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Treacherous Ground: On Some Conceptual Pitfalls in CSCW

2016; Springer Science+Business Media; Volume: 25; Issue: 4-5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/s10606-016-9253-x

1573-7551

Kjeld Schmidt,

Language and cultural evolution

The tangle of conceptual issues that conventionally, in CSCW research, is referred to by the term 'awareness' (mostly with a qualifying adjective such as 'reciprocal' or 'mutual') poses a major challenge to CSCW.On one hand there is widespread agreement that the phenomena referred to by that term are somehow critical for collaboration technologies to become integral complements of cooperative work practices, but on the other hand confusion reigns as to how those phenomena are to be conceived of or even described.The disconcerting fact is that the term 'awareness' is being used in reference to rather different phenomena: to 'collaboration aware' software programs (e.g., Lauwers and Lantz 1990;Dewan and Choudhary 1991), or to actors' knowing and taking into account the wider organizational context (e.g., Dourish and Bellotti 1992; Dourish and Bly 1992), or to 'shared situation awareness' in the form of intersecting datasets (e.g., Endsley 1995;Endsley et al. 1999;Endsley and Jones 2001), or to more or less subtle means of directing attention (e.g., Nardi et al. 2000), or to the sentient stance of skilled actors as they effortlessly and reciprocally align their individual contributions to the cooperative effort (e.g., Harper et al. 1989;Heath and Luff 1992;Harper and Hughes 1993) 1 .Worse still, perhaps, there is a manifest tendency for different research traditions within CSCW to simply ignore the existence of different conceptualizations of 'mutual awareness', or of the different uses of the term, and to proceed, for instance, in exploring the affordances and challenges of, say, 'shared interfaces', 'augmented reality', etc. as if the conceptual problem of 'mutual awareness' has already been solved and hence a state of intellectual harmony achieved.In their article in this issue of the CSCW Journal, Josh Tenenberg, Wolff-Michael Roth, and David Socha (2016) put an end to this intellectually untenable state of affairs, by confronting established positions in CSCW with an articulate critique.With that, we can no longer proceed as if we do not have a problem.For that alone Tenenberg et al. are to be commended.Moreover, irrespective of whether or not one agrees with their conception of the problem or accepts the solution they outline, by proposing an alternative conceptualization grounded in respectable intellectual traditions, and by supporting their argument by a very rich 1 Actually, the earliest of these studies did not use the term 'awareness' but described the observations in different ways (e.g., 'monitoring', 'noticing').However, the term 'awareness' was later imported into that line of CSCW research as a label for actors' 'monitoring', 'noticing ', etc. (cf.e.g., Heath et al. 1993;Heath and Luff 2000;Sellen and Harper 2001;Heath et al. 2002).study of an instance of intense cooperative work, they force us, the CSCW research field, to critically rethink that whole bag of issues.Now, as it happens, I have myself, for more than two decades, tried to get to terms with how we can understand what we have termed 'mutual awareness' and have written extensively about the problem (Schmidt 1994a(Schmidt , b, 1998b;;Schmidt and Simone 2000; Schmidt 2002a Schmidt , b, 2011)).I also happen to be the author of some of the texts Tenenberg and his colleagues target in their critique (2002a, 2011).However, while I find their rendition of my position as expressed in these texts inaccurate and in places somewhat distorted, I will abstain from corrections and counter-interpretations: it is history anyway, and, more importantly, I accept that what I have previously written on these issues leaves much to be desired.So instead of justification I will try to move the discussion on the issue of 'mutual awareness' in CSCW forward by offering a critique of the solution suggested by Tenenberg et al. and, pursuant to that, by addressing the obvious shortcomings of my previously stated position on 'mutual awareness'.I hope this will also contribute to clarifying this longstanding issue. The challengeTenenberg, Roth, and Socha raise serious objections against the notion of 'mutual awareness' as used in CSCW.If I understand them correctly, their argument consists in a two-pronged advance.First of all, they find a conception of 'mutual awareness' common to the work of Toni Robertson, Christian Heath, Paul Luff and others, as well as myself, and characterize it as 'a first-person perspective that black-boxes the intentionality of others, focusing only on the actions, communication, and resources that are "publicly available"' (Tenenberg et al. 2016, § 1).This conception, they find, 'stops at the boundaries of skin and skull: one heeds what one can perceive of others without regard to their beliefs or goals' ( § 2).That is, it is a conception of cooperative work that portrays workers as hard-nosed behaviorists.Or as they summarize their critique, 'the minds of the individual actors are black-boxed': Against this conception Tenenberg et al. argue that collaborating workers, in performing their activities, not only 'heed' what others are doing, moment by moment; they are, in doing so, exhibiting 'shared intentionality'.That is, the subtle and effortless coordination to which the term 'mutual awareness' alludes is constituted by workers' possessing or developing 'shared intentionality'.In 'Shared intentionality […] provides a basis for reconceptualizing awareness in CSCW research, building on and augmenting existing notions of individual intentionality.And it is just such a reconceptualization of awareness, from "mutual awareness of something" carried out seamlessly and effortlessly (Schmidt 2011), to a "shared awareness of something that each recursively knows of the other" that we provide in this paper.' (Tenenberg et al. 2016, § 2).This is a very ambitious undertaking indeed!This commentary will focus on a critical discussion of the notion of 'shared intentionality' (and its support notions, 'sharing' and 'common ground') as developed in the literature Tenenberg et al. advocate as 'a basis for reconceptualizing awareness in CSCW research', primarily in the work of Tomasello but also Clark.Towards the end of the commentary, I will revisit the notion of 'awareness' and suggest that it frames the research problem in a way that leads nowhere.