The Street Finds its Own Use Cases.
Adam Greenfield on the fault lines between actual use, and how the designers imagined people would use technology:
I have never seen a use case that starts with a proposition like "Greta wants to sneak out and meet her lover Patrick, without making her husband Bertrand suspicious." Or "Kenji wants his private contact information to be more available to his close friends than the random boys he picks up clubbing." Or "Claudia wants to IM and play games on her computer at work, while making it seem as if she's busy getting things done."
And yet, experience tells us that's just what people do with technology.
Greenfield mentions an instance where providers have anticipated this sort of deceptive use pattern -- the "Escape A Date" service.
So I'm bothered by EscapeADate.com replacing the informal pattern ("Joe, call me at 8:30 so I have a way of bailing out if my date is terrible".) Even though both are lies.
Does your ditched date implicitly understand that she's been blackballed? What happens when both you and your date's phones ring at 8:30.
Do you want to have a discoverable credit card record of a charge for EscapeADate sitting around when the next girl you meet calls a friend at US Bank and asks them about what you buy? Yes, that's illegal, but apparently everyone's cheating these days.
The "yes, everyone cheats" so let make it part of our business plan idea bothers me. I'm not saying it out of sense of superiority, but out of utopian, nerdish frustration that humans favor little lies over brute honesty. And a worry that taking our little lies into the the internet, phone, and banking systems, where trails are left, will make little lies into big problems.
Besides the fault lines between use cases and actual use, technology exposes another: the one between our human nature and what our cultures expect of us.
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Sunday, October 17, 2004
