Texture: Human Expression in the Age of Communications Overload

by Richard H.R. Harper

Our workdays are so filled with emails, instant messaging, and RSS feeds that we complain that there’s not enough time to get our actual work done. At home, we are besieged by telephone calls on landlines and cell phones, the beeps that signal text messages, and work emails on our BlackBerrys. It’s too much, we cry (or type) as we update our Facebook pages, compose a blog post, or check to see what Shaquille O’Neal has to say on Twitter. In Texture, Richard Harper asks why we seek out new ways of communicating even as we complain about communication overload.

Harper explores the interplay between technological innovation and socially creative ways of exploiting technology, between our delight in using new forms of communication and our vexation at the burdens this places on us, and connects these to what it means to be human—alive, connected, expressive—today. He describes the mistaken assumptions of developers that “more” is always better—that videophones, for example, are better than handhelds—and argues that users prefer simpler technologies that allow them to create social bonds. Communication is not just the exchange of information. There is a texture to our communicative practices, manifest in the different means we choose to communicate (quick or slow, permanent or ephemeral). The goal, Harper says, should not be to make communication more efficient, but to supplement and enrich the expressive vocabulary of human experience.

Genres: Communication, Technology

303 pages, Hardcover

First published October 8, 2010

About the author

Richard H. R. Harper is a British computer scientist.

Reviews

[Laurel · Rating 5 out of 5]

The title of this book does not do justice t o the contents. This is a must read for anyone in the field of communication.

The author explores "whether our passion for communication is leading us toward a dystopia where too much communication obfuscates necessary expression [eg- too much email] and whether our delight in communication [eg-twitter, Facebook, G+] is leading us to refashion what we think of as our essential selves" (p. 246).

Although I don't believe he actually names them, his thoughts revolve around technological determinism and the social construction of technology. "New mechanisms of being in touch [in this case digital] extend the weave of being in touch, increasing as they do so the social fabric of our existence" (p. 267).

I is refreshing to read such a well-written, thoughtful book about new communication technologies (which really aren't new anymore, are they?). The author works for Microsoft in the UK.

[Red Dog · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is one of those books that if it was only a little better written, it would deserve five stars, but sadly often loses the reader with convoluted and sometimes unclear exposition. I'd recommend you read the last chapter first, since it lays out the arguments in the clearest fashion, but then this is perhaps to be expected in a book that is made up of a series of articles. What the book does do is lay out Richard Harper's journey from a technologist who subscribes to the mechanistic, input/output model of human experience that most creators of tech still seem to adhere to, to someone who appreciates the more nuanced, textured, and human nature of how we communicate, and one can only hope that more of his colleagues follow this same path. It's just a shame that at times he describes his journey by way of extrapolating from fairly flimsy straw men (cf. his early take on 'all' sociology saying "x" about the impact of mobile technologies, when this is clearly not the case) purely for the sake of dismantling an argument. But given his final position is sound, I suppose we could forgive him this, although maybe I'm biased by the fact that Harper finds most value in the branch of sociology that I personally follow, that of Garfinkel's ethnomethodology and Sack's Conversation Analysis...?

Beyond this, the book is interesting from an historical point of view (despite only having been written eight years ago), given how different a world of blogging, MySpace, Google Latitude, some newcomer social network called Twitter, and Facebook as a place where all the kids go is from our own. But it's also interesting that the more things change, the more they stay the same, since even in 2010, Harper is critical of the way in which Twitter and Facebook want to organise our feeds, saying that systems which want to analyse our online behaviours and provide us with the content we really want "look like failing", something that many contemporary critiques of social media would no doubt agree with.

[Ninakix · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved this book: it discusses how we must understand communications technologies not through numbers, but their expressive abilities as a communication tool. In this view, it's not the fidelity of communication, but rather how it maps to what people want to say. Caveats would be that the writing can be at times a tad academic, and I didn't buy into all of the arguments regarding social networking.

[Margot Note]

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