Further Information
Heath et al (2002) use the concept of configuring awareness to describe how situation awareness is not just a ‘state’ of shared understanding of a particular situation dependent on availability of accurate information, but a continuous social process that relies on people being able to – often very subtly – highlight different aspects of a situation for themselves and for others who need to know. Configuring awareness might include, for example, the subtle practices of colleagues who while working independently remain sensitive to each other’s conduct. In moments requiring coordination, this can make visible specific actions in a given space or network that are relevant to one’s own without being disruptive to those actions. In material information environments, such as a control room or an office, understanding others’ attention is easier than in a virtual information environment, where access, attention and copying are disembodied.
Politics of information brings two requirements into conflict: 1) to enable a cooperative working division of labour, people must, be able to see (as well as hear, feel) relevant information; 2) but at the same time they must be able to keep some information invisible to others to be able to control its spread in line with their interests:
the visibility requirement is moderated by the divergence of interests and motives. A certain degree of opaqueness is required for discretionary decision making to be conducted in an environment charged with colliding interests. Hence, visibility must be bounded. The idea of a comprehensive, fully exposed and accessible database is not realistic. A worker engaged in cooperative decision making must be able to control the dissemination of information pertaining to his or her work: what is to be revealed, when, to whom, in which form? Deprive workers of that capability, and they will exercise it covertly…a common information space must be ‘peopled’ by actors who are responsible for the information (Schmidt & Bannon, 1992, p. 16-19)
The sensitivities, practices and skills involved in knowing who needs to know what, paying attention when it matters, and assembling information to make meaning can be undermined by new technologies such as common information spaces (Bannon and Bødker 1997). While a necessary element for collaboration and coordination of activities and information, such awareness is not easy to design or govern for. This is because when taking into account the range of demands of disaster management, in particular, it is possible to see that solutions which attempt to specify what awareness focuses on in advance will likely not properly support the specifics of the situation.
Comments 1
We actively looked for approaches how to help digital ethics … We used the guidance for a full analysis of our healthcare information exchange platform and produced a practical manual to help any practitioner as well as operator understand the ELSI aspects that had to be observed during information sharing.
In addition to the benefit of having a comprehensive guidance, we also experienced a lot of reassurance that many problems which seemed to suffer stagnation due to various perceived regulatory barriers, could actually be solved in a very pragmatic way by breaking them down and tackling their different components with a common sense attitude and solid ethics expertise.
My experience shows that using the isitethical guidance enables research teams to provide trustworthy technologies with good chances for acceptance and implementation. I strongly believe that the impact of the work done by Prof. Buescher and her team is tremendous. Perhaps one of the reasons for the success is that the work is not executed in an ethics silo.
Dr Toni Staykova, FRACP
Vice President International Education and Innovations
Cambridge Medical Academy
Cambridge, UK