- Social Translucence: An Approach to Designing Systems that Support Social Processes
- The Chat Circles Series: Explorations in Designing Abstract Graphical Comm. Interfaces
The first paper focuses on designing digital systems based on the human-human communication in real-world. Authors state that these kind of digital systems for communication and collaboration between users can be created by allowing users to observe each other’s activities. They explain about three principals for social translucent systems which are Visibility, Awareness and Accountability by providing an example (the door with the glass window) and then discuss their chat program (a social translucence system) called Babble.
The role of Awareness and Accountability in a social translucent systems is undeniable but I see them as two effects of a cause, Visibility. I think we can consider the Visibility as a significant principal of translucent systems. By making users’ activities visible to one another we inject Awareness and Accountability properties into our system.
Also, I have been thinking about Identity as a principal in designing a translucent systems. In the third part of the example provided by the authors in this paper, where they are explaining Accountability, they say:
“Suppose that I do not care whether I hurt others: nevertheless, I will open the door slowly because I know that you know that I know you are there, and therefore I will be held accountable for my actions”
Which shows the importance of the Accountability. However, in social systems if people don’t know each other (Anonymity), most likely they don’t care whether their actions hurt others or not. So, in an anonymous system, considering the above example, although I know that you know that I know you are there, but because you don’t know who I am, so it is likely that I will do what I want. Thus, in my opinion the Identity’s role should not be neglected in social translucent systems. Anyways, do today’s social translucent systems follow these principles?
Although almost two decades have passed since such papers that were the basis of social networking sites formation published, the spirit of social translucence has remained unchanged. Because we are still using social cues for making our decisions and social translucence systems facilitate it. However, authors in this paper talk about similarities between digital and physical spaces. According to their program, Babble, like other early social systems, you are facing a digital room like a physical room. Their program shows users’ presence and their activities. You can see these properties in Chat Circles too. Of course the space of the Chat Circles looks bigger and more flexible but the spirit of both programs seems the same. In today’s social networks like Facebook, users’ presence are not depicted. On Tweeter, users follow each other based on interesting things that users share. So, the space is not related to the social translucence principals anymore. In my opinion, considering a spatial scope as a dimension for a social network is not a good idea. What if many users want to join a chat room? Imagine 68 million active users in Tweeter want to join a chat room. Even joining much smaller number of users in a chat room can also be unthinkable. Of course, I found the Chat Circles idea interesting though as I said this program also suffers from space problem.
The Chat Circles, is an abstract graphical interface for synchronous conversation. Different from Babble and its social proxy, here presence and activity are shown by changes in color and form, proximity-based filtering intuitively breaks large groups into conversational clusters. I think, if they could add another dimension (3D instead of 2D) to their program, it would be more interesting. They also introduced three new elements in Chat Circles II: images in the background, action traces and a map of the entire space. They claim that the background images can introduce a topic for conversation. This is a good idea for the technology of that time, but I think the online topic modeling for each group can be useful here.
