Summary
In “Social Translucence: An Approach to Designing Systems that Support Social Processes,” the author discusses the importance of the visibility of social information in recreating certain aspects of physical interaction in the digital realm. Awareness and accountability of our surroundings and actions largely govern how we act in person but online communication spaces may be devoid of all that. The author proposes three approaches to answering the question on how to bring social cues to a digital space: realist, mimetic, and abstract approaches. They attempted to design a infrastructure to assist in small group settings that could provide textual and graphical representations of users social information called Babble.
In “The Chat Circles Series: Explorations in designing abstract graphical communication interfaces. Talks about how textual communications have evolved to be more interactive and what interactivity and features mean for social interactions on digital platforms. They created a text chat that introduced proximity based chat via visual representation, just like in real life where you generally must be nearby to participate in a conversation. They also included visual representations of a users past presence which allows other users to identify hotspots of interaction. They even discussed many of their other interface designs used like TeleDirection, Chat Circles 1 + 2 to engage users and better convey emotions not present in purely text conversations.
Reflections
I had never really considered how much visibility and awareness play into talking to others effectively. It would make sense since a large portion of how we react to given instances or conversations is based off of reading body language and the speakers intonation. However the thought never crossed my mind how it impacted digital interactions. The ability to make an online discussion readable, not just to those participating, is a huge part of making sure information or opinions are disseminated correctly. If you look at sites like reddit, user awareness is promoted via the voting system so others are able to attach and incorporate new trends into their own subreddit comments.
I could draw a lot of parallels between what they were trying to do in “Chat Circles” with technology now. For example their TeleDirection idea is similar to twitch streamers who stream their daily lives and accept input from people watching or following the stream (although the space isn’t so much collaborative as it is caustic). Some of the other interfaces they included such as being able to label other users (tagging like on reddit) but the graphical representation of other users via their reputation could easily be abused. It made me think about most of the features I now see incorporated into my frequently used messaging/chat systems and a lot of what was pioneered in this piece evolved in one way or another into fairly common implementations. It’s interesting to think about how there’s so much that can be done with current technology to interact and shape other users online appearance besides simply “replying” to them.
Questions
How would the task of bring social cues to the online world be improved via current technology.
For the author of “Social Translucence” why does he consider so many technologies to be walls between people rather than their more apparent use as bridges?
Hindsight is 20/20 but what sort of estimation can be done on a users future behavior?
Is expressing emotion to strangers via text really necessary?
