#participantcentered #casestudies (1)

Aside from ANT, a second major claim outlined in the first chapter hinges on the necessity of participant-centered design. Liza Potts' (2014) second chapter delved deeper into participant-centered design with ANT, defining fire spaces in contrast to the walled gardens mentioned previously. Fire spaces are sites “where connections among actors remain relatively stable while they add information to the network or modify it as content becomes highly mobile and sometimes unpredictable” (p. 28). Add to that the distinction between mutable mobiles, tools that can be modified by participants, and immutable mobiles, those that can’t be modified, and her discussion of information content forms across the stages of translation becomes all the more useful to understanding the value of social media systems. An interesting example of this was illuminated in chapter three. In this first case study on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the walled gardens that tried to help included FEMA, The Red Cross, and CNN. CNN’s Safe List, for example, was criticized for offering a list that restricted participation by users and even basic searching with an amount of information that is simply too large to search, even in an alphabetical layout (p. 49).