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.