Culture and control in a media space

Dourish discusses the technical-social relationship in regulating access and accessibility in media spaces. He suggests there is a social-technical continuum along which mechanisms of regulation is located and enforced. While some media spaces such as Xerox PARC's don't have explicit technical constraints on media space access and use, it has a explicit "sign up" step in order to be part of the media space. This way, it is subject to the soical practices and norms to govern acceptable media space use. Others such as the Godard in Rave, which provides a set of mechanisms for users to set access and accessibility among a set of services including a sound based feedback mechanism. In this way, the control is largely technical to reduce the misuse of media space technologies. At the same time, he emphasizes even in Godard which has explicit technical constraints for access and accessibility, it is still subject to social regulations, for example,social pressure may mitigate against refusing video access to superiors, or the feedback on the other end will render constant "glancing" into others' offices inappropriate.