Reification and design

Description
In order to develop his idea of communities of practice, Wegner needs to identify how people construct meaning. He asserts that "practice is about meaning as an experience of everyday life." In other words, I think he's saying that one has to understand how people make meaning in their daily activities if one wants to understand the practices in which these people are engaged.

He argues three things in this chapter:
1. A process he calls "negotiation of meaning" is what creates meaning
2. Two processes called participation and reification interact during negotiation of meaning. Participation is participation; reification is the process by which norms, mores, or a cultural environment become objectified (the claim from Vignette I is an example of a reified object).
3. Participation and reification constitute a duality. Wegner carefully cautions us not to think of these two as opposites on a spectrum, or participants in a zero sum negotiation of meaning game.

I'll go into more detail here than I normally might, since this reading is so dense and I feel like it would help my understanding to write it out. Feel free to skip ahead if this is a boring retread of what others have written. :)

Negotiation of meaning
Negotiation requires sustained attention. It is an active process that both is affected by and affects the environment in which the meaning is being negotiated. Wegner links negotiation as the product of negotiation of meaning.

Negotiation of meaning is an active process and Wegner identifies and unpacks two dynamics that most contribute to negotiation of meaning: participation and reification.

Participation and reification
Participation, too, is an active process, which comes as no surprise. Wegner defines participation as the "possibility of mutual recognition" (56), which is a definition that has interesting implications for the discussion of lurkers that occurred in class last week. Participation is also "a source of identity" (56) in that we define ourselves in relation to those with whom we participate in communication or an activity.

Reification
The process by which abstractions become objectified or codified in some tangible way. A series of reifications over time is often an environmental feature of practice: "claims processors are not the designers of the rules and forms they use, yet they must absorb them into their practice" (60).

Critique & Connections
By Wegner's definition of participation, I feel like he would assert that lurkers are participating in an online community. I'm intrigued by this, partially because it jives with how I think about lurkers

Reifications in online communities often take the form of designs (of forum software, of moderation systems, etc.). We see in the claims vignette that the reifications of prior participants in the community have traceable effects on the current participants. Certainly there are cases where prior reifications serve to make life more difficult for a community participant and cases where they improve in in some way.

I'm not sure I have a mastery of the concept of reification yet, but I think there's a discussion about design to be explored, especially design for the long-term and designing with future trade-offs in mind.