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I’m putting together a draft of a paper to give at a Yale Information Society Project lunch in a few weeks. This was set up months ago, in large part with the goal of forcing me to actually get down in tangible form a lot of what I’ve been thinking about and point myself in a specific direction for my next research project. Unfortunately, I’ve been finding it remarkably hard to get back into writing (particularly after having spent months revising my dissertation into a manuscript, currently out for review). That in mind, I figure I’ll start sketching out my argument here, so I can at least get some of the ideas out while I’m figuring out the connections between them.

So, the general topic in which I’ve been increasingly interested are the people who fall somewhere between the traditional categories of “producer” and “consumer.” Thus far, I’ve got a title:

bq. The Instruction Manual and the Wiki: Amateur Identity and Technology in Commons-Based Peer Production

I’ve been thinking a lot about instruction manuals as a metaphor for the ways that we use technology; if, following general STS theory, the actual *meaning* of a technology is structured by the frame of knowledge layered on top of it, then we can think of there being a sort of cultural “instruction manual” for every artifact.

A key property of an instruction manual is that it’s tangible, words on paper, a fixed codification of what one can do with a specific thing. When we buy a new camera or VCR or microwave oven, the manual that comes with it was produced by the corporation that made the artifact itself (though not necessarily by the actual designers and engineers who made the artifact; this is an important point, and one which cries out to be studied by some sort of ethnography of technical writing). We, as consumers/users, are expected to learn how to use this new thing we own by reading the manual.

One might raise the point that instruction manuals are almost universally reviled, and the goal of many designers is to create technologies that are, in a sense, __prêt à employer__ – for many, the ideal design is one which requires no instruction manual, but which is so obvious on its face that any further discussion of how it is to be used is superfluous. The thing that gets left out of this argument is the fact that there is still an instruction manual of sorts, just one which hangs in the intangible threads of culture that inform our day-to-day lives. At one point, users needed an instruction manual to understand that a green button with a right-pointing triangle meant play and a red button with a square meant stop, but this knowledge became so ubiquitous as to become invisible, so commonplace as to be obvious.

This is one mode of using a technology – following the instruction manual (whether physical or cultural). There’s another distinct mode, however, one which is either prized or punished depending on the particular context; this what happens when a person picks up a thing and *plays*, in essence revising (or even creating out of whole cloth) sections of the instruction manual for that thing[1]. In these cases, it’s as if the instruction manual which was normally held fixed by both the physical nature of print and various cultural force has been posted on a wiki, where anyone and everyone can edit or add to it in a virtually frictionless manner.

That’s the key tension here, between the instruction manual and the wiki as models of how we learn what a given technology is good for.

fn1. The word “play” is really important here, though I’m still trying to understand exactly how…I first realized this at this year’s 4S meeting when talking with Bart Simon about video games, at which point I first grasped how useful Game Studies might be to the study of amateurs/hackers/tinkerers in general…

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November 25, 2005 Epistemographer » Blog Archive » Blackboxing and Instruction Manuals

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