The accompanying slides can be found here:

The video of the talk can be found here.

What is Cognitive Science?

I started by discussing the field of Cognitive Science (my department at UCSD). Cognitive Science is broad, interdisciplinary field that is rooted in three main areas: brain, behavior, and computation. For example, it studies how people think, what goes on in their heads, how they behave in the world, and (on the computational side) how to model some of these real human traits to develop new theories or hypotheses. Of course, Cognitive Scientists do a number of other things, too. (Human-computer interaction is also informed by studies of Cognitive Science).

What is Distributed Cognition?

Ed Hutchins and other researchers developed the theory of “distributed cognition” (dcog) at UC San Diego in the late 1980s. Dcog is really an approach or theoretical framework for studying all of cognition—it is not a type of cognition. It is also not the same as “collective intelligence” or “wisdom of the crowds,” and it is not simply studying how people interact with each other. It recognizes that “human cognition is always situated in a complex sociocultural world and cannot be unaffected by it” (Hutchins, 1995, p.xiii), and therefore considers people’s interactions with others, with material artifacts in the environment, and with the cultural influences of a place to understand how a cognitive system operates. This cognitive system, or “unit” of analysis, may be at the level of a single individual or it may include many operators and environmental factors (think inside an airplane cockpit or on the bridge of a navy ship).

Distributed Cognition on Navy Ships

Ed’s seminal text on Cognition in the Wild (1995) seeks to understand how people manage to sail large navy ships. The “unit” of analysis here is the entire collection of “objects” involved in navigating a ship: including all the relevant actors (main navigator plus the people who assist him), their tools (gyroscopes, maps, compasses), and the navy culture that imposes various rules and regulations in the way people can (and must) interaction with each other, for example. Studying a setting like this makes it fairly obvious that people are, in fact, embedded in complex environments—saying that “cognition” is what goes on inside the skin or skull of a single individual here overlooks too many other factors that (directly and indirectly) influence what gets done.

Onto the Social Web

This framework can also be used for studying the Internet. The Internet is clearly distributed (from the servers that support the principle architecture to the people who interact on various web services). The “social web” is a term some people are using to describe the increasing social nature of people’s online experiences. Many websites are being built on an inherent social framework, where people can easily connect, communicate, or share with others, and often as a by-product of their primary use of the site. Applying dcog to the social web here, we must study the entirety of people’s online experiences: from their social interactions (exchanges with friends, buddy lists they may have), to the websites they use (interface elements, “social objects” they create and discover from blog posts to social bookmarks), and to the web culture itself (people’s inherited or adopted social roles, rules for sharing or interacting, etc.)

A number of researchers have studied social networks and how people interact on individual websites (Digg, Flickr, Twitter, del.icio.us, etc.), but I believe this is the wrong “unit of analysis.” Today when people use the web, they are actively involved on multiple services even for simple tasks like reading the news. Sites like FriendFeed, SocialThing, and lifestream.fm, which aggregate users’ diverse online activities, suggest that this is increasingly the case. My FriendFeed account, for example, provides a single view (or “stream”) for my actions online: uploading photos to Flickr, posting status updates to Twitter, checking in at a new location on Brightkite, Digging an article, or writing a blog post. Yesterday alone it had about 10 updates of my various activities. Of course, people can choose whether or not to use these types of services to record their histories, but considering I had 10 “items” of activity yesterday, imagine what else I did that wasn’t recorded using this service?

Think about what your morning routine is like. Do you visit certain services to read the news or check updates from your friends or family someplace? The hypothetical (yet realistic) example I gave in the talk was: imagine you start by checking your Gmail account, then flip over to your news reader (e.g., NewsFire). From there you find an article from the New York Times which you read and decide to bookmark on Ma.gnolia (or del.icio.us )—either to share with friends or with plans to revisit in the future. You may decide to check updates on Twitter, from which you discover a friend has posted pictures from a recent trip. You follow the link to Flickr and browse the photos. While this episode may occur over 15-20 minutes, 5-6 websites were used to stay up-to-date on current events (whether personal or public). Of course, your routine may include different websites, communities, or interests—this example is intended to be representative only in its broad structure. However, distributed cognition can be used to study the interactions of single individuals as they operate across a range of online environments, sites and services, cultures and contexts, specifying the correct boundary of analysis to be web-wide, not simply system-wide (i.e. single services).

We could also apply dcog theory to study the flow of information across the social web. Considering just a portion of the hypothetical morning routine from above, a single article was published on the NYTimes.com, appeared in a user’s feed reader, and ended up as a bookmark (pointer, reference) on Ma.gnolia. Perhaps new users later discovered this information through the bookmark. How does this general “topic” (content of the article) relate to similar news stories being published online? In other words, what is an information topic’s history, flow, and influence? Social web services are facilitating the propagation and (re-)production of information (whether original items or “memes”). Here distributed cognition could help direct our study of the context and consequence of information as it exchanges hands and flows across multiple services on the web. (Do social web services help extend the “reach” of information topics?)

Conclusion

In summary to what I thought would be a much briefer recap of my talk, I intend to focus my research on users’ extended (distributed and embedded) interactions with people, interfaces, and networks across the web. Ultimately this will probably involve both log file analysis on a large scale and ethnography of fewer numbers of individuals. It’s interesting to study the social web both from the perspective of the individual users and of the information itself (social objects getting created, shared/propagated, and discovered). Both people and objects make up the web, and distributed cognition theory will help establish the appropriate level of analysis for the specific question we’re answering, by including important factors like social interactions across different web services to subtle cultural influences.

Apparently, this year’s fires were not nearly as devastating as the 2003 wildfires. Nearly twice as many homes and nearly twice as many (combined) acreage was destroyed in 2003 compared to this year. Nevertheless, the damage caused by this year’s fires includes 7 deaths and more than $400 million in firefighter costs; the city is expecting $1 Billion in disaster relief. (Can’t recall exactly where I first got these numbers.)

After UCSD decided to close last week, I flew to Mountain View a few days earlier than planned. I made good progress on my work, visited with folks at PARC to discuss upcoming research plans, and finally spent a wonderful weekend with Leif. Leif and I started by flying to Portland, OR, to visit with old friends (Wingo and Mormon). We were given a whirlwind tour of the city, had some enjoyable meals, and even had time to visit Powell’s bookstore, which was conveniently located a block away from our nouveau-industrial(ly) themed hotel, the Ace Hotel. By mid-day Saturday, we began our road trip back along I-5 in Oregon and 101 in California. The drive was so beautiful! Oregon is experiencing full-on fall weather, so the air was crisp, the leaves were turning, and the hills were lush and green. (Despite these differences, the landscape along I-5 in Oregon reminded us somewhat of the central valley in California.) Once we made it to Northern California, though, the Redwood forests dominated the landscape. There was some heavy fog (as expected) right along the coast, but the Elk Prairie Campground, where we camped (in the Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park), experienced mild, clear weather. Sunday morning we went for a hike among the Redwoods and saw a heard of wild Elk eating breakfast in the meadow. (We were within 10 feet of them–it was both scary and cool!). We stayed on 101 the rest of the way through California, hoping to make it to the Golden Gate bridge just before sunset. Unfortunately, traffic in Santa Rosa delayed us by 20 minutes of our goal, but we ended up having a delicious dinner at Cha-ya, a new vegetarian (vegan) Japanese restaurant in the Mission, followed by homemade ice cream from Bi-Rite. It was an excellent weekend. I’ll try to upload some photos soon…

Be well, friends.

A highlight of my reunion was visiting with friends, Erika Williams and Molly Meneely, for breakfast at Hobees:

But overall, I came away from my reunion feeling a little empty. Most of my good friends these days are not my former classmates. Of my good friends who were there, we couldn’t spend much quality time together because of the way the reunion was designed (happy hour, to tail gate, to class party…all settings where people just kept boozing). I almost had more fun at Leif’s NC School of Science & Math reunion! Although I didn’t know anyone there, I had long conversations with about 10 really interesting people! Maybe being removed from the history and relationships in that group let me look beyond any cliques to enjoy the people as they are today.

It will be interesting to see how these people and my relationships with them will change in another 5 years, although I imagine that I’ll grow even more distant from my college friends as our lives continue to spiral away from each other (geographically, professionally, emotionally). Although that seems inevitable, maybe it’s not entirely undesirable. Afterall, I have a fantastic life: I am challenged and satisfied by school; my friends are fun and interesting; I am healthy and active; and I am loved and supported by my family. College was a great part of my life–but it is natural and fulfilling to have moved on.

I’m feeling relieved, though, that I have finally finished all the work I needed to do this week. Tomorrow (October 4) I’m flying to San Jose for the night, and then Leif and I are heading to North Carolina for a long weekend! It’s Leif’s 10-year high school reunion from the North Carolina School of Science & Math (NCSSM). Does that make him old? We are also going to try to rally the troops (his high school friends) to make a visit to the mountains for a day or two…we were there once before, and it was quite nice to escape “computer-land” — I mean the state of most of my life. Then we are back in the Bay Area from Oct 10-14 for my 5-year college reunion — nuts! I got word that an old-old-old high school friend (Latika Ravi) lives in San Francisco now so I really hope we get a chance to visit her. I know I will be busy, though, with reunions of my own group of college friends, freshman dorm, class (’02) party, etc. Although this mini-vacation is not exactly in line with a school break, it is much needed and I am looking forward to it!

I will, of course, still be online, reading, writing, working and may even answer the phone especially for those of you I haven’t talked to in a while: Addie, Danika, Erinn, Mom (in order of the longest time that has elapsed since last talking). Did you not make the list? Try g-chat instead where I can pretend to talk to you while still doing my other work. Please forgive me. This sort of nonsense talk is what happens when you’re up waaaaay past your bedtime and you still can’t fall asleep…but that’s a story for another day.