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.
Summary:
This paper seeks to provide a foundation on designing system to support communication and collaboration among large groups of people over computer networks. They introduce this idea of “social translucence” defined as designing systems so that social information is emphasized within a system. For social translucence to occur, the authors pose 3 key areas identified to facilitate a social knowledge community in the digital world: visibility, awareness, and accountability. In layman’s terms, can social cues be implemented given the 3 key areas. The authors develop a prototype, Babble, to have a concrete example of this space.
Reflection:
For someone (like myself) who was born early 1990s, it is weird reading a paper trying to deeply consider what social factors are considered important to designing these systems. My perception of social translucence is one of intuition rather than a problem that needed solving as technology was well into making these systems social in someway. For instance, when I was old enough to read and write reliable I could converse with many people through AOL instant messenger or AIM. At the time, it was AIM was one of the go to applications to instantly talk to someone (green dot and all). Honestly, I shouldn’t be too surprised given the level of depth one needs to go to engineer an appropriate solution to most things, so why should this be any different.
Bring it back to the paper, this idea of designing systems to mesh with human behavior at individual and collective levels is interesting. As stated in their conclusion, the authors foresaw a rise to new social norms in these designed systems. Their lens of visibility, awareness, and availability were guiding posts for it to happen. In my opinion, this concluding thought couldn’t be more correct. I use discord a lot where I’ve been a part of many servers. Each server handles their community in a different way. A brief description of discord is it’s an IRC with a friendly GUI front-end where you can be a part of many servers. These servers are customizable and are created and molded into what the existing community believes supports their community agenda best. I’ll reflect on this idea of conversations using emoticons and emojis for the remainder of this reflection.
Another angle on this conversation norms. I just want to touch on the topic of emoticons and emojis. This is a broaded thought, but back in 2000 IRC used emoticons like this one :-). Short hands to these emoticons became a norm for sharing expressions. Text alone is left to the interpretation of the reader which can lead to weird tensions — this is sometimes a problem for me just texting personally as I leave short and sweet texts which leads to an indifferent feeling that is taken by the reader. Not my intention, but I digress. Nowadays, emojis are used to not only add expression but are a symbol to a broader context (such as acceptance or denial) and even form sentences without words (not unlike hieroglyphics). Additionally, places like discord allow for custom emotes which I’ve seen to enhance a community experience by using something created out of their community with understood purpose and expression. What’s interesting is how people communicate thoughts or intentions this way. One example on a speedrunning discord server is any decision that comes up they ask the community to vote using reaction emojis (no text allowed in this server channel unless approved by mod). See a picture below of this phenomenon:
The above picture is a paragraph written by the moderator of the Super Mario World community. Here they are polling the community on changing of timing rules and ask the community to vote via the CHECK or X emojis. As you can see, additional emojis are used to convey feelings towards the poll. “EZ” is a short way of saying “that’s easy.” Some of the other emojis there are either custom static or animated emojis that the community use for their own expressive purposes or generic memes.
There was a lot in this paper that gave me a lot to consider in a different light when looking at social communication applications like AIM or discord. But as far as social norm generation, I think the authors were spot on.