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 –
[1] deals with social translucence in digital networks. It identifies 3 key areas which contribute to providing translucence; visibility, accountability and awareness. It tries to address the fact that certain dimensions of social interactions are not apparent or a given in digital interactions. It focuses mainly on abstract visual representations of the world, as opposed to realist or mimetic approaches. The authors take inspiration from architecture and urban planning, and discuss in great depth a system, babble, which tries to create a socially translucent platform for interaction, describing how it handles conversations, user activity, and knowledge community building.
[2] describes many approaches at building a socially translucent system based on abstract representations of the world and the users, namely Chat Circles, Chat Circles II, Talking in Circles, and Tele-Directions. It goes into more detail about the particular design choices of each system, how they helped ensure social translucency, and observations of users interacting with these systems.
Reflection-
Firstly, these two papers were among the most entertaining and interesting papers I have read in this course so far. There were many interesting observations I could make, including the following:
[1] emphasizes that there is a balance between privacy and openness to facilitate social ease of communication, and knowing these balances is often key to guiding and enforcing social interactions. [1] gives a very interesting example of authors of a book gathering together to finalize the organization of a book, where they used physical space and social rules to their advantage, to create translucency through space and time (i.e. the visibility and the audibility of authors).
Certain platforms enforce translucency through ephemerality, and have mechanisms to prevent users from subverting mechanisms, e.g. Snapchat notifies the user if someone else takes a screenshot of their snaps, thus creating social pressure to enforce ephemerality. [1] talks about Babble, which creates a platform which provides social translucency, but not much information is given about the feedback they received from users about the system, i.e. whether they actually felt more comfortable interacting in this environment, and whether they felt it was natural or forced, and whether it was useful. Moreover, some of the drawbacks of the realist approach highlighted by the authors are not valid anymore. For example, the limitations on processing speed, number of users, bandwidth, technological support, etc. are not the same as they were 20 years ago.
Interestingly, [1] mentions that for company document databases, people wanted to know which person wrote an entry. Data should be social too, instead of being only dry and descriptive, creating a knowledge community instead of knowledge database. Semiautonomous communities which each aggregate and select information to send to higher up communities, can be democratized too, to encourage privacy. This feature can be successfully implemented in a website which behaves similar to reddit or 4chan.
[1] talked about the need for creations of summaries, indices for conversational data, but there is a need to conserve privacy. However, enough information should be given to new users for them to get a gist of the conversation without them understanding the in-jokes, etc. The anonymity paper dealt with how the system “self-corrected” for this, in the example of 4chan, through certain phrases/lingo or tasks like the triforce.
[2] highlights the effectiveness of terminology on the users perceptions of other users and the platform, i.e. labelling “lurkers” as listeners gives the active posters the mental image that they are an audience.
Even in a system designed to emulate real world social interactions like Chat Circles, the entire conversation history is stored, to accommodate for the fact that users might be browsing several systems at the same time. This shows that perhaps there are some things inherent to online interactions which no amount of socially conscious design can take away, and that maybe online interaction is a wholly new kind of interaction for which new hybrid systems should be designed.
An area where [2] lacks is that it is too explicit in its data display. Any sort of user behavior statistic cannot help but be very obvious. E.g., data about user posting makes it very clear which users are “shy” or do not post as much. However, in social interactions, this is not explicitly pointed out, but subtly, almost subconsciously realized. It is a challenge to design a system which allows this to happen.
Encoding into the design the ability for events to serve as icebreakers is also an interesting insight in Chat Circles II. Events in platforms like Facebook are largely crowd fueled, where the users themselves create and consume the content (excluding facebook games), but a platform like Club Penguin/RuneScape on the other hand has events generated by the platform itself, which serve as a common topic of conversation. Also interesting is the fact that people tend to move around in the same area, as an analog to fidgeting, and even do things which are unnatural in the real world, like dancing around each other or forming conga lines, to provide movement based social cues to the conversation. Analyzing the movement patterns of characters in MMORPGs who are idle and simply talking to each other might also be an interesting related project.
