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.

Read More

[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.

Read More

[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.

Read More

• 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.

Read More

• 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.

   

   

   

Read More

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.

 

Read More

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. 

Read More

[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.

Read More

Readings:

[1] The Chat Circles Series :  Explorations in designing abstract graphical communication interfaces

Summary:

This paper focuses on the design aspects of a chat environment, which is free of limitations incurred by the more traditional text chats. The authors modified plethora of aspects of their chat environment, resulting in various different representations of appearance of a chat environment and determining user-interface interaction.  Some of the primary environment elements that the authors predominantly focused on were history, movement, communication channel, context, individual representation, and the environment itself. Working with previously outlined elements, the authors devised five chat environments including Chat Circles, Chat Circles II, Talking in Circles, Chatscape, and Tele-direction. This paper was able to highlight the entire process of creating chat programs — intended to “foster rich, engaging environments for sociable communication online.”

Reflection/Questions:

I am of the opinion that real life social setting can never be transposed to the digital realm — primarily because social interactions are based on myriad of physical cues and the interpretation of which are distinct for every individual based on their upbringing, their past experiences, and their current state of mind. Howbeit, as the authors described we can come close to simulating real life social interactions, but their context might differ. A lot of our social understanding comes from interpreting not what the speaker is speaking, but their underlying tone — a big reason voice messages over wechat are so popular in China and even considered as a status symbol [1]. I think Talking in Circles is the best representation of daily informal chat program as it encompasses verbal cues with physical cues. When I started reading Tele-directions in the paper, it reminded of a game called Blue whale, which turned fatal for many souls, as the tele-director asked tele-actor to take their life in order to win the game. Ergo design, context, and environment of an application are of utmost importance. Whilst reading the paper I thought what is it that I want in a daily informal social chat program? First few quick answers were facetime, whatsapp call, and google duo; then I thought about how to enhance these experiences — having a 3-D AR rendering of the person I am talking to instead of a 2D rendering. I have only thought about chat programs where I am talking to known individuals in an informal setting — hence context coming into play.

[2 ]  Social Translucence: An Approach to Designing Systems that Support Social Processes

Summary:

This paper focused on creating a system that would enable large groups of people, over the computer networks, to communicate and collaborate. In order to create such a system the authors identified three key feature namely visibility, accountability, and awareness — that exist in the real world to aid us in social interaction. They also discourse how our individual constraints and our understanding of social constraints influence our social interaction in the physical world. The authors of the paper present a functioning platform called “Babble”, and  highlight the flaws that social translucence raises, from a digital communication perspective.

Reflection/Questions:

Towards the conclusion of the paper, the authors write that “the digital world appears to be populated by technologies that impose walls between people,” and I am of the belief that these walls don’t exist because of design but because of physical strictures that digital life presents, in comparison to physical world. The walls also exist because of our heightened sense of conscious, as our activity in virtual world persists and can be used against us in future, on the flip side our words are fleeting and people forget. Unless we are able to have a full virtual reality/augmented reality set up, and all communication is verbal, these walls will continue to exist. I believe that new social rules/norms will surface with evolution of social media and our integration with the virtual world. Howbeit, we are currently in the stone age of the internet (in terms of evolution). It was interesting to read about persistence of material in social media, this reminded me of variety of cases where popular people ran into PR problems because one of their old tweets resurfaced in a different light/context. Expanding on the last point, all of us are very careful when posting on social media because companies go through our social media accounts — this problem doesn’t exist in physical world. This situation makes me think of the next social science problem that might need a solution —  how to protect people from getting cyberbullied for their tweet/ message being highlighted in the wrong context? How to allow people to freely share what they would in physical world, without the fear of being harshly judged by others/ not being vetted out by companies ? The authors also write that “in the digital world we are socially blind,” I would agree with this and I would add that we are socially manipulated, for instance exposure to only happy photos/messages/memories of people evoke jealousy in us. In addition, when people take part in social media activity we are not aware of their current state of mind and hence their most recent post might not be reflective of their current emotional state, hence socially manipulating us. 

[1] https://qz.com/443441/stop-texting-right-now-and-learn-from-the-chinese-theres-a-better-way-to-message/

Read More