{"id":141,"date":"2019-10-03T02:55:45","date_gmt":"2019-10-03T02:55:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cscw2019\/?p=141"},"modified":"2019-10-03T02:55:47","modified_gmt":"2019-10-03T02:55:47","slug":"social-translucence-reading-reflection-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cscw2019\/2019\/10\/03\/social-translucence-reading-reflection-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Social Translucence: Reading Reflection #2"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

While reading the first half of this paper, in the back of my mind was the thought: \u201c2000…what technology did we have then…I wonder what this Babble<\/em> is going to be?\u201d\u00a0 When I actually got to the section on the prototype: \u201cOh my G**, were these authors the first ones to conceptualize modern chats?!<\/em>\u00a0 Holy moly!\u201d\u00a0 My entire life, I\u2019ve taken timestamped, sequential, persistent conversations completely for granted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still today, nineteen years after this paper by Thomas Erickson and Wendy A. Kellogg, there are countless digital systems that are opaque in many ways.\u00a0 I had an experience in an online class at my workplace that illustrates this opacity nicely. We were in a \u201cbreakout\u201d session, about five of us, where we were jointly editing a word document.\u00a0 There\u2019s no way to see whose cursor is where like there is in google docs. Since no one was taking the role of secretary and we only had a few minutes to do the exercise, I started editing the document and spoke into my microphone to explain what I was doing.\u00a0 I could hear them, so they can hear me, right? In face-to-face communication we have this assurance of communicative symmetry<\/em>, as the authors coin it.\u00a0 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the remainder of the exercise, five or ten minutes, I get increasingly frustrated because someone keeps changing things in the table that I just changed and repeating things I just said.\u00a0 It\u2019s as if the rest of the team can\u2019t hear me. I pawn it off as just another case of men talking over women. A few seconds from the buzzer, I realized: my microphone was on mute the entire time. What a stupid mistake, right? A stupid mistake that I would have been much less likely to make had the situation been more translucent: if we could have seen each other’s faces (my team-mates probably thought “Molly,” whoever she was, was out to lunch, since she never talked the entire time<\/em>), or seen whose cursor was where, for instance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One thing I think the authors got wrong, in a way, is that knowledge communities had to be small:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our experience suggests that knowledge production and use will proceed most easily in a semiprivate environment\u2014a relatively small community where knowledge workers feel \u201csafe\u201d enough to venture tentative interpretations and conjectures. […] <\/em>(69)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stack Overflow, as an example, has the same affordances they describe, for the opposite reason: it\u2019s so big<\/em> that people aren\u2019t afraid to ask questions, because is their friend or colleague likely to see?\u00a0 Or maybe it\u2019s more owed to the community feeling that Stack Overflow has nurtured through its encouragement of newbies and reward of thoughtful answers.\u00a0 I\u2019ve heard that it\u2019s possible to do \u201cprivate\u201d Stack Overflows for intra-organization Q&A, but I\u2019m not sure how popular this is\u2026 It\u2019s probably better than SharePoint for many answer-seeking needs, but I doubt that anyone whose job deals with software goes looking for answers on their department\u2019s private Stack Overflow more often than the normal Stack Overflow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The anecdote about the thirty text-book co-authors surprised and delighted me.\u00a0 They were tasked with collectively deciding the order that the chapters would come in, in a physical room, moving physical pieces of paper, one per chapter.\u00a0 My first thought was, this can only go poorly: everyone will only care about their <\/em>chapter and no one will make sure it all hangs together cohesively.\u00a0 Not so! This room full of co-authors accomplished the task by organically organizing themselves into (my interpretation):<\/p>\n\n\n\n

  1. Defenders of their chapter<\/em> – who were protective of the chapter they wrote and felt strongly about where it should go.<\/li>
  2. Flitters<\/em> – who moved around the room and getting a broad-strokes sense of the whole.<\/li>
  3. Section experts<\/em> – who hovered around a group of chapters and guided the organization of that group.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    In the course of a paragraph on privacy, they gave the example of elections, where it is paramount that certain things be very private<\/em> (e.g. casting your ballot with no fear of repercussions), and certain other things very public<\/em> (e.g. the ballot counting).\u00a0 Having grown up here in the States, I sometimes take these things for granted, but they are the bedrock of democracy!\u00a0 I believe it\u2019s also vital that people see, whether physically or digitally, their friends and role-models participating in democracy, as well as have access to data on the make-up of their district, and be able and empowered to contact their representatives.\u00a0 Democracy is certainly threatened by some consequences of the digital age, but I am heartened by the ways in which the public aspects of democracy are becoming increasingly translucent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \u2026  So, if you\u2019re reading this and you can vote, be sure you\u2019re registered!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    While reading the first half of this paper, in the back of my mind was the thought: \u201c2000…what technology did we have then…I wonder what this Babble is going to be?\u201d\u00a0 When I actually got to the section on the prototype: \u201cOh my G**, were these authors the first ones to conceptualize modern chats?!\u00a0 Holy…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":266,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-141","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cscw2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cscw2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cscw2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cscw2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/266"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cscw2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=141"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cscw2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":151,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cscw2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141\/revisions\/151"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cscw2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cscw2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cscw2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}