Who's motivating your users?

Alfred Hitchcock used to say that he never made a "Whodunnit" movie. His movies were "For whom was it done?" In fact a lot of his movies begin with the crime. In some, the victim of the crime turns out to be the criminal himself.

In all of Hitchcock's films, we the audience witness some aspect of the crime. And because Hitchcock was a master of camerawork, and used his camera to let the audience in as a witness, we're usually in on something that one or more characters don't know. Jimmy Stewart's neighbor leaving his apartment in Rear Window, as Jimmy reaches for something he has dropped. The killer's shadow on the shower curtain in Psycho. A vertiginous zoom in on Kim Novack's curled hair -- an audience reveal that winds up the plot's second, and formal spiral in the mystery Vertigo.

Hitchcock's films were as riveting as they were not only for his splendid choices in casting his lead actress, but for his singular talent at subordinating characters to formal puzzles and logics. He is credited as being the first to involve the audience in solving, or "creating," the film. He was notorious, too, for glossing over his actors' needs and for attending instead to the visual narration of the particular puzzle at hand. It mattered more to him the direction in which his actors were looking than capturing their motivation.

Hitchcock knew that a mystery thriller could become endlessly suspenseful if actions were not simply as they appeared, but were instead motivated by another, for another, or on behalf of another. This allowed him to continuously shift the "guilt" and "suspicion" from character to character. We in the audience had the job of figuring out who was who, and who was who to whom.

The solution to the puzzle, and to the crime, always came out when relationships among the characters could be resolved.

Action is more interesting when it is a matter of interpersonal motive and relationship, rather than the accomplishment of the task itself completed by the action. It's a pity there are few good imitators of Hitchcock. (Although there are some; and social films like Crash, Amor es Perros, Red, White, Blue, Babel, and others in which relationships form out of coincidence and chance in a way capture the state of social fragmentation endemic to contemporary society.)

We in social media can learn from Hitchcock. We can learn to ask not "What did the user do" but "For whom was it done." Was it done for his/her own self-image and repute? Was it done for the attention of another? To solicit reciprocal interest of another? To gain notice by a group, club, or circle of peers? To obtain status in front of an audience, or to receive the validation of peers?

I wonder what kinds of social media Hitchcock would design, if he were in our industry. How might he use his "camera" to show the audience something that was off screen to the actors involved in a situation or social interaction. What kinds of relationships he might put people in if he were designing social games. And how he might reveal clues and thread his plot points. Whether the audience might be involved in passing that thread through the warp and woof of a networked social fabric. And how interesting and engaging some of his creations would be, designed not around Who said something but For whom was it said?


Note: This blog post belongs to a series on "status culture." The posts examine status updates, facebook activity feeds, news feeds, twitter, microblogging, lifestreaming, and other social media applications and features belonging to conversation media. My approach will be user-centric as always, and tackle usability and social experience issues (human factors, interaction design, interface design) at the heart of social interaction design. But we will also use anthropology, sociology, psychology, communication and media theories. Perhaps even some film theory.
The converational trend in social networking sites and applications suggests that web 2.0 is rapidly developing into a social web that embraces talk (post IM, chat, and email) in front of new kinds of publics and peer groups. User generated content supplied to search engines is increasingly produced conversationally. Social media analytics tools provide PR and social media marketing with means to track and monitor conversations. Brands are interested in joining the conversation feeds, through influencers as well as their own twitter presence.
This changing landscape not only raises interesting issues for developers and applications (such as the many twitter third party apps), but for social practices emerging around them. So we will look also at design principles for conversation-based apps, cultural and social trends, marketing trends, and other examples of new forms of talk online.
These blog posts will vary in tenor, from quick reflections on experiences to more in-depth approaches to design methodology for conversational social media.

Inspiration from Elsewhere: Social Media and Film Theory

Summertime rolls on here, and when the weather is this good I have a hard time staying online. Months of cold fog and wind loom in the coming winter months; these days of lazy autumnal warmth beckon to be enjoyed. Panic in the markets and economic distress all around haven't been good for job prospecting of late. So my gut instinct this past week saw me outside with books and a thinking cap.

Which has all been very inspirational, as it turns out. There are times when inspiration comes from elsewhere. I found it this week in film theory. I enjoy film theory primarily because I'm a film nut. Film is the art form of the twentieth century, and as it incorporates image, technology, dialog, story, genres, production, characters, performance, and industry, it epitomizes the artistic and creative opportunities of modern times. Like social media and web cultures, film is fascinating both as a medium and as a cultural production. It can be enjoyed as is, and when thought about.

Dipping back into the film theory of Gilles Deleuze this week, I re-discovered a number of concepts that have me very excited. They had to do with my three part model of the social media user experience, and with the construction of various narrative forms in film. The former has me thrilled because the three part model keeps popping up in a number of theories and their resonance with an approach to social media interaction design is encouraging, to say the least. The latter has me thrilled because I've been scratching my head of late when it comes to applications of social media in marketing and branding -- and the huge variety of narrative and film forms explored in film theory offers a cornucopia of ideas for online conversational marketing.

I just want to touch on these briefly, because it may be a while before I'm able to punch out in-depth blog posts. So if you are a theory geek, or interested in how social interaction design can draw from film theory, read on. I'll post later on how these ideas may be applied by practitioners and organizations. I know it doesn't take a film theorist to make a good film -- but it is fun to find confirmation in theory of what makes the film good.

Deleuze uses the sign system, or semiotics, developed by Charles Saunders Peirce to build a system of "images" and signs designed for film, which is unique in that it produces not only image but time. I've written about the difference between page and time-based social media recently -- and I often return to film theory because it offers a means of understanding how time is captured in contemporary representational media. (Where social media differ, of course, is that time is captured in the medium -- take twitter as the best example of a tool that organizes content chronologically -- but is not experienced or consumed in a straight and continuous run of time. Time is continuous in film; discontinuous i social media. And yet in both, time is an ordering principle for the presentation of content to the user/consumer.)

Peirce's signs are, to simplify, the firstness of the thing itself; the secondness of a thing reflected, and the thirdness of a relation. Very cool to me, as my model is based on Self, Other, and Relation. The resonance here works well for social media because the "firstness" relates to the content of a user's direct and immediate expression of Self online; the secondness relates the reflection and orientation to another user (Other); and thirdness to the relationships and social relations captured in social activity (Relation). I had been thinking that my Self, Other, Relation approach resonated well with a view of social relations that distinguishes among monadic, dyadic, and triadic organization. Monadic being Self expression, Dyadic being interpersonal interaction, and Triadic being mediating and relationship-oriented interaction. I know this is theoretical stuff, but the three-part model keeps coming up, and I think that thinking in terms of individuals, pairs, and threesomes (or groups) makes sense as a means of grasping the nature of "social" online.

What Deleuze's film theory brings to theory of film "genres" (a term he would disapprove of) and film forms (he calls them "images") is also contributing to my approach to conversational marketing. I've been thinking of late that the key to social media branding involves first moving away from an "image branding" approach to one that is more communicative and participatory. But getting from the insight to actual applications has been a challenge. Knowing that the medium is young yet, and using film theory and history as a source of comparisons, however, has opened up possibilities for what the future may still hold. If commercial efforts are to successfully use social media at all, I don't expect it to be by simply extending mass media branding and marketing approaches. The arrival of the talkies, and development of filmic techniques (inventions in camera work, lighting, editing, montage, and so on) as well as framing and an acute understanding of the effects of film, have all conspired to produce fascinating forms of entertainment.

I really think the current social media landscape is practically waiting for creatives to take over where the engineers have left off. Would you want television designers to be responsible for what's on your TV? Well that's where we are today: having built the stuff we need the content creatives now to show us what we can do with it.

So back now to summertime ideating -- and to bringing concepts into the daylight.


Related:
My own research notes on the theorists Niklas Luhmann, Gilles Deleuze, and Harold Garfinkel in relation to understanding social media, and theorizing social interaction design.