On Wed. morning I went to a great session titled “Knowledge Flow in ‘Real’ and ‘Virtual’ Spaces.”

Patricia Lange (San Jose State U.) led off talking about her analysis of ‘tech talk’ in online chats. She argued, in a nutshell, that debaters and ‘flamers’ often resort to morality as the basis for critiques in the great Linux/Windows debate. Her talk was an interesting mix of social-rhetorical analysis and ethnomethodology. Later on, Patricia and I talked a bit about whether the tense of statements in a chat room has any influence on the arguments, whether it’s intentional, etc. What I mean is, in most chats you can either type something directly, in which case the text appears as “: ” or you can give a command that makes a statement in the 3rd person, as in “ thinks the Linux/PC debate is pointless.” These two different forms might say something about the speakers’ strategy for conveying power or authority through online chats. Anyway, a point for further discussion.

Roxana Wales also gave a nice talk on her work at NASA with the Mars rover missions. She’s just recently moved to Google, not to work on a product, but to study work practice and growing pains at Google itself. Very cool stuff, and I can’t wait to hear more about it.

Elizabeth Churchill also gave a great paper in which she described her work with an interactive community bulletin board in a café space. I really loved her discussion, partly because it was well framed, and partly because it meshes really well with recent thinking I have been doing on the power of soundscapes as a shared ‘canvas’ for communication, collaboration, and creativity. Although Elizabeth’s story ended sadly (the touch-screen bulletin board broke and no one paid to fix it) I think it’s way ahead of its time. One question, largely unresolved, is how people will respond to the presence of new and potentially foreign interaction artifacts in their space. Which technological frames will they use to understand them? Are the ads? Are they like physical bulletin boards? Like computers or laptops? Fascinating questions.

Perhaps the best part of this session, which attracted a small but vocal and diverse group of people, was the discussion. We had a good 30 minutes of chatting about a variety of issues. This is why I love the SfAAs – they bring together a generous and curious group of folks who just want to share ideas. I hope there continue to be more IT-related folks at the meetings. Brigitte Jordan has been a fixture for the last few years, and I have really enjoyed her contributions, beginning with a roundtable on corporate anthropology at the 2004 meetings in Dallas.

More later…