Summary:

The article “The Chat Circles Series: Explorations in designing abstract graphical communication interfaces” explores various interfaces and how social interaction changes by what the interface looks like. Design features such as background space, individual representation, movement implementation, communication channels, and history depiction change how users communicate. When talking online, the environment is completely different than communicating in person. Design concepts have been tested through different interfaces such as Chat Circles and Chatscape, by adding certain elements to see the different social interactions. Chat Circles uses simple 2D graphics, implementing colored circles that change size and brightness level. The different elements help create different experiences for the user, but all contain the idea of making communication between users easier to understand. The visuals help text conversations become more life-like and understandable.

Reflection:

Before reading, I never thought about how the interactions through technology and in reality are so different. There are many benefits and disadvantages of communicating through online text chats. When using online chat methods, users can go back through the history of their conversations. If they are not completely invested into the conversation, users can multitask while communicating then check back and read the conversation fully later. The user’s attention can be somewhere else during the conversation. I personally like to multitask and talk to people as I am completing daily activities. However, messaging online can lose emotional context with the other users. Cues such as tone and emotion are hard to be expressed online. The invention of emojis has greatly helped this issue. Users are able to insert emotional faces into their text messages, to help the receiver understand their tone. Most people use online messaging as a primary source of contact. As technology advances, creating better visualizations for communicating is essential to clearly understanding what a person means or receiving the proper information.

Questions:

Is it possible to truly understand context and social cues through text messaging?

I know I message people via text messaging more than I talk to them in person; is it better to steer away from communicating only through texts?

In what other ways can we express emotion online? Is it needed?

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Summary

“Social Translucence: An Approach to Designing Systems that Support Social Processes” discusses the design of interfaces that support meaningful communication on a large scale. Erickson and Kellogg describe the importance of social translucence – characterized by visibility, awareness, and translucence – in digital systems that allow users to enrich their social experiences. Social translucence allows interactions of online users to mimic physical interactions in the real world by following three design approaches: realist, mimetic, and abstract. Decisions users make are dependent on their environment, which is why awareness and visibility of other users is important to incorporate in the design of an online social platform.

In “The Chat Circle Series: Explorations in designing abstract graphical communication interfaces,” authors Donath and Viegas explore the design behind the interfaces of graphical chat programs using Chat Circles. These Chat Circles are a minimalist design environment (using shapes, text, colors, and images) that are influenced by environment, communication channel, individual representation, history, movement, and context. Furthermore, Chat Circles can reveal information such as how frequent users post, what times they post, popular topics of discussion, ambiance of a conversation or topic, and user movement throughout chats.

Reflection

The details of “Social Translucence” about social awareness and the environment that we are in was something I never thought about because though I often communicate online, I do so without much thought to the design of the platform itself. In hindsight, the environment we communicate in does definitely play a large part in how we communicate. For instance, on Instagram, Twitter , and Facebook, we create the environment we are a part of by friending, following, and chatting with certain people that we choose. Updating your status via images or text can also support group awareness; your friends and family are curious as to what you’re doing or what you did. Introducing physical interactions to online interactions was also a fascinating concept to me because obviously aspects of communication such as body language aren’t evident online, but voice and language (as discussed in our previous readings) are and do affect the conversations. Other than body language, voice, and language, other indications of our emotions include emojis, gifs, and stickers.

“The Chat Circle Series” offered an interesting insight on chat interfaces and their design. One feature of Chat Circles I found intriguing is behavioral representations of users on ChatScape using shapes. The particular feature that surprised me the most is the dependency of the user’s shape on the judgement of other participants. For instance, if a user is aggressive or obnoxious (visually, a shape with many edges and angles), would other users want to engage in conversation with them? It is possible that this alter the way users converse because they are more aware of what other participants think of them. The Chat Circles history interface was also cool because it’s very similar to message logs we have today (texts, iMessage, Facebook Messenger), but it displays the posts as horizontal bars. I liked how the history allowed for a visual representation of the frequency and time of posts.

Questions

• In what ways do current social media sites impose walls between people? (I understand the issues the authors pose in the Introduction about digital tools being primitive and cumbersome, but I’m not entirely sure how these impose walls)
• Does a user with more edges on their shape (for ChatScape) make them less approachable?
• Was it fruitful to include behavioral representations on ChatScape?

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Summary

The “Chat Circle Series” is about how to design chat interfaces, and what people like about them. It mentions an interesting point in the idea that in purely text based discussion, a listener plays no part. You have to participate in order to influence the conversation in any way. The “Chat Circle Series” references a series of iterations of a chat room the researchers have been working on, with the idea that it starts as a simple set of “chat circles” and they add features as they believe those features enrich the chat experience. Users in the circles must move around in order to speak to other circles of people, meant to simulate you being a part of a conversation. As well, without being in a circle the user cannot read those messages being sent. They then go on to explain how each given element that they chose to look at, listed below, relates to the overall whole. They found for example, that pretty bright colors n a black background for each circle worked quite well, but only if the site had a large number of people using it at any given time. When a small number of people were using it, the background went from a good contrast to sparse and bleak. They then talk about a project called TeleDirection  and finally conclude the paper with a blurb about further study topics.

Reflection

The idea of involving listeners in conversation online is useful, albeit difficult one. Twitter or Pinterest are perhaps at the very least decent examples of sites which manage this. You can re-tweet or pin something which you like, meaning it becomes more heavily disseminated into the world. Its important that the researchers started with a long list of different areas to focus on in their work. They chose Environment, the Communication Channel, the Individuals Representation, History, Movement, and Context as their categories for focus. The movement category also proved interesting. The big question was how you can make something which is fairly static, just text and messages with a few pictures mixed in, feel alive and moving. As well I found it odd that people’s ideas of personal space actually translated into the circle chats. Not that I don’t believe them, just that its interesting that your views on how close is too close, or how far away is uncaring translate to a bunch of circles you chat in.

Questions

When designing a Social Media site or addon, what are some of the important focus areas? What do you think were the focus areas of some of the more major ones, Facebook or Twitter for example?

How might you create a chat function that better emulated real conversation than basic messaging?

How does what you use to represent you online (avatars or photos) change other’s opinions of you?

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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:

In the article “Social Translucence: An Approach to Designing Systems that Support Social Processes” the author discusses the action of communicating through digital interfaces. The author focuses on the areas of visibility, awareness, and accountability. They argue that the digital age has begun to diminish the effectiveness of the way that we communicate in our modern times because the systems we have set in place do not support social interaction as well as they should. We need to be visible to others and they visible to us, we need to be aware of where we are communicating and we need to be held accountable for what we say/do. Without these aspects of communication then the true meaning and essence of communication begins to break down. The author gives the great example of a door that opens too fast. If we add a sign to the door then people may read it and open it slowly, but they may also ignore it and accidentally hit someone when they open too fast. But if you put a window into the door then people can see if others are on the other side, are aware that they could hurt someone and that other people can see them, as well as knowing they are accountable for their actions in the eyes of the people who can see them.

In the article “The Chat Circles Series:Explorations in designing abstract graphical communication interfaces” the author writes about the new interesting ways that people are creating for people to communicate using new technologies. Some of the examples that the author gives for new ways of abstract communication are chat circles and then a more evolved form of chat circles 2. Both of these abstract communication techniques revolve around the idea that a user holds a circle that represents themselves. They can see what other users are saying if they are close enough to the other users circle but cannot if they are to far away. This allows for the users to remove themselves from seeing what is being said without leaving the conversation fully. Chat circles 2 builds on this idea and allows users to use photographs in the background that can help spark new conversations. This was found to help stimulate conversation even when there were only a few users in the chat space.

Reflection:

We hear often that body language and the perceptions we make from it make up a very large portion of our understanding of a conversation but these articles just reinforce that fact even more. They both show that the interactions we have with other people, aside from the actual words that are being spoken actually speak volumes as to the value, point, intensity, and meaning that we gleam from a conversation. This is not only true for how much we get from watching and interacting with somebody else but also from the way that we naturally act to convert information ourselves. Subconsciously the visibility, awareness, and accountability we feel when interacting with someone through more than just text makes us act and respond so vastly differently that it would truly be a waste to let those aspects slip away. These articles have really driven home the point that for communication to be truly effective we must have more that just words on a screen because the words make up so little of the total information we look for in a conversation.

Questions:

• How much information is lost when we take away the body language and interactions of a conversation?
• How would it be best to create a platform that does not require face too face interaction to convey a point as effectively as true face to face conversation?
• Can that true recreation of direct spoken conversation ever be captured by another median?
• Can a true sense of accountability be created for digital platforms?

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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?

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Chat Circles Series talks about graphical communication interfaces. Now more than ever, text is probably the most convenient way to communicate with someone.  However, what text messages fail to convey are emotions and feelings, which play a role in everyday human interaction. The researchers then set about building different interfaces, from Chat Circles, Talking in Circles, TeleDirection and Chatscape to address such challenges. Each has their particular set of features to convey how active a user is, log messages, their role in their social group, etc.; all with the goal to make communication between users more transparent. Chat Circles for example generates a circle on the screen when one types; shrinking or increasing in size and assigning them to the respective users.

 

I think emojis have been a great addition to text communication as they allow users to express themselves more genuinely. Going back through my text conversations there’s not one where I haven’t included an emoji or some sort of gif. I don’t use them as much as some people do but going through my history it seems that about every 4-5 texts. As the paper states, emotions are sometimes lost in a pure-text environment. Not just emojis but now one can add gifs to any text conversation as well, which can more accurately depict how one feels regarding an issue. Gifs are taken from all sources, tv shows, movies, memes, etc. As silly and pointless they may seem to some, I think since they usually reflect humor between two parties well which in turn builds trust. These types of add-ons to text based communication have allowed people to not be constrained to just words when communicating.

 

Can social sites like FB, Twitter, etc., based off users’ icon history, predict their behavior?

What triggers people to add icons to their text conversations?

 

 

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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?

 

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Summary

In “Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community,” the article discusses how disjoint we are from our actual personalities in an “anonymous” space. Specifically online where others may latch on to other defining features of your online persona in order to identify you or how they expect you to act (i.e. a goofy avatar, your writing style). Usenet was this article’s example of choice. It then took on a signalers and recievers model to explain this honesty and deception similar to how biologists and game theorists will analyze interplay between truthfulness and deceit in a communication system.  Assessment signals, were ones that followed Zahavi’s Handicap principle, where a user must possess a trait to send the signal. However those that do not follow the handicap principle are called conventional signals. These are the ones where it is open to deception and manipulation.  In most cases conventional signals would cost less to send than assessment and can easily be used by trolls and catfishers in an online environment.

In “4chan and /b/: An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community” 4chan, an online messaging board, was examined. More specifically /b/, one of the more notorious sections of the site. The article then examines what sort of role the anonymity and ephemeral nature of the posts plays in what users are willing to create and distribute on the site. The anonymity has also cultivated a culture within users of the site, although the culture it has created is not exactly good by any measure the anonymity has created camaraderie amongst the anons.

Reflections

The article “Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community” really highlighted that online we can be whoever we want to be. We can claim expertise in areas where we have none. We can fabricate experiences that we’ve never had. In fact some people will even create multiple accounts, like troll or smurf accounts, online to cater to their other preferences. It can provide leeway for users to do and say things they’d never do in real life but also create a safe buffer for those who are less outgoing or more concerned to join in discussions freely.

The fast pace nature of 4chan is pretty well known and in most cases not for a good thing. I found it interesting that ephemerality was studied as it didn’t take into account the fact that many threads are archived via users. The distribution of content through anonymity was also interesting to see as requests and discussions, which I perceived as being the majority of the content, were much smaller in terms of presence.

Questions

What drives others to create malicious personas?

Is deception always for the worst in online environments or is that all that we hear about?

Why is it important to maintain ephemerality in an online to some?

Anonymity online is often very shallow so why does it give others so much confidence?

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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 1 Sept. 2017.

 

Akshay Java, Xiaodan Song, Tim Finin, Belle Tseng. “Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities”. http://aisl.umbc.edu/resources/369.pdf. Accessed 1 Sept. 2017.

 

Summary

 

In “Is it really about me?: message content in social awareness streams,” the researchers sought to study how users treated twitter with respect to the kind of content they would post. What they ended up doing was classifying the content of posts and using that to determine what sort of user someone actually was, either a meformer(majority posts are about themselves) or an informer(majority posts provided non-user information).

 

While in “Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities,” it was more focused on how users interact and how communities are created between those users given the rise of microblogs. They were able to check geographical distributions and user intentions before designing three groups that they believe encompass users: information sources, friends, and information seekers.

 

Reflection

 

I find it impressive the deductions made from data grabbed by third parties and the analysis and can only imagine what sort of nefarious metrics twitter themselves is probably conducting. It was interesting to see how they classified users in the above papers, but I can’t help but feel the catagories are too broad. In “Is it really about me?…” I felt that their sample size was to small and couldn’t account for possible biases so it was a little difficult to take to much stock from theirs.

 

Questions

 

– Does twitter artifically shelter sub-communities?

– Why is it that twitter succeeded where others failed?

– What makes twitter a preferred platform. I see the shortened versions of things to be very misleading?

– What other metrics might be more useful to have if twitter is not already collecting them?

– How accurately can major events be predicted based off of social media (i.e. arab spring)

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