My previous post brought up some interesting (to me) issues around how people relate to software. By this I mean whether they perceive the software tool to be just there, kind of an immutable fact of the world, with good bits and bad bits bit still something that just exists; or whether they perceive it to be a dynamic, mutable creation of human endeavour that can be changed at will. In a sense, I think most people understand that it really is the latter if they think about it, but do they behave differently when they're using it on a day to day basis? When a problem crops up, do they think about the person who created the problem, and what they did wrong to make it behave in that bad way, or do they think of it as a deterministic, mechanical thing that they need to work around?
I'm thinking out loud here - I don't know the answers. At this stage, I'm not even sure what I'd put into a journal article search to find the research on the subject. I'm sure it has been studied by someone, somewhere. But I think it might be pertinent to my research - perhaps there was a gap in my understanding of my interview subjects. Perhaps I was expecting them to think like software developers rather than like normal people. If so, it may be that I framed my questions incorrectly, and didn't understand the answers and why the answers I was getting didn't give me the information I was interested in.
A quick straw poll of my PhD study group backs this up - I just asked what their first reactions to a software problem would be, and they answered in terms of seeking help and finding workarounds. There was no mention of any thoughts about a person or a motivation behind the software; it was just a fact that needed to be attended to.
So I think I will need to do a search of the literature to find out what has been written about the differences between how tool-makers and tool-users relate to their tools, and they try to figure out how that has affected my interview outcomes.
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