A NEW CYBER VIEW // EDUCATION: Computer scientists at
UCI challenge the hype and study what computers
really do.
DATE 02/28/95
NEWSPAPER THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
SECTION METRO
EDITION MORNING
PAGE b01
STORY LENGTH 54 INCHES
HEADLINE A NEW CYBER VIEW // EDUCATION: Computer scientists at
UCI challenge the hype and study what computers
really do.
BYLINE/CREDIT DAN FROOMKIN:The Orange County Register
SUBJECT TERMS OC:COMPUTERS:RESEARCH:COLLEGES:EDUCATION
KEYWORD-HIT.
John Tillquist is getting a Ph.D. in computer science, but he
doesn't spend his time hunched over a terminal writing algorithms.
He visits companies to study what other people do with their
computers.
Out in the real world, he finds, computer systems often don't do
what the people who designed them -- or who bought them -- had in
mind.
"Expectations about computer use are often quite different from
how computers are actually used," said Tillquist, one of 21
graduate students in a special program within the University of
California, Irvine's computer-science department.
While many of their colleagues continue to make computers
faster, stronger and better connected, students in the CORPS
program -- shorthand for Computers, Organizations, Policy and
Society -- are taking a different tack.
They're exploring what may be the next big frontier in computer
science: the relationship between computers and human beings.
Enrolled in the largest program of its kind in the nation, these
graduate students examine the gap between what should happen and
what does happen -- and try to learn from it.
Operating in a field in which speed and power carry the promise
of utopia, they are the critics, the philosophers. And arguably,
the realists.
"Computers are facilitators, not causes," said Rob Kling, one of
11 professors in the CORPS program. "The only thing they cause is
headaches."
Consider electronic mail. Designed to make communication more
efficient, it often ends up being used for social chatting -- and
downloading pornography.
Consider new technology. Managers buy it expecting competitive
advantages, labor savings, reduced costs and increased efficiency.
But the workers actually use the computers, and they look out for
their own interests.
"They will accommodate to the systems to some degree, but they
will also accommodate the systems to them," Tillquist said.
In one study, Tillquist, 39, visited a fast-food company that
installed a new computer system to standardize the way franchise
locations were selected.
The system required people who went into the field to input
information about a potential site. The computer then analyzed the
data and made a decision.
But the people in the field, used to autonomy, refused to become
mere keypunchers.
"They continued to make decisions based on gut instinct,"
Tillquist said. They only used the system to justify the decisions
they had already made.
In the end, management grew to accept the scaled-down use of its
expensive computer system. "It has some value, but not the value
they expected," he said.
Another company found that its new computer system -- designed to
link its sales staff with the shipping department -- caused massive
delays.
The reason: People in sales worked on a monthly quota system,
and after making their quota they would "bank" new sales, reporting
them only on the first of the next month. On the first, people in
shipping were deluged with orders and often lacked inventory.
Management changed the software so the computer accepted some
information with the electronic equivalent of a wink and a nudge.
Now salespeople can alert shipping to "future orders."
"The salespeople would then say: `Ship this. The order will be
in next month,' " Tillquist said.
Lisa Covi likes Vice President Al Gore's vision of a national
information infrastructure that offers a little girl in Tenneessee
full access to the Library of Congress.
But it makes her wonder, "Well, is that little girl being taught
to read?"
Covi, 31, is studying the use of electronic libraries, or what
she calls "digital libraries." And she is doing so skeptically,
wary of the fantasy that systems one day will provide everybody
with access to everything.
One possibility she considers is that even literate people will
never be able to find the stuff of value amid all the junk flooding
computer networks.
"It'll be just like having a zillion channels of television on
and nothing to watch," Covi said.
A study she and Kling conducted of four groups of university
professors raised even more practical concerns.
She found that professors aren't using many of the
digital-library services available to them because they're unaware
of the services, or because it's too annoying to learn how to use
them.
"They don't see why they have to learn something new every time
new software comes out," she said.
Wayne Lutters, 24, is studying a kind of virtual community he
thought would be dead by now.
An outgrowth of the initial spread of personal computers in the
1970s and '80s, computer bulletin boards, or BBSes, give people a
chance to call in from their computers and communicate with people
who share interests.
"As the Internet is exploding, these should be shrinking,"
Lutters said.
After all, the Internet offers more of everything -- more people,
more topics, more games, more things to download.
But BBSes are flourishing, not dying. And that led Lutters to
study them.
His conclusion: BBSes are like suburbs to the Internet's chaotic
city. "You kind of know your neighbors there," he said.
Lutters also has noted that many BBSes now offer access to the
Internet -- but in a limited, filtered way, to meet the specific
needs of their users. He thinks further study of BBSes may help
answer an increasingly important question facing society:
"What does it mean to have an electronic community?"
While his fellow CORPS members explore how computers work in
society, Dave McDonald, 30, is trying to insert social principles
into computers.
The E-mail system he is designing would ideally develop an
awareness of relationships between people. For instance, if
McDonald and a colleague frequently communicate and exchange files,
after a while the system would automatically send the colleague any
files he or she requested.
"It starts to make judgments," McDonald said.
But there are problems.
"What happens if, for instance, our relationship falls apart?"
McDonald asked. "And it can happen in one E-mail.
"We're not sure how we're going to resolve that."
UCI's pioneering work in computer science dates almost to the
university's opening day 30 years ago.
In the early 1970s, with a series of studies of the impact of
computing on organizations, the "Irvine School" of social analysis
of information systems was born. CORPS soon followed.
Since then, even as their colleagues make breakthroughs in
applied mathematics and systems design, CORPS students have been
studying how those breakthroughs play out in society.
"They're looking at the theory of the computer," said Leysia
Palen, 26, who is studying the dynamics of a virtual community
shared by about 1,000 computer-science undergraduates at a major
research university. "We look at the theory of the human and the
computer. ... We're the social science of technology."
CORPS students, most of whom go on to teaching careers, are
frequently critical of sweeping claims regarding breakthroughs in
computing.
"We know the hype doesn't sound quite right," said Beki Grinter,
24. "So you start to wonder, `Will this really work out?' "
Many CORPS students also share an acute interest in ideological
issues.
Does technology distribute power equally? Or does it further
separate the haves from the have-nots?
Is privacy a lost cause, given the ability of computers to
collect and distribute personal information?
Is a field dominated by men creating systems that are hostile to
women?
Troll the Internet and, if you can find it, there is plenty of
discussion about these issues -- but little research.
Even in academia, Kling said, "very few computer-science
departments are taking these topics seriously."
Some of what the graduate students discover gets plowed back
into the curriculum for UCI's computer-science undergraduates, all
of whom take at least one class with CORPS faculty.
Kling, 50, said he hopes those classes will encourage the next
generation of designers and programmers to "try to understand when
computers are helpful or not."
And maybe, Kling said, they'll learn how to design systems to
meet real-world needs "so that people want to use them."
(SIDEBAR)
ONLINE WITH CORPS
If you have access to the Internet and software that lets you
browse the World Wide Web, you can learn more about CORPS' graduate
students by pointing your browser to
http://www.ics.uci.edu/dir/grad/CORPS. This will let you see some
of their personal Web pages -- sort of interactive resumes. We
recommend Lisa Covi's and Beki Grinter's in particular.