Erickson and Kellogg were interested in designing systems that supported communication and collaboration of large groups of people over computer networks. They wanted to learn how to design systems that support coherent and productive communication such as those that are based in the physical world. They posit that it is possible to design coherent communication systems if each participant and their activities were visible to each other. They proposed socially translucent systems that have three characteristics – visibility: That users’ presence is visible, awareness: That users are aware of others’ presence in the system and accountability – That each user is accountable for their actions in the system.
This idea that we are socially blind in the digital world still holds true, although to a lesser extent. Whole communities have been built with socially translucent structures. It has become easier for users to observe and imitate others’ actions; to engage in peer pressure; to create, notice, and conform to social conventions.
The “Babble” system in essence reflects many community-based communication services, group texts, or even slack come to mind when reading about “Babble”. Persistent documentation and synchronous representation of conversations have become ubiquitous features in most online communities and chat services.
Moreover, online communities have been built successfully with their own social norms and systems that allow for the three characteristics to be present or in certain cases, be circumnavigated to allow for coherent conversations. Reddit, Wikipedia and Stack overflow are great examples of such communities.
The idea of social proxy, is also ever-present, the ellipses we see while someone is typing a message, the green dots represented availability and other signifiers represented commonality and conversation threads have all become important part of online communication. Constraints such as user privileges, or moderation have played an important role in maintaining the coherence of such forums. The frankness of conversations on “Babble” is also a phenomenon seen widely on online forums.
From our perspective, the digital world appears to be populated by
Erickson and Kellogg
technologies that impose walls between people, rather than by technologies that create windows between them.
From the authors perspectives, the digital world seemed to be filled with technology that imposed walls and restrictions rather than creating windows. This is partially true today. With many online forums having existing and detailed rules and conventions, conversational channels act as constraints themselves, often pigeonholing themselves into only working a few similar ideologies. For example, subreddits can often get quite specific in the type of members and also the rules they enforce. Today’s world is filled with a different sort of wall. The walls of ideologies and algorithms that reinforce them.