Summary
The article, “Social Translucence: An Approach to Designing Systems that Support Social Processes” discusses about the difficulties of digital communication and collaboration. As social creatures, people are sensitive to the actions and interactions of others, however, in the digital world there are no social cues to observe. To help solve this social blindness, the authors created a prototype digital environment that would be socially translucent called Babble. An important aspect of Babble is the social proxy, a minimalist graphical representation of users’ presence and activities. In the social proxy, the conversation is represented by a large circle and the participants are colored dots. Users involved in the current conversation are represented by having the dots be within the circle while users who are logged in but in different conversations are shown by dots that are outside of the circle. After two years of daily usage, Babble was found to be an effective environment for supporting informal group conversations on various topics.
The article, “The Chat Circles Series: Explorations in Designing Abstract Graphical Comm. Interfaces”, discusses about the development of a series of abstract graphical chat environments called Chat Circles. The series represents the projects’ growth to more legible and engaging social environments, with each new project having some different kind of feature or fulfilling a different purpose. The article not only talks about the various projects but also discusses the differences between the projects and how those differences affected the social communication. It was found that including group information, graphics, and online speech helped foster better communication and sociable atmosphere among users.
Reflection
I think both articles bring up a valid point about how, though, digital communication has made it easier for people to connect and talk, the lack of in person interaction can affect the conversation. A large feature that is missing in online conversation is tone of voice. The tone of someone’s voice can greatly affect how a message is conveyed and how someone could respond back. For example, if someone was asked a question in a harsh voice then that person is more likely to respond back angrily or defensively than if the question was asked in a calmer voice. This kind of situation can be easily seen online, where textual conversation can come off as impersonal and cold due to lack context and tone causing people to often misinterpret other people’s intentions as explained in the second article.
The prototype Babble that was created in the first article reminded me of how a lot of online chat applications now have a way to see if your message was sent and read by the other person. The first application I thought of was Facebook’s messenger. Whenever you send a message to someone using messenger, there is a small icon that appears next to the message sent. The icon can be either a clear circle, clear circle with a check mark, a blue filled in circle with a check mark, or a small circular version of the user’s profile picture. These 4 types of icons present the status of the message. A clear circle represents that the message is being sent while a clear circle with a check mark means that the message has been sent but the other person has not received it yet. A filled in circle with a check mark means that the message has been received but unread and the circular version of the user’s profile picture means it has been read. The usage of these icons like how Babble uses circles and dots, help users feel more involved and there is less of a sense of disconnect.
Questions
- With the increase usage and popularity of emojis, is it possible that in the future people will move away from text-based messages in favor of graphic based messages?
- Would the usage of “likes” and comments be consider a way of social cues in a digital environment?
- Is it possible that the lack of context and emotion felt through online messaging be due to how people tend to write less in online messages?
- How can people tell a happy text-based message from a sad text-based message?
