Rethinking thin: social relationships in social media

In a recent post titled The Social Media Bubble, Umair Haque raises some provocative questions concerning the value of the relationships we form on the internet. His post has drawn some attention, and I'd like to quickly throw in my two cents.

Haque wites:

"I'd like to advance a hypothesis: Despite all the excitement surrounding social media, the Internet isn't connecting us as much as we think it is. It's largely home to weak, artificial connections, what I call thin relationships."

Now I don't have a quarrel so much with some of his conclusions. I have an argument with how the issue is framed.

I don't believe that we should be thinking in terms of relationships. Rather, I believe the issue should be framed in terms of communication. My reasons are fairly straightforward. If we focus on relationships, we attribute to the relationship what actually belongs to communication. We call them thick or thin, we describe them as strong or weak ties, and we measure the value of connectivity in terms of network density and connectedness. We place emphasis on the tie, rather than on the subjects (people) knitted together.

My issue with this is twofold. First, I think it's a mistaken transposition of the logic and analytic of social network analysis to the attributes and qualities of human relationships and social organization that social network analysis doesn't really address. In social network analysis, the tie is privileged over the node, that is, the connection over the subject (person). But all ties are not equal. And ties are not really relationships.

I cannot imagine a psychologist inquiring as to a client's network density, Dunbar number management issues, or presentation of negative Facebook connectedness symptoms. Ties, used in social network analysis, are a means to abstract and diagram the connectedness of a number of nodes/individuals deemed to be connected. It's got nothing to do with the experience of relationships, the depth of human commitments, feelings of isolation or involvement, not to mention the substantial domain of emotional and communicative wealth that is transacted daily in the form of civil social conduct.

If we are interested in the meaning of social networking at the human scale of experience, then ties are the wrong way to think of it. The social network analysis model of social is an abstraction. It neither lays claim to causal explanation of interpersonal communication and meaning, nor to a properly humanistic observation of the emotional and lived life of members of a society. What it can do is abstract the number, density, and connectedness of members of a bounded network. And in that, surface patterns. But to mistake the tie for an intersubjective relationship, or to subordinate the tie to the mode of its reproduction -- which is communication -- is a mistake.

And this is where we trip ourselves up. For when we talk about social relationships and the social web, we inevitably turn to our own experiences. We rally in defense of the thin tie, the weak tie, follower numbers, connectedness, and what have you, in arguments based on personal experience. But of course! Social networks, and social tools of talk, as I prefer to call them, are quite simply a new means of mediating communication and interaction in a manner that captures and preserves interactions on a publicly accessible medium. Ties are not the explanation, communication is.

My second issue with the misuse of ties-as-relationships has to do with relationships in general. They don't exist. We relate to each other, and in our communication and interaction, express and "exchange" the content of communication and the meta-contents of emotional and affective interests. We are relational; society is relational. But never and in no social theory that I know of are relations reducible to this notion of a tie such that subjective human experiences can be described adequately by the tie. There is no tie -- there are two or more subjects committed for a stretch of time to pay attention to one another, take interest in each others' interests, handle the interaction in an acceptable fashion, and to some degree commit to communicate again. If, in social networking, we exchange tweets with one another for just a moment, but never again, then we have had a passing interaction. It's that simple. Ties and relationships don't have to be brought into the equation.

The medium facilitates asynchronous communication between people whose mutual connectedness online can make them present to one another in a fashion that transcends the limitations of physical co-presence. And which, for its capture and storage of that communication in the form of a digital textual artifact, renders this communication in a way that, within the medium only, lends it some persistence and durability. All of which leaves behind content for later use, re-use, recontextualization, and what have you. That's what it's good at: mediated communication and interaction.

While I suspect that our tendency to use social networking metaphors as descriptions of "the social" owes to the fact that we as much technologists as we are sociologists, the whole matter of social relationships has been a matter of some cultural concern for a while now. It's perhaps a post post-modern thing. Or a technology and disconnection thing. We have seen it in pop culture for years. Movies like Crash, Babel, Amelie, and countless others take up social relations and society -- as characters are brought together over seemingly arbitrary and random events and connections. In TV shows like The Wire and LOST the theme is explored in terms of the multi-layered interdependence of different social classes and institutions, or in the formation of communities out of nothing but a random event. And these shows are direct descendants of earlier works by Altman, Godard, Fellini, even Fritz Lang (M) and so many others.

The organization of the social is a perennial interest. We want to know what relates us and how we relate. We want to know what a commitment is, what trust means, and how loyalties and friendships are created, sustained, and preserved. Technologies of communication are a means -- in this day and age of communication, they are a means of production. A means and mode of the production of communication. And for this reason, a contributing factor in the organization of the social. But they are not a metaphor for the social, are not an abstraction of society's connected architecture, or an explanation of social byproducts and human experiences such as friendship, intimacy, groups, or communities.

Relationships are maintained by communication. Interactions frame the possibilities for communication between subjects whose attention is focused on the shared experience of a social situation. Social tools change the nature and modality of both interaction and communication, simply because they permit both to occur disembedded for time and place. It's not the tie that is the relationship, it's mediated social action by means of which communication is used to relate. And as we all know, and have experienced, the meaning of relating to one another online comes in all forms and shades of significance. Furthermore, relations may be unilateral and one directional, bidirectional, or triangulating and mediating. They have affect and real human interests: we like each other, admire each other, pay attention to, support, encourage, quote, refer, include, remember, and forget each other. These are our experiences and in our experiences are how we relate.

The tie has no such attributes, and in social network analysis, may not even capture directionality. Ties are not mutually affirmed or reciprocated. Communication and interaction is. What's more, the tie may falsely sustain the appearance of a bind that exists. But as we live our friendships and communities, and use our social tools as means of communicating, we pass in and out of attention as well as through different periods of interest and engagement. Much of this is even just social observation; where is the tie and how would it be captured when the act of being involved is an informal and somewhat haphazard habit of following twitter. The experience of social observation is hardly counted in social networking, for the simple reason that our tools can only capture actions.

It is easy to undersell the value of social tools on the basis of relationships. But to conflate relationships with the processes and practices of communication and interaction is a mistake, and places the cart before the horse. Relationships form out of communication and are sustained and reproduced during stretches of interaction -- stretches that include periods of passive engagement and un-involved social presence. That these aspects of subjective experience cannot be captured and represented in the form of a tie is just the misapprehension of human relationships in the form of abstract models of connectedness. Social life is transactional.

Related:
Social Media in Isolation is Useless to Government, to Business, and to You Mark Drapeau

Umair Haque Is Another New Spatialist Stowe Boyd

SXD: The construction of objective relations and operations

This piece has been adapted from a white paper I have in progress on the social web and social media. The paper concerns the deep relationality of social media. This is an excerpt on the construction of relations.

Connections
The world of the web is built on data that has neither fixed position nor place in terms of physical reality, but which exists by dint of its accessibility. This world of information available as you go, on an "as needed" basis, is constructed out of links. Because it depends on links for its reality and availability, it is deeply relational.

All relations are constructed and subject to modification as those relations themselves develop (or lose) connections. This world is a never-ending proliferation of references whose value is contingent on their visibility, because their visibility is the condition of their existence, and thus their use, and hence relevance.

In social media, participation in this world is always a construction of the world at the same time as it is a mode of consumption. And the social web is a "space" in which the connections formed by use are in some ways analogous to the connections formed inside a brain and from which comes mind. Subjectivity is the emergence of subjective mind — of socially relevant and valid associations. These associations among data elements employ distinctions that connect and differentiate data. Selections of data count as choices — individual user choices as well as machine-made operations.

Operations capture relations
Social media systems, like any computer-based application, perform a variety of functions. These include database queries, filtering results, and then sorting them for some kind of ordered display on the page. Functional operations may connect, distinguish, add to, or extend items of data and their associations. Users sometimes see these functions in the form of UI elements such as menu items, buttons, ratings, votes, and so on.

These operations indeed make use of calculations and algorithms, but in the social web they usually appear quite socially meaningful. In spite of their technical basis, operations are performed to produce and mediate the social, by way of a constructed presentation interface. In other words, technical operations underlie many of the constraints on social interaction online.

If these various operations are a necessary means of producing the content of social media information and content, what kinds of operations are involved and what kinds of information selections do they make? Social media are not entirely constructed out of user participation and content (communication). So then surely these operations shape the social that may form around an application. And if that is the case, then perhaps this social includes and manifests bias of selection at its foundation.

A basic associative operation is required for anything to be found (the web is built on links; data is based on links). The associative operation connects. Connections make navigation end-user possible. Votes, ratings, and other selections and expressions of user tastes and preferences all require operations.

Because the web uses links for associating objects as well as for providing navigation to them, these associative connections directly apply to visible information and content forms. In this way, associations reflect subjective preferences, or values. Captured in code and codified, qualitative selections enable quantitative operations. The ambiguity of subjective choice is sacrificed for the stability of binary selections. The social web is differently social — a cornucopia of social selections rendered coherent by selective switches.

In the formal organization of information online, and this holds for social media, most activity depends upon some very basic operations. Associative connections produce the coupling operation of a link. The operation is conjunctive: one thing and another.

Sometimes a pair remains just a pair. But a pair can be extended with further conjunctions into a series. A series of joined things might be grouped into a set, that set then being tagged (named) or categorized and thus given additional identity. Here the series is more than a series, for it has a designation applying to each element in the series. And for this the elements in the series need not be navigated by "next and next," but may be shown in any order.

Subtraction and exclusion suffer from the fact that the subtractive operation normally leaves no record (unless data is rendered historically). So we tend to always add and join content online. Put differently, links are positive associations — the web grows connections along series.

Operations take form
There is a logic to the forms in which these operations are presented as information — communication included. This logic expresses the intrinsic (if you will) arrangement of conceptual relations among the individual elements of a pair, series, or set. Magnitude, or quantity, is the most common, and covers operations and relations involving more or less, greater or lesser quantities.

Ranking and rating, ordered lists (top tens), and so on would be examples of values arranged by magnitude. Magnitude works well to create social distinctions and to differentiate social membership. For example, it might be used to articulate popularity, importance, or trending, all of which will strike us as eminently "social." In our culture, and in our mediated world of social news and information, magnitude is a widely-used social differentiator.

The fact that these operations are normally presented as a call to action, for the purpose of engaging users, engenders further common social practices. Adding friends, adding posts, adding links, adding tags, songs, products, become social operations when given recognizable and familiar forms. And because addition is captured and rendered more easily than subtraction, the common logic of making connections among objects online privileges increasing values over decreasing values. (And magnitude conceptually wants to increase and grow.)

But there are more operational orders available in the real world world. Operations essential to cultural expression and representation, but which are difficult to codify and operationalize online. There are, for example, symbolic and signifying orders in which one thing stands in for another. Analogies and metaphor also produce relations among items, without reducing that relation to simple associative connection. You might call this fuzzy logic — it's the greater range of subjective association possible with mind and communication.

In social organization and in the world of human communication, there are connections that require more than a direct coupling or connection. For example, triangulation, which permits us to select one thing for the purpose of some other relation. In relational terms this is would be shown as a relation between A and B that has an effect on the relation B and C (in a set of relations A-B-C).

Triangulation is a fundamental feature of social organization, allowing for indirect relationships and actions. Human relationships are the subject of a great deal of this indirect, triangulated interaction, and while pairs, or dyads, are the basis of a meaningful exchange, it can be argued that it is the triad that forms the basis of groups and social networks.

But indirect action is difficult to represent in a medium whose basic operation is explicit coupling (linking). The common link has only one reference, not two. Triangulating communication and action can be attempted with a series of two or more connections. If action A causes action B which leads to C, for example, a series might appear as triangulation. We have gift and pass-along transactions in many social media systems that illustrate this kind of activity. But triangulating activity that simply involves the social observation by C of activity between A and B will go unrecorded.

It's likely that future innovation will give rise to more complex and differentiated operations than we have available to us today. Perhaps the link is just the beginning; the first and necessary means of populating the world with named objects and identities? Perhaps the future of social online will extend the web built on basic associative connections and quantifying operations, using smarter social algorithms that anticipate personal and social preferences and tastes. Upon which we might imagine future design possibilities that will allow more for changes in scale, intensity, changes of time frame and interval, speed, modality (voice to text, etc), and gaming as means of capturing and re-presenting information and communication.

Example of basic associative connections:

• Add
• Repeat
• Confirm
• Join
• Subtract
• Couple or pair
• Chain

Types of operations
Here is a list of some of the common selections and operations on which social media are constructed.

• Limiting operation: this operation limits elements (people, posts, objects) displayed. Although the limit has no value other than its number (say a Top Ten list), it can have social significance (most popular). Note that nothing changes about the item, no relationships are created among items in the limit set, and no semantic assignations accrue to items in the limit set. Limit operations are good when a social or cultural form is needed and when it can be created by subjecting membership to scarcity and competition.
• Extensive operation: this operation takes an object, element, term, label, person and extends it. Tags are extended when they are applied to objects. People are extended when they are added as friends. An extensive operation creates additional connections that extend an identity. All concepts have infinite extension (for the concept "chair," there is an infinite number of actual chairs); online, these extensions are established through links.
• Proliferation operation: this operation, through actual copies of digital files, through embedded players and reference, or through links and messages, proliferates an object or element. Proliferation here is different from circulation. In the digital kingdom scarcity exists in the user's attention and time, and on the on the display (screen) itself, but not in the world of data, files, and links. Proliferation operations send an object, image, person, link, or other element around, increasing its visibility and presence. Viral operations are proliferations.
• Increase (additive) operation: operations that increase a stock of anything by creating more of it are basic increase operations. This operation has a value for reproduction, and though it doesn't create significations itself (addition of the same to the same has no meaning) we have a cultural bias that favors accumulation. Adding friends doesn't change the nature of the term friend, doesn't change the friends themselves, but does signify popularity (and for no reason other than a socio-cultural one). Whether or not the number itself (of elements) matters depends on whether the operation constructs a number or a series. If it constructs a number, the total may matter (either by signifying or by tending towards a limit). If it constructs a series, then the operation functions across time and is for all intents and purposes unlimited.
• Series operation: this operation creates a series out of steps. Series are not sequenced, and have no intrinsic order. In other words nothing changes in the going from one to the next, logically or conceptually. The arrangement is simply a series of connections and serves purposes of navigation.
• Pass along: this operation simply involves passing an item along. It is useful for circulation where proliferation (which involves duplication or linked reference) is not desired.
• Scale operation: there are two operations that involve scale, one in which scaling changes the thing (non-linear), and one in which it doesn't (linear). Most social psychological factors change as scale increases (a group of five, ten, 25, 50, 500, 5,000...).
• Bifurcation (either/or): this operation is used in voting and in exclusive choices. It is one of the few operations in which exclusive connections are made. It is worth noting that exclusion is not visible, though quantities can show the balance of yes/no or accept/reject selections in toto.
• Combinative operation: operations that combine and/or join items are commonplace and are necessary to cementing connections between things that are alike, similar, or related in other ways (price, location, etc).
• Semantic assignation operation: operations that assign semantic meaning, such as categories, labels, tags, priorities, and so on, are critical for the production of meta data. Search engines wouldn't work without this operation. Indeed, the difficulty of merging socially-constructed meanings (folksonomies, tags) and taxonomic (hierarchical taxonomies) meanings will continue to confound designers.
• Move operation: this operation repositions an element, on the page or across pages, or among domains. Moving elements is a bit strange in that it the online world cares little "where" something "is" (how to get to it matters more).
• Self-reflexive operation: Social media capture user input and display the results. Thus some links change what they point to according to use. Because their referent or value changes based on how many times they are clicked relative to other links point to measure their own activity, they will have changing destinations or referents. (A "most viewed member" link will point to the most viewed member, whoever that is at the time).

Bear in mind that these are relations among data selections, and not relationships between people. Interpersonal and social relationships of course also take different forms, but are not formalized or expressed by means of logical operations. Rather, they are expressed through subjective interest, action, and communication. Furthermore, inter-subjective relations involve subjective interpretation — people create relationships around relational moves that are far more complex and which are richer in meaning. (Psychological relational types include self-reference, introjection, internalization, projection, transference, and more. Social relational types are built around dyadic and triadic units, and vary in social form along axes of trust, commitment, dependence, and more.)

Relations described here and in these operational logics are objective, not subjective. Yes, they may obtain values through selections that originate with user choices and activities, but codification in data and meta data objectify relational values. It is for this reason that we find and use here basic logical associations: connection, conjunction (and, and), and disjunction (and or).





Related: I think the different types of relations described above might be useful to efforts such as the synaptic web. Combined with subjective relations formed around user relations — to other users, to their content, to activities and practices — we might map out some of the emergent subjective web's future possibilities.

Algorithmic authority: critical reflections

In a post late last year on algorithmic authority, Adina Levin compares and contrasts the relevance of social selections and recommendations made in Google and Facebook. She raises the question of the algorithm's capacity to approximate human preferences.

On Facebook's Friend recommendations and use of social algorithms to surface relevant news, a topic of discussion at the time, she writes: "Louis Gray writes that this approach caused him to miss the news that his sister, who'd been regularly posting updates, had had a new baby."

In human affairs, and friendships in particular, algorithms are of course only precariously prescient. In fact and reality, they often "fail." I would like to take a closer look at this failure. What is it, when it is not machine or operational failure, but failure to produce accurate social results?

When algorithmic authority fails
We need to begin with the claim of "algorithmic authority," around which discussion by Clay Shirky and others has been rich. There is some conceptual slippage here. Is the algorithm's authority in question because it fails on occasion? In which case, it lacks authority for being inconsistent and unreliable. Or is its authority in question because it cannot compete with human judgment, or "the sort of social assessment we do every day about maintaining social connections." (@alevin) In which case its failure is an intrinsic flaw, and we should bracket the notion of algorithmic authority with the recognition that its reach and effectiveness is always only partial and speculative.

In addition to the conceptual slippage we just noted around the claim to authority, there is I think some further confusion introduced by the fact that algorithmically-based social search, recommendations, and navigational methods involve a call to action. Namely, I wonder if Adina rightly raises the point but conflates recommendations with their call to action.

Surely, when Facebook makes a social recommendation, it assumes that users will themselves choose whether to connect, poke, or ignore those users recommended for friendship. Most likely, Facebook is using friend recommendations to surface members its users have not yet connected to. Its social algorithms make recommendations, but users connect the loop by taking action.

In other words, authority is not in the claim alone (the friend recommendation, which claims that the user is a potential friend of yours), but in the user's response. The user's acceptance or rejection of that claim validates the algorithm's authority.

Authority, in short, depends perhaps on the user, not on the algorithm, for it is only on the basis of the user's acceptance that authority is realized. It is subjectively interpreted, not objectively held.

For conceptual clarity: the general and the particular
I think "algorithmic authority" conflates two concepts into one idea, making it easy to confuse the argument and draw ambivalent conclusions. What is the authority of the algorithm? And in what cases do algorithms have authority? Those are two separate things. We have a problem of the general and the particular.

The algorithm generally may invoke the authority of data, information sourcing, math, and scientific technique. Those are claims on authority based in the faith we put in science (actually, math, and specifically, probabilities). That's the authority of the algorithm — not of any one algorithmic suggestion in particular, but of the algorithmic operation in general.

As to the case or context in which algorithms have authority, there are many. Adina contrasts two — the algorithmic selection of relevant news and the recommendation of friends based on one's social graph. And there are, of course, many other examples of use cases and contexts in which social algorithms surface and expose possible connections and associations. In the particular example cited for Louis Gray, and in any other particular case, it is the rightness of the algorithm's particular selection that makes a claim to authority.

So we have the algorithm as general method, and context as particular instance. In the former, the algorithm as general method authorizes the claim to authority. In the latter, it is the rightness of the particular case or result that justifies the claim to authority.

Two kinds of normative claim: large and small
Either claim to authority may be recognized and accepted by a user. Either claim to authority may be invested with trust and confidence. And either may likewise fail, but on its own terms: as a failure of algorithmic operations to surface social associations and relations; or as a failure of algorithmic selections to refer to an individual user's interests, tastes, and preferences. The authority of method in general may fail to capture relevant associations belonging to the social field in general. The authority of selection in particular may fail to articulate relevant social facts to the particular individual.

These two kinds of authority, or rather, two claims to authority (for that's really what they are — claims valid only if accepted) correspond to small and large normative claims (Habermas). Normative claims are linguistic statements that use "you should." The call to action in a friend recommendation is a normative "should." Small normative claims are wagered by the individual (to personalize Facebook friend recommendations, something like: "Friend Jimmy, I think you guys would get along"). Large normative claims are referred to institutional authority (to institutionalize Facebook friend recommendations, something like: "We can see more of your latent social connections than you can, and on that basis we recommend you friend Jimmy").

Clay Shirky's "social judgments"
Clay Shirky, speculates on algorithmic authority in a post and manner that exemplifies the point.

Shirky writes about the authority invested in him: "Some of these social judgments might be informal — do other people seem to trust me? — while others might be formal — do I have certification from an institution that will vouch for my knowledge of Eastern Europe."

There are in fact two kinds of trust involved here, each of which may be related to authority. First is trust in the person known. Second is trust in social position or role. This is the distinction between trusting the Clay you know and trusting the professor named Clay.

We tend not to distinguish person and position, but there is again a difference between trust invested in the particular and trust extended to the general. Shirky calls these "social judgments" but in fact the former, being personal, is less a social judgment than a personal assessment. We trust friends not by their reputation but by our personal experience.

(Sidenote: In all matters social media the personal and the social are easily conflated or used interchangeably. My aim here is to cleave the difference in the interest of clarity.)

Shirky goes on to say that "As the philosopher John Searle describes social facts, they rely on the formulation X counts as Y in C." But I think Clay employs a bit of fuzzy logic going from social judgments to social facts. The failed and misguided friend recommendations Adina so rightly notes, and the suggestions made by news sourcing algorithms, are not just "social facts" but are claims to truth.

Searle would himself likely agree that a claim that rests on authority is in fact not a fact but is a linguistic statement. It makes a claim whose validity depends on normative rights assumed by the the authority in general and whose rightness depends on the claim's validity in particular.

Claims made on the basis of authority depend on the audience for their validity as a "social fact." In other words, they are "true facts" only insofar as the audience accepts them to be so. They are not "real" but are simply "valid." (This argument uses Habermas' three truth claims and is an alternative to Searle's concept of truth. If one is going to use terms like judgment and fact, it behooves one to get picky.)

Authority and the call to action
Now, I have suggested that it might not be the recommendation itself, but the implied call to action, that is the problem Adina identifies. Not, in other words, that Facebook recommends the wrong person, but that it recommends they become friends, and that a poke start off the friendship.

As we have seen, the social recommendation is actually a linguistic claim. Its validity is up to the user's interpretation and response. In its form as a navigational or interface element, it solicits a call to action, yes. But its construction is as a linguistic claim.

I had suggested that Facebook surely doesn't expect users to take action on its recommendations unless they want to. So if we don't mind that the algorithm's selection is a misfire, then our response is a separate matter. In fact, what's at issue here is the authority of a claim made to recommenced social interaction.

The algorithm's suggestion not only solicits the user to make friends, but implicitly includes all the social sharing that follows from that choice of inclusion. That is a matter of social action — not just of the selection of information.

But the question of whether the algorithm can play a role in social interaction and social actions is an entirely different matter. For the time being, we simply want to crack the conundrum of algorithmic authority.

A brief note is in order, for I am not just trying to over complicate matters. There is a reason for this complexity. It is, as is often the case in social interaction design, because there are two orders, two levels of analysis, or two register in play. First, is the meaning we might impute to objective and factual information — "authority" we impute to information and data that lays some claim to personal and social relevance. Second, is the meaning constructed socially, or in the social world of subjective meanings. In systems involving users and social action and interaction, there is the pseudo-objective meaning of the information, and the separate world of valid social claims involved in action and communication among people related to each other with different degrees of interpersonal and social commitment.

Information v social action: different kinds of claims
The meanings of statements of fact, those involving what we think of as information, are not in the same linguistic register as the meanings of the claims and expressions of individuals. They are different kinds of utterance, produced (uttered) in the former case by machines (e.g. algorithmic suggestions), and in the case of the latter, by individual users.

Claims made by people relate us to those people, and our responses are a form of social action in which we anticipate and account for the other's response. Actions involved with information can be one-off actions — but those involving other people form the thread we call relationships, no matter how thick or thin.

In the world of web interactions and social media, the call to actions that belong to the system's very social DNA and design will take the form of both human and system messages. And I suspect that it's in the call to action, especially when it implicates social relations (e.g. Facebook algorithmically selected friend recommendations), that what may bother us lies in the action domain of meaning, not in the factual domain of information selection.

Confusion can arise because both system messages such as Facebook friend recommendations and user-generated content take linguistic form, and as such make the types of claims and solicit calls to action and interaction that are possible with language.

The authority of the social
And yet we recognize that systems are socializing themselves in automated and algorithmic ways. And with this trend in social system evolution, many new interactions and activities produce a new kind of social organization. The results of which are disruptive to a wide range of media industries.

Shirky has been a keen observer of this cultural drift. His analysis of algorithmic authority is in keeping with his view that systems absorb and reflect their own use by user populations, producing hybrid social effects in some critical areas of cultural and social organization: trust, influence, popularity, reputation, and so on. For Shirky, this has produced something new: the authority of the social.

"As more people come to realize that not only do they look to unsupervised processes for answers to certain questions, but that their friends do as well, those groups will come to treat those resources as authoritative. Which means that, for those groups, they will be authoritative, since there's no root authority to construct from."

Socio-technical transformations: judgment and authority
We can drill down even deeper, for there are two transformations at work here: the transformation of human judgment to algorithmic sourcing and filtering; and the transformation of the authority of position to the social as validation of authoritativeness. From the use of human judgment to increased reliance on algorithms, and from the authority of traditional social positions and institutions to the authority of open and networked populations.

In moving from the personal and human recommendation to the algorithmic selection, we invest our trust in a system able to source vast amounts of information. Trust is invested in its systemic reliability. This replaces the trust previously invested in an individual's experience and personal judgment.

We trade system complexity and system techniques for the reasons and thinking of a person. The algorithm now replaces human judgment on the basis of its much greater ability to weigh and value multiple sources of news and information. And it does so by necessity, for we could not evaluate social information as voluminous and that captured in the social networking world.

But trust in systemic reliability differs fundamentally from the criteria we canvassed above and by which personal or institutional (small and large) authoritative claims are waged and validated (accepted or rejected). Here, again, separate concepts combine to form "social judgment" and "social authority." And as with algorithmic authority, one involves a transformation of the general form of authority, and one, the particular form of judgment.

The general form of authority is assimilated to the concept of a social whose sheer mass, volume, and speed of information sourcing justifies its making a claim to authority. And the particular form of judgment, which is personal and individual, is transferred to the social which is a hive-like collective mass subjectivity.

There's no need here to break down the conceptual moves used in forming the concepts of social judgment and social authority. For they follow the operational moves used in forming algorithmic authority. What is compelling, and interesting, is the manner in which these new concepts borrow from their predecessors, dragging along with them the validity and authority established long ago, while accruing meanings and associations.

Conclusion
I do not question whether this is just the conceptual handiwork and word smithing on which industry experts and analysts rely as food for thought and bread on the table. Clearly these concepts resonate and describe adequately some of the transformations — technical, social, and cultural — that social media participate in. I do question the risk of taking these concepts literally, their implications uncritically, or their assumptions without reflection. For it is then all to easy to fashion a house of cards on subsistence logic and its subsiding logical fault-lines. The consequence of which is to sometimes misread and misapprehend how social works, to overlook what users do and choose, and to falsely attribute social results and practices to the technical infrastructure on which they depend.

On the private/public distinction, publicy, and sociality

I am late to the discussion about privacy sparked by Facebook's decision to go public (so to speak). A good many points have been raised by Zuckerberg's claim that times have changed, including reflections on privacy, identity, publics, and sociality. Stowe Boyd has a new term for this: publicy. Tim Leberecht's reflection on sociality is worth note. And Adina Levin points out some of the points raised by Stowe in a post on boundary formation. But rather than offer my position on privacy, I'd like to say a few things about the whole private/public distinction. I think that if the private/public distinction is proving to be worn out then we ought perhaps rethink our concepts. And in so doing, leverage those that exist already — I guess I'm not convinced that new terms are entirely necessary unless they attach to recognizable claims or arguments, but that's my own personal taste in social web anthropology.

Like many of you, I think the opposition of private and public is now problematic at best, if not counterproductive. First off, privacy suggests to me individual rights of ownership, protections and security, safety from exposure and the risk of misuse and abuse of personal information. It centers on the individual and his or her protections. I prefer to think of the Self, which is for me already social(ized), and for whom "privacy" is negotiated constantly through interaction, communication, and other social and relational transactions.

Viewed from the Self, rather from the private, the notion of public is orthogonal. Public, to me, suggests the public sphere, and the formal, institutional, legal, economic, cultural and other forces that organize it. Conceptually, the public sphere is orthogonal to the social and to different kinds of sociality. In social theoretical terms, the public refers to a kind of social organization in which individuals don't really experience themselves as acting and interacting subjects. It is "constructed" on the basis of those interactions perhaps, but the term captures anonymous sociality — not, in my view, the one experienced when socializing online.

Simply put, the private/public distinction is not one that I use in conceptualizing social media "spaces." It contributes little to understanding the interactions and relationships users must negotiate while socializing online.

(Sidenote: publicy is not only new and thus obfuscating, but sacrifices the possibility of leveraging existing theoretical arguments. If the term exists to address a conceptual problem, why not address the conceptual problem instead o the terminological one? We are not yet rid of the conceptual problem, but have instead a new terminological problem — that of placing publicy in a discourse on mediated social realities.)

One can describe a social field from above or from below. From above for its form, shape, boundaries, and so on. And from below, for its organization, relations, and means of reproduction. I prefer the latter, for the reason that social media are forces of the social reproduction of social fields. The top-down view may help us describe the social, but the bottom-up view brings us closer to its relations and dynamics.

For me then, the Self and Sociality is a more useful use of terms. The Self negotiates its social engagements and participation in social media. Socialities form around different kinds of organization. These forms involve different kinds of relations, from interpersonal talk and transactions to groups, "communities," and a vast number of transient or persistent practices (games etc).

In thinking about socialities, we ask not what they are but how they are organized. What are the relations between members? How do these relations become reintegrated in how members relate differently or uniquely to themselves? If we believe that attention, presence, communication, games, or other kinds of organization are involved, then to what effect and with what outcomes? These forms are often temporary, but meaningful nonetheless because they produce a great deal of communication (which is captured).

(Sidenote: as a concept, "social thickness" doesn't quite make sense to me either. Thick and thin are used in social network analysis to describe strength of tie. Density to describe network relatedness or connectedness. Social thickness would seem to suggest that attributes of interaction can be ascribed to tools but with the caveat that these attributes are nonetheless aspects of communication, relationship, and interaction. The term visually sediments out a notion that seems better explained in terms of either action (communication), relation, or presentation (at the interface).)

Focusing not on publics but on socialities also shifts emphasis to dynamics. For any type of social organization, ask what can it do? How is it assembled? This is an age-old philosophical question: What can a people do? Not what do people do, but recognizing that their relations are organized and their interactions structured, what is a people capable of?

Answers would vary whether one were looking at socially-mediated branding (advocacy, virality), social business benefits, or online fan cultures. What types of talk and what kinds of social interactions does the sociality promote, and what types does it preempt? Does it promote the Self as image and ego, the group as collaborative, the whole as a unity with purpose? These are anthropological questions valid for us as observers of mediated cultures.

Mediated socialities indeed present us with information and as such involve a number of information problems: access, distribution, search and findability, connectedness, shelf-life, actionability, and so on. But when the information is the artifact of interaction and communication, it's produced by means of action and interacting subjects.

In social interaction design, this means grasping the social action requirements of a system and also the secondary and follow on consequences of socialities produced and constructed by social systems. These are two separate conceptual domains: one of social action and one of media. I get that we want for new terms by means of which to describe phenomena and issues unique to social media. But we need, too, coceptual logic and argument: if not a logic then at least a description of social acts and technical re-framings.

SxD: Primary and Secondary Frames

I wrote several times last year about frames and re-framing the approaches to social media design. The concept of frames is borrowed from Erving Goffman's analysis of face-to-face social interactions. In brief, frames are how we know What's going on, and consequently, How to proceed. In Goffman's analysis, frames permit a vast number of opportunities to change and shift What's going on by means of what he calls keyings, reframings, cues and more. It's by means of the concept of frames that a comedian can tell a joke about a World War II ace telling a joke about a dogfight involving not a Messershchmitt but a Fokker. Framing explains the fact that I was able to retell that telling as described in a book about telling to you here and now, and you get it.

In thinking about frames, I was compelled first in the fact that frames offer a preferred alternative to conventional interaction design schemas. Frames are a way around the issue of lost context in social media. And can accommodate the greater number of meaning problems involved in both direct communication and symbolically-mediated interaction (use of interface and functional elements to structure interaction).

Frames also allow us to split the interaction schema in two, from one-sided user-software interaction into user-user interaction. A single frame corresponding to the social interaction at hand can now be analyzed from each user's perspectives of experience. This double-sided interaction model is essential if we are to recognize that the experience is not only different for each user, but is interpreted also. Users interpret the actions of others, and interpret the medium's role in representing and "designing" the actions of others. Our competencies with use of social media involve not only technical but also "social" competencies.

But last year my thinking around frames was monotheistic. Frames were frames. Now, I've long thought that systems theory can contribute to our understanding of social media, for the simple reason that media are systems of production, around which social practices emerge as social systems reproducing themselves incessantly on the basis of individual contributions. Systems theory provides a thinking of dynamics and processes, both of which in my mind trump structure and architecture as approaches to emergent social order over time. Systems, like structures, can be understood for their constraining and enabling features. But systems emphasize feedback loops and can better explain social media outcomes that include bias, ambiguity, noise, scale, and more.

Core to systems theory is the concept of order. Core to the systems theory of media is observation. Media are second order observation systems — they operate by observing "reality's events." The reality of media is a second order "reality." So, then, social media behave similarly, sometimes as a third order observation of second order media, sometimes serving as a second order system for third order observation by mass media. The two systems of media observe one another — this by necessity of the fact that they now use the same technical means of production (the web).

I think there may be a rich conceptual and theoretical, if not also methodological, benefit to combining frames of analysis with second order systems theory (there are different kinds, I use Luhmann). I divide frames into primary frame and secondary frame.

Primary frames correspond to user experience and are how we might accommodate most conventional UI and IxD user-centric concerns and descriptions. They are what the user is doing most proximately and immediately. Motives for user behavior here include the conventional observations of use and intent, as well as need and interest. UI design patterns, application settings, form design, sequencing, and much of the rest of UI designer's palette is in effect here. Valid usability concerns apply here also, and offer rich and necessary feedback around an application's efficacy from functional and use-based perspectives.

Secondary frames correspond to multi-user social interaction design interests, and may be justified as a design consideration from the argument of second order systems theory. Social systems mediate interaction and in their design re-present individual and aggregate activity by design: this is second order observation and produces what we think of as the social. Sociality emerges as a combination of mutually reinforcing social dynamics involving use practices, talk practices, social practices, and cultural practices. None of these can be explained or referred directly back to primary frame actions, for all depend on second order intervention of the social tool.

• Use practices are informed by the tool's thematic organization of a social field: my use of a tool is socially informed.
• Talk practices are informed by the tool's structured (facebook) or open (twitter) organization and representation of talk: including capturing audience, chronological and asynchronous discontinuous temporal ordering of talk, visibility and availability settings, and more.
• Social practices are informed by use of symbolic languages and media forms (including video, games, etc) by means of which new practices enable rich and innovative second order interactions.
• Cultural practices emerge as contextually specific games, past times, habits, and more: the same social practice may be used in many cultural forms (Linkedin status updates are not twitter updates — we know this culturally, though the social practice, which is to update an audience, is the same).

Now none of this may be conscious to the user, of course, but my interest is in formalizing a framework for social interaction design that is as good at accounting for social effects and outcomes as it is at describing the needs of interface and application design. Social interaction design needs to furnish social media professionals with observations and explanations, if not also proscriptive guidance, for social outcomes on the basis not of the individual designer's skill but on a generalizable methodology. This would be easy if the medium in question were objective only, but it's not. Subjective use, inter-subjective interaction, and second order effects insist not only on the importance of agency (user-centriciity) but also social complexity. This is not film theory, but urban planning.

I hope to expound on this during the course of the coming year. The field is new and its insights un-researched. I would be thrilled to work with those of you more familiar with research methodologies to lead investigations into social media practices. An at the same time, I look forward to working with those of you who are visually inclined to diagram and represent some of these dynamics in generalizable forms. I will continue to develop framework details in the interest of furnishing some observations around which practices, and what outcomes, are not only the best, but promise innovation.

Lunch for good, food for thought

A post by friend Chiah Hwu today has reminded me of a topic that was on my mind recently. That being both the subtext and explicit goal of a series of well-catered, guested, and hosted lunches organized by the name of LunchforGood. Assembled by Chris Heuer and Myles Weissleder and made possible by Lunch.com's J.R. Johnson, the lunch series kept attendees well-fed in exchange for food for thought. The connecting thread, as drawn out by Chiah: better use of social technologies in support of conversation. And not just any conversation: good conversation, conversation for good.

This set me off in several directions and on more than one occasion I concluded that there will never be a social technology capable of steering conversation among participants to desired outcomes. That the basis for understanding and agreement between people has little if anything to do with the media and tools by which those people communicate with each other. In short, that the problem is simply orthogonal to the proposed solution.

I agree with Chiah that technologies do not solve social problems. They solve technical problems. And to frame a social problem in technical terms is likely a misguided approach leading to misdirected outcomes.

So on the tendency of social media to propagate good and goodness, I side with the skeptics. There is nothing intrinsically good or bad in social tools. And just as they are value neutral in themselves, it would be hard to make the claim that as tools they can bridge social gaps and misunderstandings. (Note that I mean "as tools" -- their uses can of course have impacts on culture, society, education, politics, economics, etc.)

But their use, well that's different.

Two points then come up around use of the social tool as tool for good. First, might there be uses of social tools that favor, if not directly produce, social good? And second, on what basis does good form: common identity or resolvable difference?

On the first point: Is is possible that social tools might be designed to facilitate constructive social processes (interaction, communication, commitments, trust, etc) as their social outcomes? (Differences in opinion around What counts as Good notwithstanding.)

And on the second point: Is it possible that common ground (what we have often called affinity) is a less interesting social attribute than differences of kind and degree?

If, in other words, commonality often takes the form of "I agree," and difference takes the form of "I disagree," which might engender the more rich and interesting conversation?

IF participants agree that Global Warming is bad, on what basis are they agreeing? Does this make them alike? Being alike, would they like each other? Is that the idea of commonality and affinity? For if it is, we can surely do better than to tag them all up, assign them a group name, and sell t-shirts emblazoned with "me too" and "follow me!"

Commonality based on shared identity comes at the price of individual differences. The issue, it seems to me, is less that we are different and more that we do not appreciate and understand the nature of our differences.

I, for one, think that a tool designed to tease out close differences would likely lead to far more interesting interactions than one designed to cement shared identities.

The problem raised over the course of the LunchforGood gatherings was, at some level, How do we improve social media so that we can all find what we have in common and get along better? But commonalities, whether as shared traits, passions, hobbies, beliefs, activities, record collections -- these do not provide a basis on which to extend the commonality. Commonalities in common are no guarantee of shared identity, shared affection, or harmony.

Shared attributes and qualities do not create a simple and smooth social unity and peace. Conflict and difference are not properties of identities and attributes -- they are a dynamic. They happen in context, during an event perhaps or due to a change in situation. And when differences erupt, it is not commonalities that resolve them but a shared commitment to constructive outcomes.

Conflict and peace are a matter of interaction and communication: they're a process. Shared interests are found through communication. Cooperation develops them. Conflict, when it erupts, is handled by means of interactions (brinkmanship is a classic type of interaction). Interactions are the way in which participants agree on a common course of action, by which they arrive at agreement on what to do if not why.

Interaction takes time, it involves turns, it is a process and is iterated. Now those all seem well within the purview of social media and social tools.

But getting there will take some creative thinking and design. And will take interaction models that can validate and capture far more than the overlapping interests of strangers on the line. (Commitment, for example, easily escapes the online environment. As can and do sincerity and honesty.) Interaction models perhaps involving shared resources, sequenced interactions, dependencies and knowledge/information partially revealed/concealed according to levels and commitments of trust earned and verified.

A final thought. Whether this is even a design problem for which there is a design solution is of course debatable. But the real world may offer some examples and references. Interaction dynamics have been found in conflict as well as peace and cooperation... For example, rituals, ceremonies, and less formal pastimes exist, which in their form and structure as social practices bind participants through objects, rules, moves, obligations (etc) to a shared course of action.

There may be many hidden dynamics and practices out there. We have perhaps only scratched at the surface of what social tools can be good at. And in many ways we cannot know what is possible, for that depends on practices and designs yet to be invented.

Realtime streams: now and then

All social media involve a dislocation that de couples the act of communication or interaction from its artifact, which is a text or recording. This is a shame, in some respects, but one that creates possibilities that wouldn't exist if it weren't for the medium. The medium allows us to be always here and now but visible elsewhere anytime. It has a built in "anyplace, anytime."

This anyplace, anytime is brought into focus by each of us when we use social media. For us it's always now. When I use twitter, I use it now. If I read your tweet, it's now. Your now, which is now "then," is again "now" for me. In reading your tweets I experience them in my own time, even though they were written by you in your time. On your time.

These different times become irrelevant to the medium, for each user's activity makes them present. But the differences do have consequences for some of the medium's particular capabilities. One of these being its way of focusing and harnessing our attention.

Media theory makes the observation that media, or mediated experiences, amplify along some axes of experience while bracketing out others. The phone: voice, and talk. Tv: the eye, and watching. Twitter: the now?

If each of us is in the now but in our own now, then the dislocation and de coupling of a tool like twitter is exacted on the time dimension. We don't experience it that way, because we're always "in time." But we do experience the temporal artefacts, if you will, of the dislocation.

For we in being on twitter, now, we're paying attention to other people, seeking attention from other people, who are not there now, or not in our "now," even though the tool makes it seem so. There's a temporal illusion, if one may mix metaphors ontologically. And I think this may have something to do with the residual practices that develop around attention and which contribute to the attention economy.

I am on twitter now, and for all intents and purposes you seem to be too, or rather, I'm experiencing you now (even though it's now "past" and "then" for you). If I pay attention, by tweeting, tweeting to you, retweeting you, or even simply by reading/observing (which is paying but not giving attention), then I'm being social. I'm engaging in a social act. That social act connects us virtually, because I'm paying attention to you. And if I tweet, some part of that attention wants to close the loop with you. It wants a response.

All social action, mediated especially, intrinsically seeks a return look, a response, if not from you then some other person. It's a tacit social principle and basic social binding mechanism, meaning that it goes without saying.

"Goes without saying." Communication, because it has other people in mind, does a lot that goes without saying. The return is what we want from twitter — and the reason that so many new users drop it. The simplest return is the follow — and the reason so many use following strategies. But talk intrinsically begs the question, makes the appeal, and suggests the response. Talk is structured so that every linguistic statement suggests appropriate, valid, responses. That's how language and meaning work.

The dislocation of all these attention flows, for we are all in the flow of attention, from the streams that result from them, creates a fundamental social "desire" for relocation, or connection. All these mediated forms of talk are looking for ways to make communication more probable, more successful, and more valuable.

The dimension of time is a hidden dimension but one that we know is there, and which operates at a deep level, because twitter is a tool of now. We may see the streams of others, but we experience them in the flow of our own.


This post in continuation of a thread:
Synchronic and diachronic readings of activity streams
The Flow Past Web: even better than the RealTime thing
Activity Streams: Realtime and Streamtime
Activity Streams: Content and Flow

Activity Streams: Realtime and Streamtime

The realtime web is living on borrowed time. Not in the sense that time's running out on realtime. But in the sense that the realtime web actually involves two kinds of time. One is the time in which information is delivered. We call that realtime. The other is the user's time, which I'm going to call streamtime.

Realtime is immediate, streamtime is borrowed. The realtime web operates immediately. The streamtime experience is immediacy.

A lot has been said about realtime and our immediate access to information, but little has been said about streamtime, or the immediacy with which we experience realtime. And since streamtime relates to our consumption of realtime content, the concept might be worth unpacking.

The web collapses the distance between production and consumption. In realtime web terms, the stream delivers information instantaneously. The user, in streamtime, has access to it as if it were there. So where realtime information delivery has to do with simple clock time, streamtime involves the immediacy with which we relate to realtime information. This immediacy is actually a kind of proximity — of the kind sometimes called "ambient intimacy."

Streamtime is about proximity. And proximity combines two concepts: closeness and now. Immediacy as here, and immediately as now. And since there is no "space" on the internet, when we say proximity, we mean it in different terms: not spatial distance but presence.

But when we say presence, we usually mean individual presence: the presence of other people sensed through realtime social tools. So the streamtime experience actually contains two separate kinds of proximity: that of the information itself (delivered in realtime) and that of its sender.

Of course, we don't think of the information source as a sender — we think of the person. It's this trick of imagination that allows us to "feel" connected through the wire. (What I've called "approximity" in the past.)

For example, streamtime, not realtime, is the dimension in which attention is paid. Attention is awareness (directed mental attention, or focus), and time. Attention is paid by when we mentally select something to pay attention to, and is paid for as long as we hold that in our awareness. So streamtime then involves a commitment of attention to a steady stream of incoming information, much of which is messages (updates, tweets, etc).

Some of these messages are personal messages, some are system messages. Personal messages are communication of a sort. System messages are as if sent by a person, insofar as they report on a user's activity. They are sent automatically, but we read them as if they were personal messages and can sense who they are about. Activity updates may not be in the words of the user, but they're nonetheless a proxy for communication.

Streamtime, then, not only takes attention paid to the information and content itself, but also takes the attention we pay to each other, and which we spend by communicating. Where information is just that, information, communication is actionable. We can respond to it, reflect on what a person meant, reply, or forward (RT) it. Or rather, we can respond to the person, not to "it."

Streamtime raises the constant possibility that we might take up communication with a person — at a minimum it requires the increased attention we pay to people (over information straight up). This is the demand on the attention economy staged by realtime and experienced in realtime: that we think not only about what's been said but about the person who said it.

Social tools to help with the demands of interacting and communicating may be an area still ripe for innovation. These demands are real, and they affect not only users and how they maintain friendships, but also brands and how they connect to customers. If the cost of realtime is paid in streamtime, then communication, not just information, is the problem we're facing.

Social Interaction Design: Structure

This post is inspired by today's excellent reflection On the thoughtful use of points in social systems by Adin Levin of Socialtext. Adina summarizes a twitter conversation that unfolded yesterday among "Kevin Marks, Tom Coates, Jane McGonigal, Tara Hunt, Josh Porter and a few others on the thoughtful use of points and competition in social systems."

I'm going to spin this off in a different direction for reasons of my own, but I highly recommend visiting Adina's post.

I want to address just a few somewhat philosophical points salient to the social media design field in general, and important to my own practice of social interaction design more specifically.

There's an intrinsic tension between three key positions, each of which we should have an understanding about. They are:

• the user
• the system
• the social media professional

Why the third? Because we observe user actions and build or implement social media systems, and therefore have notions about the other two, how they inter-relate, and need to reflect on our notions to better understand how they shape what we can do.

The user has interests and motives that we will never have complete access to — in fact by most accounts the user himself isn't aware of the reasons or causes of all his actions and choices. But the user matters to us because we do claim to take a user-centric approach to social media design. And not for no reason: capturing user interests and producing compelling and engaging social experiences is what it's all about.

And we recognize that there's this vast and complex social field there in which all manner of reasons, motives, incentives, interests, goals, and what have you that might account for what users do, why, and whether they will do it again. We won't know all of that, but for that we should not consider the user a black box, or explain user behavior on the basis of causes external to him or her. The user supplies his own motives and experience.

Now there's a natural tension between user-centricity and design. For the explanations of user action are subjective — anchored in the user's own stream of activity, and embedded in the user's experience of friendships and social structures that span time and space.

Design, however, needs objectivity. Things, elements, operations, ordered in support of functions having functionality. In short, uses.

Now, in the old days, that is, pre-social software, we could conflate the user and the use case. All was neat and tidy. The user was what her use of the software was, the use case described that use, and the system's success was a clear binary situation. We could describe users by their needs (I need to do this "because of" motive) or goals (I want to do this "in order to" motive). These supplied the utility served by means of transactions with the software. Easy pass/fail system problem: was the software successful, efficient, and effective.

Design requirements could then be articulated on the basis of user flow, activity, or action sequencing (wizards step the interaction for simplicity and effectiveness). And more. The point, in other words, being that we could structure user action with elements, codify button functions, articulate requirements for screen content, layout, and navigation, and even structure time. Then, according to the system's primary functions, we could filter data, sort results, and order them on the screen — using many tried and tested best practices.

Now, as professionals interested in designing and building social media, we need to consider a) the user experience b) the system design and c) our own perspectives and understanding of how a) and b) inter-relate.

• We can take a roughly causal view of it: the user responds to design constraints.
• Or a normative view: the user is constrained by the norms and values of a community of users
• Or a functional view: the user has needs and goals, and uses social media to accomplish these with and through other users
• Or a psychological view: social media present an external psychosocial world onto which users project their expectations, and from which they internalize the meanings of interaction outcomes
• Or a communication view: users maintain relationships and engage in communication through social media as they would in daily life, with varying notions of what social media are, do, and of the people who use them

And there are other views, some of which pertain strongly to brands (users have passions), to marketers (users consume brand messaging), to mass media (user eyeballs have moved to social media), to customer service (users have the power), and so on.

My point being that each of us, as social media industry practitioner, likely has a take on this that leans in some direction or another.

I often find that design, engineering, and product folks tend to have more objective explanations of What Social Media do and how they work. Marketers, PR, Sales, etc have a more people (user) centric view. And so on.

We need both, but we also need to know the limits of our own perspectives — else we run the risk of confusing what it means to us with what it means to the user. And of confusing how the design works with what the user is doing. They are not the same.

Social interaction is a particular kind of action. Social action is oriented to another person. It has the relationship of "I : Thou" or of "We." Now the fact that social media are media — that action is mediated by means of design elements that have their own "meanings" and by language as writing, sight as image or recording, and interaction through navigation — this all matters, for any social action is not directly social but mediately social.

Terms like proximity, connection, relationship, conversation — we need to recognize that these are terms applied to a world that is phenomenologically constructed and ontologically absent. Or better, imagined. I am, now, typing into a little box talking to you, attached to a little box. Terms we use to describe the social evoke precisely the social attributes that world is missing. It is missing proximity, connection, relationship, and conversation. Just a point worth making.

Clearly this point serves little purpose aside from dusting off our idiom a bit, but clarity in perspective requires a good wipe now and then.

So, to where I wanted to go with this. Social interaction needs to accommodate users, as individuals. Needs to accommodate users with other users (social action, communication, and social practices). Needs to accommodate design (structure of elements and resources, rules, functionalities, and systemness: structure in and over time).

Anthony Giddens has a nice take on this. His view, called "structuration theory," claims that social structure is a duality: it is real, but doesn't exist unless reproduced by people constrained and enabled by it. The user has agency, structure constrains and enables action. This is perfect (IMHO) for social systems.

He makes three helpful distinctions around structure:

• structural principles: Principles of organization of societal totalities
• structures: Rule-resource sets, involved in the institutional articulation of social systems
• structural properties: Institutionalized features of social systems, stretching across time and space

I find these very useful. For the challenge is in trying not to confuse design and structure with causality (that a user responds to constraints). And it permits seeing the ways in which social "stuff" happens when users begin, haphazardly and around a particular tool, app, site (etc) to form practices (the sticky). For social practice is structuring: relations, behavior, expression, meanings.

There is "structure," then, on the social side and on the design side. And in between, the interactions and communication are how the whole thing is reproduced, constantly, daily, all the time. (And why flow and streams are such an important shift.)

There is more to say here on interaction and communication (language has structure, interaction has structure), and how users use each to relate to each other, while also supplying the juice that turns the social media engine. But this was meant to be a quickie and I don't want to violate your sense of good and proper form.

(I will say, though, that I think it's in articulating social practices that supply social organization, use of symbolic elements that stabilize meanings used in social media (little design features, nav, icons etc), and then how the system transforms communication into infomation and social content, about which it offers system messages, views, aggregate data as a reflection of the system on its own use by users.)

So I think that as we move forward in our approach to designing the social, we might reflect on our positions and approaches. By doing so, we might shape the field, and I think it's an emerging one, so that we can see how practitioners with different areas of focus and experience fit together.

Social Interaction Design: Beyond Use

Interaction design works, in part, because it is able to anticipate user behaviors. Design theory models interactions: with products or services and their features, functions, interface, and so on. And if we're reasonably competent and a little lucky, we get the outcomes we expect.

But it's one thing to model interactions with software or hardware, and another to model the social interactions so critical to social media.

The conventional (non-social) approach to interaction involves a single user experience. User-centric approaches provide ways of thinking through that user's goals, needs, and objectives. The idea being that by modeling interactions based on theoretical notions of user-centric objectives, software can be designed to successfully and satisfactorily engage with the user.

In short, the interaction is between the user and the product (software). The design methodology defines user needs and thus suggests successful design solutions.

But the methodology is based on a functionalist view of interaction and an instrumentalist view of user goals. Functionalism, grossly stated, reduces human interests to causal sequences. It is based on the idea that we know what we want to achieve, and how to go about achieving it.

This is called instrumentalism because it suggests that humans do things for a reason, and human activity is understood as a combination of acts, actions, and activities in which ends are met by appropriate means. We all know where this leads us: to a view of human interaction that can be optimized, operationalized, quantified, and assessed in overly simplistic terms of success or failure, efficiency or inefficiency, and effectiveness of ineffectiveness.

The reason this approach fails to account for interactions around social media is two-fold. First, it fails to grasp the rich social dimensions of social interaction and communication, which as we experience daily are not governed by rational and instrumental goals alone. Secondly, it propagates a misleading claim that design structures and organizes interactions in social media (because design satisfies user needs and goals) — which of course it doesn't.

Social interaction involves two users (or more). Their interactions with each other, mediated and facilitated by social media (the software), are what qualify whether a system "works" or not. But to incorporate the experiences of two users into a social interaction design methodology we need to do more than simply double up user-centricity (say, as a two-user framework). It's not just a case of two users instead of one. It's a case of two subjects communicating and interacting with each other. And that means relational dynamics.

The critical insight into a social interaction design model then must absolutely begin with human interaction. And the most fundamental idea in human interaction is that it rests on double contingency. Double contingency is the basis of inter-subjectivity: each subject intends and interprets meaning freely. The meaning experienced by one user, even if it explains some of what the user intends to communicate and do with the other user, is not the same as the meaning experienced and interpreted by the other. The contingency comes into play simply because meaning cannot be attached to the interaction, but "exists" only in the experiences of the users involved.

This generates some perplexing problems. As much as we would like to stabilize and define the interaction's meaning, there is no such thing as objective meaning in social interaction. There is only the meaning experience by each participating user. Meaning is inter-subjective, not objective. An outsider cannot know it, define it, or even observe it. Designers are the outsiders, and in social media all interactions are meaning-based, not information based. (Information can be said to be "meaningful" objectively, but interactions are meaningful only to a person who experiences subjectively.)

The fact that as social interaction designers, we have no access to the subjective world of meaning and experience of the user does not mean we lose our ability to observe and describe what's going on entirely. It means what it has meant to any professional in the human and social practices: we need to know how we know what we observe and describe, and be aware of the limitations of our knowledge acquired and explained. The meaning of an interaction, or of communication, is not what the observer thinks it is (that would be ridiculous). It belongs to experience itself, and in many ways is not even conscious to the person experiencing it.

From some perspectives this is not an intractable problem. Social interactions become consistent, recognizable, and familiar as personal and individual habits are taken up as routines, pastimes, games, and many other forms of "conventional" interaction. As long as we, as practitioners, grant that we cannot offer a complete account of the inner experience of each and every user, and that we seek instead to observe social media to find common social practices and forms of interaction, we can still model interactions and describe frames of experience in generalized terms.

(Note: The goal of social theory is to go from particular descriptions to general descriptions. User-centric design is of two-minds on this and is in some ways stricken with an internal paradox: emphasis on user experience lays claim to the particular (an individual); design for all intents and purposes can only model the general.)

Related design disciplines encounter a similar problem. One that may serve as an analogy is urban planning. Urban planning anticipates social interactions facilitated by architectural choices. It recognizes the importance of general social phenomena: traffic and traffic flow, congestion, activity, commerce, the congregation of people, and so on. Urban planners are social architects, and they can model and design for these social phenomena. They cannot guarantee that fans have a good game, but they design stadiums to the observed social practices of what people do when attending live events.

Or to take another example, multi-player games. Designers of multi-player games use social interactions as an intrinsic aspect of game play. The standard ingredients of game design — roles, positions, rules, scoring, powers, levels of difficulty, etc — are only the game's elements, rules, and design. They are not the same as game play itself. Game designers anticipate the experience of game play by their users separately from the elements which comprise the game. They work game play and experience into the design by anticipating play: taking turns, slowing down, speeding up, providing back-channels for player communication, structuring collaboration, competition, and other social dependencies, etc.

Event planners represent another example. Event planners work with their understanding of large (or small) groups of people, often bringing their sense of time, timing, and duration to bear on activity scheduling (from the rituals of events like opening and closing ceremonies, to satisfying the seemingly banal needs of audiences, such as wi-fi, name tags, coffee breaks, and swag).

There are of course other examples of disciplines and professions that are social in nature.

Designing for the social interactions of people using social and communication applications, however, is complicated by the fact that the interaction is mediated. Social interactions online are not the same as they are offline. There is less "there," there online: people aren't together, so it is impossible to describe "what's happening." Often times, people aren't interacting at the same time, so it is difficult to observe a temporality or duration. And in the absence of a sense of shared space or location and shared period of time, we lose our ability to refer to a "situation." It becomes difficult to observe, let alone describe, what's going on.

We may then be tempted to describe interactions using what can be seen on the screen: posts, messages, ratings, votes, and so on. But that would be to miss out completely on the relationships, the intentions, motives, communication, symbolic interactions, and other aspects of social interaction which transcend empirical evidence. Not to mention time, which is such a critical dimension to social interactions. For all social interactions involve references to past activity and create opportunities for future activity. Relationships are nothing if not the orientation we take to others over time, moreso perhaps when we are absent from each other than when we are present.

Designers like to talk about context. Context situates activity, and activity's acts and actions. Context situates participants, and frames their interactions for a stretch of time (an episode or period of time). Context, in design speak, is like situation in social interaction speak.

Most social encounters involve a situation. Situations supply almost unlimited possibilities for creating and experiencing meaning, using all aspects of social action and communication together. Meaningfully intended acts, taken up by participants oriented to a meaningful situation and meaningful interaction, may objectify their meaning intentions through language, use of symbols, engagement in ritualized social transactions, and so on. And because members of a shared cultural background can recognize these externalized intentions, and the languages and objects used for expression and communication, common practices can emerge and become familiar. (Familiarity breeds repetition, repetition becomes routine.)

The designer of social media must work without access to "a situation" and all the context that situations provide (which we can also describe as the framing of experience). Instead, designers have only their inherited orientation towards the user experience, and a framework of social practices continuously evolving around the media that sustain them.

(Second Note: We should note that users and experiences are different. Use cases conflate the two by combining a need, goal, or objective with the user experiencing that need, goal, or objective. It's a phenomenological reduction of the experience used to define a generalizable "case." In our (use) case: the user has the need that defines the utility of the use. This kind of definition of user experience conveniently leaves out the user interests unmet or inconsequential to an application's functionality.)

Users are not just their needs and goals; and are not just the experience they are having now. In social media, user personality differences are profound and important. It is in fact likely that certain combinations of user personality types not only work well, but contribute to the growth and success of some social media systems. Users are different and their experiences are different.

So where do we stand, given that context defined as experience and practice involves factors that transcend what can be empirically observed? And given that a reduction of user centricity to needs and goals results in misleading use cases founded on a functionalist notion of utility?

We simply don't have the language required to observe, describe, and explain existing online interactions yet. Nor to anticipate the possible field of online social interactions, let alone the probable future of social interaction design innovations.

To produce this framework, we would need to both describe the user's interactions with a social media system and explain, if not predict, the social outcomes and practices that make the application a viable social system.

There may be an aporia in the theory and methodology. To wit, a complete and systematic description and framework of online social interaction may be impossible, not because such a framework simply could not account for all that goes on descriptively, not to mention proscriptively. Rather, because much of online social interaction is rife with "failure": missed and failed communication, and failed or fading interactions.

With the breakdown sometimes comes a breakthrough. Failure, in this case, is not total. Failure may instead suggest that a design methodology oriented to success is simply the wrong approach to social phenomena.

Design normally regards its successes and failures in terms of functional efficiency and efficacy. But in social media, function is not the best metric. In fact, systems that are poor examples of design may indeed result in high volumes of use and activity: the less well something works, the more social interaction and communication may be involved in using it. We might say that people like mess and messy, or that they like to go where the action is (to quote sociologist Erving Goffman).

Can mess and failure be designed, such that social activity results? Possibly, though it might make more sense to think of mess as "ambiguity."

Goffman observed that in social situations, rituals provided a means for corrective behavior and action when the communication itself had broken down. He observed that ritual picks up where grammar leaves off: that when grammatical rules are broken, other ways of making sense are required. And this is true in social media. So true, in fact, that the entire genre may be described as a failing, error-prone, discombobulated and wholly-uncoordinated mess of a social experiment. And that it is only through the persistence, tolerance, and fascination of its users that much of social media survives with users intact.

But if this is the case, and I believe that some degree it is, then the failures, mistakes, misunderstandings, and missed connections serve to create new forms of interaction. These interactions answer the need created by failure, and take shape as gestures, communication, acts, and the myriad tacit codes of conduct that distinguish people, groups, identities, and more.

Ambiguity, unresolved and unclarified, may drive users on to repeat and reiterate their attempts at expressing themselves and obtaining a response or reply. Ambiguity may motivate those who wish to know more or understand better. Ambiguity may fuel rich and complex social dynamics in which the myriad of acts intended to figure out what's going on and how to do it in effect create what's going and how it works.

These phenomena exceed the capabilities of design to regulate or control — but not the abilities of designers to anticipate and accommodate. A social interaction design discipline oriented to regulating social dynamics, responding with agility to emerging social practices, steering social outcomes by dynamically controlling, gating, preempting, and amplifying communication by means of navigation, content layout, emphasis, symbolic objects, and channeling might promise a new kind of design. One that oriented to outcomes but which emphasizes system processes and social dynamics over structure and stability.

I do not know if this means a different kind of design or a different kind of designer. Social interaction design, to me, is not a matter of designing the screen but of designing systems for interaction. It's my impression that the boxes by which many of us design and with which we try to contain the experience need to be opened up to systems and their processes, and interactions and their social dynamics. It strikes me that user experience professionals could enjoy a rich and fascinating engagement with social media if we can further develop approaches to social interaction that accurately anticipate outcomes by means of a grasp of these dynamics.

This is by no means a finiished thought, and I welcome your thoughts and comments.

Transparency: truth in social media

I consider social media to be talk technologies, and I've been suspecting of late that the debate around "transparency" is a debate about communication. I say this only because transparency is sometimes used to describe branding, advertising, PR, marketing, corporate behavior, and of course, use of social media. All of these activities can possibly benefit, or suffer, from transparency.

Think of transparency and you see clarity. You see through the foil, the "grand gestures" (Deb Shultz), and the clever tactics of corporate marketing and PR. Transparency then describes how a brand relates to its cusomtomers.

Transparency certainly involves a company's interactions with its customers. This impacts the customer's experience, and thus idea, of the brand. From the customer's perspective, you get what you see, and what you ask for, you sometimes get also. We sometimes call this authenticity, meaning that a company is sincere in its customer relationships and communication.

Company walls, too, become transparent &emdash; if not on the inside, then on the outside. Company disclosure is an element of transparency: companies that no longer try to conceal their inner workings, or which are "open" to sharing their activities with the outside world, are transparent. This kind of transparency involves the visibility of company actviities.

Then there is customer service. This, too, is a key feature in the new transparency. Here it generally means treating customers with respect, fairly and responsively (in a timely manner). This involves a kind of equality in relations, in the sense that, as the saying goes, the customer is always right. It's transparency because it puts the company in its right place: not above, but in the service of, the customer. This is the rightness, the justice, or fairness of relations.


To return to the beginning, then, I find these different accounts of transparency interesting because they all involve "truth." I deliberately avoid Colbert's infamous claim to "truthiness," because that is just the image of truth.

There are, in pragmatics (a branch of linguistics), three claims to truth made in all our communication:

• a claim to truth as fact (something is true about reality)


• a claim to truthfulness (somebody is sincere, means what s/he says)


• and a claim to authority (somebody is allowed to claim what s/he claims, e.g. has the social position or authority)

These aspects of truth in communication underlie the concept of transparency.

Transparency is:

• truth in brand communication and behavior: factual accuracy, full disclosure, no manipulation, denial, misrepresentation of the truth


• truthfulness in brand intent: authentic self-representation, genuine, sincere, and honest communication, behavior with integrity, respect, and understanding (including the listening part)


• truth as the right to speak and act: respect for laws and norms, codes of conduct, etiquette, shown by associating with the brand's own community, audience, and marketplace as an equal participant committed to a shared and common future, sustainably and compassionately

I suspected that transparency had something to do with communication when it became virtually interchangeable with authenticity. These are terms we use in describing people, and trust, especially. They apply to people because they involve intentions, actions, speech, behavior: human stuff, deeply social stuff.

We might in fact say that transparency is really about humanizing for-profit companies. That as professionals, and as consumers, we ask for transparency in corporate behavior because it is what we expect from state and government behavior: accountability. In other words, transparency is in the zeitgeist.

One final thought. For transparency is not all that it's cracked up to be, for all and at all times equally. As tax payers, it is a citizen's right to expect accountability in government actions.

Companies that sell products, and which use their brand reputation to do so, are paid by consumers for their products. There is no social contract, but an exchange of money. In other words, the brand that embraces transparency does so in its own self interest. I'm not saying that this invalidates corporate transparency, but that it complicates it. Social media may want to be used authentically. But companies and brands are unlikely to embrace full transparency.