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1996 Sense-Making Workshop

Workshop Abstracts

COPYRIGHT AND CITATION INFORMATION:
© Shields, Peter and Dervin, Brenda, 1996. Cite as: Shields, Peter and Dervin, Brenda (1996). Sense-Making and the missing user in telecommunication policy research. Paper presented at International Communication Association annual meeting, Chicago, Illinois, May 23. Available at: http://communication.sbs.ohio-state.edu/sense-making/meet/m96pshields.html

ESSENCE OF PROJECT:
In current US telecommunication policy debates, industry, government and academic discourses regularly include untested assumptions about residential user needs and wants as part of their justifications. We seek in a modest way to add the missing residential user voice to the debates. To this end, we set out to collect a detailed and sophisticated data base that would allow comparison of telecommunication perspectives, needs, and uses of different population sub-groups, specifically urban versus rural users. The intent was to examine the ways in which population sub-groups differ on a set of dimensions extracted from a review of the relevant literature: Phone Importance (user assessment of the importance of the phone in their lives); Phone Privacy (user opinions and actions regarding privacy violations--what they think, what they have done, whether it worked); Phone as Basic Right (user opinions regarding the phone as a basic right, whether they would be willing to pay higher taxes and/or higher phone bills to assure it, and why); Telecom Ownership (user ownership of basic phone technology and ownership--past, present, and possible future--of "enhanced" services and the ways in which these were seen as helping and/or hindering users); Phone Diary (user use of the phone for one full week).

The project was executed in the data collection phase with a phone survey to a sample of Ohio residents. The interview process was based on the Sense-Making approach. To date one data analysis has been completed and reported for comparisons of user uses and assessments of "enhanced" services (Shields, Dervin, Richter & Soller, 1993). Currently, we are in the process of writing-up the results of our analysis of telephone privacy.

THE REASON WE TOOK THIS ROAD:
A key constitutive feature of telecommunication policy discourses is the struggle to construct the residential telecommunication user. Actors from government, industry, consumer groups and academia construct residential users as citizens and/or consumers with particular needs, behaviors, interests, and desires. Typically, debates are framed in the following manner: Shall the government or the market satisfy the telecommunication needs of particular groups of users, and if so, to what degree? The frame employed permits only a relatively small number of answers. Even more important, it takes for granted the needs, behaviors and desires in question, as if they were self-evident or beyond dispute. The discursive contest therefore tends to occlude the fact that the interpretation of people's needs is itself a political stake.

Sense-Making (S-M) offers a means of challenging the "reification effect" of the "needs talk" alluded to above. S-M mandates that the analyst enter the lives and worlds of the users so the latter can talk in their own terms and in the contexts of their own situated lives about their telecommunication needs and wants. The analyst can then identify the kinds of gaps that exist between user understandings and institutional understandings of user needs and behaviors. Unearthing these gaps can represent a significant disruption in the operation of institutional power. That is, these gaps make clear that the interpretation of people's needs are not simply given or unproblematic, rather need interpretations are contested. This leads quickly to the following kinds of thorny questions: What exactly do various groups of people really need and who should have the last say in such matters?

THE BEST OF WHAT WE HAVE ACHIEVED:
Thus far, results bear out the view that there are enormous complexities in user perspectives, needs, and uses that are being systematically glossed over by the policy discourse. For example, in our analysis of user uses and assessments of "enhanced" services (e.g., cordless phone, answering machines, call forwarding, call waiting) no evidence was found to support the stark differences between urban "haves" and rural "have-nots" that is widely assumed in the policy literature. The results also indicate that rural and urban residents may differ in their motivations and, thus, be attracted to different products and services. Again this is in contradiction to the policy literature which assumes that all users will want and seek the same kinds of products and services.

Much of the academic and policy discourse concerning privacy invasion is focused on new telecommunications and computer applications, not the commonplace telephone. Our data suggests that this is a glaring omission. Approximately 60% of our 300 respondents felt that their privacy had been violated.

We are now preparing analyses using multiple predictors (demography, context, situation) as policy relevant criterions. In doing so, Brenda has spent many hours wrestling with how to present policy "articulate" quantitative data and how to complement/contest this with qualitative data. Melissa Spirek (Department of Telecommunications, Bowling Green State University) has been of considerable help in this regard.

WHAT HAS BEEN PARTICULARLY HELPFUL TO US:
Peter is very much informed by the political economy tradition which privileges analysis of particular structural features of social life. In much political economy discourse the individual agent is quite often portrayed as a mere bearer of social relations. By contrast, Brenda is the architect of an actor-centered approach to the study of communication and information processes. We have found that our respective engagements with Anthony Giddens' structuration theory has provided a meta-theoretical framework or discourse that has facilitated dialogue between us. In Giddens' schema, agents and structures are understood to be mutually constitutive or codetermined entities, neither being subordinate to the other.

Giddens' stratification model of the agent has been quite helpful to Peter's conceptualizing. The model suggests that agents routinely and chronically "reflexively monitor" what they are doing, and the contexts and settings in which they are doing it. An important aspect of this is that agents "routinely...maintain a continuing 'theoretical understanding' of the grounds of their activity." In other words, agents are usually capable of elaborating discursively why they act as they do. According to Giddens, reflexive monitoring occurs at two levels of consciousness--discursive and practical (these levels are subject to the drives and motivations in the agent's unconscious). Discursive consciousness mean "being able to put things into words." Practical consciousness consists "of all things which actors know tacitly about how to 'go on' in the contexts of social life without being able to give them discursive expression." Here agents rely on implicit stocks of knowledge about social rules and resources (structures "carried" in the knowledge which actors possess). The "boundary" between discursive and practical consciousness is porous and contingent on the agent's time-space path (e.g., exposure to new contexts, settings, knowledges). Peter understands S-M as a means of "tapping" not just the agent's discursive consciousness but it also can be used to provide glimpses of how the boundary may shift. In fact, it may be claimed that S-M interviewing techniques in the hands of a skilled practitioner effects shifts in the boundary (a conscientizing effect?).

WHAT HAS HINDERED US/WHAT HAVE WE STRUGGLED WITH:
As mentioned above, we operate out of different frameworks--political economy (Peter) and users assessments (Brenda), respectively. Because of this we have had to pay particular attention to building bridges between the two frameworks. An example of this, is Brenda's repeated attempts at seeking to understand what it is about political economy or policy debates that has Peter interested in particular kinds of data or has him posing certain kinds of questions. As suggested above, much of the "bridge-work" has also taken place at the meta-theoretic level.

Particularly vexing has been the epistemological issues that the project raises. We are interested in giving voice to the missing residential user. But what is the basis for this? Are we saying that residential user's interpretation should be sovereign? Whether and how is it possible to distinguish better from worse interpretations of people's needs? Are all need interpretations equally valid?

At some level in this project, we make a commitment to two notions: (i) needs are for the most part culturally constructed and discursively interpreted (ii) it is incorrect to assume that any need interpretation is as good as any other. How do we justify this commitment? Clearly, our adherence to the first notion rules out an appeal to a traditional objectivist approach (i.e., it is simply a matter of finding the interpretation that matches the true nature of the need as it really is in itself, independent of any interpretation). Further, in committing to the second notion, we don't want to take an additional step to suggest that there is a pre-established point of epistemic superiority, as if it were a matter of finding the one group in society with the privileged standpoint (the residential user!).

As we struggle with these issues, we find ourselves close to the kind of position that has been staked out by the likes of Iris Young, Nancy Fraser and David Harvey. For example, Fraser argues that we must take into account two distinct considerations when assessing interpretations: (i) Procedural considerations--for example, how exclusive or inclusive are competing needs interpretations? How hierarchical and egalitarian are the relations among the interlocutors? For Fraser, procedural considerations suggest that the best need interpretations are those reached by means of communicative processes that most closely approximates the ideals of democracy, equality and fairness. (ii) Consequentialist considerations--for example, would widespread acceptance of some given interpretation disadvantage some groups relative to others? Does the intepretation conform to, rather than challenge, societal patterns of dominance and subordination? For Fraser, the consequentialist considerations dictate that the best interpretations of needs are those that do not disadvantage some groups of people relative to others. In this schema, some interpretations of needs matter more than others. This is based on a commitment to some universals.

WHAT WOULD HELP US NOW:
We would benefit from discussion of the points raised above (sections G. and H.).

PROJECT ABSTRACT:
As noted earlier we are the in the process of writing-up the results of our analysis of telephone privacy. The following is a brief summary of what we hope to achieve:

National surveys in the US and Canada indicate that in the last decade or so there has been a dramatic increase in public concern with privacy. A recent Bellcore sponsored US national survey suggests that much of this concern may be related to practices associated with telecommunication--when asked to provide examples of privacy invasions, telephone related examples amounted to 28.5% of total responses. Against this backdrop, policy makers across North America have increasingly turned their attention to telecommunication privacy. Numerous privacy policy initiatives have been undertaken by federal and state telecommunication regulators in the US and the safeguarding of privacy has been declared a core objective of Canadian telecommunication policy.

Yet policymakers are deliberating and devising telecommunication privacy policy with little empirical evidence concerning the relevant telecommunication behavior and needs of residential users. The relevant survey research focuses on relating attitudes about privacy to demographic characteristics. Some studies have also attempted to link attitudes about privacy to respondents' ideological positions. As James Katz has recently pointed out, these contributions to understanding privacy overlook user behavior. The consequence is that "we have little understanding of who takes what steps to protect privacy, and what actions people are willing to take to protect privacy as opposed to sentiments or concerns they express about its loss."

The purpose of the paper is to begin to address this research lacuna. Our analysis is based on data collected with a telephone survey of a sample of Ohio residents. Using Dervin's actor-centered, sense-making methodology and associated interview technique, we generate a combination of quantitative and qualitative results that will illuminate the following: users' understandings of what constitutes telephone privacy invasion; the privacy protection strategies developed by users; the motivations that led to the development of these strategies; users' understandings of the costs and benefits of these strategies. The paper will conclude with a discussion of the policy implications of our empirical findings.