“[…]Digital technologies that render the world legible in new ways — by creating new representational forms that account for action in the world (such as activity-recognition systems) or making the invisible visible (such as many location-based systems, social-networking systems, or data-mining applications) — help to shape this encounter and are themselves shaped by it. The social origin of legibility is a critical issue for collaboration in mobile and ubiquitous environments. The examples that we have presented argue for a different view of information and information use than pervades conventional engineering discourse. They argue that the elements of the everyday world around which ubicomp applications seek to organize themselves — individuals, roles, groups, places, activities, times, contexts, and so forth — are not elements of the physical world to be uncovered and recognized but are instead elements of the social world. Their informativeness derives from the nature of social participation, and their nature and meaning are negotiated in, expressed through, and solely available to social practice. When we think of sensing technologies as devices that order the world, rather than devices that describe it, then alternative relationships between the social and technical are strikingly brought to light” (Dourish and Bell, “Divining a Digital Future. Mess and Mythology in Ubiquitous Computing”, The MIT Press, p.195)
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