Wednesday, January 31, 2007

I can see (myself) for miles and miles and....

I don't normally write personal posts. But last night, during one of those proverbial late-night-staring-at-the-ceiling attempts to sweep the cobwebs from the corners of my mind in order to prepare it for rest, I had what felt like a small-to-middling realization. I remembered realizing, out on the playa one night at Burning Man, that I'd lived all my life unable to tell the difference between anger and resentment. Coming from others, I mean. That when a person was angry with my I immediately thought they resented me. What mattered of course was how this affect my response.
I realized last night, thinking about this project to define the "user" of social software as a user in conversation with him/herself as much as with "real" others, realized that there are some emotions that are easily mistaken online. Really big, important emotions. Though they're not really emotions; they're aspects of communication that involve emotion. But it's precisely because they're not expressed, they're read, that they are easily confused. Empathy and projection. A person might be empathetic or sympathetic, compassionate, in an email, or post, or comment. That would be our reading, our impression. But the person being compassionate might be projecting. Transactional Analysts described these kinds of phenomena as "crossed transactions."
For example: Bossman: Mary, get me a hundred copies of this report by lunch please. Mary: You don't own me you know! I do have other things to do! (They were a bit less PC back then; but you probably recognize the dynamic. Think of Chloe in 24). TA would have called this an adult-child transaction, wherein Mary responds as a child to a demanding parent.
So the thing that hit me was that there are certain kinds of communications, affective or emotionally rich ones, that are handled in face to face talk by use of body language, face, and of course the fact within seconds we can establish, by walking up or down the ladder of intensity and risk, each other's intentions. But in blogging, commenting, emailing, (less so in IM -- because it cycles through short turns and is actually connected to another person), we are required to read/interpret the intention behind what others say. And so we can read them generously, that is assigning to their words what seem to be their intentions. Or we can read them internally, that is through our own emotional complexes, including of course all the things we tend to hear because we're sensitive to them.
Some of the most important aspects of communication, those having to do with interest, with liking a person, with being acknowledged, ignored, agreed with or disagreed with, are essentially up for grabs. If we have emotional cobwebs and detritus, and I don't know a soul who doesn't, we recognize/encounter our own crap in other's words, and assign it to them (unless we're enlightened, in which case we can catch ourselves before answering!). Same with ideals, fantasies, wishes, etc: we might believe they mean it (when in fact *they're* engaged perhaps with their own idealizations). This would explain the tendency in dating sites for people to ascend the ramp to intimacy at great speed, only to then fall from the peak disastrously and walk away in great disappointment. The medium engages us with our own means of understanding another's intentions, but brackets their ability to correct where our heading.

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Tuesday, January 30, 2007

New SxD White Paper: The Social Engine that Drives Review Sites

Social Interaction Design Guide: The Social Engine that Drives Review Sites 2007, pdf, 16 pages. NEW! A Social Interaction Design guide to the social engine and engineering of user motivation and participation on review sites. This lighter-than-usual white paper looks at the social practices engaged in web sites built around user reviews. In particular, the paper examines the way in which reviews can become a kind of personal profiling system for reviewers. It also looks at how reviews create and add value, and poses the question of how business might participate in social marketing of this kind.

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Monday, January 29, 2007

The User of Social Media: A Second Self?

I've been thinking about the user in social software and social media, from a designer's perspective, and thinking about the user experience behind participating in these systems. Wondering, for example, how this all becomes "social." Wondering how to integrate the fact that social media are in some respects anti-social. Or a-social. That the "social interaction" they engage is, at the end of the day, constructed from individual user experiences, from users blogging, posting, commenting to an audience they don't see, and in some ways presenting a self that's as much self image as it is some kind of true self. It's strange, all of this. Here are just a few thoughts on the matter...

  • Social media engage us, provide us with a means to express ourselves and to communicate with others. It is the potential for any contribution we make online to become communication (if it is picked up by another), that holds our principal interest in it.

  • But even when we don't actually engage in a round of talk, through discussion posts, comments, or what have you, we're aware at some level of an audience. And having this audience, as an audience of real friends, family members, and peers; and of those we will never meet, supposedly motivates us to continue participating.

  • There is remarkable power in the possibility of communication, of recognition and acknowledgment by others. As there is also in the motivating power of an audience that reads, bookmarks, tags, andc licks much more than it actually comments substantially. We could call it the power of the social in its absence and distance.

  • And this raises questions for those of us involved in designing social software. In particular, it raises questions concerning the status of the user, his or her relation to others, to him or herself, and to what motivates participation and communication.

  • We believe in the possibility that we can present and reveal ourselves through self expression online. Through writing, or "talking." A lot of this involves a kind of "telling." And, we must assume, the idea that we can tell our Selves. Also that there is truth, that we produce truth, that we are the locus and production of truth, and that in talking or telling we reveal our truth. Also, that we know what our truth is, and expect that it's a truth others can recognize (there would be little point in writing if we doubted that we were being taken seriously). At the same time, we are aware that the medium dissimulates—that others do not read us, see us, or understand us as we do ourselves.

  • This is an untested hypothesis, but I believe that we tend not to re-read what we write, tend not to re-watch the videos we post, or re-listen to the recordings we have made, once we have posted them. We don't engage with ourselves in that manner. And there's an obvious reason for this (if it's true): we know what we wrote/shot/recorded.

  • But we do look at our numbers: of page views, links, compliments, etc. This is in part because we live in a culture of statistics, but it's primarily because numbers are change. It's in numbers that the medium presents the existence of others. This is how badly we need feedback. Or how little the medium captures and represents. In communication terms, the medium withholds the yes/no response to an utterance; withholds its rejection or acceptance.

  • Viewed historically, our culture seems both remarkably comfortable with confessional, exposing, biographical forms. We are becoming ever more removed from tradition, from a sense of history, from civic obligations. Money and markets continue to colonize daily life, and in some respects social media participate in fabricating a marketplace and mirror-world of Selves.

  • The worlds created by social media are Self-centered. And an asymmetry exists between expressing our Selves and giving attention to others. Attention we give to others is always a reflection on our Selves.

  • Social media stage an audience that is, through our participation in it, an audience-for-us. The audience is apparent through comments, numbers, and other signs of its interest in us.

  • Who then is the user? Can we speak of a modern Self? Who (where) is the Other? The fact that the act of participating online is technically mediated puts us in relation to our Selves. As the Other, too, is mediated (and imagined).

  • Should we speak then of a Self in relation to an idealized Self and an internalized Other? Or possibly a Second Self? Is the Self we manage online the Self we wish to show to others, the Self as we wish to be seen? If so, are we not in relation to ourselves as split subjects? Reflected in a wired or wireless hall of mirrors?

  • And when it comes to user motivation, are we motivated not directly by others, but by our internalized versions (images) of them? And similarly, are we sometimes motivated by a sense of this second Self, our idealized Self, and whatever creative and productive acts are involved in maintaining and propping it up?

  • For whom do we do the things we do?

  • All of this of course has consequences for social marketing, social networking, user generated content experiences, and of course device and application developers in the communication space. For regardless of which version of the User—a rational user, a social user, a split user!—best describes the user of social media, it is essential that we be able to describe user motives, needs, and experiences if we are to grasp where and how business can successfully integrate online media for its own purposes.

Saturday, January 27, 2007

The User Experience of Review Writing

Another excerpt from the forthcoming white paper on Review Sites...

Review Writing
The inner experience of writing a review involves a large number of things, and without going into any in depth, we need to acknowledge at least several of them. There is the thing reviewed. There is whom it is written for—this might be "yelpers" or "anyone" or "mommydaddy" or "friend," "stalker," "business owner," "the Almighty," or "the cute Yelper who just requested my friendship." There is the style of writing, which might hew close to the utility of reviewing or stray off into personal ramblings, flashes of wit, hooks and lines designed to get attention, and so on. There is the use of qualifying observations by which a reader can glean, for him or herself and not because the author has said so, the salient selling points of the thing reviewed. There is then, as just mentioned, the recommendation or advice given within the recommendation, which itself can vary among all shades of "should," "perhaps" "tentatively" "confidently" "ought" "must" and "not." There is the revealing of the depth and scope of one's authority on the matter, or not, or lack of it (which is not the same as not revealing, it's a matter of not admitting!). There is the difference between being the first to review, in which case the review may inform subsequent reviewers, because a review can easily be a response to a review, to reviews in a series, or to reviews overall, depending on where the author puts him or herself in his/her emotional/mental relation to the whole proceeding. There is the review as comment to, or commentary on; and in commenting to, one might address reviewers, commentors, their reviews or their comments, though it may be hard for the reader to tell which is which.

The experience of writing a review is in fact complex indeed, and that's not including the potential for misspellings, errors in fact, misinformed or inaccurately attributed perspectives and observations. Nor is it including the post window, tags, and now the addition of icons that can be used to represent a gestural remark, which again may indicate to some a reflection on the review, or the reviewer, and it can be hard to tell which is which since we can't ask the person who selected them. And none of this includes the context of the review, which is to say some reviewers choose a time of day, or a category, an oft-reviewed Thing, trend, or bit of news as a means of attracting more attention (to themselves, their review, the view of themselves as manifest in the review, or perhaps to others. Or the Thing, even!). And again, none of this addresses the site in which the review is posted, its "branding" and community, and the sense that each user may have of what those are, how it serves them, or whom is served, and so on and so forth. The production of a review, as we see, is not so simple as the posting window would have it. From the perspective of social interaction design, at least.

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Thursday, January 25, 2007

Understanding the Yelp factor and social reviews

The rise in the popularity of user reviews on social media sites has a lot of people talking. Here is a mode of social interaction online that doesn't require joining MySpace and putting one's Self on the line. At least, not in the manner that many of the community-oriented social software sites would have us do it. In contrast to their more fully-functioned brethren, review sites present a relatively simple value proposition: associate yourself with something, preferable something you like (product, place, experience, travel, it makes little difference for now), and describe it for us in your words. In other words, disclose some of your interests, your style, personality, habits, and preferences, by reviewing something that we can all relate to.

To support this user disposition, the codes of interaction on social media sites tend to be informal, and the proceedings are largely unstructured. There are a few categorization and publishing requirements, of course, but just a few. The system handles the reviews, attaching them to things reviewed, making them search-able, find-able, and organizing reviews collected according to modes of distinction (relevance) by-and-large inherited from search engines and common social software practices.

To the reviewer (user), then, the frame of interaction and value proposition seem fairly straightforward. Where it gets interesting is in what happens next, for review sites involve much more than just reviews. Reviews can be written for all kinds of reasons, some of them having little to do with the Things reviewed. They might also be written to any number of users, for reasons that vary from the highly personal to clichéd. And interactions among reviewers and their readers, too, run from personal and enthusiastic agreement to cold-shouldered neglect. These variations exceed the value proposition of user-generated reviews and give us a compelling case study in social media.

So as social media designers, we need to address two different user experiences, the reader's and the writer's. Our need to motivate and engage the reviewer's participation requires that we design a system to support the writer's subjective experience of writing review. We need to supply an audience, topics, stylistic differences, a participatory genre, if you will. Reviewing Things has to be interesting and compelling and must have purpose, if the writer is it hand over his or her attention to it. But for similar reasons, we to provide the reader with value also. In theory, at least, reviews should display as much objectivity as possible—enough to warrant their utility as reviews (and not just as opinion pieces). Do these two user experience propositions stand in a fundamental conflict?

Finally, we need to examine whether the design of social media can structure the axes of use on either side (reviewer/reader) such that the value produced is the value consumed. This is the nature of the challenge that often faces social media designers: creating an efficient marketplace, without use of real money or real incentives, by enabling the production and consumption of knowledge such that benefits are captured on both the production and consumption side of the equation.

Take the popular review site Yelp.com, for example. Now this site is fascinating, truly excellent in many ways, for it has succeeded in surviving without merchant participation.

The fact that Yelp.com comprises user reviews written without any merchant presence preserves the site's integrity. Reviewers are under no obligation to do anyone a favor; nor do their reviews benefit them in any fungible way. So the system provides a forum in which reviewers may write from whichever position motivates them. And because nobody's going to spend time writing about stuff unless they believe somebody might read it (this, at least, is my hope), Yelp's members tend write for each other.

Out pops the Social, and reviews become a means by which members get attention; describe and reveal themselves through things they know something about; show wit, style, pictures and collections of compliments (which span a range of review-oriented to the unquestionably-no-use-for-this-icon-but-to-flirt); make friends; find popular things and review them because they've been reviewed so many times; become domain experts; wander widely off topic; and so on. And please don't get me wrong—it's hellafun. Indeed Yelp has become an interesting case study in the importance of anticipating the social forces that emerge when a system is launched into the world, and interactions begin to pile up one on the other. For users don't read manuals, or the fine print in the terms of agreement, to learn how the system works or how to use it. Users, and I should simply say "we," look at what others are doing. This tells us what's going on, and with that, how to proceed. If it's empty, well then no point in trying to become popular. If it's full of people, then whatsup and whatsgoingon?!

Social media sites are built on the contributions of users who themselves orient their contributions to the site's organization, theme, and audience. On Yelp.com, for example, some write many; some write deeply; some write to write to others; some write their secret discoveries; others can't believe it when a member holds out that local nugget for all to see (I committed this neighborly faux pas when I revealed that a local grocer squeezes its own orange juice). ;-). Some, having written a few, find those who have written about the same; while others find members they like, and comment on their writings for the association. Some — and don't get me wrong, I do this, and there are no write and wrongs here! — write to the author, some to their scene, some write about themselves with utter sincerity, and some write to cover, dodge, and cloak with seductive mystery all around.

Indeed, the social practices emerging around social media become particularly pregnant in the case of review sites. It is now a bonified genre, though some sites participate thinly, others richly. Contributions are codified across categories, horizontally and vertically. This serves the needs of site and content navigation. In each vertical we have "best of's, lists, recent, trends, price and other qualifications. Vertical organization is simple, as it's vertically organized: books, music, blogs, dvds, consumer electronics, nannies, and (yes, we're that far along) review sites themselves. And of course reviewers, too, are presented by similar qualifying criteria.

Now it would seem that the disinterested review is the most useful. But we're in social media-land now, and a) there's virtually no such thing as taking a disinterested relation to a Thing that is liked; and b) because a writer's reviews are hung out for others to read and know them by, even if it were possible in our write up a disinterested review of the Thing At Hand, social interest (getting noticed, being accepted, liked, and other warm fuzzies) rather blows that all away. Let's be honest here: nobody's going to spend time writing about stuff unless they believe somebody might read it.

We just split the practice along two axes and user experiences: reader and writer. So now let's integrate the social back into the two axes then. No user review on any user-generated content site is published without containing within it some negotiation of the possibility that a post/review/comment may be taken up in communication. Reviews are now a form of talk. Users are interested in each other (even when this takes shape only within their minds only), and this interest can overrun the objectivity that would most benefit the stated purpose of review sites, to wit, qualifying the Thing At Hand with unmotivated user evaluation. Interest in people; interest in content. Does the split pose a problem to the genre?

Social participation is essential if anybody's going to be bothered to write. But social participation may also transform expertise and utility into a popularity contest for compliments and friends and sheer volume of reviews. My personal preference is movies, because I've seen a boat load of them. For many it's food, dining out, bars and restaurants and all that fun stuff that people do when they're not cracking their craniums on the inner workings of social software. Everyday Things belong to familiar turf and territory: good for self-disclosure and personal opinionating. But how will the marketers and markets integrate it all? Because ultimately, business wants a piece of this, and the word is out: there's gold in them thar hills.


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Sunday, January 21, 2007

The Opacity of Users in Transparent Technologies

Social software and social media sites present an interesting challenge to those of us interested in the user experience. Where the user experience in "conventional" software can be examined according to assumptions we (know how to) make about the user's goals, needs, and objectives, when it comes to social media we have to think outside the proverbial box.

The conventional view taken up in the world of software draws a straight and unbroken line from the user to the software application. The user's agency is goal-directed, values success and effectiveness, and engaged in needs-oriented activity (e.g. transferring funds online). But in social software sites, the user uses the "software" to engage with other users.

The user's activity is an encounter with the world of meanings produced by other users participating in some form of organized, structured, formal or informal "interaction." At times the user simply reads the contributions of others. At times s/he communicates with those others. At times s/he is in a self-reflective mode, aware of how things reflect on him/herself. At times s/he becomes immersed in an online encounter and is taken up with it.

Each of these variations--and I've sketched only a handful--involves a complex set of relationships, real and possible, among known or familiar, present or absent, individual, group, or collective, identified or anonymous participants. Investigating this matrix creates immense and radical challenges to UI, UX, and interaction designers. Psychology, sociology, economics, and anthropology each suggest theoretical approaches worth considering. But few of them can accommodate the medium, the technology itself, without upsetting some of the fundamental positions from which they are argued.

The intervention of a communication and publishing medium and the substitution of interaction tools functioning asynchronously --often through text, image, and sometimes video, but always involving a representation of the user's presence--requires us to think differently about what users are up to when they head online. These technologies shift ourselves away from ourselves, giving us a screen on which are painted words, statements, links, lists, pictures and whatnot, in place the other (person) him or herself.

If we are to make progress on the user psychology and relation to his experience of social media, we need to accept the basic fact that the "social" in social media is optimistic, perhaps deceptively so. Sure, we encounter others online. We "talk" to them through our blogs and comments. We "collaborate" with them, sharing files, bookmarking and tagging sites, creating photo sets, group blogs, and more. But communication that is mediated neither unfolds like it does when it is face to face--when people take an interest in each other as well as a shared social encounter--nor does interaction move through the rhythms, speeds, or intensities of activity that are possible in a live situation.

A new set of relations is emerging. They are not the obvious ones, those we've described until now as organizing activity on social media sites like those that serve dating, career networking, learning, socializing, buying/selling or other themed social practices. This new set involves the self to him or herself. It engages psychological factors like projection, introjection, transference, internalization, externalization, and so on.

It involves relations of number, from the couple to the triad/triangle, to clans, tribes, groups, crowds, and audiences. It might engage in the shifting and circulating economy of attention, of debts and gifts, governed by etiquette or set in a chaotic classroom melee. It can compel a user to an insight of self-realization, or develop into a fascination with an other (user). It might be organized or informed by acts of communication, suggestion, flirtation, admiration, appreciation, and these might become known through blog posts, emails, comments, discussions, messages or other gestural substitutes such as those offered as icons at many social software sites. And there are many more possibilities.

But they all engage a relation of self with self, and involve an impression of the other that is founded on the other's own attempt to present/express him or herself. All of this culminates in an enormously-varied experience of developing awareness of the other and of oneself at the same time, sometimes as a reflection off the other, sometimes as a projection of one's interpretation of the other. Interpretation and projection, substitution and displacement, talk as conversation and as its short-form exchanges--all unfold on a ribbon of time itself unreeling through discontinuities, fragments, segments, chains, and aborted episodes that do not come together so much as occur concurrently.

The social world online is a hall of mirrors in which it's hard to hold an image standing still, let alone in motion. More on this in the next few weeks.


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Thursday, January 18, 2007

Here's talking at you, kid... It's all talk on social media



"Of all the gin joints in all the world, you have to come into this one..." Ever get that feeling that there's a whole lot more talk going on here than there is listening? That perhaps the medium itself is biased? That the writing medium only captures statements and utterances, posts. It only captures us when we talk. It doesnt capture us when we don't talk. And because the screen here can only show what its design is capable of seeing, nothing exists that is not added to it. And we know that. The web's speed has increased these days to such a velocity that it's become impossible to think without having to communicate about it (as i'm doing now, if just to make a point).

I'm reminded of the Fawlty Towers Germans episode in which Basil Fawlty (John Cleese), in the middle of hanging a moose head on the hotel lobby wall, has to climb down from a stool to answer the phone, at the other end of which is his hospitalized wife, calling to ask if he has hung the moose head. And his response, something along the lines of "I'm doing it! I was just... I mean, what is the point you stupid bint? I was just busy doing it and then i have to stop doing it to pick up the phone to tell you that i was in the middle of doing it?! I mean is there anything esle I can do for you? Move the hotel a couple feet to the left?'

There are of course many ways of talking. But this mode, which is for the most part "talking to oneself", produces a strange conversational effect when it involves attaching comments to others' posts, responding to comments in posts, posting on posts, and so on. I wonder whether we'll recognize each other, some day (and I hope far away). We'll recognize ourselves, of that I'm sure. But will anyone else? Well there'll be gin joints to stop into. And some day, some where, in some far off gin joint along the norther coast of Morocco, in a town known as Casablanca, somebody will say "here's talking at you kid" and perhaps there'll be nothing wrong with it...

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Monday, January 15, 2007

Towards a reckless rethinking of Social Media

Those of you familiar with what I'm trying to do with Social Interaction Design know that I'm trying to avoid reading social media analogically. It's too easy. Social media may resemble social interaction, online communities may resemble gatherings, blogging may resemble conversation, Youtube may resemble TV. But I'll never construct a framework for the design of social software and social media on analogy alone. Some big picture brushwork is in order, if only to think aloud about the State of the Things, so to speak.

Over the course of some email exchanges with friend and colleague Evelyn Rodriguez lately, I've become increasingly aware of my need to address a couple critical points.

First, is that my theory of mediated social interaction and social media requires that I ground my theoretical positions in theory first, and in example, second. To get beyond impressions and observations of social media sites, I'm adapting social theories for application by design practitioners. This forces me to speak of users in the abstract, and of phenomena like folksonomies, online discussions, presentation of self in social sites like MySpace, and so much more, in abstracted terms. This is simply a theoretical necessity, and if I'm to unwrap the ways in which our use of these sites transform our relationships, bracket and displace our face and body communication, and similarly transform expressions, speech, gesture, and other modes of self expression within some thin and extended form of mediated talk, then I must lay down the basic principles by which recourse to media involve those media in transformation of individual and social practice and communication. Media, that is blogs, discussions, commenting, email, texting, youtubing—they all involve form and content, both of personal expressions and of the social practice that emerges around them.

Second, I have to qualify my accounting of the user experience. While much of what I write has the tone of a distanced observer, I'm a daily user and practitioner, and I don't disrespect or mean to overlook the user experience. That said, I can't build a theory on my own user experience, nor for that matter, on any one individual's experience. I hope to arrive at a theoretical framework without neglecting the user's participation and relation to all of this. But I mean to do that by characterizing the second order phenomena as the indirect result and product of users participating; not as a direct result of their motives and intentions. This is one reason for the pleasure I take in systems theories and social theories/psychologies. I get to describe meaningful acts without attributing them to any one user, or persona, in particular. The task of describing daily life, and its participants, through and with social technologies shouldn't prevent me from speaking to our everyday experiences (as users) of this stuff. However, my intent in producing consistent characterizations of what's going on require me to take an observer position. So, no insult to bloggers or designers or MySpacers intended! I may be right standing right behind you, but i'm not looking over your shoulder!

Now, social media are talk media. They may use forms of writing, of image, of sound and video, as their means of presenting their users to others, or of presenting their users' contributions (to nobody in particular, to the whole world, or to one person in front of everyone, it matters not). I like to maintain this distinction between contributors and their contributions because I believe that there are two fundamental modes of participation in social media, and two modes of use of social media content. At their very core, social media split the world, and our presence in it, by an act of mediation. This is media theory, and precedes "social" media by many decades. The idea is simple: any use of technology (and some say, tool also) distorts our direct experience of the world, as it engages us in it also. The magnifying glass amplifies vision. The phone, hearing. The microphone/PA, speaking or singing (eegads). When our experience is modified by a technology, this modification occurs through the balance of our sensory/perceptual relation to the world (and our being in it). We pay more attention to the mode amplified (phone: talking not looking; camera: looking not talking). Social media, too, steer and direct our attention. To what? To ourselves, as, I hope to show below, through others. This may seem a tad radical, but I want to suggest that social media are in many respects me-media. My first line of defense on this would be, simply, where is everybody? The web has no people! To which you might reply "but it's all people; all this content is there because somebody put it there!" And i might suggest that you turn the power off, look up at the person at the table sitting next to you in (you're in a cybercafe, right?), and answer the question again. Even I'm not that foolish. We don't think of the web as a screen and a browser, with words and pictures, and a means of navigating at our quick-bitten fingertips. As Laurie Anderson famously put it once, speaking of the cinema, we don't go to the "projectors," we go to the "movies." I, too, believe that technologies like these are transparent (for the most part). And that's precisely why I'm grounnding social interaction design in practice and not in technology. If I were to stay on the side of technology, and treat the user as a rational and goal-oriented technocrat, I would see only the user-web site interaction. And my whole project is an attempt to send UI and User Experience design through the screen, down the pipes, across the backbone of this Net, this Matrix of ours, to pop straight out of the screen at the other end till we're looking at the inner sanctum of our other user's speculating nut-case. I think user-device-user. And for that reason, I can use media theory only until it becomes baggage so heavy that I have to check it in and pick it up at the end of my journey.

To get back to the point, then, people are here, individually and collectively (as an audience, as well as anonymous individuals). But they are here and there by virtue of recording media, and in some cases communication and interaction tools. We encounter each other only through the content we have left online. Social media thus present users (people) through their contributions. Now, I take from sociology of interaction a distinction between person-person involvement and person-talk involvement. In the former, interlocutors are interested in each other, through their interest in the other's interest in them. Whether this interaction is a game of desire, or of psychological acknowledgment, of recognition of the other's and one's own existence, or of one's importance to the other, really doesn't matter. Those are each voices in the same choir, and for the most part in the same key. The person to contribution angle is in some ways more interesting, and from a business person's perspective, more apparently obvious. It describes the obvious fact that as speaking subjects we can pick up another's utterance and reply to it. We can talk *about* something while we talk to each other. Now, it's my belief that we're always doing both at the same time. But this gets interesting in social media because, well, it's hard to know which is the mode in play. I often say that social media are interesting because they produce and complexify this ambiguity, and that in any communication situation it only makes sense that interactants would address ambiguities in order to know what to do next (if only not to do something embarrassing!). But it must also be noted that human expression is fundamentally ambiguous, and that it is in fact the mutual effort at resolving the ambiguity of meanings and statements, as well as reconciling --or exacerbating-- the ambiguity of intentions and motives, that undergirds all human interaction and talk. And I do think that social media are talk media (we dont paint online, don't cook or eat or swim or sculpt online. Even filckr is successful because pictures tell a thousand words, and haven't we all gone to a gallery with the idea of possibly meeting somebody in front of a painting, the canvas hung so vertiginously providing an ice-breaking opportunity to engage in profound raccointeur along the lines of "sublime, isn't it?").

Here is where it gets interesting. Social media are media of relations. They create relationships between documents, such as web pages or other linked files, between people, their comments, reviews, lists, between movies and similar movies, and so on. Nothing exists online if it isn't linked to. There's simply no getting to it. Now, Yahoo (directory browsing) and Google (key word search) et al provide what is, in essence, a map, a menu, a table of contents to all this otherwise invisible stuff. User generated content is now popular (don't people remember geocities?!) because it's getting the word out. Users, and not just publishing giants; users, and not just celebrity bloggers (of which I have Oh So Longed to be one) made this! In other words, we are moving from the web of information to the web of people. Ah, but people exist only through their contributions. And we might take an interest in their contributions, or in them, or in both, right? See how it gets interesting? It is much more unclear, in mediated interaction, which is the mode that has hooked a commentator, which is the mode in which we should communicate with another user. Where in face to face interaction we adjust our impressions, scale our interests up or down in the person or his/her speech, with such furious rapidity and precise expression that it is truly, truly, mind-blowing sometimes to consider the performance and essential feat that it is, this moment of mutual linguistically-mediated exchange. Today, for example, is Martin Luther King day. Could that man have possibly, even remotely, achieved in his I Have a Dream speech, online, say as a blog, what he did in those few precious but staggering minutes of presence atop the Lincoln memorial? Could he have lifted the hearts and moved millions of souls to finally Get It, What's Wrong With Race Relations in America, if he had been poised, instead, at the apex of a Top Ten bookmark list of writings at NoLongerDreaming.com? Get my drift, pilgrim?

We manifest ourselves in mediated talk by indexing what we're talking about to a number of possible references: a blog, a post, or comment, a video, something we said, something she said, our picture or your picture, a nightmare, or a dream. The art of expression online, as with the art of interpretation online, is in the knowing what's going on, and knowing what the author has meant, so as to either proceed in a round of talk, or not. We interpret, and interpret, and interpret. And it's my own view that, I am sad (but not in a teary-eyed way, mind you) to say that we get there, to the knowing what's going on, through ourselves much less than through the other. Which is not to say that we miss each other entirely. No, there is light in this place, and it sure as hell shines on a lot of fine engagements. But where we want to think that the media are becoming social, it might just as well be that we are becoming asocial. Take, for example, the inner experience of blogging. Bloggers, such as myself right here and now, fall into a kind of relationship with themselves while writing. One that involves conjuring up an imagined audience, specific or not, individual or multitudinous (ah, what is must feel like to be a super blogger, throngs of cheering minions hanging on every sublime and exquisite deployment of comma and em-dash, moved to click and type and tag their profuse and effulgent praise the moment they come crashing through the door and are settled, bouncy and barely-contained, for a turn at the keyboard of their own; sigh... ;-)... )... [note to reader: i'm not sure what it means to deploy ellipses after a smiley, but i've wanted to do that for a long time, and this was the time to just go for it]. My point being, digression included, that the inner experience cannot be discounted. So, to reprise an earlier observation, I count the user into the equation, but cannot theorize from the user perspective or experience alone.

To wrap, then, as I must return to the paying events of the day, I propose a sort of logic. It goes like this. Social media offer a productive encounter of self with self mediated by mediated other. Self : (Self-image : Image of Other). From this, I suggest that we characterize the stunted but nonetheless fascinating and undeniably popular mode of interaction at YouTube as involving a variant, a new kind of communication system (and language): Self : (Video-Image : Other). What YouTube does is allows us to say more with face, but less with words. And for some, particularly those for whom communication is speed, is not self-reflection and writing, but is gestural, social, quick, that may be a more useful communication form. Videos present much more content. They're much more tangible, and quickly interpreted. And one can say a lot about oneself by posting a video, without having to say anything. This is why YouTube is social: it offers the possibility of taking up communication with others around videos that serve as signs, almost like brands, bumper stickers, etc. But it's a failure in many ways for the simple truth that we're still inventing how video posts might become expressive, meaningful, reflection of who we are or what we think. They work as a means of showing, literally, (oh, pun, of type accidental) what we like. That gets us off the ground, at least, as a means of finding people we might like, or who might be like us (we learn the hard way what that difference is!). Reviews, such as yelp, are similarly a means by which review authors create a fragmented profile of themselves, by expressing who they are through what they think/have to say about places, businesses that others can relate to.

So, social media are media that in which participation is socially informed. We'll see social media, yet, and I dare say we may one day look back on the blog years as being rich in thought, commentary, and opinion. But what the heck, it's technology time folks, let's go!

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Thursday, January 11, 2007

New Social Software Design White Paper

White Paper: Social Interaction Design Guide: Social Media, Social Practices, Social Content 76 pages. by Adrian Chan


I've had to take a break from social media blogging lately to work on a few white papers and reading notes. There's only so much you can do in a short form blog post!

In this recent white paper I take the idea of socio-technical competence seriously. Social theorists wouldn't conventionally associate technical competencies with matters of social interaction, communication, and so on. Technologies are supposed to be props, objects, things; and as such, not essential to social encounters.

But when the communication runs through a technology, when it's a matter of user-device-user interaction, then the medium's role comes into play in a big way. So this white paper takes a look at how social media and social software sites are designed. I assume that users and visitors are able to tell when the contents of a page reflect social interaction. We might even argue that it's this kind of competence with online media that has made Web 2.0 possible. (If you believe that the social and cultural conditions need to be prepared, or grown, before people can see the value in new technologies, and realize them). I assume that users understand that the etiquette on a dating site is different from the etiquette on a career networking site. I assume that youths are clear about the self-reflective use of testimonials published on their friends' pages (what they write says something about them). And so on, with further assumptions.

Social interaction design suggests that the architecture, functioning and features, the use of screen real estate, the particular presence of people (faces, profiles), or general suggestion of audience presence (as on amazon, imdb), the organization of content by tags, that all these design decisions are social, not technical in nature. If you have built a television and nobody's watching, you don't fix it by adding buttons to the remote control. It's the same with the design of social media. We're now very clearly in a paradigm shift that is likely to reverse the roles, disrupt the talent pools, redraw the territories, and fundamentally change the mode of consumption and attention given to social and mass media. This shift affects software and technology design and content production and programming (network TV, cable, movies, radio, etc.) equally.

When media are social, the need for high production value diminishes because other people grab the user/viewer's attention instead. The possibility that anything posted online might solicit a response transforms content from its form as an object to its potential use in a round of communication or talk. I still believe that all social media are talk systems, including Youtube (in which the "utterance" begins with a video and the response can be video or commentary). And therefore social software designers have to attend as much to the enabling of talk and interaction, on the page and over time, as they to do the elements of traditional web development.

Check out the white paper if any of this is interesting. It runs over much of my theoretical framework and then dives headlong into the organization of content into modules and lists, top tens, most viewed members, and all of the other means of social content organization.

My next white paper, coming this month I hope, will feature new uses of links and relationships at the social as well as object or data level. My sense is that the link is no longer a document link but a view, a node if you will, and that the web 2.0 organization of social content and participation will increasingly permit users to pull together people or pages depending on their preferences, affinities, interests, and so on. And that those, stored within and across social media networks, will create vast opportunities for commercial systems to learn about the associations that make sense and which layer onto objects and data a social and personal appeal. At which point social marketing and relationship marketing ought to really take off, and social interaction design with it.

Social Interaction Design guides and White Papers
Social Software theory Reading Notes


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