Summary
The article “Social Translucence: An Approach to Designing Systems that Support Social Processes” talks about how the online world is almost socially blind in interaction and communicating with one another. They study how in the real world, physical interaction influence everyday things around us like how the world is shaped in even architecture and design. They then go into discussing how we gain most of our knowledge from conversation. The prototype Babble is used to test these social interactions online by monitoring social activities and information. In the end they compare the digital world to a translucent door with a sign to warn people. They believe people must read and analyze what they see to govern their actions after. Instead they would like to make things transparent so the users may use their heuristic manners once they already see the other people as if it were a glass door.
In the article “The Chat Circles Series”, they talk about how text communication is becoming dominant in today’s world of communication; however, with text, you can miss the context, tone, and overall environment of the statement. This brought people to study ways to incorporate an environment into a text communication interface. There are a few programs that have tried this by using animations or pictures to communicate with text. Chat Circles and Chatscape are a couple studies that have been developed from basic ideas at first and continued to develop. Chat Circles started with a blank background with the ability to assign colors and shapes for each user. This creates a communication environment with basic function. They continued to add onto it with more features and then Chatscape created icons where you can assign animations and shape interactions. These small extra interactions help create more of a close relationship in communicating even with text alone.
Reflection
After reading the articles, I reflected on how tone and emotion is usually masked behind a text. When someone reads a text, they cannot hear or see the person. This happens to me very often where people take something I say the wrong way or miss the emotion behind it. There are apps now that animate text now like snapchat sends pictures with text and they have animated emoji. These icons help express more emotion and adds another dynamic to what you are saying. Even messenger has options to send gifs and emoji. I will need to consider how social interactions online through text need to find ways to implement emotion and voice. The digital world creates a wall between each user where there are certain guidelines to follow when interacting with one another; however, if we can tear down that wall and create a face to face interaction online, we may be able to see people interact at a more social level with manners they are already familiar with.
Questions
- What walls need to be taken down to create a more face to face interaction between users?
- What environment would Chat Circles and Chatscape be used for? Workplace or socializing with friends?
- What made them decide on that specific interface and the display of the environment?
- What other ideas can we implement to add more emotion, voice, and action to textual communication?
- Which additional function helps the users the most with feeling more connected with each other?
