My stab at positivism was meant to be similarly inflamatory, but, I think you and I are talking about different aspects of positivism. The kind of positivism that troubles me is that which claims a clean, tidy view of science and change. Kuhn and Latour are with me on that one. I do have some interpretivist sympathies, I guess, because that’s a common alternative provided to positivism and allows for much more layering and a lot less tidiness.

I guess “Take that, Positivists!” – the title – was meant to say, “See, I’m not the only one who thinks social computing underestimates the messiness.”

I think that you are somewhat confusing positivism (an epistemology) with an attitude that is common among engineers. As anyone who has been to CHI, or WWW, can attest, engineers have a natural tendency to think that their work is the most important and hardest part of building something. It is natural to focus most on what you know best. At CHI, I call this the “if you build it they will come” attitude. They seem to believe that building the software is the hard part, and once you’re past that stage, the users will flock to you.

This “if you build it” attitude is distinct from, and not necessarily a consequence of, positivism. It is perfectly possible to take a positivist approach to designing software to “make our lives easier” and to help build the internet in a way that assists with your 3 stated wishes. I think it is important to realize that it is not positivism that you take issue with, but the shallow way that positivism is commonly employed in engineering-related research. (At least, that’s what I suspect. You might take issue with positivism as a whole, but your post didn’t seem to indicate that.)

As an analogue, I think sometimes Paul Dourish comes across as a similarly shallow interpretivist. Sometimes he just barely scratches the surface of interpretivist research and then publishes it as if it were the final work. In particular I’m thinking of his paper on how people think about computer security. He makes the (somewhat obvious) interpretivist finding that people place their trust in others, and usually experts, to deal with most of their security problems. This is a surface-level observation from what people say. Nothing more in-depth was done to try to tease out why, or how these relationships are built and influenced, or what happens when they fail, or anything like that. I think this is the interpretivist analogue of “if you build it they will come.”

It is possible to do shallow research in both positivist and interpretivist traditions. Striving for more depth can make both epistemologies meaningful. It is unfortunate that such a shallow approach to research has taken hold among a decent number of the researchers who work on the border between engineering and the social sciences. I think we will not fall into that trap. But don’t let examples of shallow research convince you that “positivism” is a bad word, or that there is necessarily a solution in interpretivism.