So here boyd describes privacy as a form of control a person has over information-their own information. It never occurred to me before how much control is a part of usability (and privacy by extension). If a user does not have control over the language or iconography of a knowledge space, for instance, then the space will not be usable, and the information not usable. 

Add in a person's already heightened sense of a lack of control, as in over the fate of their child's health in a battle with cancer, and we have an even more highly precarious site of usability, as Kim et al illustrate in "Keeping Users at the Center: Developing a Multimedia Interface for Informed Consent.” The authors add in factors like the problem of coordinating experts' schedules, sharing decision making across unequal power planes, cross-cultural communication, unequal access to or familiarity with the threshold of medical familiarity necessary, and it gets only more and more complex from there. In fact, there is so much out of the designer AND the users' control, it comes to feel sort of miraculous when any sort of communication happens at all. And yet it is here that the user is most important, as they describe: "this article begins from the premise that to place the pediatric patient or parent needs anywhere but at the forefront of the design effort is to dilute the intent of informed consent—to protect patients" (Kim, et al. 336). I've never seen the users' emotions considered before now. 

In "Rethinking Usability for Web 2.0 and Beyond," Wolff, Fitzpatrick, and Youssef ask how the new literacies at work in Web 2.0 have bearing on the ways in which technical communicators are responsible for their content once is is moved into another location by an app like, say, google reader. With these apps, users want to be able to control content. As the authors point out, "Dismissing the applicability of usability because of the supposed goals of the creator is not only condescending but dangerous. It suggests that an agenda grounded in the idea that standards are permanent structures that don’t evolve with the times." In other words, usability test must in this way ALWAYS be user-centered, even when trying to satisfy the goals of a company or organization. The user must perceive herself as having significant enough control over the space to be able to carry out the actions she chooses, and those which the company or organization has some investment in. To meliorate the many conditions affecting any given users' levels of control over a space, knowledge, a task, is ultimately the goal of the designer. (and to throwback to datacloud, this is how flattening has been simultaneously very useful and very frustrating, depending on the user.)