[1] Garett, R. Kelly (2009) – “Echo chambers online? Politically motivated selective exposure among Internet news users”

[2] Resnick, Paul (2013) – “Bursting Your (Filter) Bubble: Strategies for Promoting Diverse Exposure”- Proceedings of CSCW ’13 Companion, Feb. 2013.

Summary

The topic for todays’ discussion is Polarization and selective exposure which means people are exposed to a certain kind of news and they are unaware of what is going on beyond that the “exposure bubble”. Selective exposures offered by a filter bubble is a result of personalized search avoiding diversified and conflicting information. These papers conduct surveys among the population using their political beliefs. The previous researches reveal that the internet news users mostly read and watch the news which conforms with their political belief (opinion reinforcement) rather than opinions which challenge their political beliefs. However, peoples use of internet to acquire political knowledge has raised concerns regarding selective exposure problem. The authors conducted a survey – a web administered behavior tracking study to access how the ones political attitude influences their use of the online news. The study used 5 hypotheses (H1 to H4) based on existing research on exposure processes. The study found that people are more inclined to look and spend more time to read new stories containing more opinion reinforcing information and that they are less likely to look and to be influenced by the opinion challenging information. The last hypothesis concluded that a person will spend more time to observe a story contradicting or challenging their opinion.  The reason being the greater the length of exposure in the news the greater opportunity for the person to refuse to view this news in the future.

 

Reflection

We were first exposed to the filter bubble effect in the paper by Hannak et al. [3]. This is a user getting exposed to information which is personalized due to their search history and might be as a result of algorithmic bias. Echo chambers scenario is mainly because of the fact of web personalization. A user is exposed to beliefs and news which are relevant to their search history and de facto their personal beliefs. It was interesting to learn that when it comes to political domain, people also spend time researching politically challenging data in order to critique the opposite idea further. Thus, being exposed to varied idea gives rise to breaking of the filter bubble, however they are not likely to alter their belief. The need for algorithmic audit is becoming clear to me.

Another important problem that may arise from selective exposure that may have a much larger negative impact is the health sector. Be it beliefs related to vaccination or other health procedures, if people who are against it are exposed only to data to support their hypothesis that may have a severe consequence. Similar to the example provided in the text, even if these group are exposed to theories contrary to their beliefs, they might use the exposure as a form of opinion reinforcement. How can we make sure that along with breaking the filter bubble, the person also becomes open to new thoughts as well?

[3] Hannak, Aniko et al. (2013) – “Measuring Personalisation of Web Search” – Procedings of International World Wide Web Conference Committee. (527-537).

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Readings:

[1] Echo chambers online?: Politically motivated selective exposure among Internet news users

Summary:

This paper studies the widely known echo chamber phenomenon. In order to carry out his experiment the author of the paper recruited subjects from readership of two different online news sites — which supported either sides of the aisle. The big question that the author was trying to address was: are people more likely to read news that supports their opinion/belief, or do people actively try to avoid news that challenges their opinion? In order to answer the big question, he made five different hypothesis, and proved them right using results from his experiment. The five hypothesis were:

1.  The more opinion-reinforcing information an individual expects a news story to contain, the more likely he or she is to look at it.
2.  The more opinion-reinforcing information a news story contains, the more time an individual will spend viewing it.
3.  The more opinion-challenging information the reader expects a news story to contain, the less likely he or she is to look at it.
4.  The influence of opinion-challenging information on the decision to look at a news story will be smaller than the influence of opinion-reinforcing information.
5.  The more opinion-challenging information a news story contains, the more time the individual will spend viewing it.

Subjects recruited for the study were not indicative of the larger US demography, howbeit the recruits from the two news sites shared various demographic similarities — hence making it possible for the author to make the generalizations and prove his hypothesis correct.

Reflection/Questions:

Whilst reading the paper I stumbled across a certain statistical number and it stood out to me — more than 85% participants were white. The immediate question I had in mind was what could be the reason for a majority white representation? More access to technology? Widespread access to education, resulting in higher interest levels in news ? The previous question was followed by how would the study be affected if the race of the participants was more diverse and more equally distributed ? This particular paper and all the other papers that I have read in this class discuss the phenomenon of filter bubbles and echo chambers, which talk about what kind of news do people consume and do they get enough exposure to opposing ideas — but this assumes a single topic(same topic on both sides); reading this paper made me interested in understanding how to deliver different news topics that people might not get exposure to because of all the different filters in online platforms. For instance someone might be reading both sides of news for gun control, but that same person might be so immersed in gun control, that he might not pay attention to poverty.

There are three more interesting ideas that I got from this paper :

1.  Exposure to how many opinion-challenging news articles would it take, either consecutively or in a very short interval, before the reader disregards the source entirely; consequentially not revisiting that source ?  (title of the article)
2. When reading an opinion-challenging article, what kind of credibility does the reader ascribe to the source ? and how does the perceived credibility of the source affect the comprehension of the news article that the reader is reading ? (source of the article)
3.  How do people react to different treatments of their views in an opinion-challenging article, and how does this impact their future take on opposing news ? (content of the article)

I think all three of these questions are very important for designing a platform where the user is exposed to opinion-challenging news in a positive manner, without being driven away or becoming resentful towards opinion-challenging news. In fact, answers to these questions might help researchers and designers in creating a platform that promotes readers to read opinion-challenging news.

[2 ] Bursting Your (Filter) Bubble: Strategies for Promoting Diverse Exposure

Summary:

This paper talks about possibly nudging people towards a more diverse exposure to news articles. The authors discourse two different possibilities of nudging people:

1. Diversity-aware news aggregators
2. Provide subtle nudges to promote readers to choose more diverse news

After detailing different methods of nudging people, the authors move onto talk about various methods that promote processing information in a motivated manner. On this end, the authors further discuss three different platforms — Reflect, OpinionSpace, ConsiderIt — that have promoted more deliberate behavior by audience indulging in divergent opinion; in other words promoting empathy.

Reflection/Questions:

During the paper, the authors suggest that “news aggregator might set a higher quality threshold..”, but this only makes think that quality is an intrinsic property and is subjective, consequentially can’t be used as a measurable attribute. One thing that all three platforms(reflect, opinionspace , and considerit) have in common is that a user has to go through more rigorous interaction with the platform, for the platforms intended operation to be meaningful — for instance ConsiderIt has its users create a pros-cons list. Not everyone has this kind of patience and/or time, so one question that I ask myself is: how can we design a platform that is not as time intensive, but still engages readers (of opposing ideologies) in a more deliberate fashion?

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[1] Garrett, R. Kelly. “Echo chambers online?: Politically motivated selective exposure among Internet news users.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 14.2 (2009): 265-285.

[2] Resnick, Paul, et al. “Bursting your (filter) bubble: strategies for promoting diverse exposure.” Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work companion. ACM, 2013.

 

This week’s papers study and discuss the Filter Bubble effect – the idea that people are only exposing themselves to viewpoints they agree with, to the detriment of obtaining diverse viewpoints. This effect is especially prominent when it comes to reading political news. The first paper studies the reading habits of users of partisan news sites. From their results, they could conclude that the desire to seek out news that reinforces one’s own opinions does not necessarily mean that one goes out of their way to avoid challenges to their opinions. In fact, they found that people engage more with the opposing views, perhaps to try and find flaws in the arguments and reinforce their own views. The second paper is a discussion by multiple authors on strategies for decreasing the filter bubble effect such as gamifying the news reading, encouraging the users to make lists of pros and cons on issues they read, having the news sources push through opposing views if the content is high quality, etc.

The first paper’s findings that people don’t actively avoid stories that challenge their opinions very interesting to me. It means that in most cases people are willing to engage opposing opinions even if they don’t necessarily agree with them. Big internet companies that rely on providing personalization could safely tweak their recommendation algorithms at least a bit to allow some opposing views to filter through without the fear of losing business, which may have been a concern for them.

Something I would like to know, that the first paper didn’t cover is how much are the people comprehending the stories and how much does it influence them? For opinion reinforcing stories, are they tuning out once they realize that the story agrees with their opinions? For opinion opposing stories, are they spending that excess time trying to understand and does that extra engagement lead to at least a shift in their opinion from compared to their earlier stance? Perhaps this study could be done with a final quiz that asks questions about the story content and also interviews to measure if there has been a shift in their opinion.

The idea of gamifying the task of getting a person to reduce their selective exposure, through the use of a stick figure balancing on a tightrope discussed in the second paper, is a very promising idea. Stack Overflow thrives with an enormous amount of content because they have gamified answering questions. You can earn different levels of badges and that gives you prestige. Perhaps the same thing can be done to encourage people to read more widely by giving them points and badges and have a leaderboard tracking the scores across the country. People actively chase the high of getting better scores which is why I think that this might be fairly effective. Of course, you don’t want people to game the game so maybe this gamification could be combined with the other ideas in the paper of having people discuss and interact and rate the comments to prevent botting the game.

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The continuous evolution of computer systems and networks infrastructures connected the world, making it possible for anyone connected to the internet to easily communicate and interact with acquaintances as well as strangers within various contexts. With new possibilities, new challenges arise. A question imposes itself, how to maximally convey the traits of real-life social interactions through a computer application?

Electronic online communications date back to early 1970s when the email service was introduced. No doubt that this was revolutionary, however, with the evolution of computer systems and applications, it became possible to create other contexts of online communication with a more synchronous aspect, where people could have an online conversation as similar as possible to a real-life one. This possibility raises the above question.

In an attempt to address this question, Thomas Ericsson, and Wendy A. Kellogg introduced the concept of Social Translucence to the design of social applications. In their work “Social Translucence: An Approach to Designing Systems that Support Social Processes”, they first define social translucence in terms of three aspects of real-life social interactions; visibility, awareness, and accountability. After that, they present the design of an online social application that serves as a knowledge community. Although their design looks simple, its details attempt to capture many aspects of social interactions. Their application is called Babble, and it consists of multiple textual conversation threads where people chat with each other about some topics. They also design a graphical representation of the conversation called social proxy, which depicts a conversation as a circle, and people are small circles moving within the large circle to reflect their activity within the conversation.

From my view, one of the most successful parts of their design is the way the conversation is organized. The date and time stamps, followed by the name and the text message convey a lot of information from a social perspective. This reflects the flow of the conversation, how fast people respond to each other, and it gives the sense of a lively conversation because everyone is seeing what all other parties of a conversation are saying in a near real-time way. It also makes it possible for people who later join a conversation to catch up with at least the most recent part of it. We can notice that this is the convention for most of today’s chatting tools.

The design of the social proxy adds more awareness to some characteristics of the conversation. From my view, this idea is successful in terms of reflecting the activity of speakers and listeners within a conversation, however, there could be different meanings and interpretations associated with the spatial patterns of users. This point of spatial patterns is from the points I like the most about the Chat Circles Series project.

The Chat Circles Series is an attempt to add more liveness and awareness to online conversations by introducing concepts of hearing range and moving in the space. The original Chat Circles and its evolutions try to move as close as possible to a real-life style of conversations. Although this is good in terms of portraying many aspects of social interactions, it could have some drawbacks.

If I imagine traveling back in time and talking with the designers to improve their design. I would focus on how online conversations will become an inherent and mixed part of every day’s life, and in order to cope with the pace of the users’ lifestyle, their design will need to become much simpler. Although some parts of the Chat Circles’ designs are used in today’s chatting tools, for example, the circles growing and shrinking to indicate who is speaking in a group call in Skype, I would stand for the simplicity and readability of Ericsson et al.’s design of a chat thread. Their design is highly used in current chatting tools. Combined with some newer features such as “last active” or “seen by”, and the possibility of reacting with an emotion icon (e.g. emojis) is able to convey sufficient social information.

Finally, my ultimate belief is that although it is highly useful and important to import as much real-life social traits as we could to the digital life, it will never replace the value and importance of a real-life social conversation.

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[1]        T. Erickson and W. A. Kellogg, “Social translucence: an approach to designing systems that support social processes,” ACM Trans. Comput. Interact., vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 59–83, 2000.

[2]        J. Donath and F. Viégas, “The chat circles series,” Proc. Conf. Des. Interact. Syst. Process. Pract. methods, Tech. – DIS ’02, p. 359, 2002.

Human beings are social animals. The importance of communication in us being a social animal is vital. We use speech as a mode through which information about our world and ourselves, construct agreed together myths and legends to create shared realities and even use it to warn one another. But, in the recent years, this physical phenomenon is increasingly being substituted by the virtual equivalent. These virtual tools, unlike the physical equivalent are crude in nature. How can one create a tool that is not crude and is as functional as physical speech? This is the question [1] is trying to tackle.

[1] firstly defines the term social translucency. It identifies that visibility, awareness and accountability are the building blocks of social interaction. It also identifies how naturally constraints come into picture and the importance of shared understanding of these constraints. The author then goes on to describe various systems that facilitate these functionality.

The privacy concerns associated with a system like babble is warranted. But could you bring in the notion of privacy in such systems and implement them? One could enable functionality through which one can peruse through another’s post history or go into circles anonymously. But how do you prevent misuse of these features. One could create social pressure by notifying users on who viewed their profile like in the case of Linkedin or have viewed their post history.

Given the need for “windows” and not “walls” in digital ecosystems, would require the transportation of data that constitutes as social information along with the actual information. Although such a system is important would such a bandwidth heavy requirement create barriers to users who do not have access to them? Although, internet access and speed is improving, the transplant to a fully digital world will only take place when the universal access to broadband becomes reality.

Mimetic platforms could be reality through the use of AR/VR technology.  Given how the average compute power especially mobile devices are increasing rapidly, barriers are being removed to enter into the market with such “mimetic” platform. How you integrate such functionalities, giving users an actual benefit in being in your platform would determine the success of such a platforms.

It’s an interesting how rare “abstract systems” are in the wild? What could be the reason behind it? One of the reason could be the upfront cost associated with learning the mechanics of the system.

Paper [2] is concerned with the process of designing a system which is legible and engaging. It progresses from a barebones system to more feature laden system giving the reason for each functional upgrade. The “socially translucent” systems [2] builds are Chat Circles, Chat Circles II, Talking in Circles, and Tele-Directions.

Given how systems like chat circles work, how can you accommodate for people having multiple accounts or online personas?

The chat circles could also show users, groups having discussions on similar topics extending the functionality of the “hearing range”. These groups may be located far away geographically and the topics may be found in real time using state of the art NLP systems.

Given the information from [1] and [2] trying to force online communication channels to mimic how physical communication works, one could also argue if such a push is needed? I believe a hybrid of the current system with a more social translucent feature is what is necessary. Being able use the “legacy” mode would be one way to move forward. Online communication should be given the space to let it evolve naturally like how physical conversations have.

Given, how many people we interact with online vs how many you actually have a conversation with offline, it is necessary different people be put in different “circles” accommodating for pressure to put people you wouldn’t normally want in your innermost one. Such a tiered approach, although not new, could help address the elephant in the room i.e. the privacy issue associated with online social communication platforms.

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[1]        T. Erickson and W. A. Kellogg, “Social translucence: an approach to designing systems that support social processes,” ACM Trans. Comput. Interact., vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 59–83, 2000.

[2]        J. Donath and F. Viégas, “The chat circles series,” Proc. Conf. Des. Interact. Syst. Process. Pract. methods, Tech. – DIS ’02, p. 359, 2002.

 

In the first paper, the premise is around the concept of “social translucence”. A term that the authors’ claims have the characteristics of visibility, awareness, and accountability. The paper structure seems pedagogical in how the authors explain the central term and later goes on to talk about knowledge management and knowledge communities. Finally, the entire theoretical base is implemented in the system called “Babble”.

The use of urban design and architecture was reminiscent of the Open Spaces video that we watched and studied in class. It reinforced how the domains could influence HCI for the better and how past researchers have explored certain possibilities using the same. The most important question of the paper for me was “Why is it that we speak of socially translucent systems rather than socially transparent systems?”. The paper mentions that privacy and visibility have a vital tension warranting social translucence. The power of constraints is an important idea as I feel there is a fine line between the users feeling free under reasonable restrictions and them feeling restricted. As a developer and/or designer it will be an important quality that the platform we develop needs to have. The fact that the constraints we establish should be evident to all users and clearly indicative of the reasonable restriction base is one that is difficult to achieve.

Knowledge management has been one front where organizations have improved since the time of the publication, but analyzing this on a deeper level based on the previous readings would lead me to the line “But it is interesting to think about the possibilities of a system that was designed to “know” about the notions of authorship, citation, and research communities.” If we were to design an autonomous agent which could act like such a knowledge management system I can see a similar argument made for the same.

The latter part of the paper feels like the inspiration for many of the currently existing online communities, with one in particular that jumped at me viz Reddit. The needs explained in the “Activity Support”, “Conversation Visualization and Restructuring” and “Organizational Knowledge Spaces” all are captured in these social platforms to a large extent. The paper gave a strong reason for having the particular structure for these platforms.

Finally, the three approaches to implementation that the paper mentions in the realistic, mimetic and abstract I feel can be addressed more as three particular stages in HCI. The article was published in a time where the first two approaches were not feasible because of technological advances. I feel that the next groundbreaking social platform will be with the mimetic approach.

The approaches talk about different levels of interaction which gives a good transition into the second paper. Here the entire paper talks about the “evolutionary” development of a platform. The paper essentially could be a very good case study on how to implement the theoretical base we get in the first paper into actuality. The concept of graphical environment is not a new one but they do not seem to prosper long enough or have wide enough reach to contest with the existing communication platforms which are more abstract in nature. Given this fact, I still feel with the shifting paradigm and users open to use the mimetic approach the next platform can be built mimicking the Chat Circle procedure as the entire platform has been built from the ground up with each and every feature justified. At every step, the paper tries to capture the key interface elements that were listed.

As a student of human factors, I see the possible implications of each and every claim. From the multiple hues to add visual vibrancy to informative backgrounds all the way to immersive visual scenes stimulate different levels of response for the human. I can understand why and how such models are required. With the current technological prowess, I feel such an approach could result in a platform that will see a lot more success as I still feel that even though current platforms have elements mentioned in the paper an entire platform with this approach is yet to be built.

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• 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.

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• Papers:

  [1] Social Translucence: An Approach to Designing Systems that Support Social Processes – Erickson et. al.

  [2] The Chat Circles Series – Explorations in designing abstract graphical communication interfaces – Donath et. al.

   

  Summary:

  The first paper deals with a design theory,  “Social Translucence”. Social Translucence can be characterized by Visibility, Awareness, and Accountability. These principles guided the design of a system called Babble, a socially translucent medium for interaction in and conversations.

  The second paper underlines various approaches towards building a socially translucent system, such as Chat Circles, Chat Circles II, Talking In Circles and Tele Directions. At the mention of Circles so many times, what comes to mind is the infamous Google + which implemented ‘circles’ as a denotation of friends.

   

  Reflection:

  Accountability is one of the key factors in the translucency of a Social Media Platform. And accountability should not only mean that of users but also that of the Platforms’. Eg: Facebook is as responsible at curbing fake news as much as the user’s themselves.

  Another consideration that the Social Media Platforms make while making themselves translucent is visibility and ephemerality. Story based platforms such as Snapchat pictures disappear after seconds of a user opening them. Not only that, but the Sender is notified of attempts to take a screenshot by a given user.

  Further, when Donath et al discuss Chat Circles and their approach, there are certain issues which with the passage if time needs reconsideration. The system has visibility, awareness, and account yet it may not always be suitable for long discussions with multimedia conversations.

  Furthermore, features liked History may or may not be included in the System Design based on how human intuitive or utility intuitive, the System is supposed to be designed.

   

   

   

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Paer 1: Social Translucence: An Approach to Designing Systems that Support Social Processes

Paper 2: The Chat Circles Series: Explorations in designing abstract graphical communication interfaces

In the first paper, authors introduce a design theory called “social translucence” and describe it’s three characteristics: visibility, awareness and accountability. They embody these principles in a system called “Babble”. In the second paper, authors design series of graphical chat programs, starting from a simple interface to ones with advanced features and study implications of these features on social communication.

Although it’s been two decades since the Ist paper got published, the principles are still considered the core elements of the design of online social systems.

Making User’s identity and activity Visible through social signals: Users expose their identities using display picture and profiles while activity is visible using the feed, posts shared, likes and comments. The question is how much information is too much? Not all features will increase user engagement. I remember facebook removed its “ticker” feature that used to summarize the activities of our friends on right side of the news feed.

Visibility is again associated with design constraints (word limit of a tweet, ephemerality of snapchat video) as well as privacy concerns. Algorithmic bias might also affect visibility of activities of certain friends.

In the study done in 1^st paper, authors considered small number of people where almost everyone is visible to everyone. That doesn’t hold true today. It’s impossible to have millions of people together in a single interface. Thus, today we have the concept of friend circle, followers, friend network etc.

So then comes the question, are people outside our network important? Do we want social cues from these people? Will I be as interested in seeing a post of “friend of a friend” as I will be of my immediate connection? And more importantly do we have a true estimate of our invisible audience? An interesting study was done in paper “Quantifying the Invisible Audience in Social Networks”. The authors found that “social media users consistently underestimate their audience size for their posts, guessing that their audience is just 27% of its true size”.

Does the above finding still holds true? Today although the online platforms are providing privacy settings to control every aspect of your data. But are users fully aware of these settings? Are they using these settings to their full potential? Can we do a study where people are shown the actual audience of their post, and study the after effects of such disclosure.

Authors describe the other two features in the best way. Awareness:  “what do I know?”. Accountability: “I know that you know that I know”. Visibility gives rise to awareness. Blue double ticks on my whatsapp indicate that my friend has read the message. Awareness also brings social rules into picture. We are aware that trolling someone is bad. If I troll and abuse, I will be held accountable for my actions: I can be banned, my post could be removed, my answer could be downvoted. So awareness leads to accountability.

The papers introduce two systems: babble and chat series. Both study the effect of several graphical features on communication. Today, communication is no longer limited to text, we have images, videos, GIFs, emojis. Technological and infrastructure barriers in using realist (video calls) and mimetic(3D) means of displaying information no longer exist. Some of the findings in Chat circle paper still hold today, some not. Like in chat circle 2, a background image is added to give chatspace a theme. Today, the chat spaces are not bounded by themes and almost everything is discussed everywhere. But display pictures can have themes, like a rainbow effect on your dp in Facebook shows that you support gay rights. Having friends in circles failed for google plus. Chatscapes feature to follow or avoid someone very much exists today. In chatscape one can modify other’s appearances by labelling them as “funny” etc. Similar to this, we have reactions (anger, laugh, like) but these are given to posts and not people.

 

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