The Inmates Have Requested Asylum

I spent much of yesterday afternoon listening to podcasts from a conference I wish I had attended: the IA Summit. The podcasts are up on Boxes and Arrows (thank you Chris Baum!) and are well worth a listen. I also found that they looked good in iTunes with the visualizer turned on.

I don't know that I'm an information architect. I was a web developer for seven years but eschewed acronymic attributions on principle and felt that most of us were making it up as we were going along. The design agencies that billed for process and methodology took the designations most seriously, it seemed, and had the design talent that gave them the right to do so. After the dotcom crash many of those methodologies were shelved, as budgets for web work drew the line item for process out of the picture. The industry was commodifying, rates tumbled, and there were few compelling development projects available to small agencies. For a while many of us developers were working like architects being asked only to paint the exterior of a house. The real building contracts were fewer and farther between.

Then the social web began taking shape, and things got interesting again. I removed my entire web portfolio from my site and hunkered down to think about social software. Fascinated as i have always been with social interaction and communication -- in theory and practice -- it seemed to me that new opportunities would emerge for what I started to call "social interaction design" (SxD). I was not so allergic to labels after all -- as long as they were my own. And i pretty much kept to myself, doing startup work and thinking about a conceptual framework for mediated social interactions.

Listening to IA pods yesterday got me thinking about where we now stand. IA, IxD, UX, separately or together is not so important -- the institutional taxonomy and territorial distinctions being beside the point. For I have yet to see an IA drive a social media design or experience. Yet to see an interaction designer lead the team. Yet to see a user experience lead define what a social media application will do or how it will work. From my limited experience in Web 2.0, engineering drives features, marketing drives branding, bizdev drives platform interoperability and open-ness, and web design drives UI, navigation, information architecture. A coffee house, co-working space, or apartment serves as the shop or studio. And process is determined as much by whatever everyone else is doing and launching as it is by internal startup dynamics.

There is no high-level design methodology for social interaction or social media development. IA, IxD, and UX are regarded as a luxury, considered an unnecessary use of funds, and are largely irrelevant and out of the picture. How is it that the very field that should be in front of social media trails it so badly? Why is it that we are still trying to define a tidy set of concepts, for identity, presence, privacy, messaging or what have you, while "web 2.0" startups are out there making this stuff up as they go? Why, failing the means by which to understand social interactions well enough to anticipate them ahead of time, are we cooking up dishes to throw them at the wall in order to see what sticks? Is agile a design process, or another way of saying "we don't know what will happen?" Do we not know what will happen because that's how social media works, or because we don't know how to look at it?

I don't have answers for these questions, but I have suspicions. I do think that design organizes and shapes the user experience. i do think that user experiences, together, produce social practices. I do think those social practices are consistent -- with the designs that facilitate them as well as with the social themes and activities by which we all "know what we're doing" and "what's going on," socially. Something has been built, that something is constrains and enables, and decisions have been made. But our field, the design of social media, is lacking the language and framework by which to conceptually grasp and reasonably anticipate (if not predict) design outcomes. In their absence, it is funders, technologists, marketers (all due respect, but they have their interests and competencies and they are often not user-centric in nature) and visual designers who are making the decisions that shape what a product is, how it (is supposed to) works, by whom it is enjoyed, and what their enjoyment will leave behind. And in the absence of clear thinking and an understanding of mediated social practices, our next best option is to rely on best practices -- which, we know, do not travel well and are frequently lost in translation. (All social media do not need twitter.)

it's nigh on the hour that we begin to furnish the industry, and ourselves, with a solid set of concepts for the "design" of social interactions. They can be obtained and drawn from insightful and principled works in sociology, psychology, linguistics, communication theory, and symbolic interaction. For the inmates have requested asylum. They're not in the asylum. We've misunderstood the very word "asylum." it's not a place that "they" are, but something they want. Design of social media is not containers and spaces, is not identities, mug shots, and IDs. Presence is not roll call and privacy is not just control. People are the content, they're not the contents. I get the sense that in our predilection for design and our visual-mindedness, we have become too comfortable with spatial architectures and confining spaces. That in our emphasis on the user we have forgotten her experience. We treat users as objects, put them in little boxes, and watch them from the panopticon that has been at the center of any post-industrial prison since the idea of control regimes was first thought up.

Design of social media is not a visual problem, as design should not be a method of control. Design should refer to how we think about social media and social interactions -- not something we do in order to design the user's experience. Design should, in this case, be our discipline and conceptual practices. Design should be what we create in order to anticipate individual and social experiences and interactions -- with all of their contingent, dependent, and temporal dynamics intact.

Joshua Porter mentioned, in one of the podcasts, the case of corporate plazas. This oft-cited tale tells of how corporations failed to realize that in their aesthetic self-aggrandizement, they had built plazas and lobbies for themselves that looked good but were barren and bereft of life. William H Whyte, a must-read for anyone doing social, was one of the pioneering researchers to reclaim public spaces for public use and consumption. He proved that we like, and in fact want to be in the midst of, streams of social activity and noise. But he also demonstrated that it was not design, but humans, who negotiate and determine the flow of activity. Subway users in Tokyo, he discovered, could get through a revolving door and to a train in numbers and rates of flow exceeding the theoretical design limits of the door itself.

I worry that unless we catch up quickly, social media will continue down self-reinforcing, and thus increasingly un-imaginitive, cycles of best practices. That we will be left to design corporate plazas. And that we will do so with a taste for the neat and tidy that is our preference as practitioners, but which will only result in lifeless and unsatisfying boxes, and, well, arrows. Imprisoned in the structured containers of thought of our own making. While the inmates, having long left the building, scratch their heads in the yard.


There is so much to learn by thinking outside the box.

Social capital on twitter: analytics of flow

I've been thinking lately about social analytics, and in particular how it applies to twitter. Twitter is a conversation tool, and content on twitter is more akin to speech than it is to its long-form brethren. The term "micro-blogging" is, I think, a bit of a misnomer in fact. "Micro-blogging" suggests writing (blogging). To me, twitter is clearly talk. Micro-messaging would be more accurate -- but then messaging is micro already.

Because the content on twitter is produced by people talking, it would need to be measured differently than conventional page-based content, social or evergreen. We would want to measure talk, not pages. We would want to measure talkers, not sites or domains. We would want to measure relationships, not in-and out-bound links.

But I think the industry's long legacy in web analytics and web traffic analysis will most likely result in early-generation tools built around the measurement of web traffic. That's the easiest migration path for a web analytics to social analytics tool -- repurpose existing methods and technologies. Visible Technologies, Radian6, Techrigy, and other tools tend to focus on traffic and enhance it with views of topical spaces, tag clouds, and volume around twitter. (See Jeremiah Owyang's coverage of social media measurement.

Having used these tools, I could understand it if some of you have had the experience I have: there's a lot of interesting stuff in there, some of which I wouldn't have noticed, but I'm not sure what it means. The approach taken to blog and web site measurement, which hails from search engine approaches and is in fact closely tied to search engine results, maintains a focus on phrases and words. Value is then assigned to pages (content) by means of relative rankings. The relevance of a visitor or visitors (people) is imputed from clickpaths and search phrases. All of which paints a picture of people looking for something, which we assume is related to the words and phrases we have captured them using.

So to transfer a search-oriented methodology into a conversation space (twitter) seems misplaced and misguided. And may explain why at this point we have no idea what to make of twitter analytics other than to count people and posts relevant to us.

Measuring user activity in order to glean valuable information from it will fail if the measurement methodology is incommensurate with the activity taking place. If a tool's tracking DNA was designed for a population of people looking for information, getting it from pages, and qualifying which ones are valuable by clicking or not, then the search at the core of that tool is misaligned to conversation spaces. In conversation spaces, or the social web, people talk to other people, expressing not searching, and addressing themselves to the public at large, to small groups (followers, peers, affinity groups, friends), or to individuals. The meaning of the words they use is not akin to the meaning of words found by search analytics; what's measured will be misinterpreted by analysts if it is misunderstood as a query.

I believe we have to learn how to mine social capital and flows of social currency in conversation spaces. Users have an interest in gaining an audience. They want to accrue interest and get attention. They speak in ways that attract attention from strangers, and hold conversations with those they know. The fact that all of this occurs in an open social field creates a significant number of social distortions, yes, but those could be accounted for if tools were properly designed to filter out those distortions. An understanding of speech -- in terms of statement types, addressing, response and uptake, distribution, and so on, would be much better suited to the space than the current and conventional analysis of word-based queries.

Relationships among speakers organize and inform how they talk and about what. Open social relationships have a different structure and organization than social networks. So this would have to be modeled and used as a means of making online talk relevant. The user centricity of the space would need to be accommodated, as talk in open social spaces has to do with establishing presence and soliciting the presence and attention of others -- again, a kind of activity in sharp contrast to the use of words in search. Search phrases address the brand or information sought after, making the connection between user and results simple and direct. Words used by people to conduct open talk make an appeal to the attention of others -- the direction of speech is in other words reversed: it doesn't look for and query, but instead appeals and attracts.

Brands of course recognize that influence is involved, but continue to think of it as a property of a person, when in fact all influence (power) is a relation. It can be undone by an audience and in fact it "exists" only in the "eyes" of the beholder. Which is why influence needs to be maintained and sustained by talk and activity. It is not a property accumulated and protected, nor is it diminished when spent. Social capital in fact accrues to the person spending it, and its "expended" by communicative acts perpetuated and distributed by others. This has always been the case with dynamic social capital and status: it must be used if it is to be increased. And yet we continue to count influence by followers, numbers, and quantities that give us the false impression that it is a property owned, not an process sustained.

Time is the difference between the approach taken by existing metrics and those required for conversation spaces. Conversations and their dynamics are temporal. The social dynamics of conversation can only be understood as social proceedings that unfold in time, over time, and having temporal properties associated with human experiences of time: fast, slow, waiting, hastening, pausing... Pace, rhythm, and flow. I suspect that most currency traders would know what to do with this

Social media personalities and Personas 2.0

I'm featured today in a Hot Studios interview with me about my social media personality types. Coincidentally, or serendipitously, I've been working for the past several days on conversation models for social media designers, interaction designers, and social media user experience experts.

There is a organization in the forms of talk we get even in openly-structured social media tools like twitter. It's less noticeable, but I've recently returned to Eric Berne's Games People Play for more inspiration from his transactional analysis (one of many psychological theories of communication and interaction). And of course symbolic interactionism always applies well to social media when modified for the screen.

I think these personality types will become even more powerful when put into a social dynamics of social media. This would entail:

• which user personality types can form symbiotic and mutually-beneficial relationships
  
• which user personality types tend to produce large volumes of conversation
  
• what kinds of conversation those are
  
• which user personality types tend to organize flows of attention (especially in open social spaces like twitter)
  
• which user personality types tend to aggregate lasting audiences, followings, fans, and so on
  

Because social media scale up and "get organized" on their own, it's very likely that we'll be able to find social patterns in their growth. And it's likely that these patterns will correlate with the psychology of users who lead, follow, maintain, and grow online communities.

Open social spaces grow differently than social networks in which relationships are symmetrical. I think the absence of "real friendship" as a constraint on relationships creates a need for other means of surfacing and validating social hierarchy/position/rank. Influence measured as follower count is absurdly over-simplified. We're all much better judges of who's who than that!

The sociology of face to face interactions and social encounters (Goffman) however generally leaves individual psychology out of the picture. Interactions are understood as having a frame (including an opening, middle, and closing) that is strong enough to structure interactions without having to go to individual motives, interests, or needs. But that doesn't work for us. User-centric design, and our physical separation from one another in social media, requires that our interaction models account for benefits to the user individually as well as socially or collectively.

So some theory of psychology of online interaction is required. And the next natural step is a social dynamics that shows how different personalities, together, produce the kinds of content and activity that are effective and sustainable on social media. A social dynamics would take us a long way from the original concept of personas!