The artifact is interesting. The notion of “degrees of artificiality,” though, I have a problem with in this case, as I’d like to be able to account for items circulated by retweets and status message or news feed items. I think that where messaging is the activity, it should be simple to describe objects related by means of how they are referenced. Again, it’s less important to me to find a new term, or to redefine object — more important to recognize the importance of relations.

Thanks for the tip, the book looks interesting.

The term *object* is the key thing here – and possibly ‘object’ is too abstract to help us out here. We’ve been using the term ‘artifact’ lately to help us get a little more concrete.. then we can start to build on some interesting thinking around artifacts coming out of the UX, HCI and Design communities.

eg Klaus Krippendorf’s ideas on artifacts in The Semantic Turn (link below) are pretty interesting in this regard: particularly where he describes the new kinds of artifacts that come under design consideration http://bit.ly/bFYouw

Completely agree with you that we can take affordances into question. I think I touched on that as object properties in this or a different post. One might then distinguish between affordances tied to object properties, social affordances (sharing, forwarding, “giving”, tag etc) and communication and social interaction affordances (comment on; tweet; rate; tag, etc).

Where
–the object property affordances = object specific and “grow” object specific data on the object in question (number of, views, etc)
–social affordances = object’s ability to be distributed, aggregated, disaggregated, embedded, played, etc
–social interaction and communication affordances = social uses that capture communication and interaction attached to the object, about the object, accumulated as object is distributed, etc

I agree that the social practices may not be visible or entirely available, but I don’t think all possible or probable object-related practices are proscribed by the object. As with any social interaction, context can be re-contextualized, frames can be reframed. In this sense, the relations an object takes up to users, contexts, other objects, etc in practices, in my view, do more to shape social interaction than does the object.

So I regard an object as a reference more than as a contextual constraint. That was the gist of my critique — that we should pay as much attention to object relations as we do to objects, and that we tend to over-attribute interaction to the object, and under-appreciate relations.