Summary
The paper “The Chat Circles Series: Exploration in Designing abstract Graphical Communication Interfaces” discusses the design and creation of a basic graphical chat program and examines the differences between different interfaces and how they effect social communication online. Feelings, emotions, impressions, and sometimes voice are hard to convey over text, so there are new types of communication (Chatscape and Chat Circles) based on only graphics and other visual queues. On these platforms, people can communicate with people in ways other than text, so they can change the shape and color of their icons to help communicate with others. Chatscape also allows users to change the appearances of each others icons in the chat space. In the future, these researchers say that they want to continue to change and influence they ways that people communicate in online spaces and possibly create more ephemeral spaces than there currently are in Chat Circles. Maintaining conversations and interactions in some kind of database or chat log could also possibly be in future research projects.
Reflection
This is a really interesting field of study especially because I have never really learned about it or thought how it could change the current and future internet landscape. There are other social media communication tools that do not rely on textual communication, such as snapchat, instagram, pinterest, and tumblr, and now that I think about it, sites like snapchat and instagram have changed and shaped more traditional social media sites (facebook, twitter) . Over the past few years, instagram and facebook have adapted snapchat-like story features and facebook/twitter have both changed their timelines to focus more on photo and video sharing rather than purely text posts. Snapchat specifically is the closest platform to being almost only based on non-textual communication.
Questions
- How has photo and video sharing effected and changed sites like twitter and facebook?
- What is the future for sites like Chatscape and Chat Circle?
- Is does youtube classify as a site without primary textual communication or is it more for broadcast?
- How can sites like twitter, snapchat, and facebook get better at enabling users to express and utilize social cues?
