Digital technology has become a defining characteristic of modern life. Almost everyone uses it, we all rely on it, and many of us own a multitude of devices. What is more, we all expect to be able to use these technologies "straight out the box." This lecture discusses how we are able to do this without apparent problems. We are able to use digital technology because we have learned to cope with it. "To cope" is used in philosophy to mean "absorbed engagement," that is, we use our smart phones and tablet computers with little or no conscious effort. In human-computer interaction this kind of use is more often described as intuitive. While this, of course, is testament to improved design, our interest in this lecture is in the human side of these interactions. We cope with technology because we are familiar with it. We define familiarity as the readiness to engage with technology which arises from being repeatedly exposed to it—often from birth. This exposure involves the frequent use of it and seeing people all around us using it every day. Digital technology has become as common a feature of our everyday lives as the motor car, TV, credit card, cutlery, or a dozen other things which we also use without conscious deliberation. We will argue that we cope with digital technology in the same way as we do these other technologies by means of this everyday familiarity. But this is only half of the story. We also regularly support or scaffold our use of technology. These scaffolding activities are described as "epistemic actions" which we adopt to make it easier for us to accomplish our goals. With digital technology these epistemic actions include appropriating it to more closer meet our needs. In summary, coping is a situated, embodied, and distributed description of how we use digital technology. Table of Contents: Introduction / Familiarity / Coping / Epistemic Scaffolding / Coping in Context / Bibliography / Author Biography Acknowledgments 18 Introduction 20 1.1 Digital Natives 21 1.2 Unruly, Complex Technology 24 1.3 Monday, Monday 25 1.4 The Habitual Nature of Everyday Life 25 1.5 Coping, Comportment, and Cognition 26 1.6 Actions to Support Coping 27 1.7 This Lecture 28 Familiarity 30 2.1 Key Points 30 2.2 Defining Familiarity 30 2.3 Readiness to Cope 32 2.3.1 Making Use of the Tacit 33 2.3.2 A Structure for Prior Knowledge 34 2.3.3 Collages and Vicarious Learning 36 2.4 Our Involvement with Digital Technology 37 2.5 Not Being Familiar 38 2.5.1 Reconfiguring One’s World 39 2.5.2 Computers are Part of ‘Modern Life’ 39 2.5.3 Participating in The Modern World 39 2.5.4 The Meeting of Two Worlds 40 2.5.5 In Summary 41 2.6 Familiarity within HCI 41 2.6.1 Making Sense of Tasks 41 2.6.2 Shared Meaning 42 2.6.3 Learning To Be Familiar 43 2.7 In Summary 43 Coping 48 3.1 Key Points 48 3.2 Introduction 48 3.3 Practical Coping 49 3.4 Immediate Coping 53 3.5 Smooth Coping 54 3.6 Embodied Coping 56 3.7 Is Coping Simply Intuitive Behaviour? 58 3.7.1 Two Modes of Cognition 58 3.7.2 Intuition and Perception 60 3.8 An Initial Sketch of Coping 62 3.9 In Summary 63 Epistemic Scaffolding 68 4.1 Key Points 68 4.2 When Coping Alone Is Not Enough 69 4.3 Defining Epistemic Actions 70 4.4 Abduction 70 4.5 Epistemic Actions at Work 71 4.5.1 Epistemic Actions As Articulation 71 4.5.2 Using the Environment 72 4.5.3 Making Use of External Representations 74 4.6 Private and Public Language 75 4.6.1 Self-Talk & Instructional Nudges 76 4.6.2 The Zone of Proximal Development 77 4.7 The Appropriation of Digital Technology 78 4.7.1 What is Deemed Not To Be Appropriation 79 4.8 The Dimensions of Appropriation 79 4.8.1 User Configuration 80 4.8.2 Ensoulment 80 4.8.3 Personalisation 82 4.9 Technological Niches? 82 4.9.1 Niches and Ecologies 85 4.10 In Summary 86 Coping in Context 88 5.1 Key Points 88 5.2 Situated, Embodied, and Distributed 88 5.2.1 Coping Is the Situated Use of Digital Technology 88 5.2.2 Coping Is the Distributed Use of Digital Technology 89 5.2.3 Coping Is the Embodied Use of Digital Technology 90 5.3 Coping Is How we Use Digital Technology 90 5.4 Last Word: A Fresh Look at Cognitive Science? 92 Bibliography 94 Author Biography 110 Heidegger’s Obscure Terminology 23 Knowing-How and Knowing-That 31 Familiarity as a Meme 44 Rewritable Routines 45 Dispensing with Representation: Becoming Expert 50 Why Coping Is Not Flow 52 Action-Oriented Representation 55 Thinking with Our Hands 57 Is Coping Automatic? 63 Operations 64 Commodities and Things 81 Table 3.1: After Riva and Mantovani (2012) 59 Table 3.2: Adapted from Kahneman (2011, pages 21 & 22) 59 Table 4.1: After Kirsh 1995a, p. 66 73 Table 5.1: After Bødker and Klokmose, 2012a, p. 202 91
