11
- November
2005
Posted By : Adrian Chan
Social interactions scale uniquely

Social experiences and interactions scale uniquely. Which is just one reason that social interaction design needs to pay close attention to the intervention of technology in communication and interaction. A new feature at an online community, for example, not only changes interactions between two users. Those changes scale up, introducing a new understanding of “what’s going on”, and of how to proceed…. Some outlined thoughts here:

• Individual user experience: Ambiguities in communication: what’s intended, how to respond or reply, what comes next, when is it over, etc.
• Group user experience: ambiguities of communication, intent, context, interaction and so forth are scaled, and produce interpersonal and relational ambiguities among members of the group, team, etc.
• Macro social repercussions: ambiguities introduced by the mediation of communication by technology produce confusion, loss of purpose, misunderstanding, anomie, and possibly some amount of social disintegration.

• Individual user experience: Competency issues, such as interface problem, how to use technology features and functions, as well as how to extend those into practices to make them even more valuable
• Group user experience: incompetency with the technology and mediated process leads to ineffectual communication, inefficiencies of information transfer, activity coordination, knowledge production, transaction execution and verification, and so on.
• Macro social repercussions: incompetency with technology use produces communication failures and lost opportunities to successfully circulate messages and social claims.

• Individual user experience: Degrees of participation in the technology or practice, from light usage to compulsive behavior
• Group user experience: differences of degree of participation among users of a technology leads to imbalances within a group, team, or other collectivity of role practice and adoption, task completion, group communication, maintenance of organizational structure and individual positions within it, and so on.
• Macro social repercussions: imbalances lead to damage to organizational, institutional, and social hierarchies, authorities, roles, and their functional contribution to social cohesion.

• Individual user experience: Transitivity, or the degree to which a user allows communication to flow through him or her (whether actively or passively).
• Group user experience: resistance to transitivity or breakdowns in flow of communication produce group or team communication failures, dead end messaging and interaction, isolated but not shared successes, and so on.
• Macro social repercussions: lost and broken communication cripples decision-making and follow-through at the level of macro societal processes.

• Individual user experience: Displacement of individual and personal communication issues onto technologies, and vice versa.
• Group user experience: communication mix-ups and misunderstandings caused by the confusion of interpersonal and technical issues leads to lost group or team cooperation, misunderstandings, conflict, and compromised attempts to resolve them.
• Macro social repercussions: confusion of interpersonal and technical communication and its effects demands additional conflict resolution and efforts directed a social processes.

• Individual user experience: Stresses induced by expectations imposed by and through use of technology, as well as by unexplained inconsistencies, resistances, and other individual and social use issues.
• Group user experience: stresses on individuals lead to group or team dysfunctionality resulting from displaced attempts to mitigate stress (which result in confusion of group or team cohesion and process).
• Macro social repercussions: stresses result in a need to address their symptoms and effects, thus committing social energies to the place explicit attention on byproducts of ineffective communication.

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