supporting the construction of community identity. The folklorist Alan Dundes says, “it is important to recognize that folklore is not simply a way of obtaining available data about identity for social scientists. It is actually one of the principal means by which an individual and a group discovers or establishes his or its identity.” (Dundes 1989)
Facilitating community integration. Folklore can serve an “ice-breaking” function between relative strangers (George 1973).
Understanding community dynamics. Toelken says “One of the key features of a folk group will always be the extent to which its own dynamics continue to inform and educate its members and stabilize the group.” (Toelken 1979)
Establishing common ground. Mechling defines Folklore as “Expressive, stylized communication performed within and for a community of humans … which form the basis for the creation of meaning” (Mechling 1986). This makes folklore an important part of what linguists call “mutual knowledge” – an underlying set of knowledge that is shared and known to be shared on which communication rests.
Educating community members. Toelken states “folklore functions in part as an informal system for learning the daily logic and worldview of the people around us” (Toelken 1979).
Technology and Face-to-Face Communication I have drawn on folklore for its community-building efficacy in face-to-face environments such as conferences. There is some debate in the literature as to whether communication must be face-to-face in order for it to be considered folklore. Some (see Mechling’s above definition of a folk group) still hold to a true oral or “word of mouth” definition. Others require only that the communication be “informal” (see Toelken, above) and “personal” (Oring 1986), meaning that it happens outside on any mass medium or organized system of knowledge dissemination (e.g. books, television). Without resolving this debate, however, it is clear that the informal and personal aspects of folklore make it especially appropriate for the unstructured mingling that goes on at a conference.
If folklore is a useful tool for thinking about community building in a variety of contexts, why then focus only on technology that only supports community building in face-to-face settings? The simple answer is that technology to support face-to-face community building is vastly underrepresented in technology research. Ask a group of people about new technologies they use to support communication, and the cumulative list might include internet tools such as e-mail, video conferencing, instant messaging, chat
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rooms, and discussion groups, and telephony-related technologies such as voice mail, pagers, and cell phones – all technologies designed to support communication at a distance. Ask that same group of people to name their five most memorable “communicative moments,” however, and most of them will involve face-to-face interaction. Why isn’t there more technology to support this mode of communication?
One reason may be that face-to-face communication is often considered the gold standard against which computer-mediated communication is measured (Hollan and Stornetta 1992). Since this type of research is focused on using technology to reproduce the physical world’s rich set of social cues in the online world, it has little to say about what technology can do when those cues already exist. The implication is that there is nothing to improve. Of course, this is not the case. For example, while the medium of face-to-face supports “high bandwidth” conversation, it does not make it easy to see the patterns of interaction between large numbers of people that make up a community.
Another reason there have been few technological inroads into face-to-face communication may be more insidious. In the public’s mind, there lies a deep-seated belief that technology is antithetical to intimacy. Consider the current debate about people’s use of cell phones in public places. An article called “Cell Hell” in the online Salon Magazine bemoans a proposed use of cell phones on airplanes, “eliminating one of the last oases of unconnected time.” The cell phone is just the latest example of a technology that is derided for encroaching on our humanity. However, it may appear especially threatening because, where technologies like television and the Web had to lure us to them, the cell phone was one of the first that was able to follow us into the restaurant, the park, the car – into our daily, personal world.
Although technology has its limits, we should not accept that it has no role to play in building face-to-face community. While we must respect people’s protectiveness of their “face time”, we must also help to fashion a new image of technology that is not inhumane, restrictive, or isolating – in other words, that is not a threat to this kind of interaction. This thesis aims to extend the realm of technological possibility to include face-to-face community building.
Problems in Face-to-face Community BuildingThis thesis will address three major problems in community building: Insularity, the “Common Ground Problem,” and “Ego-centeredness”. I will call the sum of these problems ICE, and call the technology that works to address them “ICE breakers”.
InsularityInsularity is one of the major enemies of successful community building. Many companies I have worked with have complained that their efforts to gather people from across many different groups have been thwarted by the participants’ strong tendency to interact within their previously established groupings, or cliques. Even people who express an interest in breaking these boundaries have a hard time doing it. The consequence is slow community stagnation due to lack of communication between various sub-groups.
The Common Ground ProblemWhile the medium of face-to-face supports “high bandwidth” conversation, it does not make it easy for two strangers to figure out something meaningful to talk about. In fact, since all conversations are built on “common ground” or “mutual knowledge”, it can be quite awkward to use conversation to acquire enough mutual knowledge to have a conversation. Linguists call this chicken-and-egg paradox the “Mutual Knowledge Problem” (Krauss and Fussell 1990), or what I call the “Common Ground Problem”. We all experience its awkwardness at the beginning of conversations with people we do not know. While it can be partially overcome by a solid introduction from a trusted third party, the combinatorics of a large gathering make this impossible for most interactions. The problem of uncovering common ground becomes increasingly difficult in an age where gatherings include people from many cultural backgrounds.
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Ego-centerednessThere is considerable evidence that people have a poor conception of the social network that lies beyond their immediate circle of friends, also called their “ego-centered network” in social network theory (Wasserman and Faust 1994). This was famously illustrated in Stanley Milgram’s research in which subjects were asked to guess the number of people it would take to connect two random people in the U.S. via a trail of acquaintances (people guessed 100 on average, while the actual number was closer to six) (Milgram 1967). If people had better-developed understandings of these social network phenomena, they might work to become more effective community participants.
Why the Media Lab is a Good Place to Explore Technology for Face-to-face Community BuildingThe Media Lab is known for creating two things: new technologies, like wearable computing, and new communities, like News in the Future. Some of the research that forms the basis for this proposed dissertation used experiments at semi-annual gatherings of Media Lab sponsors, where we tried our technologies with hundreds of users. These users have a genuine need to overcome their insular tendencies (e.g. to sit with others they already know at lunch); to find common ground on which to build enduring relationships; and to better understand the evolving structure of the communities they are forming. The fact that Media Lab sponsors come from all over the world, from all different industries, and with all different prior knowledge about the Lab make them a challenging test-bed for face-to-face community building technology.
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Proposed Approach to the ProblemThis thesis draws on folklore as a model for how to break the ICE in a gathering of individuals, transforming it into a folk group that demonstrates diverse member interaction, a sense of shared meaning, and an understanding of its own dynamics. The key is to simultaneously preserve many of the existing qualities of folklore while adding other novel properties enabled by the introduction of computation. This mix of preservation and innovation is guided by the desire to leverage and enhance folklore’s role in creating and maintaining a folk group.
The following section examines the three main Folk Computing technologies we have developed in terms of what traditional features of folklore they preserve, what new features they add, and how this can enhance folklore’s community-building role. These technologies and the experiments that support them will be re-analyzed and discussed in the proposed thesis, and their value in supporting the Folk Computing framework will be assessed. Note: although many of the qualities of folklore and Folk Computing are relevant to several devices, for the sake of brevity, I only discuss them in the context of the technology where they first appeared.
The Thinking TagsEvent / Technology: In 1995, at the 10th anniversary of the Media Lab and the launch of the “Things That Think” research consortium, we created 200 computationally augmented nametags for the sponsor meetings (Borovoy, McDonald et al. 1996) (Borovoy, Martin et al. 1998). After programming these badges with their multiple-choice answers to five opinion questions, sponsors could see a simple measure of how much they had in common by noting the number of flashing lights on their badges as they conversed. Each green light corresponded to a question they answered the same way. Each red light signified a question they answered differently.
Folklore Quality Preserved: Although this early work was missing many dimensions of folklore, it preserved one of its key properties: its fondness for “wild” habitats. Folklore thrives in unstructured, informal social environments. We struggled to design an augmented nametag that would not impose too much of its own structure. For example, we wanted to avoid sponsors having to use PC kiosks in order to program their nametags, since this would have been very disruptive to the social setting. Instead, we came up with a way to integrate tag programming into the social space by designing special “bucket kiosks”. The picture to the right shows one of the five kiosks where guests could program their answer to a multiple-choice question by dunking their tag into the bucket that corresponded to their answer. This provided a much more social approach to the programming task.
In the end, the Thinking Tags blended quite well into the sponsor gathering. Participants kept using them for longer than we imagined (causing a small battery crisis), and the tags were seen supporting conversations in elevators, in the bathroom, and over dinner at a museum.
Novel Folklore Qualities Introduced: The Thinking Tags provided an early example of the power of social devices that exhibit a small amount of computational agency. All two participants had to do was turn toward each other, and their Thinking Tags automatically engaged in a conversation on their behalf, resulting in a simple kind of introduction (e.g. “You two have a lot in common”). Also, the tags were our first experiment with a technology that could reveal common ground between two people (Borovoy, Martin et al. 1999). While folklore has always helped to contribute to common ground, the onus has been on people to go through the often-cumbersome process of discovering what they have in common.
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Enhanced Folk Group Support: Many users commented on how the Thinking Tags made them feel comfortable interacting with a wider circle than they ordinarily might. As mentioned previously, folklore is often cited as playing this “integrative” role in communities (for an example, see the Background section on integration). However, I believe that the augmented properties of the nametags made them especially good icebreakers. The agency exhibited by Folk Computing devices expands their integrative capability by giving people a visible alibi for their extroversion – “my tag made me do it”.
Meme Tags and Community MirrorsEvent / Technology: In 1997, we built 400 nametags for another set of fall sponsor meetings (Borovoy, Martin et al. 1998). Participants could program these tags with short 64 character ideas, or “memes”, that they believed in. When two people met, each person’s tag displayed a meme that he or she subscribed to and that the other person had not yet seen. If people liked the meme they saw on their conversation partner’s tag, they could click a button and a copy of it would “jump” to their tag. We also created large screen “community mirrors” that showed visualizations of how memes were moving through the community in real time.
Folklore Quality Preserved: The Meme Tag technology reproduced the key folklore quality of exchange. By allowing people to author and trade their own memes, we saw a folk culture begin to emerge around jokes (“If brute force isn’t working, you’re not using enough of it”) and proverbs (“The future is best seen through peripheral vision”)
Novel Folklore Quality Introduced: Most folklore that travels by word-of-mouth maintains no history of how it got from point A to point B. We designed the digital memes to remember their path of travel and to report it back to a central server. This allowed people to track the spread of memes they created, and to observe other community dynamics in real time.
Enhanced Folk Group Support: Much is written about the role folklore plays as a mirror of a community’s culture. For example, Oring discusses how ethnic folklore “allows the dynamics of the ethnic group and aspects of ethnic identity to be reflected back to its members” (Oring 1986). However, this claim is usually made in terms of how the content of a particular piece of folklore – for example, a joke – reflects something about the community culture. Our Community Mirrors (see image on right) reflected patterns of folklore circulation back to the community members in real time, allowing them to see things like what demographic a particular meme appealed to. Previously, this type of analysis was only accessible to researchers, who would painstakingly “collect” specimens of folklore in different locations in an effort to map their distribution.
I-BallsTrials / Technology: In 1999, we wrote new software for 500 key-chain sized devices for the Lab’s MindFest event (see image on right) (Borovoy, Silverman et al. 2001). With them, children and adults could create, trade, and track simple digital games and animations – called “information balls” or “i-balls” – with each other. In 2000, we tested a new version of the i-ball technology over the course of three weeks with the students, teachers, and staff at a Cambridge K-8 public school.
Over the course of these events, kids created a variety of genres of i-balls, including: “Hot potatoes” that must be passed around according to certain rules in a certain amount of time; “Quests” that send a person in search of a variety of other people who meet particular descriptions; and “Hitchers” that are simple autonomous software “agents”
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that hitch-hike around the community, invisibly jumping from one user’s i-ball device to another’s. While we had most of these in mind when we created the i-ball technology, there were also a few interesting cases of “generic innovation.” In my thesis, I will explore what these cases were, and why there were disappointingly few of them. Folklore Quality Preserved: Conservatism and dynamism are called “the twin laws of folklore process,” (Toelken 1979) meaning that older pieces of folklore are constantly adapted for current contexts. The i-ball technology supported this process by allowing participants to take any i-ball they had received, break it open, change its program slightly or drastically, and then pass it on to others. It was easier to build something on top of what someone else had made than it was to do it from scratch. This quality of folklore and Folk Computing helps create a sense of tradition, connectedness and cooperation within a community.
Novel Folklore Quality Introduced: Because i-balls were digital, kids could create them using a carefully structured computational authoring tool designed for this purpose (see image below). This tool scaffolded the construction of i-balls, allowing kids as young as third grade to make sophisticated i-ball programs. For example, we designed the tool with a low “floor”, making it easy for kids to start out making a simple picture i-ball. From there, it was a smooth transition to making animations, and then complex programs.
Enhanced Folk Group Support: A graphical programming environment designed to simplify programming, combined with the ability to examine and modify programs users got from their friends, made the i-ball activity a good way for kids to teach each other powerful ideas about programming. Folklore has always played an important educational role in communities – the i-balls attempted to expand the range and complexity of lessons that can circulate via folklore.
More importantly, the combination of technology-enhanced creating, mutating, trading, and tracking that existed with the i-balls (and to a lesser extent with the Meme Tags) created a “folk culture” culture, an environment where creating and circulating original folklore was a ordinary, uncomplicated, and gratifying activity. The amount of folklore invention, and the resulting enhanced sense of community, felt quite unique to these computationally-augmented gatherings.
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ResultsThe main result of this dissertation will be the articulation of a new approach to using technology to build communities in face-to-face settings. The viability of this approach will be substantiated by data collected at four medium-scale trials (i.e. hundreds of users each) conducted using three different Folk Computing technologies. While these trials have already been completed, work on my dissertation will involve continuing analysis of their data, leading to further refinement of the Folk Computing framework. My dissertation will also articulate a methodology for using social gatherings as a means for conducting research in face-to-face community building. This is an approach that has thrived at the Media Lab, but has not yet been spelled out in a way that is useful for a wider audience of researchers. Finally, the Folk Computing artifacts themselves are an important result of this work. Each of them has exhibited a significant life beyond their original trials. The sections below give an overview of these three results.
Substantiation of Folk Computing ApproachThe following are some preliminary examples of the kind of analysis I will make use of in order to substantiate the value of Folk Computing.
The Value of a Folkloric Approach to Constructionist LearningWith the i-balls, the capacity for kids to take apart and refashion i-balls they received from others was key to their ability to make their own complex i-balls. The following graph shows how one particular i-ball was used as the basis for successive generations of new i-balls. The original is in the center, with links connecting it to all its first-generation variations. Second-generation mutations form a ring around these, with links back to their progenitors. There are even some third-generation mutations. Although this graph has a larger than average number of mutations, this functionality was used widely: more than one third of all i-balls created were mutations on other i-balls. Further analysis needs to be done to determine whether kids whose first i-ball programs were based on the work of others were later able to incorporate those techniques into their own i-balls without the benefit of mutation.
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The Use of Tracking to Help People Reflect on Community DynamicsTracking is one of the most important “unique affordances” of Folk Computing. It allows people to visualize in near real time where lore they have created has traveled, and where lore they have received has been. The following visualizations show two different views of where the “Romance” i-ball has traveled. The top node in each graph is the author of “Romance”. The nodes connected to the top node show who got the i-ball from the author, and so on. Both graphs are equivalent in terms of node placement and links. They vary only by how they are colored. In the top graph, each node is colored according to the person’s gender. In the bottom graph, nodes are colored according to the person’s ethnicity.
These visualizations were designed to allow people to explore important patterns of community interaction. For example, the school where we did our second i-ball trial was very interested in issues of diversity. One can see how these graphs make evident an interesting and complex picture of diversity. For example, by one definition of diversity, the romance i-ball has a diverse audience in terms of gender. From the amount of yellow and blue in the graph, it looks like males and females are roughly equally represented in its audience. However, if diversity is about not just representation, but also interaction, then things do not look as diverse: in the evident clusters of color, one can see a strong tendency for males to give the i-ball to other males, and for females to give the i-ball to other females. There is no such clustering in the second graph colored by ethnicity. The ability to compare visualizations of the same i-ball graph across different dimensions of data can help people to broaden their concept of diversity even further. As the graphs below show, a school that looks diverse along racial lines may not exhibit the same diverse interaction in terms of gender.
Matt grade:12
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Taylor grade:3
Karma grade:3
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Taylor grade:3
Karma grade:3
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Sara grade:7
Yi grade:4
Brittaney grade:4
Ziwei grade:4
Sangjun grade:4
Joel grade:4
Steve grade:3
Sacia grade:7
Martina grade:7
Cassandra grade:6
Mason grade:7
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Sacia grade:7
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Nathaniel grade:7
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Rachel grade:3
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Julian grade:4
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Gina grade:6
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David grade:8
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Matthew grade:3
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Gina grade:6
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African-AmericanAsian
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I observed children make several thoughtful observations while viewing these types of graphs. For example, one sixth grade boy discussed the significance of the shape of different graphs. He thought graphs where the i-ball spread widely but the i-ball author only gave it to a few people were much cooler than graphs where the author gave it to a lot people. In the former case, the i-ball spread because people really liked it. In the latter, it may have spread just because the author was popular and convinced his friends to take it.
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Unfortunately, a variety of factors kept kids from using these visualizations to reflect directly on diversity issues. In my dissertation, I will discuss ways of better integrating this type of visualization into school dialogue. I will also include a section on an experimental design to determine the impact that these visualizations have on how people think about their own community dynamics.
The Ability of Folk Computing to Provide Community IntegrationOne comment I hear repeatedly about Folk Computing technology is that it helps people feel comfortable interacting with those who might normally remain outside their circle. The following comments are drawn from a survey of MindFest participants who used the i-ball technology over a two-day event.
Obviously, there are many pre-existing examples of “ice breakers” for social events. In my dissertation, I will examine the data for what is unique about Folk Computing technology’s ability to help forge links between a community’s disparate sub-groups.
The Utility of Folk Computing in Different SettingsIn the course of the four major Folk Computing trials, we were able to explore the value of the technology in a variety of contexts. My dissertation will report on how the design of the technology, as well as its problems and possibilities, varied across several key contextual dimensions, including:
Initial Status of Community: The MindFest gathering, where we did the first i-ball trial, was a collection of people who mostly did not know one another. Media Lab sponsor gatherings presented a challenging mix of some people who had been to the lab many times and others who were newcomers. Our last trial at the K-8 public school provided an environment with a very rich, already-established community into which we introduced the technology. Participants engaged with and made sense of Folk Computing in different ways depending on the status of the community and their relationship to it. For example, the students at the school were able to construct elaborate interpretations of some of the i-ball visualizations because they knew the people that corresponded to the graph nodes. They were therefore able to see the provocative possibility of a relationship where others outside the community would just see two connected by a line.
Longevity: Although most of the trials we did were over the duration of a one to three day event, our final school trial lasted three weeks. For the shorter events, we paid a lot of attention to how to jump-start the activity, often focusing on what Alfred Hitchcock described as a “MacGuffin”:
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“I found it very stimulating as ideas were exchanged between young and old… The i-balls also had a lot to do with this.”
“In trying to solve the quests I have never seen my son so willing to go up to people he did not know to seek information. . By the end of Saturday he was engaging in conversation with anyone and everyone.”
“My favorite part was that it was a good way to get a sense of who was in MindFest also and also to get to now (sic) some more new people.”
“This also acted as an ice breaker between strangers. It was as if you had the right to ask them questions. … I believe the I-ball activity enhanced the MindFest by helping introverted people interact with extraverted people quicker.”
“It had people of all groups approaching each other and interacting in their personal sphere immediately.”
“My son is usually shy, but he went right up to people to ask questions and connect”
It's the device, the gimmick, if you will, or the paper that the spies are after…It doesn't matter what it is. … The only thing that really matters is that in the picture the plans, documents, or secrets must seem of vital importance to the characters. To me, the narrator, they're of no importance whatsoever. (Truffaut 1978).
We designed a MacGuffin for the MindFest event that would get people quickly involved in the i-ball activity. It was an Excalibur-like sword that a person who had collected the right set of i-balls could pull from the stone. Like a true MacGuffin, all the children at the event coveted this sword, while for us it was just a device to set things in motion.
For the longer experiment at the school, we wanted to see if the i-balls would catch on at their own pace, without our introducing a grand MacGuffin. In fact, this seemed to be the case. Over the first several days, teachers and students created i-balls that became drivers for the whole community. However, over the course of the three-week trial, i-ball use fell off quite sharply, perhaps due to a lack of any structure supplied from us. My thesis will explore the role of external structure in the successful deployment of Folk Computing technology in different settings.
Formality: Folk Computing technology is designed to work in the “background” of a community. Like folklore, it is not designed to be the reason the community comes together, or to be at the center of an organized activity. An interesting contrast surfaced between the formality of the i-ball activity at the MindFest gathering and at the K-8 school. At MindFest, we were pleased with the way participants taught each other how to use the i-balls. We gave about five minutes of “formal” instruction to the entire gathering. When asked in a survey how they learned to use the technology, both kids and adults said they learned about it by asking and observing other kids. Due to the nature of the environment we worked in, however, there was more emphasis on formal i-ball instruction at the K-8 school. This posed some significant challenges to creating the kind of folk culture we were interested in. My dissertation will discuss these outcomes in the context of the struggle between the formal and informal at the center of many learning communities.
The Efficacy of Different Approaches to Revealing Common GroundOver the course the four Folk Computing trials and a few smaller experiments, I gained considerable knowledge about what makes for useful common ground. For example, with the Thinking Tags, we discovered that the most important determinant to the success of the event was choosing good questions: if people didn’t “resonate” with the questions, then the resulting revelation of common ground was meaningless. However, if they identified with the questions too closely, the resulting revelation could be threatening. During some experiments after the Meme Tags, I discovered that a good algorithm for surfacing provocative common ground between two people was to find the opinion they shared that had the lowest saturation in the community at large. My dissertation will discuss these and other heuristics I have evolved for the revelation of common ground.
The Darker Side of Folk ComputingAlthough our experiences with Folk Computing technology have been generally positive, my dissertation will also discuss some areas of concern, such as:
Violation of Privacy: We have always stressed the importance of “buy-in” at all levels of the community in Folk Computing activities, and also the importance of real-time access to the data across all levels. This moves us away from the concept of surveillance and toward a community that is surveying itself. However, participating in a Folk Computing activity necessarily results in some loss of privacy. I will discuss the trade-offs between the loss of privacy and the resulting gain in community comprehension.
Depiction as an Outsider: Folklore can serve as powerful device for in-group identification (Oring 1986). As everyone knows from experience, being part of the “in” group can be very pleasurable; not being part of it can be painful. Folk Computing strives to facilitate multi-faceted communities where people are simultaneously both in and out, but this cannot always be the case. The technology potentially further
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amplifies “out group” status in very public, recognizable visualizations. My dissertation will discuss ways of negotiating the trade-offs between the “can’t we all get along?” and “cliques are a part of life” perspectives.
Methodology: Social Events as “Communities Laboratories”Although the first three research trials we conducted on Folk Computing were at conference-type events, we never believed they were the only application for the technology. Instead, we used these events as laboratories for exploring how the technology might function in more real-world, longer-term communities. This “event as laboratory” model was crucial, because one cannot test this type of technology in a classic experimental setting, with a small number of subjects and a few hours of time. Events became the perfect middle ground between the sterility of the traditional laboratory and the intractability of the real world. The following paragraphs discuss the key things that make events good community laboratories. My dissertation will also compare our event-based trials with our final experiment that ventured out into the very real world of a K-8 school.
User Community: At the Media Lab’s tenth anniversary, we handed out Thinking Tags as sponsors entered the Lab. Newcomers could see that everyone else was already wearing the tags, and they had an immediate base of users to try their tags with. Also, sponsors knew they were at a special event that would only last for two days, making them more willing to try something that was unfamiliar.
Folk Computing technology requires a user community of sufficient size to be meaningful. It also requires a high “saturation” rate: users must encounter other users frequently enough to make the technology both useful and socially acceptable. Finally, it requires a community willing to try something new. These conditions are easier to establish at an event
Maintenance: It is possible to sustain a new type of augmented social interaction over a two-day event in a single building that could not be sustained over a larger amount of time or space. The small “space-time footprint” makes it is possible for a reasonable number of dedicated support staff to keep the technology running.
Leverage: All the events where we deployed Folk Computing devices were already going to happen with or without our participation. At a minimum, this meant we could leverage the work of others on event planning and execution while we focused on the technology. More importantly, it meant we could leverage the “semantic field” that the event created. Because folklore happens in the wild – in the gaps between community structure – it wouldn’t have made any sense to bring people together to try out some Folk Computing devices as a foreground activity. The people who came to the events we worked with comprised an authentic community, or at least a community-in-the-making, with an already established sense of what they were doing there. The event organizers had already worked to establish a meaningful structure for the event to unfold within. These structures then served as a trellis for the vines of folklore and Folk Computing to grow around.
Technology Development: One can often simplify the technology development process by taking advantage of the event’s time-space constraints. Originally, we were going to deploy the Thinking Tags at Kresge Auditorium for the big 1010 event. As a precautionary measure, we took two early prototypes of the tags over to Kresge to see how they worked in that environment. To our surprise, we discovered that sunlight streaming in through the giant windows flooded the infrared communication between the tags, making them inoperable. Rather than redesigning the communications circuit, however, we simply decided to deploy them at the smaller Media Lab sponsors-only event at 20 Ames Street. We also took advantage of the event’s time-space constraints in our design of the power circuit: we used the smallest batteries we could find that would power a Thinking Tag for the duration of the event.
From our perspective, we were taking advantage of the event’s particular space-time properties to make the technology work. From the user’s perspective, these properties seemed “natural” in the context of the event, and they treated the technology like it “just worked.” This was good, to the extent that it let us observe how people might experience the technology in a natural setting. However, it also created a “Lost
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Horizons” problem when sponsors wanted to take the technology home with them. Something similar happened in Capra’s classic film where a visitor to a Utopian land where no one grows old falls in love with a woman and steals her away to his homeland. Sadly, his hopes for a life with this woman are crushed when he witnesses her suddenly age and then die upon leaving Shangri-La. With Folk Computing, the technology is the woman, the Media Lab is Shangri-La, and there was disappointment when sponsors tried to bring the Thinking Tags home with them: their battery died almost immediately. More importantly, the tags seemed much less interesting outside the environment where there were many other people who could interact with their own tags.
ArtifactsOver the course of five years, we created three major Folk Computing technologies. We produced hundreds of each of these artifacts that were robust enough to function in the hands of children and adults over the course of an event. Partly because of this robustness, these artifacts have had lived well beyond their premiere events (after some effort to deal with the “Lost Horizons” issues) and have inspired unexpected uses. For example:
Another graduate student in the Lifelong Kindergarten Group used the original Thinking Tags as a platform for creating “Participatory Simulations” (Colella 2000). Kids wearing the tags could learn about epidemiology by studying how a “virus” spread from one person to another.
Mitchel Resnick used the Meme Tags to help a group of adults at a seminar consider the role peer influence plays in what people believe. They have also been used in a wearable technology fashion show to highlight a new model of personal communication.
Sega has asked for the I-balls to be part of a new children’s museum they are opening in Japan.
Background
FolkloreThis section discusses in more detail the relationship between Folk Computing and the literature on how folklore supports community building. As with many design metaphors, our appropriation of folklore is somewhat informal: we have taken up the entailments of folklore we found most relevant to augmenting face-to-face community building, and excluded others that did not suit our purposes. That being said, I believe we have stayed true enough to the concept to warrant our use of the term “folk” in the name of the research project.
Group Identity One fundamental characteristic of folklore is its ability to establish a sense of community among those who share it. While a community of people creates folklore, folklore reciprocally helps to create the community. Toelken, in speaking about his research on the folklore of loggers, says there is “a clear indication that loggers as a group do conceive of themselves as a group, and largely through the live folklore they share with each other within the immediate circumstances of their job.” (Toelken 1979) Folklore provides the building blocks for a group identity. This works because individual pieces of folklore symbolize something deeply held by members of the group, such as a desire, a fear, an experience, a belief, or even some piece of arcane knowledge. If a piece of lore is perceived as having circulated widely within the group, it comes to represent the sense that the underlying desires, fears, beliefs it points to are also widely shared within the group. The specific beliefs underlying the folklore don’t need to be known. People only need to experience the lore as “resonant” in order to feel a sense of kinship with others who resonate with it. Because people are often unaware of the exact nature of the underlying beliefs that they share, the folklore object comes to symbolize these shared beliefs, and the resulting sense of kinship. It becomes a language that people can comfortably use to start exploring their deeper similarities and differences.
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The sense of a group’s identity is created at several points during the folklore exchange. It can happen when two strangers discover the lore they share in common. It can also occur when someone performs some folklore for a person who reacts approvingly, suggesting that it also resonates with that person. Finally, it can occur when a group of people performs a piece of folklore together, and each person experiences the delight in each other’s delight.
IntegrationFolklore can help people extend their social network. Adams, in an article detailing the central functions of folklore, calls this “integration,” and McDowell gives an example of it in his writing on children’s riddling:
"Thus, riddling allows the child to expand his communicative network beyond the immediate circles of kin and close friends. New relationships are facilitated by the availability of riddling as a technique of communication between nonintimates.” (McDowell 1979)
Folk computing enhances the integrative quality of folklore by leveraging the power of computational agency. For example, one of the most popular types of i-balls turned out to be a “quest” – a type of treasure hunt that gives people who play it a description of a person that they need to find. One of the teachers at the school made a quest i-ball whose first clue was “Go find the queen of the school”. When kids figured out that this meant the principal, and they went and docked their i-ball device with hers, they were then given another clue about who to find next. In this way, a quest i-ball provides not just a “technique of communication,” as in the case of riddling, but something closer to a communication imperative: “Go talk to this person!”. As discussed previously, it also lowers the personal risk involved in making a new connection by providing an alibi: “The quest made me do it”.
Revealing Common GroundFolklore can be a quick way for two strangers to uncover common ground. Dundes gives several instances of folklore performances designed to rapidly establish particular affinities (Dundes 1989). For example, a member of the Delta Chi fraternity, suspecting he is in the company of another member, will ask him “Do you know Kimball?” If the other person answers “E.L. Kimball, the insurance salesman?”, these people have begun a collaborative performance that will reveal them both to be fraternity members. This is a narrow example of the more general case phenomena where two strangers will cycle through their respective folklore repertoires to find points in common.
Although folklore provides a framework for identifying common ground, the process is still socially awkward. Since all conversation rests on common knowledge, there is an awkward time at the beginning of an interaction where two people are trying to establish enough common knowledge to have an interesting conversation. The Thinking Tags helped people find common ground by revealing a simple measure of how much two people had in common at the moment they began to interact. Instead of revealing common ground, the Meme Tags tried to help grow it. In a conversation, they revealed a piece of lore that one person knew and the other had not yet encountered. Both of these devices relied on the computational and communicative properties of the tags to rapidly cycle through a repertoire of folklore, searching for meaningful points of commonality and difference before any human conversation took place.
EducationAmerican folklorists Mary and Herbert Knapp use “The Secret Education of American Children “as a subtitle for their book on American children’s folklore, “One Potato, Two Potato” (Knapp and Knapp 1976). These researchers, as well as many others, have noted the role folklore plays in spreading a large amount of knowledge through a community without requiring any formal system, or – in the case of children’s folklore – without requiring any adults.
Folk Computing attempts to leverage the educational power of folklore while extending its subject matter. Children already teach each other a variety of folk games, and help each other acquire the skills required to
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play them. We have designed a programming language to make it relatively easy for kids to create and share their own folk computing games, and for them to be able to share the knowledge necessary for creating the games. In this way, I hope to make certain computational ideas part of the “daily logic” that gets circulated via children’s folklore.
Other researchers have attempted to adapt a particular knowledge domain for folk exchange. For example, Omar K. Moore created a system to support children teaching each other to read using a folklore model (Moore and Anderson 1969).
Reflecting on Community Dynamics "Finally, we deal with the reflexivity of riddling, riddling being one of the many forms of culture devoted to the examination of culture. That is to say, culture is both the subject and object of riddling, since riddling is culture and riddling explores culture. In this light, riddling emerges as a cultural form given over to examination of the composition and boundaries of a culture.” (McDowell 1979)
Folklore helps members of a community reflect on the nature of that community. It allows members to get a sense of their shared values and beliefs, as represented by their shared folklore. How does someone establish the shared nature of a piece of lore, however? Obviously, one can get a simple measure by polling one’s friends, which happens routinely in folklore exchange. However, this approach has a strong selection bias, in that the people one interacts with regularly are more likely to share the same folklore. This leads to the common mistaken assumption that a piece of knowledge is widely shared when in fact it is only shared within one’s circle.
Folk computing lets people reflect on the shared nature of folklore with much finer resolution by using technology to both track the movement of digital lore and to communicate this information back to all interested community members. For example, with the Meme Tag Community Mirrors, participants could see in real time which memes were circulating most widely among Media Lab students versus which were popular among faculty. These gave students the chance to see which ideas unified them as a group while simultaneously differentiating themselves from others at the lab. This perspective would have been hard for students to get on their own, since the data also showed that students were very insular in their interaction patterns, and were not likely to get a sense of what memes were or were not popular outside their group.
Cultural StudiesResearchers in the domain of Cultural Studies have also explored the role that “texts” circulating among people play in constituting community. In “Textual Poachers,” for example, Henry Jenkins traces the role of circulating “fan materials” – such as the elaborate artwork, videos, and scripts produced by “Star Trek” fans – in helping define and maintain fan communities (Jenkins 1992). Like folklorists, he is interested in how these texts are constantly being reworked and rewritten, problematizing any simple concept of “authorship”. Unlike folklore research, however, cultural studies is much more concerned with the power relationships that shape and are shaped by this process – as evidenced by the use of the word “poacher”.
In their influential article on “The Social Life of Information,” John Seally Brown and Paul Duguid explore the role of circulating documents in constituting community (Brown and Duguid 1996). They observe that an important part of the content of any document is the text that reflects who else has read it.
“We recognize important organizational documents from the long and impressive routing slips attached…And we assert our membership in a community in part by showing we have read those documents -- which is why we often like to be sure our own name gets on the routing slips and our own handwriting appears in the margin”
We worked hard to make this type of “routing” information accessible to users of Folk Computing technology, and as Brown and Duguid suggest, we found that it was important to people. For example, we
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witnessed one girl linger over a poster-sized visualization showing who received a particular i-ball (see page 9). She said she had received a copy of this i-ball, and she grew increasingly upset when she couldn’t find her name on the chart, and prove her membership in that community.
Whether it is folklore, fan materials, or documents, the ultimate product of these circulating texts is an “interpretive community”: a community that shares enough knowledge and beliefs to be able to negotiate a shared meaning around new “texts” (Fish 1980). This Cultural Studies construct makes explicit some ideas that are talked around in the folklore literature, and it is a useful for defining the most lofty goal of Folk Computing: to support the formation of interpretive communities.
Computer Supported Collaborative WorkA large body of research on technology supports communication and community building. Most of this focuses on tools for online community building, although some of it is still relevant background for our work in Folk Computing. As mentioned previously, the area of face-to-face communication and community-building technology is underexplored, and the work that exists in this area takes different approaches than ours.
Remote Community BuildingMost tools for remote community building have a very different set of requirements than face-to-face tools. While face-to-face tools can leverage traditional communication modalities such as voice and gesture, remote tools must carry the entire substance of the communication themselves. Early versions of such tools were limited in terms of the “dimensions” of face-to-face communication they represented. For example, on-line text-based discussion tools carried the text of a conversation, but couldn’t reproduce much of the nuance carried by vocal inflection. Early video conferencing systems represented more visual and auditory cues, but failed to preserve subtler details like gaze awareness. In the last several years, some researchers have been working to reintroduce a variety of face-to-face social cues into tools for remote communication (Ishii, Kobayahsi et al. 1993) (Viegas and Donath 1999).
Some researchers have been exploring interfaces for on-line “social visualization” (Donath 1995) that, like Folk Computing, try to give participants a window into larger community dynamics. Warren Sack’s work on Very Large Scale Conversations (Sack 2000) provides members of a Usenet on-line community with a social network visualization showing who is responding to whom in the conversation. Judith Donath, et al’s, research on “Virtual Fashion” (see http://www.media.mit.edu/~dc/research/fashion/) focuses on “tracking, analyzing, and visualizing cultural dispersion on the World Wide Web”. Obviously, these approaches differ from Folk Computing in that they designed to augment support on-line, not face-to-face, community building. They also differ significantly with regard to their fundamental unit of analysis. Folk Computing uses the i-ball transmission event – where two people purposefully exchange an i-ball – as the basis for many of its social visualizations. This means that the computer doesn’t have to do any complex parsing of text or human activity to determine where a connection between two people has occurred, which makes the visualizations more feasible and reliable. From the perspective of a community’s comprehension of itself, that also means that these visualizations are based on events that are readily discernable and graspable by individuals. The experience people have creating their own Folk Computing lore (memes, i-balls, etc.) and exchanging it with others proves very helpful in making sense of the resulting complex visualizations of these exchanges.
Same Time, Same Place TechnologyAlthough it is in the minority, research exists on using technology to support face-to-face communication and community. Some of this work focuses on “meeting support” , where the goal is to help groups of people in a meeting to brainstorm ideas and/or make decisions. This is different from Folk Computing along several key dimensions. First, meeting support technology usually plays a much larger role in mediating the dominant conversation. For example, the purpose of some tools is to ensure that people contribute anonymously (Nunamaker, Dennis et al. 1991). Other tools, such as digital whiteboards, help users create novel representations of their ideas to make a conversation more productive (Stefik, Foster et
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al. 1988). Compared to these, Folk Computing devices work much more in the background of a community. Like folklore, they represent a type of stylized discourse not designed to carry the main thread of a discussion. They are also designed to work over a larger piece of space-time than the typical meeting, and with a larger population of people.
Another type of same-time, same-place technology research focuses on building awareness of other people’s activity within a space. Technology exists to help people in a building track the whereabouts of others (Want, Hopper et al. 1992), and to get a sense of the activity they are engaged in -- e.g. Joe and Mary are standing around the water cooler, Chris is in her office reading email (Dourish and Bly 1992). Supporting this type of “background” awareness has something in common with the goals of Folk Computing, but the emphasis is very different. Rather than focusing on geography or activity, we have tried to make people aware of the ideas and beliefs that under-gird communities, bringing some people together while simultaneously pushing others away.
COMRIS, or “Co-habited Mixed Reality Information Spaces” is a wearable technology research project that, like some of the Folk Computing research, focuses on augmenting conference-type gatherings (Velde 1997). The design metaphor they use is a parrot that sits on one’s shoulder and whispers useful pieces of information into one’s ear about what is going on in one’s surroundings. Unlike Folk Computing, the main emphasis in COMRIS is on supporting individuals, not relationships or community. This is partly clear from the types of augmentation it provides, such as “agenda management.” What makes it especially true is COMRIS’ reliance on the “traditional” wearable computing approach, where the display is only accessible to the wearer (Starner, Mann et al. 1996). While Folk Computing attempts to help build common ground, COMRIS undermines it by making participants wonder whether a person they are talking to is listening to them, or to some private message about them relayed by the parrot.
Things That ThinkWith its interest in Things That Think, the Media Lab has inspired several artifacts that enhance face-to-face communication and community. The Galvactivator, created by Jocelyn Schreirer and Rosalind Picard, is the most similar to Folk Computing technology (see www.media.mit.edu/galvactivator). Like the Thinking Tags, it is a wearable device that gives people in a conversation some provocative information about each other – a measure of their arousal. Unlike the tags, however, the Galvactivator provides information that is about its wearer – not directly about the relationship between the wearer and the viewer. When Galvactivators are given to a large audience, they can also provide a kind of Community Mirror, like the Meme Tags. Again, what the mirror reflects is considerably different from the tags. One way to characterize this difference is in terms of time-scale. Arousal changes moment by moment. The common ground that an auditorium of flashing Galvactivators establishes is fleeting, and is perhaps potent because it is fleeting. The common ground that Folk Computing devices establish is based resonance with people’s deepest hopes, fears, and beliefs – things that endure over time – and it is potent because of this longevity.
Justin Cassell and her group have developed technologies designed to augment face-to-face socializing at a “literary salon”. Some of this work helps create a sense of community by inviting people to join in playful coordinated activity (Cassell, Smith et al. 1999). Other parts of the work focus on novel means of message passing between participants in the shared space. These are different approaches to community building from Folk Computing.
Rob Poor created another round of augmented nametags for a Media Lab sponsor event (looking for citation). These functioned quite differently from the Folk Computing tags in that they were not geared toward augmenting human interaction. Instead, they provided a way to “personalize” technology to respond to the unique attributes of individuals.
Constructionism and Digital ManipulativesChildren learn best when they are engaged in actively inventing, and constructing the world around them (Papert 1980). Folk Computing descends from a long tradition of computational media that allow children
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to engage with a variety of powerful ideas as they design and build their own technological artifacts (Resnick 1998). Our work attempts to extend the constructionist tradition into the social world, along two important dimensions.
We want to extend the range of powerful ideas that kids can explore via technology to include ideas about community. Folk Computing encourages kids (and adults) to think about the importance that shared knowledge plays in forming the basis of a community. It also allows them to reflect on the particular patterns of folklore distribution and social interaction in their own community.
Folk Computing also aims to help build a “computational culture” where building computer programs that children can share with their friends becomes a very natural-feeling activity. One of the challenges of creating constructionist learning environments is that the technology does not carry its own “culture of use” with it: just because kids are given constructionist materials does not mean they are encouraged to be playful and inventive with them. While no technology can resolve this challenge completely, Folk Computing is carefully crafted to support a particular model of social use. The language is designed to allow the creation of artifacts – like animations and simple games – that work as a social currency. The programs are playable and tradable “in the wild,” where kids are already socializing. The programs are also fully “deconstructible”, so kids can use the work of others as design examples and points of departure for their own work.
Our approach of contextualizing programming in a social environment borrows much from the work of Amy Bruckman on “Moose Crossing” – an on-line text-based virtual community where children fill up their world with computational objects of their own design (Bruckman 1998). That work stressed the importance of creating an authentic audience for children’s work, and allowing children to use each other’s work for inspiration and design ideas. I brought to this an interest in real-world, face-to-face community building, and an explicit interest in tools for community reflection, such as our “community mirrors”.
ResourcesAt this point, no additional resources will be needed to complete my dissertation.
TimelineIdeally, I’d like to defend my dissertation in mid-April, hand it in on May 4th, and graduate in June. At this point, I have conducted the four large-scale Folk Computing trials necessary for my dissertation. All that remains is some additional data analysis – both video and interaction data captured by the technology – and writing. It is possible these tasks will take me beyond the Spring deadlines. In this case, I will defend in mid-July and turn in my thesis in early August.
Biography
Rick Borovoy graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in 1984, and got his B.A. from Harvard in Computer Science in 1989. During a year off from college, he worked as a volunteer on the Navajo reservation in New Mexico, writing software to help in the administration of two Navajo-run secondary schools. This got him thinking about other ways technology might be used in educational settings, and when he returned to Harvard, he took several courses at the graduate school of education on the use of technology in the classroom.
After graduating, Rick worked at Apple for five years in the Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow project, doing some early research on the role of wireless, hand-held technology in collaborative science learning.
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Rick came to study with Prof. Mitchel Resnick at Media Lab in 1994, and completed his Masters Degree in 1996 on “Dr. LEGOHead”: a Mr. Potatohead-inspired construction environment for kids that combined high-level physical construction blocks (e.g. eyes that could see, a mouth that could talk) with high-level software objects that determined their behavior.
When not at the lab, he spends time with his wife and two-year old son.
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