Digital Rhetoric
James P. Zappen
Design Issues 4: Ethical Issues in Design
A. Mapping of User Controls
1. Mapping. "Mapping is a technical term meaning the
relationship between two things, in this case [i.e., the automobile,
the telephone] between the controls and their movements and the results
in the world. Consider the mapping relationships involved in steering a
car. To turn the car to the right, one turns the steering wheel
clockwise (so that its top moves to the
right . . . . The wheel and the clockwise direction
are natural choices, closely related to the desired outcome, and
providing immediate feedback. The mapping is easily learned and always
remembered . . . .
Mapping problems are abundant, one of the fundamental
causes of difficulties. Consider the telephone [circa 1988]. Suppose
you wish to activate the callback on 'no reply' function. To initiate
this feature on one telephone system, press and release the 'recall'
button (the button on the handset), then dial 60, then dial the number
you called.
There are several problems here. First, the description
of the function is relatively complex—yet incomplete. What is
two people set up callback at the same time? What if the person does
not come back until a week later? What if you have meanwhile set up
three or four other functions? What if you want to cancel it? Second,
the action to be performed is arbitrary. (Dial 60. Why 60? Why not 73
or 27? How does one remember an arbitrary number?) Third, the sequence
ends with what appears to be a redundant, unnecessary action: dialing the
number of the person to be called. If the phone system is smart enough
to do all of these other things, why can't it remember the number that
was just attempted; why must it be told all over again? And finally,
consider the lack of feedback. How do I know I did the right action?
Maybe I disconnected the phone. Maybe I set up some other special feature.
There is no visible or audible way to know immediately." (23-24)
2. Mapping Mismatches. "The problem is that each of the apparently
simple devices [a surfboard, ice skates, parallel bars, a bugle] is
capable of a wide repertoire of actions, but because there are few
controls (and no moving parts), the rich complexity of action can be
accomplished only through a rich complexity of execution by the user.
Remember the office telephone system? When there are more actions than
controls, each control must take part in a variety of different
actions. If there are exactly the same number of controls as actions,
then, in principle, the controls can be simple and the execution can be
simple: find the correct control and activate it." (208-9)
Donald A. Norman, The Design of Everyday Things (New York:
Doubleday, Currency, 1988), 23-24, 208-9.
B. Designer Control versus User-Designer Collaboration
1. Illustration 1. "At a police station in the Midwest, a police
officer named Barbara starts up the DOS-based database [PC-ALAS
(Accident Location and Analysis System)] that she will use for locating
and analyzing traffic accidents in a particular area. According to the
software's manual, she should first unroll a three-by-three-foot map of
the area, which is overlaid with six-digit numerical coordinates called
node numbers. Then she should look up the node number for each
intersection she is investigating and type them, one by one, into a
dialog box. The cumbersome map is rich in unnecessary detail, takes the
entire space of a cleared desk, and must be held down by paperweights
so that it will not roll back up; it's no surprise that Barbara avoids
using it. Instead, she opens a folder and takes out a Post-It note on
which she had written down a series of node numbers some months
before. The unwieldy node map is replaced by a conveniently sized note
that holds only the details that she needs." (1)
2. Flexible Systems. "I believe that trained information designers can
contribute much to the emergent innovations of workers, not by replacing
those innovations with centralized solutions, but by helping to design
systems that workers can modify." (4-5)
3. User as Victim. "The trope of worker-as-victim, I
contend, devalues the multiple and innovative solutions that
workers . . . develop." (19)
4. User-Designer Collaboration. "Workers' innovations are seen as
symptoms of an underlying problem; the researcher's role is to pin
down that problem and the designer's role is to develop an idealized
solution, a solution that may incorporate, but ultimately obviate,
workers' local innovations . . . . On the
other hand, trained designers can avoid common pitfalls of workers'
homegrown solutions, which tend to be of the chewing-gum-and-bailing-wire
variety. Workers produce solutions that are devious, wily, and cunning,
but often these solutions do not involve a deep understanding of the
system . . . . Workers produce solutions that
work—but often they do not produce solutions that work well by
their own criteria, and often those solutions are not promulgated so
that other workers can take advantage of them." (19-20)
5. Illustration 2. "In one possible future, a few years from now: At
a police station in Waterloo, a police officer named Marta starts up
Open-ALAS, the database and visualization system that she will use for
locating and analyzing traffic accidents in a particular area. Since
she often runs this query, she has written a macro to select the area
and pull up only the accidents that have happened within a 1DO-foot
perimeter in the past year. She is particularly proud that her macro
displays both the mapped location of the accidents and a table
summarizing the accidents by behavioral type.
She learned the macro language a few months ago, through looking at the
reference manual and examples on the official ALAS website. Some other
Open-ALAS users on the message board were always there to coach her
through the tough parts, and in fact she still posts to the board to
get help on problems and to help less experienced users with their
problems. Not only does helping make her feel useful, it rewards her in
other ways: when someone finds her help useful, they award her points.
The five people with the most points at the end of the quarter are
recognized in the DOT newsletter; Marta thinks that if she is one of
those five people, she might be able to improve her promotion chances.
Marta Logs into the ALAS website and reads the
message board. Someone in Muscatine is having trouble figuring out how
to set up a query basically similar to hers. She posts her macro, and
after some thought, also enters it into the knowledge base of Open-ALAS
solutions along with a brief set of instructions. Who knows, she
thinks, it might help other workers who are just getting used to
Open-ALAS—and if they rate it highly, that means more points
too." (201)
6. Open Systems. "In ecological terms, an open system should be like an
artificial starter reef that, once placed, serves as a site around which a
genuine ecology can grow. An open system is a centrally designed artifact,
of course, but it exists as a nexus for workers' innovations, just as
an artificial reef functions as a nexus for a developing underwater
ecology. The open system, like an artificial reef, might help to shape
the ecology that grows around it, but it is not designed to maintain
control over the ecology or constrain the ecology. Rather, it ideally
works in harmony with the ecology, providing just enough stability to
allow the ecology to flourish." (205)
Clay Spinuzzi, Tracing Genres through Organizations: A Sociocultural
Approach to Information Design. Acting with Technology (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 2003), 1, 4-5, 19-20, 201, 205.
C. Designer Control versus User-Technology Symbiosis
1. Technology and Communication. "As our technology becomes more powerful,
its failure in terms of collaboration and communication becomes ever more
critical. Collaboration means synchronizing one's activities, as well as
explaining and giving reasons. It means having trust, which can only be
formed through experience and understanding. With automatic, so-called
intelligent devices, trust is sometimes conferred undeservedly—or
withheld, equally undeservedly." (4)
2. Technology and Automation. "Designers tend to focus on the technology,
attempting to automate whatever possible for safety and convenience. Their
goal is complete automation, except where this is not yet possible because
of technical limitations or cost concerns. These limitations, however,
mean that the tasks can only be partially automated, so the person must
always monitor the action and take over whenever the machine can no
longer perform properly. Whenever a task is only partially automated,
it is essential that each party, human and machine, know what the other
is doing and what is intended." (5)
3. Technology and Control. "We are in the midst of a major change in how
we relate to technology. Until recently, people have been in control. We
turned the technology on and off, told it which operation to perform,
and guided it through its operations. As technology became more powerful
and complex, we became less able to understand how it worked, less able to
predict its actions. Once computers and microprocessors entered the scene,
we often found ourselves lost and confused, annoyed and angered. But
still, we considered ourselves to be in control. No longer. Now, our
machines are taking over. They act as if they have intelligence and
volition, even though they don't." (10-11)
4. Symbiotic Relationships. "In the 1950s, the psychologist
J. C. R. Licklider attempted to determine how people and machines
could interact gracefully and harmoniously, or in what he called a
'symbiotic relationship,' so that the resulting partnership would
enhance our lives. What would it mean to have a graceful symbiosis of
people and technology? We need a more natural form of interaction,
an interaction that can take place subconsciously, without effort,
whereby the communication in both directions is done so naturally, so
effortlessly, that the result is a smooth merger of person and machine,
jointly performing a task." (18)
5. Perceivable Affordances. "Providing effective, perceivable affordances
[or signifiers?] is important in the design of today's things, whether
they be coffee cups, toasters, or websites, but these attributes are
even more important for the design of future things. When devices are
automatic, autonomous, and intelligent, we need perceivable affordances
to show us how we might interact with them and, equally importantly,
how they might interact with the world." (68)
6. Predictability and Implicit Communication. "Smart machines of the
future should not try to read the minds of the people with whom they
interact, either to infer their motives or to predict their next actions.
The problem with doing this is twofold: first, they probably will be
wrong; second, doing this makes the machine's actions unpredictable.
The person is trying to predict what the machine is going to do while,
at the same time, the machine is trying to guess the actions of the
person—a sure guarantee of confusion. Remember the bicycles of
Delft. They illustrate an important rule for design: be predictable." (76)
7. Reverse Risk Compensation. "Psychologists who study perceived risk have
discovered that when an activity is made safer, quite often the accident
rate does not change. This peculiar result has led to the hypothesis of
'risk compensation': when an activity is changed so that it is perceived
to be safer, people take more risks, thereby keeping the accident rate
constant." (78)
8. Responsive Automation. "The examples of natural,
responsive interaction [the Collaborative Robot, the Segway
Transporter] . . . illustrate a natural application
of machine intelligence and collaborative power to provide a true
machine+person symbiosis-human—machine interaction at its
best." (90)
Donald A. Norman, The Design of Future Things (New York: Perseus
Books Group, Basic Books, 2007), 4-5, 10-11, 18, 68, 76, 78, 90.
D. Ethical Issues in Design
1. Google's Privacy Policy. "Google's massive financial
growth has translated into political influence in the arena of
policy formation and issue framing in online privacy protection
debates . . . . The promise of Google's free speech
advocacy efforts and user controls may address some privacy concerns,
but they should be recognized within an anti-regulation regime building
effort that seeks to build consensus around privacy norms, attitudes,
and principles. Within a deregulated, unenforceable, and unmonitored
model of industry self-regulation, trusting in an industry's intentions
is offered as the primary means of ensuring privacy protection." (156-57)
2. Cloud Computing. "Cloud computing describes this activity
of working and storing information on the web, rather than
on one's personal computer—'helping make the computer
disappear' . . . . Although cloud computing increases
privacy risks, as evidence suggests, some find that Google's privacy
policies have not increased in proportion to them. Google acknowledges
this growing concern by providing more user control and increasing
its outreach efforts: uploading instructional videos on YouTube,
posting notices on its public policy blog, and placing a privacy link
on its search page granting access to the 'Google Privacy Center.' Yet,
underlying this analysis is the question of whether anti-regulatory
efforts based on user control and transparency adequately meet the
new privacy challenges of cloud computing and attend to the ethical
implications of privacy rights in the cloud." (157-58)
3. Linguistic Forms. Language is bound up in causes and effects and can
influence attitudes; behavior and ,consumer orientation. Linguistic
forms within Google's Privacy Policy frame privacy protection as 'a
choice between privacy and convenience' and help orient users as free
agents, empowering individuals to choose. The linguistic forms that help
promote this shift from organizational responsibility to personal choice
involve patterns of mitigation and obfuscation, and include (1) modality,
(2) lexical choice, and (3) coherence." (161)
4. Modality. "The linguistic form of modality is the use of hedging
claims, adverbs, or 'modality markers' used to downplay the frequency
of how many times something occurs (e.g., perhaps, may, might). The most
frequently used hedging adverb in Google's Privacy Policy is 'may'
aud it applies to far-reaching statements regarding Google's data handling
practices." (162)
5. Lexical Choice. "Lexical choice is the 'systematic use or avoidance of
words.' Google contextualizes users' understanding of Google's privacy
policy by systematically utilizing terms of enhancement, shifting the
nature of privacy from a right to be protected, to a commodity to be
traded in exchange for perceived benefits." (162)
6. Overlexicalization. "A lexical pattern known as overlexicalization
suggests a pattern of relabeling that involves synonymous or
near-synonymous terms and-describes how relabeling can provide
a new set of terms to promote 'a new perspective in a specialized
area . . . [that] sometimes involve inversions of
meaning.'" (163)
7. Coherence. "Coherence, or internal consistency, addresses
how linguistic patterns interrelate in qrder to 'define an
ideological basis of the discourse itself.' Often the combination
of modality and overlexicalization is used together to obscure the
extent of Google's data handling practices. For example, in the
Privacy Policy, 'we may process . . . we
may associate . . . sometimes we
record . . . [data] may be mixed." (164)
8. Google Videos. "The
video series called Google Search
Privacy . . . reinforce[s] the language of
domesticity, simplicity, and the everyday. In generic terms, Google's
privacy videos can be classified as educational videos, public service
announcements, and user-generated YouTube videos. The combination of
genres redraws the boundaries between user education and marketing
with an inversion of the amateur and the expert (prevalent in Web 2.0
discourse); Google becomes the amateur, the user becomes the expert. This
textual heterogeneity also redraws the social relations between public and
private, with Google repositioning itself as a public utility interested
in the public good, not a private company with private interests." (165)
9. Common Craft. "Remediation allows new technology to be 'refashioned'
from its predecessors and understood in relationship to older forms of
media and contexts. Google's privacy videos will follow this approach,
using low technology and domestic examples to explain technologically
complex topics, and managing anxiety through commonplace associations
and narratives of empowerment." (166-67)
10. Common Ground. "Together, low-tech graphics, YouTube
contextualization, amateur aesthetic elements, and stylistic cues help
establish a common ground between users and Google. Simplified everyday
language also helps close the gap between Google and the user." (167)
11. Domestic Language. "Customers understand the value of getting the
right clothes back, cleaned in the right manner. Although Google is
clearly not a dry-cleaning company, the association helps establish
a pattern of mollification through everyday domestic comparisons. HTTP
cookies might help users get the right search results, but they also help
Google track users from site to site, from search term to search term,
and from search to the cloud and back." (168)
12. Narratives of Empowerment. "The Google privacy video series
both lessens anxieties and encourages personal disclosure through
appeals to user empowerment and attendant attributes including
control, participation, and self-reliance. By soliciting users
to participate in their own monitoring and then naming it control,
Google may disempower users from their fundamental interest in privacy
protection. Contextualizing the language of participation within marketing
terms may also distract from the democratic necessity for autonomy,
self-determination, and power sharing." (169)
13. Google as Networked Individual. "If companies can successfully'portray
themselves as members of the communily (networked individuals), they
can be entitled to the 'same freedoms available to others, and the same
presumption of noninterference that sociely appropriately affords real
people.'" (171)
Robert Bodle, "Privacy and Participation in the Cloud: Ethical
Implications of Google's Privacy Practices and Public Communications,"
in The Ethics of Emerging Media: Information, Social Norms, and New
Media Technology, ed. Bruce E. Drushel and Kathleen German, 155-74
(New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2011), 156-58,
161-69, 171.
14. The Ethics of Blogging. "The main problem is that many people who blog
are no longer being transparent in their writing and are not divulging the
extent to which their expressed opinions may have been unduly influenced
by the payments and gifts bequeathed by sponsors. A related concern
is the extent to which bloggers may be required to write only positive
reviews in order to receive cash gifts or other compensation." (214)
15. Blogola. "'Blogola' (a term that recalls radio's payola
scandals, in which station playlists were influenced by
record company payments) is . . . a pressing
concern . . . . [It is] paying bloggers to create
word-of-mouth and buzz." (216-17)
16. Flogging. "Flogging occurs when fake or false
accounts of happy imaginary customers and consumers are
created . . . . 'Flogging' refers to fake blogging
or reviews that are not authentic." (217)
17. Faux Blogging. "Faux blogging occurs when fake or false accounts of
happy imaginary customers and consumers are created." (222)
18. Blogvertorials. "'Blogvertorials' occur when paid bloggers are
required to write positive reviews in exchange for cash payments or free
products or services." (222)
Issues:
-
"Should bloggers be governed by the same regulations and ethics that
journalists must adhere to, or are bloggers truly a different type of
medium that should be treated with a different code of ethics?
-
Is the FTC unfairly being heavy-handed in regulating blogging and
bloggers? In other words, is the FTC more concerned about pay-for-blogging
practices than it is about the free gifts often given to professional TV,
radio, newspaper, magazine, and web-based reporters?
-
Will the blogola scandals spread to other new media and, if so, which
forms will likely be affected? We already have seen concern about
sponsored tweets. Sadly. it seems inevitable that ethics scandals will
continue to unfold as new technologies are introduced.
-
Can industry regulation be sufficient to reign in unethical bloggers or
is federal regulation the best way to stop these abuses?" (228)
Eric Jensen, "Blogola, Sponsored Posts, and the Ethics of Blogging,"
in The Ethics of Emerging Media: Information, Social Norms, and New
Media Technology, ed. Bruce E. Drushel and Kathleen German, 213-32
(New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2011), 214, 216-17,
222, 228.
E. Illustrations
1. Don Norman, "Signifiers, Not Affordances": http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/signifiers_not_affordances.html
2. YouTube Google Privacy: http://www.youtube.com/user/googleprivacy/
Latest Update: 2011-11-12
