Summary
“Social Translucence: An Approach to Designing Systems that Support Social Processes”
This article discusses a variety of social software projects that implemented chat rooms or similar tools. It emphasizes the unique features of each project that attempted to mimic or substitute real-world social interactions. More specifically, they investigated software analogies of social ques that illicit automatic responses. Distinctions were made between realistic, mimetic, and abstract design approaches. Abstraction was the strongest approach as it essentially gave up on what was expected for the sake of what is possible. It referenced the Chat Circle project as a notable attempt to abstract social behavior.
“The Chat Circles Series: Explorations in designing abstract graphical communication interfaces”
The Chat Circles Series is a set of social networking platforms that were designed to allow greater depth and dimension to expression in online chat rooms. The main idea was to represent participants in a chat room in two dimensional space as circles with text. Each sequential project attempted to add meaningful or useful layers to the platform – like moving your representative circle – or remove / change useless or non-intuitive features – like badly formatted names. The developers noticed that the rooms would remain inactive if there was not a hard-coded subject or group of subjects in the room.
Reflections
Transposing real-world social interaction to the virtual world can only be so effective. A lot of online interaction has its appeal in the anonymity and privacy of the user. Non-social or anti-social behavior is just as human as normal social behavior. Masks and mystery are appealing to a number of chatroom visitors.
On the other hand, the software is not necessarily developed with them as a target user. More natural social communication platforms should inherently result in more genuine social connections and responses.
These articles are both over a decade and a half old. Smartphones and the most popular social media platforms weren’t common place then.
Questions
What might these same researchers or developers have to say about modern social media platforms?
Specifically, what would they say about the “like”, “love”, “wow”, “haha”, “sad”, and “angry”animations on facebook live?
