Sound is one of the foundations of human interaction. It serves as the conduit for free speech, conveys the emotional appeal in music, and most importantly, is the most commonly used vehicle for interpersonal communication. Sound in technology provides users with the ability to control how, when, and where the user hears and responds to other people as well as systems. Peoples' desire to interact by way of sound and to manipulate sounds can be seen in the rapid adoption by mainstream consumers of the telephone, tape recorder, audio mixing boards, and the CB radio. Digital, interactive networks and the devices that connect to them will provide the next generation of consumers with even greater personal control over the power of sound.

This chapter explores three ways in which consumers' expectations and uses of sound impact the evolution of digital networks. First, we take a look at how digital networks evolved from communication networks. Then we examine how digital networks change and extend how consumers buy and use music. Finally, we explore the services that sit on top of the digital networks to help consumers use the power of voice to drive device behavior. After reading this chapter, you should have a good understanding of the following topics:

• How sound has evolved through interactive technologies

• How consumers have responded to the evolution of interactive sound

• How the evolution of digital networks help create a marketplace that address the needs of the interactive consumer

Let's start by taking a look at how sound has evolved in computers.

As devices become more common in the household, interactive services have evolved from a novelty into a common occurrence in people's lives. In order for integrated services to develop into a daily necessity, consumers need confidence that the technology and services are truly reliable. Integrated services provide the promise of a ubiquitous network with access to an array of information and media-rich services through increasingly powerful devices. Delivering on the promise involves significant challenges. The adoption of new devices and the resulting changes of consumer behavior create new expectations. Consumers expect reliability and ubiquitous access to service. Consumers also demand that services and devices will continue to improve with minimal inconvenience to the consumer when upgrading. This chapter explores the balancing act between increased consumer adoption and the requirements placed upon the providers of integrated services to meet such demands.

After reading this chapter, you should have a good understanding of the following topics:

• The role of infrastructure for integrated services

• Which enabling technologies contribute to next generation infrastructures

• How continued consumer adoption affects learned behavior surrounding ubiquitous access, dependence, and continuous upgrading of services

FROM NOVELTY TO NECESSITY

As people continue to incorporate integrated services into their lives, consumers begin to rely on the information and services to a greater extent. This shift from novelty to necessity places substantial requirements upon the providers of integrated services. The concept of reliance on a service is not new.

Consumers incorporate integrated services into daily routines when the benefits provided reflect their real needs. Focusing exclusively on enabling technologies rather than the customer needs is a common mistake made by designers of new devices and applications. While technology enables companies to provide new classes of integrated services, attention to classic product marketing processes leads to the integrated service's success in the marketplace. The ongoing cycle of consumers adopting new devices, developing new behaviors, and forming new expectations results in a constantly changing market. New customers with shifting expectations provide significant challenges to both the designers and marketers of integrated services. Focusing on customer needs rather than the cool new technology while designing and packaging integrated services helps ensure success for an integrated service.

After reading this chapter, you should have a good understanding of the following topics:

• The role of product marketing for integrated services

• The roles that context, cost, and clear communication play in the success of integrated services

• The characteristics of change in integrated services

BACK TO BASICS

It can sometimes be hard to believe that simple rules compose the heart of an integrated service's complex array of technologies, business models, and consumer behavior. Peter Drucker wrote that the two primary functions of a company are marketing and innovation. Everything else is simply a cost to the business. While the most visible aspect of marketing is product advertising, product marketing is arguably the most important marketing function carried out for an integrated service.

An integrated service consists of devices, networks, and the applications. Devices serve as the touch point through which consumers gain access to networks and integrated services. Interactive consumers often value applications and services through the looking glass of the devices. For example, a consumer who uses email constantly depends on a computer or another Internet-enabled device to access the service. As a result, devices help sell services by providing the tangible manifestation of the service for the consumer. The evolution of customer expectations begins with the adoption of the new device and ends with new demands on the services. When consumers adopt a new device, they begin to alter their behavior to incorporate the device into their lifestyle. Buying a new cell phone introduces conversations in line at the grocery store. Subscribing to interactive television services promotes the possibility of checking email through the television. These new, learned behaviors emerge from new patterns of device and service utilization. In turn, the emergence of new learned behavior contributes to new expectations from the consumer about interactive systems in the consumer's life. The designers of interactive systems are on a perpetual treadmill of providing new integrated services in the marketplace that meet the shifting expectations of consumers.

This chapter explores the role of devices in integrated services and identifies some of the changing behaviors that are being exhibited with the adoption of these devices.

Digital networks and devices change our expectations about managing and accessing visual images. Photographs capture memories, movies share rich stories, and we escape to new worlds and perform the humanly impossible via video games. As technologies emerge to give users control over visual imagery, interacting between photos, video, and televised images becomes an active engagement rather than a passive experience.

This chapter explores three ways in which interactive technologies change a consumers' visual expectations. First, we take a look at the change in consumers' expectations about how we build shared memories with digital photography and digital video. Second, we explore the evolution of television, as the viewer gains control over television content. Technologies like digital video recorders (DVRs) and video on demand have changed how we watch TV by extending the viewer's understanding of programming and control in viewing. Finally, we discuss the phenomenon that is video gaming and explore the impact of a networked gaming world. After reading this chapter, you should have a good understanding of the following topics:

• Which enabling technologies impact the evolution of visual interactive experiences

• How consumers create new learned behaviors by adopting interactive visual technologies

• How new visual interactive services are built on top of the next generation of digital devices and networks

Before delving into these areas, let's first take a look at the relationship between consumers and their visual experiences.

CONSUMERS AND VISUAL EXPERIENCES

We watch television, see movies, and take photographs by the millions.

Digital devices, complex networks, and interactive applications and services permeate our daily routines. The adoption of digital, integrated services in peoples' lives stems from a causal chain involving customers of new technologies, device designers and application product planners. Consumer expectations, set by the growing capabilities of interactive devices, fuel innovation from application and service product planners. Product planners then push the device designers to accommodate their increasingly sophisticated features (see Figure 1-1). The key to continual improvement without costly design mistakes lies in understanding how the consumers' expectations evolve with usage.

For example, cell phones with Internet access influence the consumers' expectations about repurposing the phone for other uses. However, browsing the Internet on a cell phone is a frustrating experience, due to the limited screen display. Application and service designers step in to meet consumers' expectations of Internet access with alternatives to Web browsing. Internet-based applications deliver discrete amounts of information suited to the cell phone's screen display, such as personalized weather and stock quotes. Internet-based instant messaging and chat allow consumers the ability to use the phone's small screen for shorthand text messages. The adoption of these types of services and applications provides incentive for device designers to develop new features to accommodate the different usage.

The evolutionary cycle for interactive devices moves as fast as the device manufacturers and application providers release new variations of the product.

As interactive services permeate the home, many of the more basic household services such as home security follow the trend toward more sophisticated owner and device interaction. Household devices like alarm systems evolve from stand-alone warning appliances to being networked into frontline sensing devices for interactive services. These networked devices provide owners with the ability to monitor homes remotely. The latest advances in monitoring feature manufacturers networking household sensing devices and tying them into a service center. Monitoring solutions increase safety and security and are evolving into platforms for enhanced productivity. As people have come to adopt and rely on these systems, the reliability and predictability of such systems become increasingly important. Interactive monitoring systems for the home require a high level of reliability, as owners will not tolerate downtime from a device as important as a security system.

This chapter explores three ways that interactive technologies are being deployed as monitoring solutions. These advanced monitoring solutions combine the power of location-determining technologies, sensors, and networked service centers. First, we explore how telematics make the automobile safer and easier to maintain. Second, we describe personal safety solutions ranging from personal emergency response systems to embedded monitoring health systems. And finally, we examine how the home is becoming safer through networked security systems.

After reading this chapter, you should have a good understanding of the following topics:

• What enabling technologies are powering interactive monitoring systems

• How consumers are using these new monitoring systems to be safer, healthier, and more productive

• How telematics, embedded health monitoring systems, and home security systems have moved alarm systems into the realm of interactive services

Finding a professional connection with a colleague seems like a simple task but can devour hours of time. An anecdote illustrates why this is hard. A researcher whom we will call David got a call with a question about research on interactive toys. David had some experience in that area and immediately recalled several people who did similar work, but who didn't quite fit the bill of this request. He vaguely remembered someone he had heard about who did do that sort of work – the researcher was a Canadian woman who had recently won an award for women in computer science. He thought but wasn't sure that the woman was from western Canada. With these recollections in mind, he set about trying to find her.

First, he tried searching based on the topic. He began with a Web search on the topic area but found far too many results. He tried narrowing his search but had no luck. He tried a number of refinements, including searching on words related to the award, and so on. After spending nearly half an hour, he decided to try a different strategy.

This time, David tried to find the researcher through his social network. He began by asking a co-worker down the hall. A short conversation didn't yield any leads. Continuing down the hall, he asked another colleague. Again, the colleague didn't know the person he was seeking, but this person did suggest another related researcher who might know the mystery woman's identity.

This series for Cambridge University Press is becoming widely known as an international forum for studies of situated learning and cognition.

Innovative contributions are being made by anthropology; by cognitive, developmental, and cultural psychology; by computer science; by education; and by social theory. These contributions are providing the basis for new ways of understanding the social, historical, and contextual nature of learning, thinking, and practice that emerges from human activity. The empirical settings of these research inquiries range from the classroom to the workplace, to the high-technology office and to learning in the streets and in other communities of practice.

The situated nature of learning and remembering through activity is a central fact. It may appear obvious that human minds develop in social situations and extend their sphere of activity and communicative competencies. But cognitive theories of knowledge representation and learning alone have not provided sufficient insight into these relationships. This series was born of the conviction that new and exciting interdisciplinary syntheses are underway as scholars and practitioners from diverse fields seek to develop theory and empirical investigations adequate for characterizing the complex relations of social and mental life and for understanding successful learning wherever it occurs. The series invites contributions that advance our understanding of these seminal issues.

The issue of identity features prominently in discourses about information technology (IT). One conspicuous narrative presented in IT commentary is that the use of the Internet radically changes our perception of who and what we are. Apparently, in anonymous online chat groups you can play charades, wear a mask, and pretend to be of a different age, gender, or appearance (Turkle, 1995; Murray, 1999). It seems that we can accomplish this transformation of identity with great fluidity now. As the Internet and its successors become more pervasive and the technologies become more sophisticated and convincing, then presumably the issue of identity itself comes under review, as do related concepts: that against which we assert our identity (community) and the means by which one's identity is promoted and transformed (education).

We survey the debt owed by contemporary IT narratives and practices to certain intellectual positions as they pertain to identity. This analysis inevitably involves a consideration of change, community, and education. Identity implies continuity in a sense of the self, a constancy behind the ever-changing mask of appearances. In the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, which dominate in the western tradition, the changing nature of the sensible realm is contrasted with the invariance of the realm of the forms, the place of identity. Whereas we and other things change, through the forces of generation, destruction, locomotion, growth, and diminution (our hair turns grey and disappears, we gather wrinkles, stoop a little, and change our occupation), that which remains constant is our identity – the immutable part of our human being that participates in the realm of the forms.

More than half of the classrooms in the United States are wired to the Internet, and the number of classrooms connected is rapidly increasing (NCES, 1999). As this network infrastructure is put in place, teachers and learners can form and participate in network-based learning communities. But for these communities to function in productive ways, we need to better understand how these communities are formed, grow, function in some mature steady state, and decline and terminate. A better understanding of this “life cycle” allows teachers and learners to better function in these network-based learning communities and permits the development of institutional structures that more appropriately support learning and teaching in these new media.

In this chapter, we review studies of network-based learning communities, especially those communities formed around collaborative projects, and present evidence for systematic patterns of change in these communities over time. Such communities are born, undergo growth, reach a level of mature functioning, and then undergo decline and cease to function. Like biological organisms, this life cycle can be truncated when the community is not properly supported or when external factors intervene in some traumatic way. We describe the life cycle of network-based communities by examining in depth an extended case study of a network-based learning activity. We conclude with a discussion of the kinds of support needed to encourage the growth and mature functioning of productive network-based learning communities.

Review

There have been a number of pioneering efforts to explicate the nature of network-based learning communities.

The reader is in for a treat in the highly knowledgeable and varied chapters that follow. The volume includes authors from a wide range of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives, all of whom have experience working directly with computer-mediated communication and community building. Each chapter provides a different perspective on the many ways that human interactions are being mediated in some fashion by the Internet. Each chapter also makes suggestions about the implications of this new set of technological capacities for the social organization of learning and development in contemporary society. This vast territory is unusually well explored in this volume.

As the comments of several of the authors indicate, memories of becoming involved in computer-mediated communication (CMC) as a medium of intellectual communication have something of a “flashbulb” character to them. Not unlike my memory of where I was when John Kennedy was shot, I remember the conditions that led to my use of CMC and my discovery that it could be a resource for community building.

The year was 1978. I had just moved to the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) with a joint appointment in Psychology and Communication. These two academic units were located on different parts of the campus. To complicate matters, my major research project was the study of classroom lessons in a school located approximately 20 miles from the campus, but my research laboratory was part of an organized research unit located near the psychology department.