A Critical Reading of the Scholarly and ICT Industry’s Construction of Ambient Intelligence for Societal Transformation of Europe

By Simon Elias Bibri

School of Art, Communication and Culture, Malmö University, Sweden

Thesis Submitted for Completion of Master of Communication for Development, Malmö University, Sweden June 2012

Supervisor: Ulrika Sjöberg Examiner: Bo Reimer

i Abstract

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) refers to a vision of the information society where everyday human environments will be permeated by intelligent technology: people will be surrounded and accompanied by intelligent interfaces supported by computing and wireless networking technology that is ubiquitous, embedded in virtually all kinds of everyday objects. These computationally augmented, smart environments - composed of a myriad of invisible, distributed, networked, connected, interactive, and always-on computing devices - are aware of human context; sensitive to people's needs; adaptive to, and anticipatory of, their behavior; personalized to their requirements; and responsive to their emotion and presence, thereby intelligently supporting their daily and social lives by providing limitless services in a seamless and unobtrusive way. The vision of AmI assumes a paradigmatic shift in both computing and society – far-reaching societal implications. The challenge lies in developing AmI forms that acclimatise to societal change and the diversity of European socio-cultural life. Indeed, one of the most fundamental views in the prevailing AmI vision is a radical and technology-driven change to social environments and people’s lives. Research emphasizes the fundamental role the ISTAG, a group of scholars and ICT industry experts, plays in the reproduction of AmI as a positive force for societal change. Therefore, the objective of this study is to carry out a critical reading of the scholarly and ICT industry’s construction of AmI in relation to societal transformation. To achieve this objective, a discourse analytical approach was employed to examine the selected empirical material: three reports published by the ISTAG in 2001, 2003 and 2006. The approach consists of seven stages: (1) surface elements and organizational structure, (2) discursive constructions, (3) social actors, (4) language and rhetoric, (5) framing as power and operation, (6) positioning and legitimation, and (7) ideological viewpoints.

The AmI discourse (vision) construction tends to be deterministic, i.e. it assumes that the ‘amization’ of society will lead to radical social transformations, and has an unsophisticated account of how social change occurs. It is also inclined to be rhetorical - it promises revolutionary social changes without really having a holistic strategy for achieving the goal. Moreover, topicalization is accomplished in correspondence with the preferred mental models and social representations. Furthermore, the discourse is exclusionary: many issues (pertaining to trust, social sustainability, human-centred design, healthcare, and community life) are left out with the intention to advance the idea of the eventual societal acceptance of AmI. It additionally plays a role in wider processes of legitimation of social agents and structures on the basis of normative and political reasons, and it offers different subject positions: between ISTAG and Europe and European citizens, and between citizens and ICT designers and producers. Likewise, it plays a major role in constructing the image of social actors – ISTAG, ICT industry, research community and EU – as well as in defining their relations and identities in ways that reallocate roles and reflect new attributes. A great highlight and space is awarded to represent these actors, and their views dominate the reports. They are the prime definer of the represented reality. As to ideological reproduction, the discourse perpetuates power relations, serves the interest of certain stakeholders in European society, and reconstructs ideological claims.

This discursive endeavor provides a valuable reference for social researchers or scientists in related research communities. Until now, there has been, to the best of one’s knowledge, no comprehensive discursive research of AmI in relation to societal transformation, more specifically the potential of AmI in modernizing the European social model and in shaping Europe’s future.

Keywords: AmI, ICT, AmI vision, AmI discourse, construction, discourse analysis, power, ideology, social transformation, society, citizens, ISTAG, ICT industry, scholarly, European, social, critical, Foucault

ii Acknowledgment

I would like to acknowledge and express my gratitude for my supervisor Ulrika Sjöberg, Associate Professor of Media and Communication at Malmö University, for her support and encouragement during the course of the project work. Her feedback was always constructive and her guidance kept me on a sound research path while her good nature made working with her a pleasure.

iii Table of Contents

Acknowledgment ...... iii Table of Contents ...... iv Abbreviations...... vi 1. Introduction...... 1 1.1. Ambient Intelligence for Societal Transformation of Europe...... 1 1.2. Research Problem and Justification...... 2 1.3. Research Objectives and Questions ...... 3 1.4. Scope and Limitations ...... 4 1.5. Review of Key Concepts...... 5 1.5.1. AmI versus Ubicomp ...... 5 1.5.2. AmI as Discourse and Paradigmatic Shift in Computing and Society...... 6 1.5.3. Social Change and Transformation...... 8 1.5.4. New Technology and Kinds of Society...... 9 1.6. Structure of the Study ...... 9 2. Literature Review...... 10 2.1. Social Dimensions, Issues and Challenges of AmI (ICT) ...... 10 2.1.1. Privacy and Security ...... 10 2.1.2. Technology Invisibility and Autonomy - Loss of Control ...... 13 2.1.3. Digital Divide – Technological and Socio-Demographic Gaps ...... 14 2.1.4. Design Process as Politics and Philosophy...... 15 2.1.5. The Social Embeddedness of Technologies ...... 17 2.2. Positioning the Study in Relation to Previous Research...... 18 3. Conceptual and Theoretical Framework ...... 19 3.1. Foucauldian Theory of Discourse and its Relevance to the Study ...... 19 3.2. Discourse and Related Concepts...... 19 3.3. The Representation of Knowledge, Episteme and Power/Knowledge...... 20 3.3.1. Socio-Cultural and Historical Situativity of Knowledge...... 21 3.3.2. Statements and the Meaningful ...... 21 3.3.3. Power as Productive, Constraining and Regulating ...... 22 3.4. Power as Control - Mind Control ...... 23 3.5. The Implication of Power/Knowledge for Truth...... 24 3.6. Subjects and Social Practice...... 25 3.7. Inter-discursivity...... 26 4. Research Methodology ...... 27 4.1. Discourse Analytical Approach ...... 27 4.1.1. Discursive Research on Scholarly Discourse ...... 27 4.1.2. Foucauldian Discourse Analysis (FDA) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)...... 28 4.2. The Corpus and Context...... 29 4.3. Analytical Tools – Seven Stages...... 30

iv 4.4. Methodological Reflections...... 34 4.4.1. The Role and Position of the Analyst...... 34 4.4.2. The Ethics of Doing Discourse Analysis ...... 35 4.4.3. Potential Ways to Go about Performing Discourse Analysis ...... 35 5. The Empirical Work – Data Analysis ...... 37 5.1. Surface Elements and Structural Organization ...... 37 5.2. Discursive Constructions...... 38 5.3. Social Actors – Collective Framing Power...... 39 5.4. Language and Rhetoric ...... 39 5.4.1. Linguistic Resources ...... 39 5.4.2. Rhetorical Figures...... 40 5.4.3. The Effect of Rhetoric...... 41 5.5. Framing as Operation ...... 42 5.5.1. Framing as Selection and Composition ...... 42 5.5.2. Framing as Selection and Salience ...... 46 5.6. Positioning and Legitimation...... 46 5.7. Ideological Viewpoints ...... 47 5.7.1. Nationalistic Ideology ...... 47 5.7.2. Vision Building and Ideological Claims ...... 49 5.7.3. Intermingled Interests ...... 49 5.7.4. Power Reproduction – the Role of EU and Governmentality ...... 50 6. Concluding Remarks...... 52 6.1. Key Findings and Discussions ...... 52 6.2. Reliability, Validity and Limitations...... 56 6.3. Future Research...... 57 References ...... 59 Appendix A: Technological Features and Benefits of AmI...... 68 1. Context Awareness...... 68 1.1. Context in Context Aware Computing ...... 68 1.2. Context Awareness: Definitional Issues and Technological Challenges ...... 69 2. Implicit and Natural Interaction...... 71 3. AmI Services...... 73 3.1. Personalization...... 73 3.2. Adaptability and Responsiveness ...... 73 4. Social Intelligence...... 75 5. Technology Invisibility ...... 76 5.1. Mental Invisibility ...... 76 5.2. Physical Invisibility and Technology Pervasion ...... 77 Appendix B: ICT and Computing Definition ...... 78

v Abbreviations

AmI: Ambient Intelligence CDA: Critical Discourse Analysis DA: Discourse Analysis DG: Directorate General EC: European Commission EU: European Union FDA: Foucauldian Discourse Analysis FP: Framework Program HCI: Human-Computer Interaction ICTs: Information and Communication Technologies IPTS-JRC: Institute for Prospective Technological Studies-Joint Research Center IST: Information Society Technologies ISTAG: Information Society Technologies Advisory Group PD: Participatory Design RTD: Research and Technology Development Ubicomp: Ubiquitous Computing UCD: User-Centred Design

vi Chapter One

1. Introduction 1.1. Ambient Intelligence for Societal Transformation of Europe

ICT permeates modern societies and has a strong effect on human lives. Technological breakthroughs and paradigm shifts continue to demonstrate that there is a tremendous untapped potential for harnessing and adding intelligence to ICT to better serve society and, thus, transform the way people live within it. Since the early 1990s, researchers have had the vision that ICT could do much more. ICT could weave into the fabric of human society and offer useful services that support communication, interaction and actions in various ways whenever and wherever needed, regardless of time and place (e.g. Weiser 1991; ISTAG 2001, 2003; Streitz & Nixon 2005). Contemporary societies are increasingly realizing ICT’s transformational and constitutive effects. ISTAG (2006, p. ii) states: ‘As ICT becomes more deeply embedded into the fabric of European society, it is starting to unleash massive and far-reaching social...change. ICT is essential...for bringing more advanced solutions for societal problems, and for providing new services’ to citizens. As a ‘constitutive technology’, ICT shapes how we do things; ‘it transforms, enriches and becomes an integral part of almost everything we do’ (Ibid, p.2). This vision of ICT builds on the AmI vision – essentially proposed by ISTAG – which claims a birth of a new paradigm shift in computing with far-reaching societal implications. AmI vision is promoted by certain stakeholders in Europe: research institutions, academia, industry and governments, mobilizing a number of scholars, scientists, experts, entrepreneurs, policymakers and so on. AmI, a revolution of technology and minds, is the privilege of the citizens of the European information society. By enthusiastically embracing AmI in all areas of European society will its citizens achieve their true potential (Ibid). AmI refers to a wide- ranging vision of the information society where everyday human environments will be pervaded by intelligent technology. According to ISTAG (2001), people will be surrounded and accompanied by intelligent interfaces supported by computing and wireless networking technology that is omnipresent, embedded in all kinds of everyday objects. These digital, smart environments are aware of human context, and are sensitive, adaptive and responsive to people and intelligently support their daily and social lives by providing efficient services in a seamless and unobtrusive way (ISTAG 2001, 2003; Riva et al. 2003). Smart environments, which can support living through advanced service provision, will be

1 commonplace in the near future. After reviewing many reports and studies, Wright (2005) concludes a strong belief in the advance of technology towards AmI, which stems from the fact that computing devices are already embedded in many everyday objects, a trend that will undoubtedly continue.

Technological innovation has become a driving force for societal transformations in modern society (Castells 1996). Change in society, e.g. in its technological environment, affects individuals, communities and organizations. As technology changes, so do social norms, relations, behaviors and structures. Hence, technology has the potential to fundamentally alter our perception of the world - and thus our actions - and our place in it, as well as our sense of self and others. The idea of mobilizing the potential of AmI to alter European social model relates to the information society discourse, whose underlying beliefs are that, according to Uimonen 2001, cited in Hemer & Tufte 2005), a total social transformation is envisaged and constitutes a good and progressive motion. The notion of AmI provides a far-reaching vision on how the information society will evolve (ISTAG 2001). This vision assumes a societal paradigm shift for Europe, whereby the emphasis is on user-empowerment, support for human interactions, and social and public services support (ISTAG 2001, 2003, 2006). Furthermore, there is a strong institutional support of AmI in Europe. It has been embedded in one of the funding instruments of the European Commission (EC), notably under its Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Framework Program (FP5, FP6 and FP7). European industry, universities and member states are also participating collaboratively in taking AmI closer to realization by devoting funds to AmI research (Wright 2005). The ultimate goal is to unlock and capture the transformational effects of AmI, as it has a great potential to lead to ‘radical social transformations’ and to ‘shape Europe’s future’ (ISTAG 2003, 2006).

1.2. Research Problem and Justification

Research (e.g. Punie 2003; Crutzen 2005; José, Rodrigues & Otero 2010) emphasizes the fundamental role the ISTAG, a group of scholars and industry experts in Europe, plays in the reproduction of AmI as a positive force for societal change. Hence, it is relevant to critically engage with the claims and assumptions made in the discourse (or vision) of AmI about the transformation of the way people live within society, by delving deeper into the social dimensions of AmI with focus on aspects that could be understated, neglected, concealed or excluded in the discourses of AmI, perhaps to perpetuate specific power relations and social conditions.

2 Conspicuously, AmI discourse is increasingly reshaping social practices - institutionalized and socially anchored actions - in Europe. As a configuration of social knowledge, it is valued and supported by the European Union (EU). This relates to what Foucault (1972, cited in Hall 1997, p. 49) labels ‘regimes of truth’, a society’s ‘general politics’ of truth: ‘the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true’ and ‘the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true’, among others. Consequently, both AmI technologies and truths are discursive and social constructions whereby seamless webs of social and political actors and factors shape their development and their creation, respectively. One implication of this argument is that AmI discourse may be constructed in correspondence with the social positions of the groups that support it, for example, in ways that regulate and control society or serve the interests of certain segments of society, hence the relevance of a critical examination.

In addition, numerous studies (e.g. Punie 2003; Bohn et al. 2004; Wright 2005; Crutzen 2005; Wright et al. 2008; Criel & Claeys 2008) have raised a plethora of societal implications of AmI, such as unjustified encroachments, abuses and violations associated with privacy, security and surveillance; digital divide; social power relations and power concentration in large organizations; user disempowerment; loss of control; and fear for technology. Many of these aspects, which are of fundamental social relevance, tend to be undervalued, ignored or unvoiced in the underlying discourse of AmI. AmI promoters seem to eschew the interrogation of new technology, preferring to see it as a realist enterprise. Indeed, there is a propensity towards painting the promises of AmI in sunny colors, promoting its goodness and godliness, e.g. as a panacea for social problems and a road to revolutionary social transformations, as featured in a number of promotional publications (e.g. Philips Research 2003) and reports (e.g. ISTAG 2001, 2003, 2006) - the object of inquiry in this study. With the above points in mind, it is pertinent to look at how various discursive strategies are deployed in the ISTAG’s reports to achieve particular intentional effects in the construction of AmI discourse.

1.3. Research Objectives and Questions

The aim of this study is to carry out a critical reading of the scholarly and ICT industry’s construction of AmI in relation to social transformation, that is, the prevailing view, in the discourses of AmI, of a radical and technology-driven change to the way people live socially (within society). Involved in the

3 construction of AmI discourse are those scholars that have taken part in building the vision of AmI, not all scholars interested in the AmI and the whole of the ICT industry. The study examines the main topics, discursive strategies and linguistic resources prioritised by the ISTAG’s reports to portray the discourse in question while unveiling what is overvalued, undervalued and excluded. It also establishes inferences about the ways in which symbolic forms help perpetuate power relations and social conditions while revealing several converging points between the ISTAG’s discourse, subjects, ideology and power. This discursive research is thus of a category that views the text in a macro-context of institutions and ideologies.

Based on the objectives and justification, the following questions can be formulated:

 How is AmI for social transformation constructed by the scholarly community and ICT industry in terms of rhetoric, framing, positioning and legitimation?  What kinds of ideologies are reproduced and advanced by the ISTAG?  How are different social actors and their views represented in the reports?

To achieve the overall objective and thus answer the research questions, the empirical material is examined by means of a discourse analytical approach consisting of seven stages: (1) surface elements and organizational structure (2) discursive constructions, (3) social actors, (4) language and rhetoric, (5) framing as power and operation, (6) positioning and legitimation, and (7) ideological viewpoints.

1.4. Scope and Limitations

This study deals with two sweeping areas: AmI and societal transformation; combined, they form a large-scale discourse in society. The analysis is confined to the potential of AmI in altering the European social model in terms of: facilitating new social groupings and community building, providing new forms of healthcare and social support, modernizing public services, providing new learning opportunities, promoting social sustainability, improving civil security, and so forth.

4 As there are strict limitations on time and space in this research paper:  Analysis of AmI-enabled economic and sustainable development as dimensions of societal transformation of Europe will not be conducted due to the scope limitations.  Historical-diachronic analysis (e.g. discourse temporal evolution and the impact of representations of reality on subsequent ones) will not be carried out.

1.5. Review of Key Concepts

This section outlines the core theoretical constructs that make up this study, including ICT, AmI, ubiquitous computing (Ubicomp), AmI paradigm and paradigm shift, social change and transformation, and new technology and kinds of society. A reader can read a more in-depth definition of ICT in Appendix C.

1.5.1. AmI versus Ubicomp

ICT encompasses a diverse set of computer systems and the various applications and services associated with such systems. The focus in this study is on ICT services pertaining to the social, including social support, public services, (social) learning, social grouping, community building, healthcare, and so forth, in the context of AmI.

AmI offers a vision of a next wave in ICT or computing (see Appendix C for a detailed definition). This technology vision of the future is reflected in a variety of terms that closely resemble each other, including Ubicomp/pervasive computing, sentient computing, calm computing and disappearing/invisible computing. These terms are used by different scholars and industry players to promote the vision on the future of technology in different parts of the world. For example, in Europe this vision is known as AmI, a term coined by Emile Aarts of Philips Research in 1998 and adopted by the European Commission, whereas Ubicomp is prevalent in the USA. Marc Weiser was first credited for dubbing the phrase ‘Ubicomp’ in 1988 and for spotting the vision in 1991. The two terms mean pretty much the same. AmI is similar to Ubicomp - intelligence everywhere (Poslad 2009). While AmI and Ubicomp refer to a vision of the Information Society, the terms can still imply a slightly different focus (Punie 2003). The term AmI has a recent provenance and is not clearly discerned from earlier concepts, such as Ubicomp (ISTAG 2003). It is the merger of two visions: Ubicomp and ‘social user interfaces’ (Riva et al. 2003, p.5). The term

5 ‘Ubicomp’ denotes technology appearing everywhere and used all the time. According to Weiser (1991), technology will vanish, be invisibly woven, into the fabric of everyday life and be massively used by people. Whereas AmI is defined as a technology that is 'invisible, embedded in our natural surroundings, present whenever we need it,’ and ‘enabled by simple and effortless interactions,’ which are ‘attuned to all our senses, adaptive to users and context and autonomously acting’ (Gill & Cormican 2005, p. 3) on their behalf. The aim is to create digital environments that can improve the quality of life of people. This work critically engages with the claims, made in the discourse of AmI, about the improvement of the quality of social life of the European citizens.

1.5.2. AmI as Discourse and Paradigmatic Shift in Computing and Society

AmI implies a shift towards a novel approach to HCI – human-centric or social interfaces. There can only be a scattered archipelago of local HCI perspectives. By this logic, there cannot be a general theory, let alone a paradigm. According to Kuhn (1962), a paradigm denotes the explanatory power of a theoretical model and its institutional ramifications for the structure of science. What renders AmI non- paradigmatic is that it is not grounded on a meta-theoretical base that transcends contingent human actions and historical and cultural situativity. Hence, AmI paradigm can be used in a broad and loose sense of an ‘intellectual framework or trend’, similar to discourse and episteme, and not in Kuhn’s specific sense. Episteme, in Foucault’s sense, has been equated to Kuhn’s notion of paradigm in the sense of distinct thought patterns in any scientific discipline or other epistemological field. Moreover, AmI concerns normative values; it is more a vision of the future than a reality, prescribing a certain desired view on the world. It is also largely based on theories of social sciences. Kuhn’s (1996) position is that social science is ‘pre-paradigmatic’ because a scholarly consensus is not available - the concepts are polysemic in the sense of the deliberate mutual ignorance between scholars (Mattei 2001). In addition, social constructivism and constructionism are widely accepted as theoretical frameworks in relation to social science theories. Social sciences, permeating the field of AmI, are of an extraordinary complexity as they involve social and political processes which are reflexive in nature (see Bourdieu 1988). They are articulated within the confines of a particular discourse and regimes of truth (Foucault 1972).

AmI promises to alter the way people live within society, by transforming the way they communicate, interact and do things. It thus represents a paradigmatic shift in computing and society. At issue is a

6 claim for technological and societal convergence: by emphasizing the intellectual convergence of diverse elements, the chances for socio-technological unity of diverse constituencies may be enhanced. Part of the appeal of Kuhn’s (1996) paradigm shift is the element of a drastic break in intellectual and therefore social practice. The overused phrase ‘paradigm change’ is appropriate in the context of AmI as it implies a radical shift in such dimensions as the users of the technology, its incorporation into different living and working spaces, the skills required, the applications provided, and the players involved (Miles, Flanagan & Cox 2002). AmI goes beyond the ubiquitously embedded computing; ‘it is a vision in which ICT, its applications and uses are both widened and deepened.’ (Punie 2003, p. 12). The vision of Ubicomp marked a paradigm break with the post-desktop paradigm of HCI, shifting from computing bottled in desktop-bound PC to computing distributed in the environment. Weiser (1991) positioned Ubicomp as embodied reality, an opposite of virtual reality, where computers are integrated in the real world, receding into the background of our lives, instead of putting human users in computer- generated environments. Ubicomp is a way to explicate ‘machines that fit the human environment instead of forcing humans to enter theirs’ (York & Pendharkar 2004, 773-774). While the vision of AmI assumes - at the level of the discourse - many shifts, including, in addition to the above, a shift in communication processes from people conversing to people over people interacting with systems, to systems/software agents talking to each other and interacting with people; a shift in using computers as tools to computers performing tasks autonomously on behalf of their users; and a shift in accessibility and networking from on/off to always on, anywhere, anytime (Punie 2003, p. 12).

To match Kuhn’s (1996) concept, a paradigm shift in computing and society should be accepted by a community of practitioners, and have a body of successful practice. As mentioned above, AmI is reflected in the EU FP5, FP 6 and FP7 for RTD. There is a strong support of AmI by a range of stakeholders - ICT industry, scholarly community, governmental bodies and policymakers. In addition, as an interdisciplinary enterprise, AmI R&D involves hard sciences as well as soft sciences – social sciences. There is an intensive collaborative work happening on cross connections of AmI with human-directed sciences, with the aim to build future generation technologies.

7 1.5.3. Social Change and Transformation

Change is such an evident feature of social reality and concerns both developed and developing societies. Social change refers to an alteration in the social order of society: the structural transformation of social, cultural, political and economic systems and institutions, so that they better respond to the aspirations of the people who seek their transformation in society. The emphasis in this study is on social systems and structures. Moreover, social change involves enormously complex processes operating concurrently and several intertwined factors that result in different social transformations. In the context of this study, social change is driven by AmI, a vision enabled by a constellation of technological and social - defined in its broadest sense - factors. The socio-technological force of AmI is mobilized to enhance the processes of communications and interactions that set social transformations in motion. Furthermore, social change is an ongoing process that can be spontaneous, purposeful or both. It results from a merger of systematic factors along with some random or unique factors (Shackman, Liu & Wang 2002). AmI technology is part of a systematic process as it has evolved as a result of a societal, intentional strategy – to promote, build, develop, realize and deploy the vision of AmI.

Technological innovation is perhaps one of the most valuable means to the road to social transformation, which results from a shift in collective consciousness of a society, so that reality is refined by consensus that can happen by both external stimulus and intentional will. Coined by Durkheim (1951), the term ‘collective consciousness’ refers to the shared social beliefs and values which operate as a unifying force within society. In the context of Europe, enhancing social reality was inspired by the Ubicomp vision that emerged in the USA in the early 1990s and by the intention of certain European stakeholders to create the AmI landscape to reinvent Europe and reflect a conscious transformation that will result in reinvigorated and revitalized society, and thus achieve intentional social transformations. Society is made up of various collective groups, such as organizations, regions and nations, which as Burns and Egdahl (1998, p. 72) state: ‘can be considered to possess agential capabilities: to think, judge, decide, act, reform; to conceptualize self and others as well as self’s actions and interactions; and to reflect’.

8 1.5.4. New Technology and Kinds of Society

Over the last decades there has been a near passion for labeling new kinds of society: information society, network society, postindustrial and so on - these are seen as the successor to industrial society. These visions of a new and different age derive substantially from the transformational effects of new technology, most prominently computing, such as AmI, which offers a vision on how the European information society will evolve - a kind of socio-technological evolution. Social evolution theory has been used to analyze various visions and to predict future societal development. In this study, the term ‘information society’ denotes the creation, distribution, diffusion, use and integration of information as a significant socio-cultural activity. Here, the information is considered as an agglutinative aspect and the technology innovation an element to get closer to information (Marì 2011). The term network society describes different phenomena related to the social changes caused by the spread of networked ICT. This is related, in the discourse of AmI, to the ‘home in a networked society’ (ISTAG 2003, p. 10). According to Bell (1974), a post-industrial society is one where knowledge is of a central preoccupation, and the prime source of innovation, power and social dynamism. Theories of such a society argue that information and services will increase in importance compared to industry (Sztompka 2002). Bell (1974) predicted that by the end of the 20th century, advanced societies would reach the post-industrial stage, which is demonstrated by: domination of the service sector (e.g. administration, healthcare, education, science and culture) and growing importance and use of ICT, among others. The increase in performance of computers and the development of the internet is a megatrend that will alter societies on a worldwide scale (Naisbitt 1982, cited in Sztompka 2002). This epitomizes AmI technology. However, critics of the post-industrial society theory argue that technology domination remains vague (Ibid).

1.6. Structure of the Study

Following chapter 1, which provides a general description of the entire research work, the remainder of the report is organised as follows: Chapter 2 provides a thorough review of the relevant literature. Chapter 3 presents and discusses the conceptual and theoretical frameworks for the study. Chapter 4 motivates and discusses the chosen research methodology. Chapter 5 presents results, an in-depth critical analysis, which answers the research questions. Finally, chapter 6 provides concluding remarks, highlighting and discussing key findings and providing avenues and directions for future research.

9 Chapter Two

2. Literature Review

Like all past paradigm shifts in computing, AmI technology has both a bright side and a dark side. Most critics and advocates say that AmI has positive and negative implications and that at the moment the balance tilts in favour of the former. Indeed, the anticipated benefits of AmI are numerous and appealing, owing to its technological features. Due to space restrictions, the reader is directed to Appendix B for detailed descriptions of key benefits and features of AmI. However, new thinking on AmI - critical studies such as Punie (2003), Bohn et al. (2004), Crutzen (2005), Wright (2005), Wright, Gutwirth and Friedewald (2007), and Criel and Claeys (2008) – distances itself from some of the original features and emphasizes the negative social implications of AmI. Among the social issues raised by critics encompass: privacy and security, loss of control, digital divide, user disempowerment, partial user participation in design, and so forth. The AmI vision is thus associated with many user issues relating to the acceptance of this computing paradigm by users.

This chapter reviews relevant literature material in relation to the topic under study, covering theoretical, empirical and critical scholarship. To structure this review, a thematic organizational pattern is followed, whereby the research is divided into sections representing the subjects for the topic, and the discussion is organized into these subjects.

2.1. Social Dimensions, Issues and Challenges of AmI (ICT) 2.1.1. Privacy and Security

AmI poses a multiplicity of vulnerabilities and threats in the context of privacy and security issues. The fact that AmI is designed to provide personalized services to users signifies that they are able to gather and store a large amount of sensitive information about users’ everyday interactions, communications, activities, behaviours, preferences, and so on. The risk is that this personal information will be disclosed to other sources, institutions and individuals (Punie 2003), and will be abused either accidentally or intentionally (Wright 2005). The more AmI knows about the user, the larger becomes the privacy threat.

10 Also, as networks become ubiquitous and larger, so do security risks. When AmI is invisible and ubiquitous, when everything is embedded with intelligence, connected and linked (O’Harrow 2005), the threats will become even greater risks than they are nowadays (Wright, Gutwirth & Friedewald 2007). Thus, privacy and security issues constitute a crucial dilemma for the user and social acceptance of AmI.

Privacy Threats and Vulnerabilities

Privacy is probably one of the main issues that worry most people when it comes to technology use. The difficulty is that the threats to privacy multiply in the world of AmI where people can be expected to be under surveillance wherever they go due to the permanent and real-time monitoring of their behavior, which is the precondition of AmI operation (Wright, Gutwirth & Friedewald 2007). AmI technologies can facilitate monitoring and surveillance capabilities way beyond the current possibilities. Some argue that these capabilities might even mean the end of privacy (Garfinckel 2001). The temporal coverage, in addition to the spatial scope, of monitoring activities will be significantly extended in AmI landscapes: from pre-natal diagnostics data in hospitals, to activity patterns in kindergarten and schools, to workplace and senior citizens’ health; AmI has the potential to create a surveillance network that covers an unprecedented share of the public and private life (Bohn et al. 2004).

How it is possible to ‘ensure that personal data can be shared to the extent the individual wishes and no more’ is where the challenge lies (Wright 2005, p. 43). AmI service provisioning assumes the exchange and sharing of user personal information between different service providers and operators. Profiling and personalisation ‘is inherent in AmI and operators and service providers invariably and inevitably will want to ‘‘personalise’’ their offerings as much as possible, and as they do, the risks to personal information will grow’ (Wright 2005, p. 43). Another implication of AmI for privacy is when data aggregation companies put their vast databases/banks at the disposal of government agencies and law enforcement authorities for surveillance ends under the pretext of security. Not only corporate superiors and overzealous government officials but also marketing companies could make unpleasant use of the same information for commercial purposes that makes invisible computers so convenient (Crutzen 2005). Other privacy issues may be linked to leakages and theft of mass personal data (e.g. banking information). The conundrum is that privacy encroachments become inevitable with AmI due to the unprecedented extensity and velocity of information and the complexity of its control. With AmI

11 orders of magnitude more personal data are expected to be collected than is the case today (Wright 2005). A world permeated with a myriad of networked computing devices raises issues concerning information control (Abawajy 2009).

Security Threats and Vulnerabilities

Security has always been an issue in the realm of technology, but will be greatly magnified in the world of AmI. The predominance of wireless technology in future AmI network is expected to create further vulnerabilities. With an internet of things, networks can possibly extend from inside the human body, through everyday objects surrounding and accompanying humans, to anywhere in the world; hence, potential implications for security breaches could be severe. The security of information - protection from unauthorized use and modification - confidentiality and integrity (Stajano & Anderson 2002) needs to be reassured, even though people voluntarily pass information to a third party and are satisfied that the information will not be used to the extent of their wishes. Safeguarding security threats is difficult in AmI environments due to network convergence, possible conflict of interests between communicating entities, large number of ad hoc communications, and so on (Wright, Gutwirth & Friedewald 2007).

Dilemmas and Challenges

Of significance is addressing the balance between privacy and security. This is a core challenge for the future of AmI and a real dilemma as there is no easy solution to the problem. In fact, the trade-off between the two is unavoidable. In AmI, ‘an increase in security (in the sense of measures to ensure the safety of society) most likely will encroach upon our privacy’ (Wright, Gutwirth & Friedewald 2007, p. 57). As echoed by Wright (2005), the same profiling and data mining technologies, which are used to improve security, can be directed for surveillance.

While EU is well aware of the need to be sensitive to the privacy concerns of society, privacy remains the realm of computer scientists and designers that will develop and implement AmI. This is especially important assuming that in the rapidly evolving area of ICT, legislation lags behind technology development leaving what Moor calls a ‘policy vacuum’. Hence, in Europe, policymakers require safeguards (Wright 2005). However, these safeguards which aim to contain the risk posed by the

12 threats and vulnerabilities of AmI (Wright, Gutwirth & Friedewald 2007) will never eliminate the risk (Wright 2005). What can be of greater certainty is that there is no certainty as to creating panaceas to the problems of privacy and security. Nonetheless, since AmI is an evolving technology, safeguards may provide a sort of assurance for users as long as they can take away their worries. Users need to feel safeguarded and have trust in AmI, as well as in those that develop and deploy it. This is of necessity for the user and social acceptance of AmI. Failure to mitigate the risks will have adverse implications. Without effective privacy protection measures, this world of AmI could become an Orwellian nightmare (Punie 2003; Bohn et al. 2003). Besides, privacy is a fundamental requirement of any modern society in the sense of people being given the freedom to control and decide what to do with their lives. The concern about privacy is part of a larger concern about control, about people having control over their own lives (Waldrop 2003).

2.1.2. Technology Invisibility and Autonomy - Loss of Control

One of the cornerstones of AmI is the adaptive and autonomous behavior of systems in response to the user. This is enabled by context awareness technology. Underlying this notion is the idea that technologies are able to recognize the user context and adapt their functionality according to that context (Lueg 2002). AmI aims thus to create active technology, mentally and physically invisible, integrated into human daily environments. The guiding idea of invisibility is that computer devices take care of the context people are in as part of their interactions, by recognizing context and responding to it autonomously. However, the adaptive and autonomous capabilities are associated with delegation of control to intelligent agents to execute tasks on their own authority and autonomy. In other words, AmI assumes everyday life to be dependent on intelligence embedded in its surrounding. This poses risks of lack or loss of control - the user’s sense of control decreases when the autonomy of the systems increases. A critical stance recognizes that users should control what is happening behind their backs and that technologies should be visible (e.g. Ulrich 2008; Crutzen 2005; Abowd & Mynatt 2000). Indeed, the autonomy of artifacts is limited (Bohn et al. 2004), and invisible interfaces are ‘inextricable linked with an intrusive way of communication and with black boxing the technology…’ (Criel & Claeys 2008, p. 59) Moreover, when the system reacts in a way that is opaque to the user, whether adaptively or autonomously, it may cause fear, as it can’t be controlled because the ‘off-switch’ is not within reach. People may get used to the effects of the technology, but the moment it ‘acts outside the range of our

13 expectations, it will only frighten us because we cannot control it’ (Crutzen 2005, p. 225). Criel and Claeys (2008) argue that disappearing technology and lack of feelings of control exclude one another. They stipulate that without digital literacy, which plays an important role in the feelings of control and of fear, ‘and without feeling of control, people will stay frightened of technological changes regarding their individual lives and the society they live in’ (Ibid, p. 59) Feelings of fear for ICT and the fear of its evolution in society are related to feelings of locus of control and the meaning of ICT in everyday life (Claeys 2007; Criel & Claeys 2008).

Loss of control has implication for Issues of user acceptance of technology. It will be very difficult for technology to be accepted by the public, if it doesn’t react in ways it is supposed to react (Beslay & Punie 2002). Physical invisibility may harm acceptance because AmI is difficult to control (Punie 2003). This intractability is due to the loss of mutual interaction between technology and the user. Perhaps, the interface, an omnipresent interlocutory space, will lose its central stage as a mediator in interactions (Criel & Claeys 2008). In fact, this fundamental paradigm of AmI - technology disappearing from the user’s consciousness and receding into the background, is seen ‘as an attempt to have technology infiltrates everyday life unnoticed by the general public in order to circumvent any possible social resistance.’ (Bohn et al. 2004, p. 19) In this study, technology autonomy and invisibility relate to service provision pertaining to the social: healthcare setting, home in a networked society, social support systems and public services.

2.1.3. Digital Divide – Technological and Socio-Demographic Gaps

Digital divide is often mentioned when studying politics on the subject of social dimensions of technology. It commonly refers to a disparity between users as to either access to technology, knowledge of its use, or both. This technological connotation of the term has been criticized by many scholars. Digital divide is often described ‘in crassly reductive terms’, and this ‘instrumentally informed discourse on digital divide is a modernist tendency to unreflectingly categorize and compartmentalize complex socio-technological changes into one-dimensional social problems in a bid to resolve them through simple technological fixes’ (Parayil 2005 p. 41). In addition to the above connotation, digital divide entails socio-economic and - demographic factors, such as income, education, gender, race, ethnicity, age, language and so forth. Disabled, unemployed and retired people are socially excluded of all kinds (Fitch 2002).

14 The social entry tends to be awarded a highlight in the digital-divide discourse relating to developed societies. Indeed, In relation to AmI, technological gaps seem to be transient as access to technology is increasingly becoming affordable and the use of technology requiring minimal knowledge. Access to AmI is likely to improve given that it will permeate our everyday lives, and the AmI infrastructure, which is bound to envelop the majority of the people, will become more affordable for larger parts of society (Wright, Gutwirth & Friedewald 2007) As to the extent of technology use in everyday life, the majority of people are expected to be moderately computer literate (Ibid). AmI will require little skills and knowledge on the part of their users (Riva et al. 2003), thereby enabling more people to use its applications. The interaction with AmI should ‘not involve a steep learning curve’ for citizens (ISTAG 2001, p. 11). However, there will still be a proportion of citizens that will not have access to AmI applications and others that will have access only to basic rather than to more sophisticated systems, thereby excluding them from benefiting fully from the AmI environment (Wright, Gutwirth & Friedewald 2007). Also, in a society with wide pervasiveness of technology, ‘people who do not possess the knowledge to use AmI will be more seriously excluded than today’; moreover, AmI will still widen existing or creating new gaps, and serious concerns exist about the persistence of digital divides as to education, income, ethnicity, gender and age (Ibid).

There is a plethora of issues that need to be addressed and overcome with respect to how AmI should be designed to enable equal access, use and distribution of technology. To move away from stereotype user in design is a real quandary to tackle. Technology design reinforces existing stereotypes when targeting specific user groups. When applications are adapted for the particular likes, dislikes and needs of a particular target user group, they will less likely be appropriate for others (Norman 2005).

2.1.4. Design Process as Politics and Philosophy

User participation appears ubiquitous in the vision of AmI. The claim about user centrality in future design, however, remains at the level of AmI discourse, as it has been difficult to translate the guidelines underlining the approach to human-centered design into real-world action. Indeed, the social connotation of ‘user participation’ is partly lost as the term has been reduced from something social and political in content and conceptual in form to merely situated in some setting, thereby diverging from its

15 origins - participatory design (PD). User participation as applied in user-centered-design UCD (a widely practiced design philosophy rooted in the premise that users must be at the center of design process) is similar but not identical to PD. In other words, although UCD approach involves consulting with the users, it is not fully participatory, as users are not fully involved in design process and thus don’t shape the decisions and outcomes of design solutions. Within user-informed design, the user is integrated at a certain moment and, within co-design, in a very early stage of the interface design process (Criel & Claeys 2008) In contrast, taken up more broadly, PD is described as a democratic, cooperative, interactive and contextual design philosophy. It ensures that users and designers are on the same footing and considered as partners, and sees user participation as a vehicle for user empowerment in various ways. Originated in Scandinavian tradition, culture and politics, PD draws authority from a very distinctive set of discourses of labor relations and social justice. Nordic welfare region is the birth place of the Scandinavian tradition of PD, where participation often is understood as a mean of democracy (Elovaara, Igira & Mörtberg 2006). Different political and non-political researchers focused on the development of specific techniques for involving users in design (for an overview see Bjerknes 1987). The political branch of PD evolved as computer scientists made common cause with workers instead of management when designing workplace information systems (Asaro 2000). PD works well because ‘it takes advantage of cultural logics and practices particular to the location in which it emerged’; different people come together to exchange knowledge, bringing ideas into the encounter and taking ideas away from it (Irani et al. 2010). However, the prevailing design approach to AmI technology doesn’t support full user participation, e.g. users contribute actively to the design process through shared design sessions. The widespread adoption of the concept ‘user participation’ does not mean that the original ideas on user participation are widely disseminated (Criel & Claeys 2008). In relation to UCD, the notion of user participation is, according to some critics (e.g. Carpentier 2007; Laclau & Mouffe 1985), seldom more than an empty signifier.

It is unfeasible to opt for full user participation; otherwise this would be costly and will complicate the matter further because the vision of invisibility of AmI doesn’t side with the idea of UCD. Placing the user at the centre of AmI design contradicts the view that AmI technology should be unobtrusive (ISTAG 2001). It is because of the adaptive behavior of technology that ‘design within use’ has, In AmI been circumscribed; designers are creating an artificial play in which they have given the active and leading role to the artificial subjects’ (Crutzen 2005, p. 224). They will always set the limitations on the design

16 and use of AmI. The active explicit participation aspect is lost because users represent ready-made sources of data for the technology in the AmI environment (Ibid). A ‘good’ design is rather about making technological artifacts ‘which will not create disharmony or doubt in the life of its users’ Crutzen (2005, p.222) Hence, any viable design solutions must be put into a much wider perspective. It is though challenging to develop novel methods that allow the involvement of users at micro- and macro-level of their daily and social lives. Design must be informed by in-depth ethnographic and sociological studies of users (e.g. Crabtree 2002), although they can be so costly and time consuming for technology designers to take on board (e.g. Mankoff et al. 2003).

2.1.5. The Social Embeddedness of Technologies

Technology emerges out of particular cultural conditions. Constructivist worldview posits that technological development is a mutual shaping process where technology and society are simultaneously shaped. Marcuse (1999, p. 39, cited in Hemer & Tufte 2005) claims that technology ‘is a social process in which technics proper...is but a partial factor’. A technology is, like a text, constructed socio-culturally. Accordingly, it can ‘reproduce varying social values through its choice..., its informational and its undeclared presumptions’, as well as convey ‘ideological messages and prompt specific social behavior’ through its design (Hemer & Tufte 2005, p. 290). In this sense, speaking of the political dimension of technological design becomes legitimate (Ibid). The premise is that technology comes ‘to life through conflicting social processes and that the realized design of a technology becomes the platform for continuing struggle, where the design as such supports or suppresses different, essentially political, objective’ (Hemer & Tufte 2005, p. 291). It is thus relevant to engage with AmI technology as a political and social institution when looking at its actual properties in relation to, for example, public spaces, healthcare environments, social support systems, and networked homes. A critical social approach must seek to unmask the ways in which AmI design are predisposed towards certain social and political directions, by investigating how power relations are perpetuated via technological design, and to formulate normative perspectives from which a critique of such relations can be made with an eye on the possibilities for technological change – the design and use of AmI artefacts. The corollary of this conception when it comes to the examination of the transformational effects of AmI is that the envisioned technologies ought to be examined according to the favoritism they embody, the social behaviour they prompt, and the social values they undermine. This pertains to the issues discussed above, which carry

17 with them social meanings and have social implications. In this respect, of particular concern for the critically minded evaluator might be in what ways AmI technologies promote, for example, adaptability or rigidity, autonomy or dependence, visibility or invisibility, and activity or passivity. In the context of the transformation of people’s lives, the results of such evaluations should be gauged against the aspirations of the European citizens that are to live in the world of AmI.

2.2. Positioning the Study in Relation to Previous Research

To find out what is already known in the area of AmI is a crucial step for this discursive research. I endeavoured to accomplish this step by reviewing the literature in a way to have an understanding of the existing body of knowledge, including where new research is needed; to create a ‘research space’ for my work and position it in the context of previous research; to produce a rationale for my study and justify its originality; and to frame the valid research aims, questions and methodologies for the study. That said no discursive research has been, to the best of one’s knowledge, carried out on the relationship between AmI and societal transformation, more specifically the potential of AmI in modernizing the European social model and shaping Europe’s future. This subject area thus deserves attention in research. Moreover, unlike previous studies, which tend to focus on a micro view of AmI, this study is oriented towards a macro view of AmI, of the involved institutions and ideologies. Additionally, in terms of social criticism, this study is methodologically and analytically distinctive in that it draws on two discourse analytical approaches: Foucauldian discourse analysis and critical discourse analysis, and employs a distinctive set of analytical tools based on these approaches. Conceptually, this study draws on Foucauldian theory and Critical Theory.

18 Chapter Three

3. Conceptual and Theoretical Framework

Crucially, discourse analysis (DA) approach cannot be used separately from its theoretical and methodological foundations. This chapter presents the relevant theoretical models of discourse. As there is no unitary theoretical framework in DA, I include conceptual and theoretical frameworks that are closely related based on the perspective and the aim of this study. The typical vocabulary, drawing mainly on Foucauldian theory, features such central notions as ‘discourse’, ‘knowledge representation’, ‘power/knowledge’, ‘subjects’, and ‘social practice’, in addition to some familiar notions from CDA, namely power as control - mind control - and ‘interdiscursivity’. By focusing on these concepts, I devise a theoretical framework that critically relates discourse and society.

3.1. Foucauldian Theory of Discourse and its Relevance to the Study

AmI purports a birth of a new societal and computing paradigm that mirrors thought patterns, or rather epistemological field (what Foucault labels ‘episteme’). This concerns a configuration of social knowledge, or what is considered and valued to be knowledge in the European society, from episteme to episteme. This study is hence informed by the work of Michel Foucault, and the foundations for theory are found in his archeological and genealogical work. The discussion of discourse in Foucault’s work bares the most relevance for understanding and deconstructing scholarly texts. Thus, Foucault’s approach is adopted as a conceptual fit for this study rather than as a result of ‘hegemony of theory’.

3.2. Discourse and Related Concepts

Discourse has been used in varying ways, with different meanings in different contexts. In this study, discourse is defined as ‘[A] group of statements which provide a language for talking about – a way of representing the knowledge about – a particular topic at a particular historical moment. …Discourse is about the production of knowledge through language. But since all social practices entail meaning, and meanings shape and influence what we do – our conduct – all practices have a discursive aspect’

19 (Foucault 1972, cited in Hall 1997, p. 44). Foucault’s definition is about ways of seeing and social practice. In this line, Phillips & Jørgensen (2002, p. 1) state: ‘…underlying the word “discourse” is the general idea that language is structured according to different patterns that people’s utterances follow when they take part in different domains of social life...’ When a group of statements are ideological, discourse is described as a system of representation that is developed socially to reproduce a coherent set of meanings, which serve the interests of certain segments of society (Fiske 1987). Discourse (re)shapes and reflects social structures and is in a dialectical relation with social dimensions (Ibid).

The concept of discourse is central to Foucault’s notion of episteme and knowledge representation. According to Foucault (1970, p. xxii) episteme is the pre-intellectual space that determines ‘on what historical a priori, and in the element of what positivity, ideas could appear, sciences be established, experience be reflected in philosophies, rationalities be formed, only, perhaps, to dissolve and vanish soon afterwards.’ This implies that different periods of history constitute different epistemological fields (or systems of thought), which grounds knowledge and its discourses and hence represents the conditions of their possibility, co-existence and interaction within a particular epoch. Foucault also spoke of regimes of truth which are supported by discursive formations and made true through discursive practices. Regime of truth denotes, according to him, a society’s general politics of truth. Discursive formations are the regularities that produce discourses (Foucault 1972). They consist of institutional apparatuses and their techniques (e.g. rules, institutions, systems of thought, subjects, things), which are used to apply discourse to the social world. Discursive practice is seen ‘as an important form of social practice which contributes to the constitution of the social world including social identities and social relations. It is partly through discursive practices in everyday life (processes of text production and consumption) that social and cultural reproduction and change take place.’ (Phillips & Jørgensen 2002, p. 61)

3.3. The Representation of Knowledge, Episteme and Power/Knowledge

Two Foucault’s (1972) assertions serve as cornerstones for this study. The first is that knowledge, whether theoretical or practical, is essentially contextual and always a matter of episteme. The second is that a discourse of knowledge is a discourse of power as knowledge is an endeavor not only to order facts, social events and actions, but also to order human subjects according to a given centre. AmI discourse thus involves a play of power because no knowledge is for knowledge sake. However, although

20 Foucault’s theories of discourse and power/knowledge are insightful, their totalising, omnipotent position lays too much emphasis on the Foucauldian paradigm for accounting for everything (Hobbs 2008).

3.3.1. Socio-Cultural and Historical Situativity of Knowledge

Foucault’s notions of knowledge representation and episteme relate to the constructionist premise that we are fundamentally cultural and historical beings and our knowledge about, and views of, the world are the product of culturally and ‘historically situated interchanges among people’ (Gergen 1985, p. 267). Foucault’s concern for discourse and discursive formations (of a particular society) helped to link culture to representation, and thus culture (and its relations of power) to scholarly texts. Representation denotes ‘the embodying of concepts, ideas and emotions in a symbolic form which can be transmitted and meaningfully interpreted’ (Hall 2003, p 10) in the context of cultural circuits that entail power and discourse processes. In terms of historical situativity, AmI discourse is relatively new; the term only entered the public mainstream in Europe in the late 1990s. It is established because social practices – institutionalized and socially anchored actions - relate to it in a structured way at this time of history. It emerged as the result of people’s daily making of history and is changing over time, can become more powerful or vanish. In relation to this, Foucault assets, in his later work, that several epistemes may co-exist and interact at the same time.

3.3.2. Statements and the Meaningful

A discourse denotes a coherent body or set of statements producing a self‐confirming account of social reality and making it true. For Foucault (1972), statement has a peculiar meaning: that which makes propositions meaningful. He investigates, in his archeological work, the rules that determine which statements are accepted as true and meaningful in a particular period of history. He asserts that discourse creates a network of rules as preconditions for statements to exist and have meaning. In other words, statements depend on the conditions in which they exist and emerge within a given discourse. He analyzes the conditions of existence for meaning to show the rules of meaning production in discourses, and he explores how truth claims emerge within different epochs on the basis of what is said. He adheres to the social constructionist premise that our knowledge about the world should not be treated as objective truths: mere reflections of the reality. They are rather products of discourse (Burr 1995). Truth is discursively constructed, and different systems of knowledge determine what is true and false

21 and what can and cannot be said - investigated by Foucault (1972). Thus, there exist innumerable statements in AmI discourse that are not uttered, and would never be accepted as meaningful, and various forms of social actions become consequently unthinkable. All in all, the historical rules of AmI discourse determine what is possible to say and delimit what can be true and false. Foucault’s conception that discourses are ‘relatively rule-bound sets of statements which impose limits on what gives meaning’ is pursued by most contemporary discourse analytical approaches (Phillips & Jørgensen 2002).

3.3.3. Power as Productive, Constraining and Regulating

Discourses and their functions are ‘tactically productive and strategically integrative notions’ (Flyvbjerg 1992, p. 122), to draw on Foucault’s theory of power/knowledge. Foucault dissects the nature of power at length and concurs that it involves far more than simple force, viewing it as operating at all levels of society, and radiating around in a complex web of directions (e.g. Hall 1997). Understood as productive, power is, in common with discourse, ‘spread across different social practices’, and thus doesn’t belong to particular social actors with particular interests (Phillips & Jørgensen 2002). What makes power accepted is merely because ‘it traverses and produces things’, forms knowledge and produces discourse, and so on; ‘it needs to be considered as a productive network which runs through the whole social body, much more than as a negative instance whose function is repression’ (Foucault 1980, p. 19). Power should therefore not be understood as exclusively exercised in oppressive acts of particular social agents and structures, but may be enacted in the myriad of taken-for-granted actions of daily life. As an instance of the constitutive power of AmI discourse, it is difficult to imagine the information society of Europe without AmI. The power of AmI discourse provides the conditions of possibility for the future social. It additionally generates particular ways of understanding, constructing, and acting in the social world, thereby excluding alternative ways of talking and closing opportunities for social actions. From a Foucauldian point of view, discourses facilitate and limit, enable and constrain what can be said and what can be true and false by whom, when and where, as well as what can be done individually, socially and institutionally.

In addition, language contributes to wider social processes of power and leads to new forms of power in terms of the rationalities, mindsets and techniques which organize and control the experiences of the subjects and the possible field of actions of others in society. Foucault is concerned with the structures

22 and relations of power that ‘govern’ the lives of those who live in the modern world (Danaher et al. 2000). This concern for governmentality ‘is useful in terms of exposing the power of systems of thought to regulate and control society...’ (Hobbs 2008, p. 14) In the context of this study, power is associated with AmI and politics (affairs and policies of EU) as social domains and the related institutional apparatus and their techniques (see above) that form the background of the discursive reproduction of power in such domains, which targets the citizens that are dependent on institutional power.

3.4. Power as Control - Mind Control

The social power of institutions or groups (e.g. ICT industry, ISTAG) is a central notion in critical work on discourse. One of the important symbolic resources that define the power base of an institution is access to, or control over, knowledge (van Dijk 1996). Having access to large-scale discourses, such as science, technology and politics, is a power resource, which can be used to control the minds and acts of people. Drawing on van Dijk (1998), people’s actions are controlled by their minds, so if dominant institutions are able to shape people’s minds, e.g. their views and beliefs, they indirectly may control their actions through persuasion and manipulation exercised by means of discursive strategies. This ability presumes, in the context of AmI, a power base of access to such social resources as knowledge, culture and various forms of scientific discourse and communication. Research and industry groups have exclusive access to, and control over, AmI as a scholarly discourse, supported by discursive formations of European society. By having control over this influential discourse, they are more powerful, and thus have the opportunity to shape the minds and actions of others. In mind control, there are different ways that power can be involved. The emphasis, in this study, is on manners associated with social cognition (Fiske & Taylor 1991; Wyer & Srull 1984): socially shared representations of societal groups and relations, as well as mental operations, such as interpretation, thinking and arguing, among others (van Dijk 1993). First, mind control entails people tending to accept beliefs, knowledge and views about the world via discourse from what they see as credible sources, such as scholars and experts (Nesler et al. 1993). Second, people may not be equipped with the necessary knowledge and beliefs that allow them to challenge the discourses they are exposed to (van Dijk 1998). In this analysis, the conditions of mind control are both contextual (they say something about European people in relation to AmI discourse) and discursive - structures and strategies used in the reports. Contextually based control stems from the fact that people represent text as well as the whole discourse; context features influence the ways dominated groups define the discourse in ‘preferred context

23 models’ (van Dijk 1998). Discourse structures have impact on mental representations; topics correspond to the top levels of people’s mental models to influence what they see as the most important information of text (Ibid). However, there is a limit to ‘the formation and change of mental models and social representations’ as, with the intricacy of comprehension and the formation and change of beliefs, it becomes difficult to predict which text’s features will have which effects on the minds of people (Ibid)

3.5. The Implication of Power/Knowledge for Truth

The concept of power/knowledge has implications for the conception of truth. This concerns particularly how the link between knowledge and power can lead to the production of particular ‘truths’ about the human subject (McHoul & Grace 1993). Foucault asserts ‘that it is not possible to gain access to universal truth since it is impossible to talk from a position outside discourse... “Truth effects” are created within discourse.’ (Phillips & Jørgensen 2002, p. 14) Here, the concept of discourse may be given too much power. Foucault’s argument that discourse produces the meanings of objects and practices is an idea that makes a nihilistic proposition that nothing can exist outside discourse (see Danaher et al. 2000). Nevertheless, Foucault’s position is that meaning is never intrinsic or authentic, and there is hence no escape of social representation, and, as a result, ‘truth can never be captured and represented in its pure, multi-dimensional form by the limited symbolic constraints of discourse and the limited physical constraints of the medium.’ (Hobbs 2008, p.11) It is indeed by operating within the context of their role in society which values the public concerns that scholars claim that they impart truths; however, this role represents a discourse that influences the manner in which AmI scenarios for social transformation are represented by the scholarly texts, drawing on various discourses, with the scholars interpreting the so- called truth of such scenarios through particular discursive representations. Consequently, scholarly texts draw on the discourses that define and surround the AmI scenarios for social transformation being represented, and they are the symbolic results of a discursive practice. As such, scholarly texts as socio- culturally situated can make only a tentative claim to absolute truth. It then becomes fruitless to ask whether something is true or false, considering truth is unattainable; rather, ‘the focus should be on how effects of truth are created in discourse’ (Phillips & Jørgensen 2002, p. 14) Of import is thus to analyze the discursive processes through which discourses are constructed in terms of how they can give the impression that they represent true pictures of reality (Ibid).

24 In addition, Foucault concurred with the adage that ‘knowledge is power’, arguing that power is implicated in the manner in which certain knowledge is applied (Hall 1997). He realized, in his archaeological phase, that truth is a procedural system for the production, regulation, consumption and distribution of statements (Phillips & Jørgensen 2002), and explored the particular way by which a discourse is applied to the social world, centering on the institutional apparatuses and their techniques in a particular society. However, Foucault’s focus on discourses can ignore such structural factors as the material and economic involved in the distribution of knowledge/power, which may expose his argument of discursive ‘regimes of truth’ ‘to the charge of relativism’ (Hall 1997, p. 51). Nonetheless, the regime of truth of AmI is infused with power relations and, thus, ways of seeing that impact on the human subject.

3.6. Subjects and Social Practice

Foucault’s view is that the subjects are created in discourses. He argues that ‘discourse is not the majestically unfolding manifestation of a thinking, knowing, speaking subject’ (Foucault 1972, p. 55). As expressed by Kvale (1992, p. 36): ‘The self no longer uses language to express itself; rather language speaks through the person. The individual self becomes a medium for the culture and its language.’ Hall (1997, cited in Hobbs 2008, p. 12) notes of Foucault’s implications for understanding representation: ‘It is discourse, not the subject who speak it, which produces knowledge. Subjects…are operating within the limits of the episteme, the discursive formation, the regime of truth, of a particular period and culture... This subject of discourse…must submit to its rules and conventions, to its dispositions of power/knowledge. The subject can become the bearer of the kind of knowledge which discourse produces. It can become the object through which power is relayed.’ Accordingly, scholars like ‘the subject’, are created in AmI discourse and operates within its conceptual parameters. This relates to Foucault’s idea of ‘the death of the subject’, the argument ‘that people are not really free to think and act, because they - and their ideas and activities - are produced by the structures (social, political, cultural) in which they live’ (Danaher et al. 2000, p. 8).

There is a symbiotic relationship between discourse and practice: particular understanding of the social world leads to particular social actions. According to Foucault (1972), it is only within the constitutive abstract space of a discourse that meaning and, thus, meaningful actions are made meaningful. In this

25 sense, some forms of action becomes natural, others unthinkable within a particular world view (Phillips & Jørgensen 2002). In all, discourses open and/or close opportunities for social actions.

3.7. Inter-discursivity

The majority of discourse analytical approaches depart from the idea that different discourses exist side by side or struggle to set meaning and define truth, operating with a more conflictual picture, thereby diverging from Foucault’s propensity to identify a single knowledge regime in each historical epoch (Phillips & Jørgensen 2002). Inter-discursivity thus takes part in the constitution of AmI discourse as a corpus of texts. Various discourses operate in a particular individual text belonging to AmI discourse. In other words, an AmI discourse fragment relates to other discourse fragments belonging, for example, to social change and policy in a way that is regulated by the AmI discourse. Discourse draws on earlier discursive structures by building on previously established meanings, and, by merging various discursive elements, it alters the individual discourses and thus, also, the socio-cultural world (Ibid). In this study, AmI and social change as discourses build on, and change, one another, as well as shapes the social reality in Europe. Investigation of change is a central area of interest in Fairclough’s (1995a) CDA.

26 Chapter Four

4. Research Methodology

This chapter motivates and discusses the chosen research methodology. It covers discourse analytical approach, Foucauldian Discourse Analysis (FDA) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the corpus and context, analytical tools, and methodological reflections.

4.1. Discourse Analytical Approach

The rationale for employing DA approach is that this investigation deals with the representation of knowledge and the broader context in which such representations are given meaning, form, and, ultimately, applied. Such an approach is used to deduce how meanings are constructed in scholarly and ICT industry’s documents on the kind of societal transformation that is envisaged with AmI and on the pre-configuration of citizens and the way they live in the world of AmI. The context and origin of the reference documents for the AmI discourse is situated to engage critically with it.

4.1.1. Discursive Research on Scholarly Discourse

DA is employed in this study as an instrument to examine the selected reports. A number of studies undertaken in recent years to research various pertinent social issues, relating to AmI (e.g. Punie 2003), development (e.g. Baaz 2005), social change (e.g. Fairclough 2007), and globalization (e.g. Backhaus 2003), have employed DA as a research methodology to examine scholarly discourses. This emphasizes the appropriateness of DA in studies of AmI in relation to social transformation. Foucault’s approach to ‘culturalist reading of modernity’ (Harrison 1992, p. 84) has been of a significant contribution to the application of critical thought to social issues and the unveiling of hidden politics within the socially dominant discourses. The implied main idea is that scholarly discourses are socio-politically situated; there is no ‘value-free’ knowledge. Critical discourse analysts argue that scholarly discourses are ‘inherently part of and influenced by social structure, and produced in social interaction.’ (van Dijk 1998, p. 352). And DA ought to reveal what grounds social, cultural and political (inter)action, e.g. scholarly

27 discourse, and how this action is engineered through discourse. It is, in this study, used to illustrate how various discourses are deployed to achieve particular intentional effects with respect to AmI for societal transformation in the context of European society. Drawing on different discourses, the text is to be taken as a product, produced by scholars and industry experts, and as a resource, interpreted and consumed by European people. Texts are indeed to be examined for their effects. Discourses aim to construct particular truths through discursive processes in specific contexts. Pursuing a special mode, the authors of texts often intend to simultaneously convince the reader that the discourse reflects a true picture of reality, advance particular ideologies, or prompt individual or social behavior. These aims can be either explicit or implicit. The main assumption of DA is that the work of dissection and reconstruction of texts can provide hints about issues like the intention of the authors and their institutional belonging or scholarly affiliation, ideological reproductions, or the potential influence of certain topics on the public.

4.1.2. Foucauldian Discourse Analysis (FDA) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)

In this study, the model for DA draws on FDA and CDA as research analytical approaches. This integration is based on loosely coupled approach, taking into account the theoretical similarities and the methodological differences. FDA and CDA both aim at a more abstract mapping of the discourses that circulate in society at a particular moment in time. CDA studies language as a form of social practice and focuses on the ways social and political domination are said to be visible in text (Fairclough & Clive 1995), and FDA deals with language and its role in the constitution of social life and in wider social processes of power and legitimation. Most contemporary discourse analytical approaches, including several types of CDA, find their roots in Foucauldian theory. Discourse is historical, discourse constitutes society/culture, power relations are discursive, discourse does ideological work, and the link between text and society is mediated – these are among the main tenets of CDA (Fairclough & Wodak (1997).

DA is an interpretative, deconstructing reading enabled by immersion in a particular culture, which provides one with a rich tapestry of ‘ways of talking’ that one may identify, ‘construe’, and relate to in a communicative situation. Accordingly, there are no standard or hard-and-fast methods to follow for examining texts or identifying discourses, but rather a multiplicity of procedural choices - analytical tools - which provide quite different insights into the text and lead to different conclusions. ‘...there is no clear consensus as to what discourses are or how to analyze them. Different perspectives offer their own

28 suggestions... ’ Phillips & Jørgensen 2002, p.1) Here, a mutipespectival work comes into play as an attempt to merge elements from different discourse analytical perspectives. This approach is positively valued in discursive studies because different perspectives provide different forms of knowledge about, and a broader understanding of, the phenomenon on focus (Ibid). In this study, different analytical techniques are brought together, exploiting features of FDA and CDA, in a unified approach to achieve the objective of the study. For instance, for critical research on discourse to realize its aims, the focus needs to be on social and political issues rather than on prevailing paradigms (van Dijk 1998). This discursive study deals with both aspects instead. It also looks at ideology, a key theme in CDA. Critical approaches share the common aim ‘of carrying out a critical research, that it, to investigate and analyze power relations in society and to formulate normative perspectives from which a critique of such relations can be made with an eye on the possibilities for social change’ (Phillips & Jorgensen 2002, p2).

4.2. The Corpus and Context

The corpus is based on purposive rather than random sampling. It includes three reports: Report 1: in 2001, Scenarios for Ambient Intelligence in 2010 Report 2: in 2003, Ambient Intelligence: from vision to reality: For participation – in society & business Report 3: in 2006, Shaping Europe’s Future through ICT

These reports are produced by the ISTAG, an originator and a strong promoter of the AmI vision in Europe and consisting of a group of scholars and industry experts. They are published during a period that marked an intense activity of the construction of AmI vision. The discourses and scenarios provide the ‘texts’ to be read and analysed. These ‘thick descriptions’ are the empirical material for the study.

As a general rule, when studying scholarly texts, it is important to delimit the material, to make a very narrow selection of texts for analysis. Given the exceedingly large number of scientific, economic, political, and social issues of AmI addressed in the reports published by the ISTAG, and given that it is typically considered ideal not to use samples of large size when employing DA, it was decided to analyze only those reports dealing with issues relating to AmI for social transformation. Likewise, given the large size of the body of reports included in this study, only the relevant sections are examined in- depth. To engage in detailed readings of excerpts of text still requires working with what is actually

29 written in the reports in their entirety. The intent is to examine how discourses operate in the body of reports, which is achieved by demonstrating how AmI discourses relate to other discourses (e.g. social change, politics, ideology), and how these discourses function on different occasions. Hence, it is crucial to read various discourse fragments to show patterns of consistency and variation in AmI discourses, in addition to engaging in detailed readings of pertinent excerpts of text. The general premise is that isolating a text from its hinterland is of necessity to misconstrue it since everything is part of everything else. To understand the effects of text, it should be situated in its actual context.

4.3. Analytical Tools – Seven Stages

Discourse analysts use a range of sets of analytical tools to orientate a critical reading of action in texts. In this study, I have identified a set of dimensions of the reports that matter the most in the construction of their overall meaning and that ought to be analysed. Accordingly, I set out seven stages in the analysis of discourse: (1) surface elements and organizational structure (2) discursive constructions, (3) social actors, (4) language and rhetoric, (5) framing as power and operation, (6) positioning and legitimation, and (7) ideological viewpoints. This approach to DA integrates several strands and influences, as well as brings in new dimensions of analysis, drawing on Fairclough (1995b), Foucault (1972), van Dijk (1998), and Carvalho (2000). The seven stages are detailed separately below.

1. Surface Elements and Structural Organization: I propose first looking at surface elements of the text - the website in which the reports were published and the author. Also, identifying the author’s scholarly and industry affiliation, institutional belonging, degree of submission to the discourse, standing and ideological commitment can help place the reports within a certain context, to draw on Carvalho (2000).

In this study, the structural organization contributes to the definition and the interpretation of key topics on AmI in relation to social transformation. Most prominently, the title marks the preferred reading of the whole reports. A bigger weigh is also conferred to the first few paragraphs, which, in the reports, tend to have the function of the lead. In this analysis, an exploration of the organization of the text tends to be revealing. However, this varies depending on the aim and the scope of each report.

30 2. Discursive Constructions: This stage is concerned with identifying the ways in which discursive objects are constructed in the reports. Which discursive objects I focus on depends on the research questions. It is important to focus on the differences between constructions, as what appears to be one and the same discursive object can be constructed in various ways. Also, both explicit and implicit references to discursive objects need to be included. Common with discourse analysis, to clearly identify discursive objects is a critical step towards understanding and deconstructing the function of discourses. In this study, the broader objects to be constructed may include the potential of AmI in modernizing European social model, while more specific ones may be, for instance, the role of AmI in providing new forms of healthcare and improving community life.

3. Social Actors: This stage identifies social actors as mainly referred to in the reports, and how they are represented. Texts play a major role in constructing the image of social actors, as well as in defining their relations and identities (Fairclough 1995b; Phillips & Jørgensen 2002). The term ‘actors’ in my analysis refers to subjects – they do things - and objects - they are the talked about. Typical for the ISTAG’s reports is that they are replete with references to institutions and anonymous experts and scholars. Some of these actors also dominate with their views more than the others, including the author. This effect relates to ‘framing power’ (Cravalho 2000) of social actors in relation to scholarly and industry community. Framing power, in this context, can be described as the capacity of one collective social actor for conveying its views and positions through the scholarly and industry community, by having them represented by scholars and experts mostly in the form of regular text rather than quotes. In scholarly discourse, having the predominant framing power in relation to a certain phenomenon such as AmI is an important form of social influence. See chapter 3 under section 3.4 for further discussion. Further, framing power is crucially not denied by scholars or experts (representing research and industry community) who hold a major power – knowledge authority - of discursive construction of socio- technological issues.

4. Language and Rhetoric: This stage looks at some language aspects - the writing style and the vocabulary - lexical choice - employed for representing social reality. It also involves such rhetorical figures as hyperbolic enhancement of AmI and understatement of its drawbacks. Rhetoric entails using language persuasively. Various persuasive means can be employed to achieve different effects. In this

31 stage of analysis, both the author’s own discourse and the formulations advanced by other social agents, working as sources for the author, are looked upon.

Other advanced forms of rhetoric are treated as discursive strategies. These provide insights into how the discourse of AmI for social transformation operates to construct meanings, and in the broader relation to social, cultural and political contexts. Drawings on Carvalho (2000, p. 23), discursive strategies entail ‘the forms of discursive manipulation of reality by social actors’ (e.g. scholars, experts), including the author, not in ‘the sense of undutiful alteration of a certain reality’, but rather ‘intervention on that reality in order to achieve a certain effect or goal’. They are described as ‘plans of actions that may vary in their degree of elaboration, may be located at different levels of mental organization, and may range from automatic to highly conscious’ (Wodak 1999, p. 188) As a common aspect of discourse, our ways of talking don’t actually reflect the world (reality) but tend to reproduce and change its meaning. And one way to do this is through employing discursive strategies. The emphasis in the study is on ‘framing’ (Fairclough 1995b; Carvalho 2000; Entman 1993) and positioning and legitimation (Foucault 1972; Carvalho 2000).

5. Framing: Discourses are characterized by excluding certain topics but also certain individuals and claiming to be true. The former is a corollary of framing, which is a central organizing principle that holds together and gives meaning to diverse sets of statements within a given (inter)discourse. AmI discourse characterizes an episteme, framing ways of thinking about certain topics, subjects and objects, a process of inclusion and exclusion of facts to produce certain meanings. Framing has been employed by many authors with quite varied meanings in different contexts. In Fairclough (1995b), it relates to the notion of choice in discourse: the text is a result of choices and hence alternative constructions of reality could have been made as alternative choices. In relation to this study, framing refers to organizing patterns present in the text (discourse), an underlying idea that directs its construction: gives coherence and meaning to its content. Framing as a highly discretionary strategy entails an operation to organize discourses (texts) according to a certain perspective, through selection and salience or selection and composition as an author’s intervention when talking about a certain reality. Putting the emphasis on perspective, Entman (1993, p. 55) describes framing as essentially involving selection and salience: ‘To frame is to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral

32 evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation for the item described’ According to Carvalho (2000), framing involves selection - an exercise of inclusion and exclusion of facts and opinions – and composition - the arrangement of these elements in order to produce certain meanings. Of relevance in the analysis of framing, in this study is, is how, and not whether, the social agents, including the ISTAG, frame the future reality - AmI for social transformation.

6. Positioning and legitimation: Discourses have a role in wider processes of legitimation and offer different subject positions. Legitimation, in the context of this study, is about justifying certain actions by social agents and structures on the basis of normative and political reasons. Positioning entails ‘constructing social actors into a certain relationship with others, that may, for instance, entitle them, or not, to do certain things’ (Carvalho 2000, p. 24). Discourses construct subjects, and thus make available positions within networks of meaning, which authors can take up or place other social actors within. Within AmI discourse, a subject position identifies a location for social agents, such as scholars, designers, experts and the state (EU), within the structure of rights and duties for those who use that repertoire, e.g. citizens, communities and organizations within European society.

7. Ideological Viewpoints: Since discourses involve subjects and relate to social, cultural, and political contexts, ideology becomes a fundamental shaping influence in, and an overarching aspect of, the text. In this analysis, ideology tends to influence the representation and selection of social actors, discursive objects, the rhetoric, and discursive strategies deployed in the reports. Ideology reproduces and legitimize social structures, hence its relation to power. According to Fiske (1987), ideology is a way of describing the world, which serves the interests of particular segments in society. Ideological propositions contribute to reproducing relations of power and domination and ‘generally figure as implicit assumptions in texts’ (Fairclough 1995b, p. 14). Ideological standpoints are expected not to be always explicit in the text, and hence an interpretive effort is often needed to locate or identify them.

In the analysis of the ISTAG’s reports, I consider normative aspects and political dimensions of ideology. In terms of its political dimension, ideology denotes the basis for fundamental political standings – what is the role of the state (union) and how should society be regulated and controlled. This is indeed visible in the reports and relates to the notion of governmentality in discourse analysis. Advancing politically dominant ideologies has to do with relating specific structures of text to structures of the sociopolitical

33 context. Several authors (e.g. Fairclough & Wodak 2000; van Dijk 2005) have examined the links between discourse and ideology, identifying multiple strategies to serve the power, either explicitly or through linguistic practices in disguise. From a normative perspective, van Dijk (1998, p. 8) suggests a comprehensive notion of ideology: ‘...the basis of the social representations shared by members of a group. This means that ideologies allow people, as group members, to organize the multitude of social beliefs about what is the case, good or bad, right or wrong, for them, and to act accordingly.’

4.4. Methodological Reflections 4.4.1. The Role and Position of the Analyst

Broadly, DA seeks to uncover meanings, through the interpretation of texts, and in this way it brings up the question of the analyst’s role, position, and preconception. The ways in which the analyst influences dissection and reconstitution of texts remain complex and vague. The constructivist view that reality is socially constructed emphasizes that constructions involve other social and cultural artefacts and thus inevitably becomes socio-cultural, although perception and thinking necessarily is individual. Accordingly, being part of a socio-cultural context has implications for neutrality in the analysis. Indeed, it becomes difficult to treat discourses as socio-culturally constructed systems of knowledge and, thus, could have been different when analysts work with discourses they are familiar with, e.g. products of their own culture. The rationale is that they may share many of the taken-for-granted understandings or unquestionable truths/common beliefs articulated in the material. Hence, the analyst is part of the text’s context, and should account for his/her role relative to the text. This role goes much deeper when the discursive research is based on social constructionist worldviews (see chapter 3). In short, knowledge and truth, and thus reality, are contingent and, thus, constitute one construction among many other possible constructions. Phillips and Jorgensen (2002) point out that there exist ‘always other positions in terms of which reality would look different’ from the position that the researcher takes in relation to the area of study, which has implication for determining what he/she can perceive as reality and can present as results; however, not all research results are equal in quality.

In terms of subjectivism, the researchers may interpret texts in differing ways based on their own perspectives and subjective inclinations. The researchers’ aims and how they influence the process of selection, delimitation and interpretation of texts certainly creates a situation where subjectivism is

34 inevitable. Arguably, the DA approach maintains a bias toward verification, a tendency to confirm the researcher’s preconceived notions; therefore, the analysis becomes of doubtful scientific value. Although this bias is general, the alleged deficiency of DA is that it ostensibly allows a room for the researcher’s subjective opinions in the interpretation process. But the question of bias toward verification applies to all qualitative methods, not just to the DA; it is rather considered as a fundamental human characteristic. Bacon (1853) wrote: ‘The human understanding from its peculiar nature, easily supposes a greater degree of order and equality in things than it really finds. When any proposition has been laid down the human understanding forces everything else to add fresh support and confirmation.’ (p. xlvi).

4.4.2. The Ethics of Doing Discourse Analysis

The nature of DA raises the issue of responsibility (ethics) of the analyst and his/her openness, willingness to inform research, ability to read the project guiding the study, and to consider trans-disciplinary perspectives. This allows the analyst to reach out to more generalizing theory and holistic views and thereby shun the risk of becoming particularistic. For example, an analyst might ignore empirical evidence and base his/her conclusions on determinist interpretations - frames as interpretive principles - or resort to particular methodological imperatives that may limit the scope of the analysis. It is hence useful to strive to avoid essentialising the research method to prevent the intellectual strait- jacketing and circumscription of thought. Moreover, it is the approach of the researcher, not the application of the method, that makes research discursive, and the aim of research should be to produce a reflexive account of how other subjects may construct discourses, an account based on the recognition of the inter-subjectivity of the research encounter, keeping in mind that one’s analysis remains subject to its own deconstructive reading and counter-interpretation.

4.4.3. Potential Ways to Go about Performing Discourse Analysis

Although the act of reflexivity may be seen as a discursive practice within a certain regime of truth, a multiplicity of reflexivity forms can still be useful when it comes to discursive research. ‘Reflexivity is a key to methodological approach, since the approach itself recognizes that knowledge claims are…permeated with values’ (Schwandt 2000, p. 198) and cultural bias. Considering social constructionist premises, the researcher’s role should be tackled reflexively (Phillips & Jorgensen 2002).

35 The underlying assumption is that reflexivity allows for a proper analysis, through reducing potential biases. A sound way is to attempt to distance oneself from the material, and extracting oneself from living in a culture to reflect on it (e.g. Terre Blache & Durrheim 1999) allows one to explore discourses as yet unexplored universe or system of meaning. It is the taken-for-granted understandings that are to be analyzed, namely focusing on how statements are accepted as true or neutralized (Phillips & Jorgensen 2002). It is also central to keep in mind that reality can never be reached, or there is no way to gain access to universal truth outside discourse, and hence discourse becomes itself the object of analysis (Foucault 1972; Phillips & Jorgensen 2002). Accordingly, I endeavor to explore patterns in and across the statements and identify the social implications of various discursive constructions of AmI in relation to social transformation as reality.

Cultural reflexivity doesn’t solve all issues, but being conscious of one’s role and position and limits is a starting point to provide a base from which one can pursue theoretical and methodological rigor in the discursive research process. A rigorous application of theory and method generates well-founded arguments. Phillips and Jørgensen (2002, p. 22) state: ‘it is by seeing the world though a particular theory that we can distance ourselves from some of our taken-for-granted understanding…’ Overall, the aim is to practice social criticism without making claims to absolute truths; the purpose of DA is not to provide definite answers but to help realize unacknowledged agendas/motivations.

36 Chapter Five

5. The Empirical Work – Data Analysis

Till now, I set out a research agenda, circumscribed the empirical data, and decided how it is to be examined to answer the research questions. Although the reports are examined separately, the objective is to have a multifaceted, unified analysis.

5.1. Surface Elements and Structural Organization

To understand the AmI vision, and thus discourse, it is important to acknowledge its context. The three reports at stake were published on IST Website and produced by the ISTAG, the committee which advises the EC’s Information Society Directorate General (DG). ISTAG made consistent efforts for ICT to get an increased attention and a higher pace of development in Europe. In 1999, it published a vision statement for the European community FP5 for RTD, which laid down a challenge to start creating an AmI landscape. Then a scenario planning exercise was launched during 2000; the scenarios were constructed by IPTS-JRC in collaboration with Information Society DG, and with the involvement of about three dozens of experts from across Europe. ISTAG continued to develop the vision under the IST program of the EU’s FP6 and FP7 for RTD. So far, with ISTAG and the EU IST RTD funding program, huge efforts have been made in the EU to mobilise research and industry towards realising an AmI landscape. In all, ISATG is a strong promoter of the vision of AmI. The above information helps to situate the reports in a certain context - where the texts operate. This doesn’t imply a deterministic view of the authorship, but rather the premise is that scholarly discourse, as van Dijk (1998) and Fiske (1987) argue, reflects and reshapes, and is inherently part of and influenced by, social structures. This argument relates to the belief in rejecting the possibility of a “value-free” scientific knowledge (van Dijk 1998).

The titles and the first few paragraphs of the reports highlight the role of AmI in serving citizens, communities and the society. The portrayal of human and social life is idealized and optimized. Particularly, the scenario ‘Annette and Solomon in the Ambient for Social Learning’ depicts unrealistic

37 social vision of AmI as to fostering community life. A set of relevant, selective quotes from the three reports are presented below, respectively:

‘The emphasis of AmI is on…more efficient services support, user-empowerment, and support for human interactions.’ (ISTAG 2001, p. 8)

‘AmI enables and facilitates participation...in society, in a multiplicity of social...communities... Radical social transformations are likely to result from the implementation of the AmI vision’ (ISTAG 2003, p. 3, bold in original1)

‘...ICT...is starting to unleash massive and far-reaching social change.’ (ISTAG 2006, p. ii)

Social context features, the properties of the language users of ISTAG group, influence the ways people define the reports in preferred social context models. Moreover, topics expressed in the titles may influence what citizens perceives as the most critical information of reports, and thus correspond to their favoured mental models. To control context is about determining the definition and deciding on, and setting of, communicative situation, what knowledge participants should not have, and which social actions must be shaped by discourse (van Dijk 1998). In all, discourse structures may shape the formation of social representations and mental models (Ibid).

5.2. Discursive Constructions

The main discursive objects of the reports in relation to the research questions are: the great potential of AmI to enhance the quality of life of the European citizen; the significant opportunities for AmI in relation to modernizing the European social model; and the positive force of ICT (AmI) for shaping Europe’s future, owing to the transformational effects of AmI. Another object is the EU’s central role in the promotion and development of AmI. The international perspective on the vision of how AmI could shape the future is a marginal object in all reports. Implicit objects include: the AmI vision will materialize and the characteristics of AmI will eventually permit the societal acceptance of AmI.

1 Applicable to all the quotations included in this chapter, both bold and italicised words and segments are in original.

38 5.3. Social Actors – Collective Framing Power

The main social actors represented in the report are: ISTAG, European research community, (ICT) industry, AmI research, academia, scientific community, Council’s policy, governments, public and regional authorities, and EU. The vast majority of these actors are institutional and governmental actors, which is an indicator of the preferred sources and of the main framing of the reports, along with the scientific and official line. The reports involve social agents’ intervention. Below is an illustrative example:

‘The scenario experts unanimously supported the importance that the AmI vision should be built upon humanistic foundations...’ (ISTAG 2001, p. 22)

In the reports’ representation of social actors, the following aspects are worth noting: the repetition of references to ISTAG, ICT industry, research community and EU, the highlight and the space awarded to representing these actors, and the fact that the reports’ account of AmI as a new societal paradigm follows the views of these actors pretty closely. These actors are thus constructed as the prime definers of the represented reality; theirs is the predominant framing of the reports. They are referred to and their interpretation of the AmI vision is aired several times. Oddly, the reports don’t award adequate highlight to representing European citizens, although they are concerned with socieal transformation.

5.4. Language and Rhetoric

5.4.1. Linguistic Resources

The reports follow a scholastic and scientific writing style: they are produced by scholars and experts (represented by the ISTAG). This may be associated with mind control in the sense that people tend to accept beliefs, knowledge and views about the world via discourse from what they see as credible sources, such as scholars and experts (see Nesler et al. 1993), which consequently shapes their actions.

Further, language choices and rhetorical constructions create in the reports a positive representation of AmI – appealing benefits and huge transformational effects.

39 The titles’ expressions ‘Ambient Intelligence: from vision to reality: For participation – in society’ and ‘Shaping Europe’s Future through ICT’ strongly promotes the vision to the public and to policymakers, and implicitly indicate the EU’s position on the vision.

The importance of AmI in relation to societal transformation is reinforced by classifying it as a new societal paradigm. And Europe is embracing AmI and well prepared to realize its full potential:

AmI ‘does represent a new paradigm for how people can work and live together.’ (ISTAG 2003, p. 3)

ICT is ‘a New Societal Paradigm: A Vision for Europe’ (Ibid, p. 29).

Other semantic moves include disclaimers: ‘Scenarios are not traditional extrapolations from the present...’ (ISTAG 2001, 1)

The above experts exemplify semantically controlled topicalization, a form of highlighting information. The discourse describes issues in general abstract terms or in lower level details as to specificity. Such moves may facilitate the formation or change of social attitudes, either directly or indirectly through the generalization (van Dijk 1993).

5.4.2. Rhetorical Figures

The main rhetorical figure to be examined here is hyperbole, the exaggerated construction of how AmI will alter the way people live socially. The following quotations illustrate such rhetorical moves.

In AmI, ‘people...navigate between (both physically and virtually) different interconnected social settings (the home, workplace, school, hospital, social care facilities, cultural institutions etc.’ (ISTAG 2003, p. 8)

‘...AmI enables remote monitoring of...physical well-being...’ (Ibid, p. 10)

‘AmI can simultaneously help us to create a haven from the pace of modern life and provide the means whereby we can choose to ‘reconnect’ to society at times that better suit the needs and interests of the individual.’ (Ibid)

40 ‘ICT will make a reality of lifelong learning for all.’ (Ibid)

‘...we are seeing a paradigm shift from traditional healthcare towards “well-being for all”’ (ISTAG 2006, p. 8)

The reports assert that AmI has the potential to transform virtually every aspect of how people live in society. Scenarios portray ideal type living in a perfect world. Although the objective of the scenarios is to provide glimpses of plausible futures, and their building ought to treat AmI as an ‘imagined concept’, it seems that only the socially desired life is portrayed. Scenarios are inclined to portray only the bright side of living in the ‘amized’ society. Scenarios for an ‘unproblematic social life’ for the prototype citizens and communities might become the standard way of living in European society for all. The dark side of AmI, e.g. the gravity of exclusion, the end of privacy, and power relations and concentration (see literature), is rarely considered in the scenarios for the social. Scenarios have also a tendency to ignore the uncertainties that are characteristic for living in a technologized society. Rejection of technology is hardly envisioned, while current-day social acceptance of ICTs is not without struggles and problems. The acceptance process is far more intricate than is usually portrayed: it involves complex processes and a set of intertwined factors, e.g. micro- and macro social context of the social environment.

5.4.3. The Effect of Rhetoric

Persuasion, the object of rhetoric, is associated with mind control. The discourse on focus indirectly influence socially shared knowledge, views and beliefs, namely through their role in the manufacture of concrete models. Considering the context of European culture, the meaning and forms of AmI discourse may persuade European people’s minds than others. Hyperboles ‘preferentially affect the organization of models or the formation of opinions embodied in such models’ (van Dijk 1993, p. 259) Packaging of elements of rhetoric is intended to encourage certain interpretations and discourage others with respect to the potential of AmI in transforming the way people live socially. The underlying assumption is that having elementary insights into mind structures, and what it is meant to control them, discursive strategies can be sophisticatedly deployed to exercise mind control.

41 5.5. Framing as Operation

As mentioned earlier, the discourse advanced by the ISTAG is very much a function of other social actors to organize its claims. There is both a descriptive and interpretive reinforcement of their views and positions. The agency of social actors is influential in the construction of reality, and the framing by ISTAG is an operation of reframing that reality. It is important to account for the social actors’ discursive intervention and the ISTAG’s. Below are key discursive themes and patterns that relate to two perspectives of framing as to the selected material on AmI for social transformation.

5.5.1. Framing as Selection and Composition a. The Daunting Challenges of the ‘Eventual’ Societal Acceptance of AmI

According to ISTAG (2001, p. 8-9), ‘the social and political aspects of AmI will be very important for its development. A series of necessary characteristics that will permit the eventual societal acceptance of AmI were identified as a result [only relevant ones are presented below]:  ‘AmI should be orientated towards community...enhancement.’  ‘AmI should inspire trust and confidence.’  ‘AmI should be consistent with long term sustainability – societal...and with life-long learning.’ ‘The experts involved in constructing the scenarios therefore underlined the essential need that people are given the lead in way that systems, services and interfaces are implemented.’

Trust and Confidence Dilemma

The perspective on the ‘eventual’ societal acceptance of AmI tends to exclude an array of facts to make sense of reality which is rather of a multifaceted nature. ISTAG (2003, p. 3) states: ‘It will be necessary to address...societal concerns... so as to provide the necessary trust and confidence in AmI.’ To foster trust and confidence is regarded by the IST program as one of the major societal challenges to be addressed for the realisation of AmI (Punie 2002). The quandary is that it is far from clear how this can be tackled. The conundrum is that privacy threats are inherent in the very nature of AmI. AmI enabling technologies can facilitate monitoring and surveillance, and hence AmI space deployment is likely to be

42 of great concern to citizens (ISTAG 2003), hence the repercussions for their trust, and thus their acceptance, of AmI technology. Experiences show that the lack of trust is one of the inhibitors to public acceptance of new technology, e.g. the use of e-health and e-government services. Incidentally, critics (e.g. Wright 2005) argue that legitimate governments are involved in the encroachments upon privacy under the pretext of ensuring security. This justifies the incredulity surrounding the effectiveness of norms of trust in government in terms of preventing invasive usage of AmI. There is general consensus that in the world of AmI, the gains in security will be an alternative for the loss in privacy or, rather, people may give up privacy and get no security in return. In addition, the safeguards and privacy enhancing mechanisms that have so far been proposed to contain the risks posed by AmI are regarded as inadequate as to ensuring social acceptance of AmI.

The Claim of Humanistic - Social and Cultural - Concerns in the AmI Discourse Construction

It is claimed that AmI is about technologies adapting to people rather than people adapting to technologies. AmI supports ‘community development - including social...aspects such as human factors in design; the application of socio-technical systems approaches to developing the AmI landscape; initiatives towards community and societal-orientated AmI...the AmI vision should be built upon humanistic foundations.’ (ISTAG 2001, p. 22) However, when looking at how AmI technologies are being designed and developed, and are planned to be implemented, it is evident that it is more about technological factors than humanistic ones. AmI technology looks at what is technological feasible and falls short in considering user and social dynamics in the design process; moreover, most work in developing AmI artifacts seems to be technology-driven (e.g. Criel & Claeys 2008; Crutzen 2005; Lueg 2002). The decisions stay in the hands of designers when it comes to the development of applications and services for the social. Thus, the mainstream guiding principle for AmI design doesn’t genuinely reflect the shift towards human centered design as implied by the vision, nor will it be the case in the near future. The quandary is that it is far from clear how human-centred design can be realised as knowledge in this area is scant as to incorporating social and cultural factors as a parameter in AmI design. Yes, the position of the need for AmI to be driven by humanistic concerns goes against the tendency of technology foresight to be technology deterministic, but this remains only at the level of discourse. Like all previous technological visions, AmI is, to a large extent, technological deterministic. In addition, in the social use context of AmI, citizens (users) and social environments are pre-configured in the design of

43 technology, and this pre-configuration will shape the way AmI will be used. The idea that users may experiment with ICTs to invent new uses and to make them their own (e.g. Flichy 1995) is certainly irrelevant in an ‘amized’ society, where technology and its applications will pervade every aspect of people’s lives. Furthermore, it is argued that the socio-technological context and societal implications of the AmI vision need to be more explicit. All in all, within the constraints of computing, and thus AmI, taking the above claimed humanistic factors into account remains a strange switch to make and difficult to concretize into real-world actions. The manifesto of human-centred design has not impacted on AmI R&D; hence, the AmI vision doesn’t go beyond similar claims made in the past.

Societal Sustainability - Digital Divide

According to ISTAG (2001, p. 15), ‘digital divides emerging from unequal developments and access to the AmI infrastructure could be related to income, education and skills, age and work’. This observation locates the inequality within users and social groups rather than within a socio-cultural and technological context. This has implication for the deployment of AmI. Indeed, access to and use of AmI systems and services will persist in the future (Wright, Gutwirth & Friedewald 2007). In addition, ISTAG (2006, p. ii) points out that advances in ICT will allow to address Europe’s social challenges in the area of inclusion in ways that were impossible and not even conceivable The EU is committed to developing ‘an information society for all’ and to enable all European citizens to benefit from the knowledge society (Punie 2003, p. 23). At issue is the claim about the e-inclusion for all people in European society. The different factors for digital and social exclusion are intertwined and intricate. Although the EC has initiated a significant eInclusion program, the digital divide issue has barely figured in any AmI project (Wright, Gutwirth & Friedewald 2007). Besides, mainstream AmI design shows that it is difficult to create AmI technologies in ways that will enable all types of users and groups to become digitally and socially included, although ICT research, policies and legislatives consent to account for different user and group perspectives in the design of technology. To overcome socio-demographic gaps is a real dilemma as technological artifacts are fundamentally designed for specific users and in a specific context, and hence they are most likely to discriminate, or show favoritism against, others, by creating new, or widening existing, social and cultural gaps. According to ISTAG (2001, p. 45), education seems ‘rapidly to be becoming a discriminatory societal factor. To avoid such a tendency toward a digital divide...it is necessary to improve educational systems’. It is argued that ICT in education continue to increase the digital divide

44 through strengthening ICT-stereotypes and reinforcing ICT knowledge gap between social classes by educational system in the information society. Furthermore, digital inclusion of aged people constitutes a condition for their social inclusion in the so-called ‘amized’ society. ISTAG (2006, p. 8) points out that population in Europe is ageing rapidly, with enormous social implication in terms of creating demand for new model of ‘health and social care’; creating ‘new requirements for inclusion and access to public services’ and presenting a challenge to education to embrace lifelong learning, so that elderly people can remain socially active. ISTAG (2006, p.1) believes that this gap can be bridged only by ‘a dramatic increase in the use of ICT’. Maybe this is an unreflecting idea to solve such a complex socio-technological problem, as it relates the solution to the wider acceptance and use of AmI while exempting the societal, political and industrial systems from the responsibility. Bridging the gap may necessitate enforcing laws by European governments to implement standards and the right of aged and disabled to technological access, that is, by enactments of disability- and aging-inclusive AmI policies and legislatives. However, ICT industry may view such inclusion issues as regulatory barriers to be overcome, which may lead to conflicts of interests between societal stakeholders. Adding to the above, gender divide is an excluded topic in the discourse of AmI. Technology is a masculine domain and the social environment that results from that is a masculine concept. Gender and feminist studies show that acceptance of ICTs are shaped by socio-culturally prescribed roles of masculinity and femininity (Punie 2003).

b. Ambient Healthcare Environment

Satisfying the need of healthcare adds to the improvements in the quality of social life claimed by AmI. ‘In health, healthcare is being delivered better, quicker and earlier...New technologies are extending life and improving health and well-being and are opening the way to more personalised treatments...’ (ISTAG 2006, p. 8) The portrayed healthcare setting is a perfect scenario where disabled and unwell are able to cope, successfully, with their illnesses. Although there are several ‘valid’ medical reasons that may justify the development of AmI (in this particular direction), it is not to shut the eye to its actual social and political properties, e.g. hospital machinery and the ready-made abuse that could result from AmI. This relates to the risk of dehumanisation and depersonalisation of patients, by rendering them into biological and physiological apparatuses (Gaggioli, Vettorello & Riva 2003). People need human- quality care on the level of intelligent prosthetic care rather than control with an off-switch within their reach (Crutzen 2005).

45 5.5.2. Framing as Selection and Salience

The following selection of quotes illustrates the way in which framing is used to induce treatment recommendation for the AmI, causal interpretation, and moral evaluation.

‘Radical social transformations are likely to result from the implementation of the AmI vision.’ (ISTAG 2003, p. 3)

‘Only by enthusiastically embracing digital technologies in all areas of our...society will...Europeans achieve their true potential.’ (ISTAG 2006, p. ii)

‘...no society can ensure the security of its citizens and improve their quality of life if it cannot shape progress in ICT.’ (Ibid, iii)

‘If we are to unlock the transformational effects of ICT we need to move further and faster in accommodating the user perspective.’ (Ibid, p. 4)

‘As technology becomes ever more closely entwined in our daily lives, so it becomes more closely related with our...moral values. We should welcome this...’ (Ibid)

The dark side of AmI is concealed when establishing the link between AmI and societal transformation. This link also undervalues the situatedness of social transformation. It is very questionable as to whether or not social living will be improved if all communication, interactions and actions become technologized. A critical deconstruction should reveal the constitutional price people have to pay for this offer of a quality of life, security and support (Heidegger 1962). The development of AmI justified by societal transformation should not lead us to overlook the social drawbacks that could result from AmI.

5.6. Positioning and Legitimation

In report 1, the construction of change justifies the action of ISTAG as a group of entrepreneurs and technologists to construct the future of Europe.

46 In report 2 and 3, the construction of the relationship between AmI and societal transformation is a powerful legitimation of the involvement of EU in the promotion and development of the AmI vision.

In report 2, the construction of the changes arising from globalisation, facing EU, is a legitimation of EU to adopt the AmI vision.

The report 3’s representation of Europe’s situation, facing an added sense of urgency, is a legitimaion of ISTAG’s mission to shape Europe’s future. ‘The future is ours to shape; Europe must rise to the challenge.’ (ISTAG 2006, p. 40)

The position of ISTAG aids the construction of an image of European leadership in shaping the field of AmI and setting its research agenda, as well as in transforming the role of ICT in society and, ultimately, the way people live socially.

The discourse also offers positions between citizens and AmI designers and producers, in that the former is inextricably dependent on the latter to benefit from the (social and public) AmI-enabled services. AmI industry dictates its own visions of how societal problems can be solved and citizens can ‘unlock creativity and innovation’ by means of the so-called radically new AmI solutions. Hence, citizens are obliged to accept designers’ and producers’ terms: what they have to offer as social services and the way in which these services can be provided. This subject position requires people to delegate much of their decision power to AmI industry and its elites.

5.7. Ideological Viewpoints 5.7.1. Nationalistic Ideology

Ideologically, the selected material from the reports is clearly on the side of European ICT industry, research community and EU. Their perspectives dominate almost the entire respective material. A nationalistic ideology prevails in the reports. The ISTAG strongly promotes Europe and contribute to its depiction as the leader in AmI research. This is evident when ISTAG makes a link between AmI research in Europe and other countries, as illustrated by the following quotations:

47 ‘Europe is taking a lead’ in many research fields compared to ‘US, Japan, Canada, Australia etc.’ (ISTAG 2003, p. 27)

‘Europe has been able to establish clear industrial leadership world-wide.’ (ISTAG 2003, p. 5)

MIT’s Technology Review considers ‘certain European centres of excellence to be leaders in specific technologies which might be important for AmI applications.’ (ISTAG 2001, p. 23)

‘It [Europe] should lead and be a first choice for ICT development and it has the capacity to do so.’ (ISTAG 2006, p. iii)

These leading positions in technological fields are associated with business and industry rather than societal areas. ‘Europe has the best chance of developing leadership positions if it concentrates on areas where future societal...needs intersect with European expertise and industrial capacity.’ (ISTAG 2006, p. 34) This act of ‘eulogizing’ may be intended to push forward the AmI enterprise, the technologization of European society, on the basis of the normative values of AmI.

‘Europeans appreciate the European model, based on values such as equality, solidarity, inclusiveness, tolerance, and sustainability...Values are by no means obstacles to innovation; they may serve as important drivers of [AmI] innovation... Values are also a key parameter for reading social patterns, an important characteristic of many successful innovators.’ (ISTAG 2006, p. 4)

The design and vision of AmI tend to promote interfering with the values and traditions of European citizens and communities as well as marginalized social groups (see literature). The advocates of AmI visions have different perspective of the AmI technologies than users and non-users that may subsequently be susceptible to other experiences than the ones intended by their design. Besides, innovation can be thought of as carrying with it a conjunction, or reflecting a web, of cultural meanings, e.g. innovative designs are predisposed towards certain social and political directions. An innovation is ‘loaded’ with all kinds of symbolic meanings by designers and producers, and users have to interact with these meanings when using ICTs (Frissen & Punie 2001).

48 5.7.2. Vision Building and Ideological Claims

As a lesson learned from preceding visions, the future reality - radical social transformation - as envisioned by AmI may turn out to be very different from the way it was predicted, if the vision materializes at all, which makes it relevant to challenge it on the basis of its unrealism. One valid reason why AmI environments didn’t really break through up till now could be that the vision is futuristic rather than grounded on realistic assumptions – vision paradox. Many things (e.g. human-centric design, user empowerment, societal acceptance of AmI) were envisioned, which is rather optimistic, and although it is part of the vision-building (discourse construction) process, such claims are not realistic. There is, in fact, an uncertainty surrounding the realization of the whole AmI enterprise as there is a plethora of societal issues to overcome and many bottlenecks and challenges to face.

According to ISTAG (2006, p. ii), ICT ‘is the “constitutive technology” of the first half of this century’. In this epoch, AmI pops up, promising revolutionary social transformations on the basis of technological breakthroughs. This discourse is serving the purposes of ICT industry looking for ways to make technology permeate every aspect of human environment – the fabric of society. The society is being ideologically and symbolically represented as ‘a haven from the pace of modern life’ (ISTAG 2003, p. 10). AmI is becoming a subject of ideological claims because it doesn’t seem to inspire social theory. AmI revolves around, albeit inadvertently, what is technological feasible, and has an unsophisticated account of how social transformation occurs, falling short in considering the social dynamics and cultural factors in the innovation process. Societal implications should be made more explicit in AmI, which is crucial for it to, as Langdon Winner in (Bohn et al. 2003) maintains, go behind the recurring one-sided claim of user technology throughout the twentieth century that it will simplify our lives and liberate us from toil.

5.7.3. Intermingled Interests

The reports are replete with implicit ideological statements that serve the interests of European ICT industry and research community. A set of illustrative excerpts are presented below:

‘The overall support to ICT research in the EU would...need to be tripled in order to reach the US levels.’ (ISTAG 2003, p. 24)

49 ‘The increasing competition at a global scale gives Europe no other choice than to mobilise its resources to attract...investment in ICT research.’ (ISTAG 2006, iii)

‘Today’s state-of-the art in ICT is impressive and the continuously increasing level of research into the next generations of ICT is bound to yield further remarkable advances.’ (Ibid, p. 5)

‘ISTAG invites the EU Member States to use all possible means to support and attract investment in ICT research.’ (Ibid, iii)

The normative facet of AmI vision has formed the foundations of political decisions made by EC - the major sponsor of AmI – on what types of AmI research projects to finance. Despite the huge funding funneled into AmI R&D and the intensive research in both academic circles and ICT industry, no real breakthrough in research is hitherto perceived. The futuristic and unrealistic assumptions of the AmI vision have, in fact, played a pivotal role in serving the ICT industry and research community. Indeed, there are signs that the AmI discourse – the original vision - is in the process of dissolving and vanishing (see Foucault’s theory of episteme), as the focus in the information society discourse has recently shifted from AmI back to ICT as a notion to provide a vision on how European society will develop (see ISTAG 2006). It is also worth mentioning that no report has been published on the AmI vision since 2006.

5.7.4. Power Reproduction – the Role of EU and Governmentality

Many of the structures of the reports are visibly linked to structures of the sociopolitical context, especially European legislators support, and stimulate a strong interest in, AmI.

A support to European politics is evident when ISTAG mentions that the ‘significant opportunities’ for AmI in relation to ‘modernizing the European social model’ are all supportive of the European Council’s policy objective. The societal transformation should occur through the prism of the EU policy. Below are examples of relevant quotations:

50 ‘...AmI technologies and environments can already support efforts to implement existing policy strategies, objectives and targets.’ (ISAG 2003, p.9)

‘...the AmI services must conform with national policies and regulations.’ (Ibid, p. 25)

‘Mastering the next wave of ICT development and its use will require research to go hand in hand with regulation and policy.’ (ISTAG 2006, p. iv)

There are inferences about the ways in which the reports ideologically sustain relations of power. The following is a set of quotations that indicate the AmI discourse role in organizing society, by attempting to order social and institutionalized actions according to a given centre:

‘Only by enthusiastically embracing digital technologies in all areas of our...society will Europe and Europeans achieve their true potential.’ (ISTAG 2006, p. ii)

‘ISTAG sees an important role for the Commission in facilitating the further coordination between national programmes and policies in ICT research.’ (ISTAG 2006, p. iv)

The idea that unlocking the transformational effects of AmI can be achieved by a coordinated effort among the dominating social structures is clearly present in the reports. Discourse can thus be classified as administrative rationalism, the assumption that AmI can be realized by legal-political formulas.

51 Chapter Six

6. Concluding Remarks

The aim of this study was to perform a critical reading of the scholarly and ICT industry’s construction of AmI in relation to social transformation. This deconstruction meant to unmask what is undervalued, overvalued and excluded, and reveals several converging points between the ISTAG’s discourse, subjects, ideology and power. A range of discursive means and strategies are deployed in the reports with the intentions of persuasion and ideological reproduction.

6.1. Key Findings and Discussions

The AmI discourse (vision) construction tends to be deterministic, i.e. it assumes that the ‘amization’ of society will lead to radical social transformations, and has an unsophisticated account of how social change occurs. It is also inclined to be rhetorical - it promises revolutionary social changes without really having a holistic strategy for achieving the goal. Scenarios for the social are idyllically described: AmI is a panacea for major social problems and the technologization of society represents a heaven on earth full of social fulfilment. AmI designers and producers follow the ideal of creating digital health, social and public environments which are fitted with their assumed expectations. They are convinced such environments, by providing ambient services, can improve on people’s quality of social living. Technologization of society differs from design of technology as to complexity, intractability, uncertainty and dimensionality pertaining to the object of inquiry – society versus artefact. Besides, describing scenarios for the social is not an innocent activity. In addition to rhetorical operations, topicalization is accomplished in correspondence with the preferred mental models and social representations.

Furthermore, the discourse is exclusionary: a number of facts and opinions - pertaining to trust, social sustainability, human-centred design, healthcare, and community life - are excluded with the intention to advance the idea of the eventual societal acceptance of AmI. To foster trust and confidence is a daunting societal and technological challenge. The quandary is that it is far from clear how this can be tackled for the privacy threats are inherent in the very nature of AmI, which has repercussion for citizens’

52 trust. The attempt to ostensibly address privacy issues to build trust may reflect an unreflecting consideration, as it tends to compartmentalize this intricate socio-political conundrum into a simplistic social problem in a bid to resolve it through privacy-enhancing mechanisms as quick technological fixes. There is moreover an incredulity surrounding the effectiveness of norms of trust in government in terms of preventing intrusive usage of AmI technologies merely because governments are themselves involved in the encroachments upon people’s privacy. The only way forward, which is yet difficult to pursue, is to undergo drastic societal changes, behavioral, structural and organizational alterations. More to the exclusion, the claim that AmI should be driven by humanistic concerns rather than technological ones doesn’t hold true, as corroborated by mainstream AmI design trend. AmI remains technological deterministic, thereby falling short in considering the social and cultural contextual factors. Human- centred design guidelines together with social concerns seem to hang about only at the level of discourse. By not finding their ways into real-world actions, they render AmI vision, if different from earlier technological visions, different only in the sense of the rhetoric about the design. The design approach in question is pretentious, unclear and fuzzy. As such, it replicates the value of the new, which is a-pathos intrinsic to AmI. To show humanistic concerns on people, the combination of science and humanity must be taken into account more than its basic function; thus, by adding social and cultural connotations in technology design, a harmonious state among people, AmI systems and services, and social environment can be created, whereby social demands can be fulfilled. This is far from being the case for AmI, and subsequently the vision doesn’t go beyond similar claims made in the past. Or, it represents a postmodern way of being non-deterministic. Further, in terms of social sustainability, the argument of equal access to technology locates the inequality within users and groups rather than within a socio-cultural and technological context. Regardless, AmI poses concerns about the persistence of unequal access to AmI and of digital divides with regard to education, income, ethnicity, age, language, culture and gender. The different causes for digital exclusion are just intertwined and complex. Besides, digital divide is a question of the social embeddedness of technologies. That said it is unfeasible to create technologies in ways that will enable all types of users to become socially included, although ICT research, policies and legislatives collectively consent to account for different group perspectives in technology design. It is hence not enough to place the notion of the digital divide on the policy agenda for society to be socially inclusive. Policy has not influenced the development of AmI as not to become a (new) source of exclusion in society. What is needed is to comprehend the reason behind the gaps rather than to assume they will vanish, or AmI would permeate all groups in society and thus be accessible and

53 usable for every citizen in Europe. Of significance is to treat digital gaps as socio-politically embedded issues rather than as symptoms of social group or individual issues. For the potential of AmI technology to benefit all European citizens it is necessary to direct its innovation, strategies and policies towards meaningful societal transformation purposes. Specific attention should be paid to how citizens and groups, against whom technology may show favouritism, are affected digitally and socially by the design of AmI technology, and critically contrast this with the meaning of the same technology for other peoples in normal or dominant positions within European society. All in all, by unveiling what is excluded in the framing of social reality, it becomes relevant to raise doubts about the actual validity of the so- called societal acceptance of AmI as the latter appears to derail from the direction where it should be heading. Hence, the promise of radical and AmI-enabled social transformation becomes questionable.

In terms of health, the portrayed healthcare setting in the scenario is primarily a perfect one where disabled or unwell are able to cope, successfully, with their illnesses. It has a tendency to ignore ready- made abuse that may result from AmI - hospital machinery and the ensuing dehumanisation and depersonalisation of patients.

The discourse has a role in wider processes of legitimation of social structures. Different actions of EU and ISTAG are justified on the basis of normative and political reasons. Certain social practices become legitimate forms of social actions from within AmI discourse, and they in turn reproduce this discourse which legitimates them in the first place. Moreover, AmI as a system of understanding the world is (re)shaping the actions and the practices of actors, as well as the meanings such actors ascribe to their social undertakings. In addition, the construction of the discourse offers different subject positions: between ISTAG and Europe and European citizens, and between citizens and designers and producers. A subject or institutional position is played with subjective or one-sided identification, and hence taking it up has a direct implication for subjectivity or biasness. Biased identification is manifest in the fact that scholars, experts and producers are offered discursive locations from which to talk and act within the structure of rights and duties for citizens that use that repertoire. Positions should be replaced by roles when it comes to society, whereby social agents may prescribe things to be acted out.

The discourse plays a major role in constructing the image of social actors – ISTAG, ICT industry, scholarly community and EU, as well as in defining their relations and identities in a way to reallocate

54 roles and reflect new attributes. A great highlight and space is awarded to represent these actors, and their perspectives dominate the reports. They are the prime definer of the represented reality. Incongruously, the citizens’ views seem to be inconsequential in the framing of such a reality. Societal transformation is about people; therefore, they ought to have a stake in constructing or refining the ‘envisioned’ reality - collective consciousness. They should be given the opportunity to express their views and get involved in the societal efforts that are meant to bring about social transformation. However, people who are to live in AmI are not asked for their views; it is the ICT industry and designers’ visions of what constitute a ‘positive’ social transformation that seem to dictate what will be altered in society. People are active shapers of their reality, not simple consumers of technology. Failure to consider this approach has indeed had repercussions on realizing the vision of AmI. One of the causes why AmI environments, which are to improve the quality of life of the citizens, haven’t break through yet - despite more than a decade of intensive research in academic circles and industry, adding to the strong interest stimulated by policymakers in Europe - is the pre-configuration of citizens in AmI, e.g. the vision of user participation. This also raises commonsensical questions: Whether European people have ever sought the kind of social transformation offered by AmI industry? What are the implications of enforcing changes that don’t correspond to the aspirations of people in society? How neutral are the designers and producers’ views on the so-called AmI-enabled social transformation?

As regards to ideological reproduction, the discourse perpetuates power relations, serves the interest of ICT industry and research community, and advances cultural claims. The technologization of society, and thus promises of revolutionary social transformations, is increasingly a growing subject of ideological claims. The initial vision should no longer be the main driver for AmI research and development. As a constructive re-interpretation of its role, AmI may need to move behind its foundational vision and embrace new fresh thinking, namely the holistic system view and the meaningful consideration of social and cultural dynamics in the configuration of citizens’ lives in the AmI landscape. There is a need for alternative research directions that may be more effective in bringing the field of AmI closer to real social impact, even if they mean abandoning some of the currently prevailing assumptions. Furthermore, the ideas proposed in the reports have links to power and interests and that the power to create symbols via the research and industry - mediation of modern society - remains far from being a neutral force. The interests of the stakeholders involved are intermingled: ISTAG requires that EU funnel more expenditure - heavy investment - into AmI, while the role of ISTAG is to, (in the vision building)

55 reproduce the ideological field of European society in a way that also reproduces the structure of power. Because the ISTAG has a relative autonomy, the dominant powers cannot directly supervise this important cultural apparatus and knowledge tank. ICT industry and research community play a hegemonic role by attempting to reproduce an ideology, as a set of norms and values that serve to reproduce and legitimize the social structure, through which the citizens, communities and organizations participate in their own regulation. ISTAG operates within the limits of the discursive formations and the regime of truth of the European society; thus, it constitutes the object through which power is relayed. It is the processes of reports production of the ISTAG which have the power to ‘make true’ the regime of truth in question, that see the ISTAG participating wittingly in the ‘governmentality’ of the European society. Besides, AmI spaces - social and public environments - will be governed from the outside and thus they will turn into matrices of golden AmI-cages – the domestication of the citizens. Average citizens as individual actors do not typically have the power (societal positions and the knowledge) to alter the circumstances of ownership, infrastructure design, and technological outcomes as to AmI landscapes. These power structures and relations will persist, although most likely in various formats and forms. At issue is that no considerations of power relations in the society are made in the vision on AmI.

6.2. Reliability, Validity and Limitations

This discursive research is based on a rigorous application of research methodology and versatile theories. This approach legitimizes scientifically produced knowledge and aids in generating well- founded, and constructing logical, arguments, which the validity and reliability of research depend upon since there is no hard data provided through discourse analysis. However, given that discourse analysis is always a matter of interpretation, and given the exploratory nature of this study, the research outcomes are open for discussions and the arguments are subject to re- and counter-interpretations. It is argued that the complexity of discourses is to be understood in terms of the complexity of cultures. To operate out of this awareness in the critical reading of the AmI discourse construction requires knowledge of the developmental patterns of technology in European society as well as understanding of the discourse temporal evolution and the impact of representations of social reality on subsequent ones. Without insights into the specific cultural and historical factors underlying the mutual, concurrent shaping process of technology and society, it is no easy task to grasp the societal discourse of AmI. That said there are aspects of relevance that might have been left out or overlooked in this discourse examination.

56 Likewise, it is important to be cognizant of what can be lost and what can be gained with each set of analytical techniques. However, all discourse analytical approaches are non-neutral lenses and involve varied procedural choices depending on the analyst and the aim of the study. The constellation of different discourse analytical approaches entails specific ways of seeing the world, thereby providing quite different insights into the text and leading to different conclusions. In addition, although most of discourse analytical approaches reveal that our ways of talking don’t actually reflect the reality, but they tend to reproduce and change its meaning, it is still important to carefully assess the appropriateness of the analytical tools as to allowing an adequate examination and productive interpretation of discourses, especially large-scale ones.

Furthermore, like any other approach, the one that I employed is associated with some difficulties. The dimension of materials to be analyzed is of large size due to two factors: the preferred large scope of analysis and the inherent interdiscursivity underlying the constitution of AmI discourse. There may be issues of manageability as to analyzing each selected material from the reports in useful time and to show patterns of variation in the discourse in question. Especially, historical-diachronic analysis and intertextuality (in terms of giving an adequate account of the time plane) are beyond the scope of this study. Particularly, the former relates to critical discourse moments (in the construction of AmI discourse), meaning periods that involve specific happenings (e.g. socio-economic changes, financial crisis) which may lead to challenging the established discursive positions within AmI discourse with respect to whether arguments or claims have changed because of these critical discursive moments or whether new alternative views have arisen due to the socio-cultural contingency inherent in the construction of social knowledge - AmI as ways of understanding and representing the world.

6.3. Future Research

Given the evolving and multifaceted nature of AmI, there are numerous alternative directions for research and a plethora of issues that need to be explored. Below are, far from exhaustive, directions and avenues for future research in relation to AmI for social change:

 Rebuilding the vision in a way to balance between innovative, futuristic considerations and realistic assumptions with regard to societal transformation.

57  Understanding the reason behind the digital divides, focussing on culture and gender gaps.  Measuring the outcomes of evaluative studies of what AmI promotes against the aspirations of European citizens that are supposed to benefit from AmI technologies.  Conducting comparative studies on cultural variations in Europe and translating the results in the design of AmI spaces for the social, e.g. healthcare and community life.  Exploring the implications of taking the structures and patterns of power explicitly into account.  Rethinking the social transformation envisioned with AmI and the pre-configuration of citizens.  Involving marginalized users and social groups in design of AmI in a more sociological and ethnographic sense, and ensuring that the results generated reflect their diversity.

AmI is a potentially exciting area for investigation with many intriguing questions and extensive research work awaiting future scholarly inquiry. The underlying assumption is that AmI may still have a profound and positive impact on society as long as there is willingness to abandon some of the currently prevailing assumptions and claims.

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67 Appendix A: Technological Features and Benefits of AmI

AmI has the following characteristics: context awareness; implicit interaction; personalized, adaptive and responsive services; technology invisibility and pervasion; and social intelligence. By being augmented with human-like context awareness and implicit interaction capabilities, AmI technologies are able to provide intelligent services to users anywhere and anytime. As highlighted by ISTAG (2001), AmI has numerous potential benefits in relation to the social, home and work spaces in which AmI will exist.

1. Context Awareness

1.1. Context in Context Aware Computing

Context has become a popular and established concept in AmI research, and context awareness an integral part in HCI research, based on findings that every human interaction is shaped by context. As a new computing paradigm, AmI has heralded a new class of systems called context aware applications and hence new ways of interaction. Context constitutes a crucial basis for the functioning of AmI environments and fundamentally influences and changes how interactive systems behave in response to users. Context awareness technology thus provides computing systems with the ability to adapt their services to users to better match their cognitive, emotional and social needs.

The context definition is still a matter of debate, although defining concepts is a fundamental step in doing scientific research. Research shows that the difficulty of context definition overarches all research in context aware computing, despite the semantics and definition of what constitutes context has been studied extensively and discussed profusely in the literature. Subsequently, several definitions have been suggested and categorized mainly into conceptual and technical. In other words, context is defined from two perspectives: an all-encompassing theoretical approach and a restricted application-specific technical approach. Technical definition of context is bound up with technological feasibility: the formalism used to encore and reason about context in AmI applications. By conceptual it is meant to define what theoretically constitutes context: what needs to be semantically represented, and hence context is described beyond technological constraints and assumptions. The most cited conceptual definition in the literature is that from Dey’s (2000) perspective that context-aware applications look at

68 the who’s, where’s, when’s and what’s of different entities and use this information to determine why a situation is occurring. He describes context as: ‘any information that can be used to characterize the situation of an entity. An entity is a person, place, or object that is considered relevant to the interaction between a user and an application, including the user and applications themselves.’ (Dey 2000, 2001) ‘Context is typically the location, identity and state of people, groups and computational and physical objects.’ (Dey, Salber & Abowd 2001) A closer examination of Dey’s definition depicts that the concept of entity is fundamentally different from the concept of context: context is what can be said about or describes an entity. Examples of constituents of contexts of entities, such as persons and computing devices, are: the location, the social setting or the emotional and cognitive state of a person, and the available memory or energy of a devise or the status or proximity of a computational resource, respectively. These constituents form the entity’s context. Schilit, Adams and Want (1994) view context as the user’s location, the social situation and the nearby resources. Schmidt, Beigl and Gellersen (1999) describe context using a context model with three dimensions of Environment (physical and social), Self (device state, physiological and cognitive), and Activity (behavior and task). Göker and Myrhaug (2002) present AmbieSense system, where they suggest that user context consists of five constituents: environment context (describes the place or location where the user is); personal context (includes personal data, cognitive and physiological states); task context (describes what the actors are doing in this user context); social context (describes the social aspects of the current user context); and spatiotemporal context (describes aspects of the user context in relation to the time and spatial extent for the user context).

1.2. Context Awareness: Definitional Issues and Technological Challenges

Context-aware computing is the catch phrase nowadays. Context-awareness is a central feature of AmI systems and a prerequisite enabling technology for realization of the AmI vision. With this vision computers are becoming ubiquitous and interaction increasingly user-centred. AmI has given rise to a proliferation of context aware systems, spanning across a miscellany of application domains and used in all walks of life, wherever there is an interaction between humans and their environment. Therefore, such systems can be of assistance to people in the social, work and home environment. Tremendous opportunities reside in deploying AmI systems on different scale, distribution and intelligence, ranging

69 from location aware, mobile aware, emotional aware, cognitive aware, social aware, culture-aware, to activity aware applications.

From a technological perspective, underlying the term context awareness is the idea that technology is able to sense, recognize and react to contextual variables, that is, to determine the actual context of its use and adapt their functionality accordingly or respond appropriately to features of that context. Systems that utilize information about the situation of its users, the environment, or the state of the system itself to adapt their behavior are called context-aware systems (Schilit, Adams & Want 1994). This implies that a system analyzes and reacts to a user’s changing context, which shapes human-system interaction. According to Schmidt (2003), context aware system entails the acquisition of context using sensors to perceive a situation, the abstraction of context by matching a sensory reading to a context concept, and application behavior through triggering actions based on the inferred context. With emphasis on task, Dey (2000) defines such a system as one that uses context to provide relevant information and services to the user, where relevancy depends on the user’s task.

The development of context aware applications, e.g. modelling context and user interaction into digital systems and environments, is no easy task. From most of the context research thus far, one of the main issues continues to be the ambiguity surrounding what constitutes context and how to properly make use of it in relation to the user. Context is a difficult topic to tackle in the realm of AmI (Criel & Claeys 2008; Ulrich 2008). This emanates from the complexity inherent in comprehending what constitutes context and how its constituents entwine and interrelate dynamically to form a contextual complex that eventually shapes the interaction. This complex includes, and is not limited to, cognitive, emotional, physiological, bio-chemical, social, cultural, situational, environmental, spatiotemporal and historical factors. It is moreover dynamic, unstructured, changeable, volatile and unpredictable. At issue is that there is a tendency in context aware computing towards reducing the complexity of context: alienating the term from its complex meaning in more theoretic disciplines to serve pragmatic purposes (Lueg 2002). Simplifications in operationalizing context appear to be necessary when developing all kinds of AmI artefacts. Researchers claim that the pitfall remains inconsequential in the functioning of many applications, until, as argued by Agre (2001), context-aware applications fail annoyingly when their wrong choices (inferences and actions) become significant. The concept of context, a perception of the situation, and that of situation are circumscribed in the realm of AmI. The social connotation of ‘situated’

70 is, to some extent, lost as the term has been reduced from something social in content to merely ‘interactive’ or ‘located in some time and place’ (Clancey 1997). There remains ‘an explicit distinction between the concept of context...and the original usage situation...as a social setting... Acknowledging the difference suggests that developers of context-aware artifacts should pay considerable attention to the fact that the context determined by artifacts may differ from what the persons involved in the situation have negotiated.’ (Lueg 2002, p. 43) or perceive. In relation to this argument, from a conceptually different angle, Ulrich (2008, p. 22) contends that contextual assumptions ‘have a judgmental and normative core that is rooted in individual purposefulness and social practice. They imply empirical as well as normative selectivity of all our judgments and claims, in that they determine what considerations of fact and value we take to be relevant and what others we don’t consider so relevant. We are not usually fully aware of these selections, nor do we overview all the consequences they may have. We are, then, always at risk that our designs and actions have effects that we do not adequately anticipate; that we raise claims that we cannot really substantiate; and that in our communication with other people, we talk at cross purposes’ Overall, ‘context is ultimately the totality of contextual assumptions and selections that give meaning and validity to any piece of information; that is, context awareness is an ideal, and ideals usually resist complete realization. This is why we need them: because they resist full realization, they give us critical distance to what is real. For most work in context aware computing, it suffices to observe that application designers use the notion of context and context awareness meaningfully to design successful applications to fulfil user’s needs and demands.’ (Ibid, p.6)

2. Implicit and Natural Interaction

AmI implies a shift towards human centred computing, i.e. social user interfaces. A prerequisite element to achieve human centric interaction in AmI is to integrate context awareness capability to enhance the interactive behaviors of AmI systems, so that they can provide efficient services in an intuitive way in support of everyday activities. Augmenting AmI systems with human-like interaction capabilities is crucial to the successful functioning of AmI spaces. One key aim of AmI is to make technology simple to use and interact with, more intuitive (less conscious), and accessible to people with minimal knowledge. To create such a technology requires what is called implicit HCI (iHCI) technology. AmI systems use implicit inputs to capture information about the user context, and thus adaptively or autonomously respond to their needs and behaviors. The new model for iHCI is characterized by the definition of iHCI as: ‘the interaction of

71 a human with the environment and with artefacts which is aimed to accomplish a goal. Within this process the system acquires implicit input from the user and may present implicit output to the user’ (Schmidt 2005, p. 164). Here implicit input refers to ‘actions and behavior of humans, which are done to achieve a goal and are not primarily regarded as interaction with a computer, but captured, recognized and interpreted by a computer system as input’; and ‘implicit output of a computer that is not directly related to an explicit input and which is seamlessly integrated with the environment and the task of the user.’ (Ibid) One of the goals of iHCI is to create interaction between humans and systems that is closer to, or emulate, natural interaction (Schmidt 2005) Natural interaction is one key feature of iHCI. It promises an intuitive interaction between humans and technology for it involves utilizing natural modalities. AmI marks a new shift of HCI, from explicit means of input, using, for example, keyboards or touch screen, towards more implicit forms of inputs that support natural human forms of communication, such as facial expressions, hand gestures, body postures, paralinguistic and prosodic features of speech, socio-cultural differences, and so forth. This will enable users to interact with computers on a human level: in the same way face-to-face human-human interaction takes place. Recognized as an inherent part of, and having a seminal influence, in direct human-to-human communication, nonverbal behaviors play a significant role in conveying context. They can provide a wealth of information (e.g. cognitive cues, emotional cues, activity cues) about the user as implicit input. This can enhance context aware applications understanding of interaction with their users and thereby adapt their behaviors in ways that better match their needs pertaining to communication, interaction and actions. Entailing special interfaces, AmI is aware of human context and presence and able of responding and anticipating intelligently to gestured or spoken indications of desires without conscious mediation, and it takes care of needs (ISTAG 2001; Punie 2003; Riva et al. 2004). AmI systems are also capable to recognize and respond to gestures and speech as commands (new forms of explicit inputs) to assist the user in carrying out routine activity more effectively and effectively. Such HCI design has a great potential to bring simplicity and intuitiveness to the interaction between AmI systems and users (e.g. Ishikawa, Horry & Hoshino 2005; Abawajy 2009). All in all, natural interaction has implication for the social, through improving how people interact and communicate in digital social environments. It allows the operation of systems to be moved to the periphery of attention in line with the vision of ‘calm technology’ (Weiser & Brown 1998).

72 3. AmI Services

AmI environments can offer a wide variety of assistive services to the user, including personalized, adaptive and responsive. This means that they should adaptively and proactively change according to the user’s context (Weiser 1991). AmI involves a digital environment that ‘is sensitive, adaptive and responsive to their needs, habits, gestures and emotions.’ (Riva et al. 2003, p. 63)

3.1. Personalization

Personalization is a common feature of computing applications. Personalization is where applications let the user specify his/her settings for how the application should behave in a given situation (Chen & Kotz 2000). In context aware computing, personalized services may involve two levels of interactivity: passive (user-driven) and active (system-driven). Passive context aware applications present updated context or sensor information to the user and let the user decide how to change the application behavior, whereas active aware applications autonomously changes the application behavior according to the sensed information (Ibid) However, in context aware computing, researchers consider only push based applications to be context-aware (Erickson 2001). This relates to technology invisibility, the guiding principle of context aware computing. The range of application domains that utilize personalization is potentially huge, e.g. e-education, e-health, mobile phones, assisted living, and so on. Personalization involves accommodating the variations between users in terms of habits (e.g. customs, norms, routines, practices, conventions, patterns, tendencies, inclinations, preferences, interests, lifestyles) as well as diverse contextual elements, such as location and time. Personalization is necessary for efficient interaction and for fine-tuning and better acceptation of AmI technologies. The diversity and dynamics of applications in AmI suppose an increased level of personalization; the related emphasis will add to the smoothness of interaction and thus the user experience.

3.2. Adaptability and Responsiveness

Adaptability and responsiveness are key features of AmI. The adaptive behavior of AmI systems in response to the user’s mental or emotional state is regarded as one of the cornerstones of AmI (Noldus 2003). AmI technology holds a great potential in permeating everyday life and changing the nature of almost every human activity. In human-centric computing, adaptability entails a system perceiving the

73 context in which it operates and adapting its behavior to it appropriately, thereby adjusting for use in different conditions. AmI systems are able to acclimatize to the human actor intuitively, which should be accomplished without conscious mediation (Punie 2003; Gill & Cormican 2005). Technology will be used ‘unconsciously to accomplish everyday tasks’, assisting people in their everyday lives, freeing them from tedious tasks (Weiser 1999). By detecting cognitive processes, such as decision making, problem solving and reasoning, AmI can assist users in performing cognitive tasks such as writing, information searching, information retrieval, product design, organizing a workshop, game playing, and so on (e.g. Kim, Suh & Yoo 2007; Lieberman & Selker 2000). The significance of research in adaptability in AmI stems from its potential to improve people’s quality of life; however, there is a downside to it: the measurement and interpretation of human body data and movements for unethical practices.

As far as responsiveness is concerned, AmI systems can perceive the emotional state of the user and adapt its behavior in response to it. These systems should be sensitive and sympathetic in relation to the feelings of the human actor and react favourably to the various situations it encounters (Gill & Cormican 2005). AmI environment facilitate human emotion experiences by providing users with appropriate emotion services instantaneously (Zhou & Kallio 2005). Researchers are investigating how to develop emotionally intelligent computers (e.g. Picard et al. 2001; Andre et al. 2004; Ptaszynski et al. 2009) while other are working on how to help users improve their emotional intelligence skills (e.g. Zhou et al. 2007). Human innate emotional intelligence could be mediated by integrating AmI and advanced ICT (Ibid). Applications of emotional context aware systems are numerous. For example, using behavioral user state based on eye gaze and head pose, e-learning applications can adjust the presentation style of a computerized tutor when a learner is bored, interested, frustrated or pleased (Asteriadis et al. 2009). Another example would be a user interface (agent) that can change its visualization by selecting relevant colors, size and fonts in ways that adapt to the user’s affective states. However, to design affective or emotional aware applications involves many challenges. More recent work argues that emotions cannot be so easily categorized and that the expression of emotions is culturally dependent (Pantic & Rothkrantz 2003). Individuals differ on the basis of their cultures and languages as to expressing and interpreting emotions. There are as many emotional properties that are idiosyncratic as universal. There is hardly ever a one-size-fits-all solution for the growing variety of users and interactions (Picard 2000)

74 4. Social Intelligence

The system feature of social intelligence is an interesting facet of AmI. It relates to the adaptive and responsive behavior of AmI systems as an intelligent capability. Emotion and social skills play a key role for AmI systems. These should be able to adapt in response to the cognitive and the emotional behaviors of humans, by understanding their cognitive and emotional states and the motives behind such states. A socially intelligent system is one that is able to select and tune actions according to the emotional state of the user’ and to the context of the ongoing activity (Bianchi-Berthouze & Mussio 2005). The new computing culture is about people empowerment. AmI emphasizes human centric interfaces which are intelligently adaptive and responsive to people and their cognitive, emotional and social needs. By adding adaptive HCI interaction methods, ‘based on new insights in the way people like to interact with computing devices (social user interfaces), digital environments can be created which improve the quality of life of people by acting on their behalf’ (Riva et al. 2003, p. 63). AmI is envisioned to become an essential and integral part of people’s social life. With socially intelligent features, AmI system can support social processes of human, produce emotions with a positive impact on the user, invoke positive feelings in the user, or appear sensitive to the user (Markopoulos et al. 2005; Tähti & Niemelä 2005; Nijholt, Rist & Tuijnenbreijer 2004; Bianchi-Berthouze & Mussio 2005; Sampson 2005). It is evident that social intelligence is vital for users’ pleasurability and satisfactoriness and thus acceptability of technology. Moreover, it is not sufficient for applications to be usable, functional, efficient and aesthetically pleasant, they also need to be emotionally appealing to gain user acceptance (Tähti & Niemelä 2005; Desmet 2002). The aim is to design AmI environments that heighten user experiences. Yet, it is the perception of the interaction and the interactive artifacts as an experience based on a subjective, socially situated interpretation that will induce positive emotions. One implication of triggering emotional states in the user, whether by subjective experience of interaction process or aesthetically pleasant artifacts, is to improve user performance. It has become a well known phenomenon that ‘attractive things work better’ (Norman 2002) – in other words, what is beautiful is usable. Recent studies demonstrate the relationship between aesthetics and emotion and their significance in the ICT design (Norman 2004, Zhang & Li 2005; Zhang 2009), between aesthetics design and emotions (Hekkert 2005), and between emotion and cognition in the context of ICT (Norman 2002), as well as between aesthetics, design and computer science (Fishwick 2006). All in all, emotion is

75 becoming central in the design of AmI systems, and the role of emotions - key element of socially intelligent behavior - has been demonstrated by numerous studies in cognitive science (Damasio 1994).

5. Technology Invisibility

AmI is aimed at creating intelligent and autonomous technology, mentally and physically invisible, integrated into our daily life. Invisibility and disappearing of technology was crystallized into a realist notion in 1991. Weiser (1991) was the first who focused on this characterization of computing: ‘The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it…’ Technology will vanish into the background of our lives, disappearing into our environment and from our perception - ‘invisible to common awareness’ (Ibid). Physical and mental invisibility denotes that one cannot sense the AmI devices, neither their presence nor their full (inter)action, but only the implicit interaction output that is intended to change the user environment (Crutzen 2005). Common to the characterization of technology invisibly are two main factors: the psychological factor (i.e. routine acting via ICT-tools and effortlessness of technology use) and the miniaturization of computing devices. Computing devices become so small as to be virtually invisible, and interfaces visible, yet unnoticeable, part of peripheral senses.

5.1. Mental Invisibility

The different metaphors used for context aware applications assume disappearing interfaces and invisibility of technology more generally. This is enabled by context awareness functionality and implicit (and natural) interaction capabilities. The guiding idea of invisibility in AmI is that computer devices take care of the context people are in as part of their interactions, by detecting relevant information and responding to it autonomously. According to Donald Norman, the term ‘invisible computing’ describes ‘the coming age of ubiquitous task-specific computing devices’, which ‘are so highly optimized to particular tasks that they blend into the world and require little technical knowledge on the part of their users’ (Riva et al. 2003, p.41). Unobtrusiveness of AmI is about interaction that doesn’t involve a steep learning curve (ISTAG 2003), through making technology effortless to use, more intuitive and reliable. Mental invisibility concerns human’s perception of computer interfaces as a psychological phenomenon, which is experienced when users naturally interact with computers. This feature will have a seminal influence on

76 people’s experience in their interaction with digital environments, and is likely to change the ways in which people represent and understand the physical world.

5.2. Physical Invisibility and Technology Pervasion

Underlying the idea of physical invisibility is ‘a new way of thinking about computers in the world, one that takes into account the natural human environment and allows the computers themselves to vanish into the background (Weiser 1991). This is made possible by progress in the development of microelectronics (e.g. miniaturisation). While miniaturization of technology has been the guiding principle of computing technology design for quite some time, it is about to reach its mature stage in AmI, a paradigm which is characterized by seamless computing environment, composed of a myriad of invisible, embedded, distributed and networked computing devices and invasively interacting in the background of human environment.

Furthermore, miniaturization plays a key role in the pervasion of technology into everyday human environment, another key feature of AmI. AmI is a world in which humans will be surrounded and accompanied by intelligent interfaces that are entrenched in virtually all kinds of everyday objects, such as mobile phones, vehicles, roads, clothes, books, paper money, lights, furniture, doors, walls, household, tools, paint and so on (ISTAG 2003); even the flow of air and water are transformed into computational interfaces (Ishii 1998). The omnipresence and always-on interconnection of computing resources is to support daily life, by offering services whenever and wherever people need them.

Considering the above characteristics, AmI has the potential to drastically change the way people live, which underlies its place in serving individuals, the community and society.

77 Appendix B: ICT and Computing Definition

ICT is an umbrella term that describes a set of technologies used to access, create, store, retrieve, disseminate, exchange, manage and transmit information in a digital format. ICTs involve computing systems and applications, encompassing personal computers, laptops, wearable computers, mobile phones, augmented-reality devices, Internet network, telecommunication systems, sensors, and so on, as well as the various applications and services associated with these systems, including as e-learning, e- government, e-health and e-communities.

ICT is commonly synonymous with information technology (IT), the engineering field that deals with the use of information and communication systems to handle information and aid its transmission by a microelectronics-based combination of computing, networking and telecommunications, as well as with the knowledge and skills needed to use such systems securely and intelligently within a wide spectrum of situations. The Information Technology Association of America (ITAA) defines IT as ‘the study, design, development, implementation, support or management of computer–based information systems, particularly software applications and computer hardware.’ (Veneri 1998, p.3) As a separate area, communication technology refers to the study, design, development and implementation of communication systems (e.g. mobile phones, computer-mediated communication systems), which are used to facilitate interaction between individuals or groups.

Generally, computing can be defined as: ‘any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computers. Thus, computing includes designing and building hardware and software systems for a wide range of purposes; processing, structuring, and managing various kinds of information; doing scientific studies using computers; making computer systems behave intelligently; creating and using communications and entertainment media; finding and gathering information relevant to any particular purpose, and so on. The list is virtually endless, and the possibilities are vast.’ (ACM 2005, p. 9)

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