- Donath, Judith, and Fernanda B. Viégas. “The chat circles series: explorations in designing abstract graphical communication interfaces.” Proceedings of the 4th conference on Designing interactive systems: processes, practices, methods, and techniques. ACM, 2002.
- Erickson, Thomas, and Wendy A. Kellogg. “Social translucence: an approach to designing systems that support social processes.” ACM transactions on computer-human interaction (TOCHI) 7.1 (2000): 59-83.
Reading reflections
Both the papers are significantly old, and there been advancement in terms of Social translucence. Applications, specifically social systems are have made their communication interfaces significantly “visible”, resulting in a more “aware” user. Examples include the adaptive chat windows where one can see if someone is typing, has read our message, the message is still pending or failed to deliver. The idea of “Given clues that useful knowledge is present, interested parties could request summaries of the topic, petition for admission to the community, or simply converse with some of the community members” is also effectively implemented in Facebook groups now.
The idea of digital spaces having graphical wear showing who has been doing what while being there seemed really novel. But come to think of it, internet is haven for the introverts, and the ability to interact privately is one of the reasons why it is so. Such participants won’t be fond of the social system maintaining their conversation history for transparency or transforming the temporal dimension into depth.
Some thoughts while reading the papers are as follows:
- Quoting from the paper by Erickon et. al. “in the digital world we are socially blind.” However, I tend to disagree with this statement as we are now more socially aware in a digital world than ever. In a physical setting, it is hard to locate a restaurant, a phone booth or a grocery store which is out of our sight unless we have been there already. The digital world not only helps us locating the service of our choice, but helps us with finding alternatives, displays a list of people who have used the service and what they say about it, and also if there is a perceived obstacle (bad weather the next day, an alternate route in effect because of construction, a traffic jam, working hours etc.) about the service which help us reaching to a conclusion. It not only makes us better sighted, but helps us in reaching a decision by being well equipped far ahead of time, unlike the “crowded parking lot” example quoted in the paper.
- Users in a digital world have the liberty to initiate and carry on multiple conversations simultaneously, without one interrupting the other, unlike real world. Having textual conversations with several people simultaneously in a digital space doesn’t hinder communication since their voice doesn’t overlap , neither does it offend the participants in the conversation if the participant turns away from them temporarily, since most of the times it is unnoticeable. It also has to do with the fact that users tend to make the most of the time in the digital world, and it doesn’t require them to be physically present at one place. Although the whole concept of depicting real world interactions in terms of hearing range, action traces, speaking rhythms and other behavioral representations is appealing, it only makes the user able to strike one conversation at a time.
