Mediation Critiques

[savannanoh]

• Text to speech experience for reading this chapter is not ideal, great that it reads the sides when it’s a term, but not great when it interrupts to read a citation
• Student writes: I wish the chapter acknowledged more explicitly that while it is true that “librarians, card catalogs, and libraries in general view their core values as access and truth” they do not always operate in this way. +1Every institution has bad actors, even libraries
• Can’t Google provide accessible and convenient information while also making money?
• Talk about how APIs/mediators can be designed to give the truth vs some other motivation, like the Google example
• Talk about the pandemic and how it accelerated adoption of CMC tools +1
• Pose questions to the reader about interfaces they use, how these interfaces affect reads personally and in society, and ask readers if they think additional types of mediation exist
• Are there other things that interfaces mediate? For example, e-commerce platforms mediate value exchange
• Reword from “Of course, as this distance between what we want a computer to do and how it does it grows, so does fear about how much trust to put in computers to compute fairly.” to “Of course, as the distance between what we want a computer to do and how it actually performs grows, so does people's fear and mistrust on its abilities to compute fairly.”
• This sentence is confusing; unsure what is meant by “one-time-program”: “interacting with user interfaces is essentially executing a one-time program that computes on-demand.”
• Go more in depth on the companies that host these mediations and their implications
• Have examples for mediating communication just like with the other
• Talk about how information architecture is used in the other types of mediation
• Doesn’t have a design lens
• Mediating automation section could use more examples
• Terminology
  • Definition of API is confusing +7 Student writes: The chapter says [APIs are] an interface used by developers, and later mentions that the user interface sits between the user and an API, without mention of a developer? “user interfaces mediate access to APIs, and interaction with an interface is really identical, from a computational perspective, to executing a program that uses those APIs to compute,” - is API a set of inputs here? Are there multiple APIs involved in running one program? +2 What makes something code vs an API? Is all code an API? Make it more clear how APIs are different from mediation
  • Social translucence wasn’t defined well
• Move 2nd to last paragraph (with the summary of the 3 types of mediation) to the beginning, before the deep dives into each
• Why was profit mentioned in the mediating information section, but not in the mediating communication section?
• Chapter doesn’t explain why the interface has a role as a mediator, rather than a simple passer of information
• Have examples of interfaces which mediate all 3 types of mediation
• Talk about how some types of mediation are prerequisites to others, like information hard to have without automation, and communication hard to have without information
• What are the characteristics of and limitations of non-graphic UIs in mediation?
• Wanted examples of social interfaces that design social cues
• Typos:
  • Word missing between “prominent” and “society”
  • Mediation communication example of video chat says video has lower latency, which seems backwards +1
• Visuals:
  • Add lines above the images so it’s clear they go with the next section, not the previous one
  • Visual diagrams would be helpful +1
  • Add an image illustrating mediation:
    

[savannanoh]

• Talk about regulations on APIs, if there are any, to prevent threats to privacy and identity