In the literature “Social Translucence: An Approach to Designing Systems that Support Social Processes” by THOMAS ERICKSON and WENDY A. KELLOGG, they tried to implement the real world conversation in computer system through social translucence.
Summary:
The literature talks about a system that tries to support real life communication and collaboration through computer system. They dubbed the system “social translucence system”, which have three characteristics – visibility, awareness and accountability. They talk about how to make online communication deep, coherent and productive. The literature talks about what sort of information a real-life conversation may convey, the sort of physical limitation people may face, how the physics of the physical place the conversation is taking place works, how knowledge is conveyed etc. When they were trying to implement all of these physical aspects in a computer system, they considered three design approaches, realist, mimetic and abstract. Among them, the abstract design approach seemed most appropriate, which basically is representing the real-world via text and small graphics. Later they talked about the Babble prototype, which is basically the prototype of today’s chat system. They explained how the visibility, awareness and accountability can be conveyed in a textual format, how the knowledge is going to be represented to the users.
Reflection:
When I first started reading the paper, it seemed so surreal. They were talking about representing the real world through computer system. For someone who is very used to the current internet, I at first, couldn’t fathom how the world was before the revolution of internet. These days, many of us look at instant messaging like a normal real-life conversation, we use text to represent our thoughts, use emoticons to express our emotions. The IMs are so advanced these days that we can send voice clips, videos, files instantly. But the paper is talking about a time when none of these existed. The Babbel prototype is basically the prototype of current instant messaging system, the father of Messenger, Discord, Skype, Slack etc. They were trying to figure out how to represent the online presence of a user, which we just do using a green dot beside the user. Many of the proposals made in the paper is the very part of our internet life nowadays. One of their aspect, social proxy, where what the user is doing at the instance, instead of a visual representation,
are sometimes expressed through texts, the abstract method, they mentioned being the best way to explain the real world in a computer system.
Going through the paper made me realize how far we’ve come in such a short time due to the advancement of technology. What didn’t even exist 20 years ago is now a big part of our life. We are so easily able to engage in a deep, coherent and productive conversation online which wasn’t even possible to think about just a few years ago.
