[1] Erickson, Thomas et al. (2000) – “Social Translucence: An Approach to Designing Systems that Support Social Processes” ACM Transactions on Computer- Human Interaction (59-83)
[2] Donath, Judith and Viégas, Fernanda (2002) – “The Chat Circle Series”- DIS 2002, London
Summary
This week’s reading was the design of social systems. There are certain properties in the physical world which enables human to human collaboration. However, in the digital world there are substantial shortcomings and problems hindering long running productive communication within the society as digital systems are opaque. Social translucence is a concept that is primarily to help design digital systems which will help information being made visible within the system. The authors try to implement translucence in the digital world and for that they introduced the Babble prototype which focuses on the textual and graphical representation to make digital information more transparent. The second paper discussed various graphical chat models which would potentially do away with the drawbacks of simple textual chats. They introduced the Chat Circles series which was essentially a graphical model to represent users and thus enhance the social interaction. It uses 2D graphics where the users words appear in circles which brightens and grows to accommodate the message. They introduced several other models with some key interface elements which were primarily based on the Chat Circles series, namely the Chat Circles II, Chatscape, Tele-direction. Both of the papers aim at making the digital design interactive and graphical in order to integrate well with human behavior.
Reflection
While reading both the papers, I noticed that they talk about the importance of graphical representation and integration of social digital interaction with human behavior in order to make the system translucent rather than opaque. One common feature both the papers have is that they were both published in the early 2000 where chat forums were in their nascent stage. More so, the data they must have worked on was late 90’s data. I believe that internet back in the day was not a very harmful place, and people followed basic etiquette. The graphical representation to exude emotions as a human interaction would have a greater negative impact in the current community.
The authors of the first paper says- “we believe that digital systems can become environments in which new social forms can be invented, adopted, adapted, and propagated”. This statement seemingly harmless can be interpreted variably in different contexts. These sorts of interactive system can give rise to negative consensus, cyberbully etc. Concept of moderators need to be implemented to monitor activity. If a particular person is being targeted by the group be it justified or not should be made accountable for. Privacy and security are far more relevant in today’s internet culture. Gone are the days where a community was purely consisted of people who believed in the cause. Sockpuppets, spammers, impersonators, trolls are all common in today’s social media.
The second paper talks about creating a graphical chat interface in the form of chat circles. This idea is novel, and I believe it would improve the social interaction and make it enjoyable. However, this approach would also require a centralized authority monitoring the activity and making sure to do away with the common problems faced by social media. If a group is filled with malicious users, then this method would become difficult to interact with. Today’s social media does a good job of maintaining accountability and security. A Facebook or a twitter profile is visible to all and the settings can be changed accordingly. Integration of emoticons, gif etc. do help with the expression of emotion more effectively than before and make the chat interesting.
