School of Information Systems

School of Computing and Information Systems

Student ID#: 113523___________User Name: jesser2@postoffice.utas.edu.au

Family Name:Reichelt_____Given Name: Jesse______________

Unit Code: KIT311____ Unit Name: Social and Cultural Issues of Digital Interactive MediaTutorial Day/Time: Friday 4 pm 5 pm Assignment Title/Number: Third AssignmentI declare that all material in this assignment is my own work except where there is clear acknowledgement or reference to the work of others and I have complied and agreed to the University statement on Plagiarism and Academic Integrity on the University website at http://www.utas.edu.au/plagiarism or in the Student Information Handbook. I am aware that my assignment may be submitted to plagiarism detection software, and might be retained on its database.

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The University reserves the right to submit assignments to plagiarism detection software, and might then retain a copy of the assignment on its database for the purpose of future plagiarism checking.Individual Assignment 3 / 3 - Lifeworlds

In this essay I will be elaborating on the concept of the lifeworld as used in philosophy especially by Husserl, and how the concept of lifeworlds can be used in thinking about design issues in socio-computer interfaces (SCIs).

Firstly, a brief history and context of Husserls lifeworld. Husserls concept of the lifeworld, although it makes its first appearance in one of his earlier texts dated 1917, it is most commonly associated and understood in the context of his 1936 work The Crisis of the European Sciences. In this work, Husserl (as the title testifies), attempts to show that modern science is in a crisis, a crisis which is a direct result of the forgetting of its own foundations. The main historical pivot which he chooses to focus on in this work is developments in the world of Galileo Galilei.

In an article published in the American Philosophical Quarterly, David Carr elaborates

Galileos proposal is that exact and intersubjectivity valid knowledge of the real world can be attained by treating everything about this world as an example of a geometrical object or relationship. If every physical shape, trajectory, vibration, etc., is seen, after being measured as accurately as possible, as a version of a pure geometrical shape, geometrical statements about the properties and relationships among these pure shapes will turn out to provide us with information about nature which shares in the exactness and universality of pure geometry. This leaves untouched of course, certain properties which do not seem directly measureable in geometrical terms: color, warmth, weight, tone, smell, etc. Galileo notes, however, that changes in some of these properties correspond exactly to measureable changes in geometrical properties In his boldest move of all, Galileo proposed to treat all such secondary qualities, as they were later called, exclusively in terms of their measureable geometrical correlates with the idea that all will be accounted for thereby. 1

So basically, (and of most importance for the latter part of this essay), Galileo, as Husserl saw him, divorced knowledge of the real world gained by the system of science, and the everyday world of people existing within it. In Galileo the former gained pre-eminence without a predecessor and the latter was relegated to irrelevance. However, as Husserl himself states,

1. (Carr, 1970, p. 333)

We become aware that we scientists are, after all, human beings and as such are among the components of the life-world which always exists for us, ever pre-given; and thus all of science is pulled, along with us, into the-merely subjective-relative-life world. 2Husserls main point here is to show which world is primary, (which is a corollary into his notion that science has forgotten its foundations). We do not abstractly and rationally approach Galileos mathematician of all life from nowhere, but rather, science comes out of (and is symbiotic upon) our very basic everyday being in the world and its background.

Now that we have situated the context for Husserls life-world, its also important to define adequately what it is. And here we come across an important ambiguity. Multiple papers on Husserl point to an important duality in Husserls conception of the lifeworld. Eran Dorfman, in a paper entitled History of the Lifeworld: From Husserl to Merleau-Ponty states

2. (Carr, 1970, p. 336)

The lifeworld is treated throughout Husserls writings with an ambiguity attested to by the gap between, on the one hand, the earlier Ideas II, in which the notion of the lifeworld is anticipated by the personalistic, everyday active attitude, and, on the other hand, Experience and Judgement, where the lifeworld is presented as the passive background of primary experience, as a vague, pre-given, silent world, serving as the foundation for any subsequent linguistic objectification. Husserl seems to vacillate between these two notions of the lifeworld: one of a pre-given level and another of a world of action; one of a foundation of everyday life and another of everyday life itself. 3So we have this two-fold conception as foundation of everyday life, and everyday life itself. As the above quote recognizes, one of Husserls main objective was to discover a secure foundation for the scientific enterprise. Seeing the failure Galileos mathematization divorced from life, Husserl sought to secure science in another unchanging, secure area. In his latter writings, particularly The Crisis of The European Sciences and onwards, he tends toward the unchanging, transcendental foundation of everyday life. However, there is an important link between the two.

David Carr, in his article Husserls Problematic Concept of the Life-World looks at ways in which to understand Husserls fitting together of numerous concepts under the single term, lifeworld.

3. (Dorfman, 2009, p. 296)

In the first point, Carr harkens back to Husserls claim that one unifying feature of the two conceptions of the lifeworld that have been discussed are that the both underlie any coherent account of science, as science depends both on the immediate foundation of experience, but also needs to exist within a cultural, linguistic community with shared values and concepts of relevance and irrelevance. In the second point, Carr notes that both the immediate foundation and the cultural and linguistic community in which we are born into (something that Husserls latter pupil Heidegger would reformulate as thrownness), are things that are generally passively received and accepted and form the background underlying much of our conscious experience.

Now having successfully unpacked Husserls lifeworld explaining both its situated context and its meaning, Ill move onto question of socio-computer interface (SCI) design. Specifically looking at the questions of, what does it mean for SCI to be used by actual people who are situated in their own, individual lifeworlds? What can SCI designers do to ensure SCI technologies fit into individuals lifeworlds? What should designers aim to avoid? What should they focus on?

First, what does it mean for SCI to be used by actual people who are situated in their own, individual lifeworlds?This primarily means that any given SCI used by a person does not exist in a vacuum, disconnected and situated apart from the rest of their life. The concept of the lifeworld is a holistic one in which a multitude of parts are constantly affecting all other parts of the lifeworld. It rejects reductionism, which, in the words of Daniel Chandler, aims to reduce a complex whole to the effects of one part (or parts) upon another part (or parts). Rather, everything is constantly in a situation of effecting everything else. This means that, in their designs, designers should take into account possible political, social, cultural, historical, racial and gendered aspects which their SCI may influence. The concept of technological determinism has, of course, been around for a long time. Indeed in Platos Republic, Plato argues that the ship, merely by the way it is designed, must have a single captain and therefore is inherently non-democratic. Or on the other hand, things like the internet, or renewable energy, where and are thought by many to be inherently democratizing technologies because of their decentralizing properties.

In more personalized SCI systems such as customer support, platforms involving representation by avatar, or more fully interactive systems such as video games, this also raises concerns of online (or offline), racism. Lisa Nakamura outlines five types of racism in these areas as visual profiling of users, voice profiling of users, racism against avatars, identity tourism (perpetuating specific racial, often quite demeaning stereotypes), anti-immigrant racism in virtual communities (such as the case of the Pink-Haired Dwarfs in the game Diablo, which came to be associated with using the game for real world profit, and thus because almost a pariah race in the game). The link between these more personalized systems and Husserls lifeworlds is especially clear as, especially in the case of video games, they incorporate a great number of features of our lived experience.

What can SCI designers do to ensure SCI technologies fit into individuals lifeworlds?

Firstly, this means that SCI designers must make some effort to familiarize themselves (if only vicariously), with the lifeworlds that their potential audience inhabits. This can take the form of some form of liaison with your target audience, whether this be something on the informal side of recorded and documented conversations or interviews or more formal and structured questionaries or doing research into similar usage data and trends. This also means that designers should utilize prototypes and customer feedback and suggestions, as this is a great way of getting a snapshot of what it means to be in your audiences lifeworld.

What should designers aim to avoid? What should they focus on?

As far as general rules go, designers should always make sure they have clear and available customer feedback. This was something that was a weak spot in the Amazons Mechanical Turk system, because the labor was so small (and repetitive), and the pay so minimal, customer support took much more time and value than the minimal labor and so was rarely implemented. If customer feedback is not available, there is clearly a fundamental disconnection from the lifeworld of your audience. Large disparities in power are also far more often than not unhealthy. Once the SCI has been released, work with prototypes to gauge how adequately you as a designer are fitting in with the lifeworld of your audience, to avoid a large number of changes. As before, this will help you as the designer, and your target audience more easily arrive at a system which works for both parties.

Bibliography

Smith, Merritt Rose and Leo Marx. 1995. Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism. The MIT Press, Cambridge.

McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Gingko Press, U.S.A.

Flynn, Thomas. 2011, 'From Husserls Lifeworld to Heidegger and Twentieth-Century

Existentialism, https://jacobrump.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/lecture-from-husserls-

lifeworld-to-heidegger-and-twentieth-century-existentialism1.pdf

David Carr, 1970, VI. Husserls Problematic Concept of the Life-World, American

Philosophical Quarterly Vol. 7, Num. 4. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20009365

Dorfman, Eran, 2009, History of the Lifeworld From Husserl to Merleua-Ponty, Philosophy Today.

New World Encyclopedia Online 2014, Lifeworld,

.

Internet Archive Wayback Machine2015, Technological or Media Determinism by Daniel Chandler - Reductionism,

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Ekbia, Hamid and Bonnie Nardi, 2014, Heteromation and its (dis)contents: The invisible division of labor between humans and machines, First Monday: Peer-Reviewed Journal on the Internet, Vol. 19, Num. 6, Assignment Cover Sheet