Summary:

This paper talks about a new visualization they’re presenting called “Themail”. This visualization portrays relationships using the interaction histories preserved in email archives. It uses this content to show a word that corresponds to a particular individual for the user and how that word changes over their relationship. These words would appear in a list with the more prominent words being of larger sizes and differing colors. For example, words that were used throughout the year were grey to show they weren’t very important while words that appeared throughout a particular month were separated into their own columns. Furthermore, selecting one of these words would also show more information on how that word was specifically used in the emails. There were also two modes for viewing information, haystack for a broad overview and needle for specific information.

 

Reflection:

Using a single word or few words to represent a whole month or year of communication with another person is an interesting way to try and represent what those communications have been like. Given that this visualization is used for email exclusively I would expect that most representations will have more of a business tone, as most people use email for business. The paper also touches on this a bit as they point out the flaws that come with using email and the nature of emails in general.  Perhaps it would be useful to remember what specific business or work-related topics were being discussed heavily during a specific month. Overall it’s an interesting idea and may be useful for business applications.

 

 

Questions:

-What words do you think would appear in your own email contacts?

-What words are most common across all interactions at the monthly level? Yearly?

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The Language that Gets People to Give: Phrases that Predict Success on Kickstarter

 

Summary:

The paper studies only successful Kickstarter campaigns in an attempt to discover common features among them that may make crowdfunded projects successful. From all of these successful campaigns the author of the paper obtained around nine million unique phrases. The author then trimmed down this list of phrases to around twenty thousand by excluding all of the phrases that pertained to the specific product and all of the phrases with less than fifty occurrences. The author then analyzed these remaining phrases and separated them into six categories. Reciprocity, or giving a favor for a favor. Scarcity,  or how scarce the product is in either amount of products or amount of time. Social proof, or emphasizing that many other people have done the same thing.  Social identity, or making people feel like they’re part of a community.  Liking, basically just positive comments about the product and Authority, or getting the appeal of an expert. All of which are common ways to sell a product.

 

Reflection:

I think it’s pretty unsurprising that successful Kickstarter tactics turn out to mostly just be pre-existing and successful marketing or advertising tactics. The reciprocity aspect may be a little higher for crowdfunded projects as a crowdfunded project pitch is somewhat of a combination between a pitch to consumers and a pitch to investors. It’s akin to a pitch to investors as you don’t actively have the product but you promise that if they invest a product like what you describe will become available and they get some sort of benefit for investing. However, it’s also like an advertisement to consumers because it’s made to a very large audience of average Joes in the hopes of attracting as many people as possible and may use emotional arguments to sell rather than to a small board of professionals who invest for a living and will require a much more logical, numbers based argument to convince them they’ll get their money back.

 

Questions:

• Do you think crowdfunded project pitches more closely resemble advertisements or investor pitches?
• How much impact do you think the pitch itself has on success compared to the promise of the product?
• How do silly crowdfunded projects like “Potato Salad” become successful?

 

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Summary:

The paper “Antisocial Behavior in Online Discussion Communities” analyzes the behavior of banned users from three different online platforms from the moment they joined to the moment they got banned. The three platforms used for this research paper were the general news site CNN, the political news site Breitbart and the computer gaming news site IGN. Using this information the paper found that banned users, before they were banned, tended to focus on a small number of threads, were more likely to post irrelevant information than other users and were more successful at getting responses than other users. More interesting was the information they found on how the banned user’s behavior would change over time. They found that as time went on a future-banned user would write even worse, become less and less tolerated by the other members of the community and that their antisocial behavior would get even worse as community feedback become harsher.

 

Reflection:

The idea that antisocial behavior gets even worse as a community’s feedback to that behavior gets harsher is interesting. I suppose for many people getting attacked by a community of people wouldn’t make the individual want to reevaluate their actions and be more social. Rather it would probably make that individual feel like they are being wronged for no good reason and come to resent the community. At this point if it gets bad enough they probably either leave the community or decide to bash and/or troll the community until they get banned.

 

Questions:

• What could be done for antisocial users as they are newly signed up to prevent them from potentially getting worse and eventually banned?
• Should anything be done?
• Are anonymous and ephemeral sites like we discussed last week a better fit for these antisocial users?

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Summary:

Social Translucence: An Approach to Designing Systems that Support Social Processes:

This paper seeks to support communication and collaboration among large groups by studying what aspects of face to face physical communication help keep it coherent compared to virtual communication. The paper also argues that allowing two parties to see each other in what they call a “socially translucent system” helps support coherent behavior. It goes on to state that a large part of how we act in face to face conversations is determined by our surroundings and an awareness of them. In order to try and fix this issue with virtual communication the paper provides three potential solutions: abstract, mimetic and realist. Abstract refers to trying to portray social information in different ways that aren’t closely tied to their physical analogs. Mimetic refers to trying to re-represent physical social cues, as literally as possible, digitally. Realist refers to trying to project physical social information digitally.

 

The Chat Circles Series: Explorations in Designing Abstract Graphical Comm. Interfaces:

This paper starts off talking about the evolution of text-based communications and how they are becoming more and more interactive. Then the paper goes into detail about how text-based communication may be extremely convenient but it lacks several key elements in conversation. Namely providing emotion and intention with things like body language or context are going to be absent. The paper then leads into talking about building several text-based chats including Chat Circles, Talking in Circles, TeleDirection and Chatscape. Each one using special features to convey certain things about the user or promote closer relationships between two users. For example, Chat Circles lets you apply specific colors and shapes to another user to make them stand out.

 

Reflection:

Social Translucence: An Approach to Designing Systems that Support Social Processes:

When I think of issues that come up in virtual conversations compared to physical ones I usually think of more human-related issues. For example if it’s a virtual conversation over text than you may miss meaning that would otherwise be in the tone of voice. Likewise if you are in a virtual conversation that includes audio you may miss meaning that would otherwise be conveyed by body language. However, I’ve never considered how being in a physical environment with another person also plays a role in conversation beyond just what the two parties are doing.

 

The Chat Circles Series: Explorations in Designing Abstract Graphical Comm. Interfaces:

Interestingly some of the aspects of physical communication I mentioned in my reflection for Social Translucence ended up being mentioned in the next paper.  Speaking of many different ideas for more specialized text-based communication reminded me of an old proximity-based text chat called “Pictochat” from when I was much younger. In Pictochat you could talk to other people using a Nintendo DS via text or self-drawn images, provided the other party had a DS and was physically nearby. Though in practice, forcing both parties to be physically close to each other to use a communcation service will remove the convenience of that service.

 

Questions:

• How much less efficient are virtual conversations at being coherent than physical ones?
• How much do you think production would increase if virtual conversations could be as coherent as physical ones?
• Which proposed solution for the issue of virtual communication sounds most promising?
• Would trying to make text-based communication more coherent remove some of it’s convenience by slowing down the process?

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Summary:

Identity and Deception in the Virtual community:

The paper talks about identity and how it plays an important role in human social interactions, such as providing many basic cues about personality and the role we play in society or helping both parties understand and evaluate an interaction. The paper then goes on to express how on the internet identity is often ambiguous or absent entirely and how this can provide deception in social interactions. Furthermore the paper discusses the concept that the physical world confines a person to one body and therefore one identity but virtual communities do not confine you to one body and therefore a user can assume multiple identities. The paper goes on to philosophically inquire about the relationship between the self and the body for a bit before returning to more practical issues that a lack of proved identity creates. Some examples given were when a high school student pretends to be an expert on viruses or when a fake virologist gives information on new AIDS treatments to people who believe him while the new treatments actually have no backing.

 

4chan and /b: An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community:

The paper states that researchers and practitioners often assume that data permanence and user identity are integral to a successful online social community, however 4chan remains successful without either. The paper researches how sites like 4chan can be successful while being anonymous and ephemeral and explores how users use 4chan and for what purpose. To o this they first decide to study just how anonymous and ephemeral 4chan is. The study for ephemerality finds that threads are only on the front page where they are most viewable for about 5 seconds, and the thread itself lasts for about 5 minutes on average. The study for anonymity find that over 90% of posts on 4chan are made by fully anonymous users. The paper then talks about the activity users partake in on 4chan and what percentage of all activity is taken by the following types: Themed, Sharing content, Question/advice, sharing personal information, discussion, request for item, request for action, meta and other.

 

 

Reflection:

Identity and Deception in the Virtual community:

The issue of identity and deception based on that identity is an already well-known issue as even in the real world and an individual needs to prove that they are who you say you are. For example, an individual needs a license to prove that you’re a qualified doctor, or a badge to prove they’re actually a police officer. Taking that issue to a virtual community only complicates it more as you can no longer even see if the person making the claim looks the part. Though identification should still be expected before accepting important information, such as in-depth medical advice. More interesting is the idea that one user can have multiple identities that they hop between. Unless the user is very obvious with their behavior it may be incredibly difficult to determine if you’re speaking with or reading a discussion between many people or just a few people.

 

4chan and /b: An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community:

The idea that a social community can exist while virtually no member of the community know who any of the other members are in the slightest is interesting. Ephemerality as brought up in the paper is interesting as well, though I feel it is not nearly as important as the anonymity for studying 4chan and similar sites for why they work. After all when anonymity is in place ephemerality is redundant, there’s little difference when the information cannot be attributed to specific individuals either way. Furthermore due to the nature of the internet, not much is really ephemeral. Anyone who wishes to can take a picture of one of 4chan’s ephemeral threads and the picture will not disappear when the thread does. The types of activity the paper categorized for 4chan are also interesting, particularly for how anonymity may play into those activities. For example, “sharing personal information” may be more popular when there’s no identity for that information to be assigned to.

Questions:

• What is a good method to finding out if multiple accounts have the same creator?
• Who is this 4chan?
• What are the pros and cons of having anonymity or having identity?
• How important is anonymity for the types of activity the paper categorized for users of 4chan?
• How important is ephemerality to these types of activity?

 

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Naaman, Mor, Jeffrey Boase, Chih-Hui Lai. “Is it really about me? Message Content in Social Awareness Streams.” ACM Digital Library, ACM, dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1718953. Accessed 30 Aug. 2017.

 

Summary:

In the paper “Is it really about me? Message Content in Social Awareness Streams.” the content of messages posted on twitter from over 350 twitter users is analyzed and ran through human coding and quantitative analysis to try and give a deeper understanding to the users of Twitter. The analysis from the paper showed that there were two common types of user behavior when writing a message on Twitter: Those who mostly talked about themselves and their lives and those who mostly talked about and shared information on other things. Furthermore the paper found that users who shared information on things other than their own lives generally had more followers and were more active.

 

Reflection:

This paper is very similar to the previous one “Why we Twitter”. It differentiates somewhat in how they gather the user data and what they are looking for in the user activity. Interestingly, this paper decides that there are only two common types of user behavior where “Why we Twitter” thought there were three types of user intention. However, it could be argued that there is a difference between “behavior” and “intention”. Especially when the “user behavior” researched in this paper refers specifically to posted content and the “user intention” in “Why we Twitter” refers to activity on Twitter as a whole.

 

Questions:

• What are some of the more uncommon user behaviors?
• Which form of common user behavior would be more useful for what kinds of Twitter research?
• Will there be more than two common user behaviors in the future?

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Akshay Java, Xiaodan Song, Tim Finin, Belle Tseng. “Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities”. http://aisl.umbc.edu/resources/369.pdf. Accessed 30 Aug. 2017.

Summary:

“Why we Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities” talks about and studies what a microblog is, using twitter as a prime example, as well as various aspects of several communities that can be found on twitter. Some examples of these aspects included how they communicate to each other, how the information spreads between them, who accesses this information or contributes to it and why they do so. Using the collected data the paper concludes that their are three types of users as well as three intentions for the users. The three types of users are listed as: information sources, friends, and information seekers. The three types of user intentions are listed as: conversations, daily chatter and reporting news.

Reflection:

I was completely unaware that other micro-blogging sites existed like Pownce. I wonder what Twitter had that these sites didn’t that caused Twitter to take off, perhaps Twitter just got lucky. Either way now that twitter is so huge it would be very difficult to make a successful competitor. It makes sense to try and use a resource of millions of people sharing their thoughts to try and learn what people think about certain topics or what topics are popular. In fact, Twitter already does this itself in a way with it’s “trending” feature. Of course, more thorough researching for specific topics of interest would be more useful overall than the trending feature. I enjoyed the analysis of the different types of user types and user intentions.

Questions:

• Why did Twitter succeed where other micro-blogging sites like Pownce failed?
• What makes sharing your opinion online so attractive for many people?
• How accurate is news sharing on Twitter?
• Could an alternative micro-blogging site ever compete with Twitter?

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