Matt Webb presented his project Glancing – I’m OK, You’re OK at ETech a few days ago, and I was very impressed.
Glancing is an application to support small groups by simulating a very limited form of eye contact online … The model for Glancing is people sitting at work, focused on their own stuff. Every so often, somebody looks up to rest their eyes or because they’re thinking, maybe actually to look at someone else. Maybe they catch someone’s eye and that person nods back. And then they all get on with their work.
The eye contact Matt describes is a graphical eye on screen that opens and closes according to how much “glancing” is going on between users.
Matt, following Goffman, explains that eye contact allows people to tentatively initiate social contact in a sufficiently ambiguous way that the other person is not obligated to respond. (That might also solve many of the problems with social bludgeoning in services like Friendster and Orkut, no?) And as Matt says, “Letting people save face is really important if you want to keep them happy.” He adds that eye contact not only allows us to see and to recognise others, but also to be seen and to be recognised – something else that keeps us happy together.
At this point, I might intervene and suggest that the value of eye contact is culturally variable – and that we should be careful not to confuse the glance with the gaze. There are many cultures, for instance, in which a distinct avoidance of eye contact is considered a sign of respect (or deference). I also recall from my primate anthropology classes that eye contact sustained for longer than 15 seconds without breaks is interpreted as a gaze – a sign of over-focus or aggression. Grrr. Furthermore, visibility and recognition can just as easily be oppressive and invasive, as they can be reassuring. (And sometimes a lack of information is more distressing than too much information.) But my point (was there one?) is that eye contact is pretty steady – steadier than glancing and sometimes dangerously close to a gaze.
In Rob’s recent paper, Visualicity – on urban visibility and invisibility, he describes the differences between a glance and a gaze:
Whereas the gaze is directed at a focus, an icon, the glance surveys a field, a context. It is a rapid scan, momentarily bringing into retinal focus a peripheral movement in search of emergent elements of the visual field. Restlessly striking first one element then another, knocking them out of the context or background into the foreground, continually interrupting the current focus of attention. The glance is visual flaneurie …
Gaze might be also understood as contemplative and intentional, but the glance serves as a metaphor of affection – it is not concentrated but marks the itinerary of those subconscious desiring processes which are most easily distracted. It alights, only to skip on
again … Glances scan for emergence, unpredicted outcomes, self-organizations resulting from the complex interaction of forces and bodies in the urban field … [A glance] rocks the gaze with its continual alerts, messaging change, bringing about a curious mixture of stasis and mobility …
Monuments and look-outs which afford a commanding view are examples of the gaze, but the glance is more mundane and intimate – an object in a shop window, the approaching automobile, the passer-by … The glance engages with the displacement of sources of control and centres of power from the present …
But back to Matt’s application – his design for tentative and ambiguous presence and greater social ease online: he says this is about more than simply “reading” data – it is about gleaning and experiencing – activities more consistent with offline sociability, and with Rob’s description of the glimpsed city.
I’m interested in sociable software that offers glances instead of gazes, in part because it shifts power relations and threatens architectures of control. This is also related to Matt’s call for greater attention to the ethical dimensions of technological development. (And this serves to remind me that I never finished writing my essay on Maffesoli’s tribes and Canetti’s crowds as ways to understand social dynamics for sociable software. Sigh.)
But really, the part of Matt’s presentation that made me beam from ear to ear was this:
[C]oncepts like adaptable design, and designing for hackability and unintended consequences aren’t just design rules of thumb, they’re aspects of how to be a good person and create a just society.
Hear hear, Matt! Couldn’t agree more :) And so when can I try out Glancing on my computer?