Social Analytics and Understanding the User

I've been having a fascinating time reading through papers on NextStage Evolution, a company in the business of metrics and online media analysis. And I'm compelled to write briefly on some core methodological principles, primarily because the methodology behind social analytics warrants careful consideration. All of us in this space want to know what the user wants, does, and might likely do. That would be valuable information, and having it would allow us to anticipate and deliver, and engage, with users. Unfortunately, user's don't declare their motives or intentions, and so it is up to analysis to model user interests from user behavior.

I sincerely believe that social media analysis needs to account not only for the user's proximate activities, those being his or her online behavior and actions as trackable by analytical tools (be they within a walled garden social network, on and around blogs, in conversation tools like twitter, or even through social applications and widgets), but also deeper and less available interests. These are the interests that underlie interpersonal interactions, communication, and relationships. And no matter how near or far interactions, communication, or relationships may appear through social media applications, they form the basis of user agency.

Agency is a sociological concept, and it underlies user actions and activities. Agency, to me, involves intentionality and motive, as well as content (information), and is interested (identifies or attaches to an object or subject). User experience is about agency. Interaction design is about agency. And inaction can be about agency, too. Fundamental to the concept of agency is that of self-reflexivity -- that we know what we are doing.

In social situations, activity and interaction are framed. That is, they unfold within a frame, which is to say that they make sense within context, and over a stretch of time. And in social interaction, the frame is often mutually constructed -- two or more people know what they are doing and if asked, would describe the situation they are in with a high level of agreement. Their recognition of the frame would agree even if they are in disagreement with one another.

This contextuality of action, I think, applies to mediated interactions as it does to face to face encounters. The difference is real, but is understood. Some interesting misinterpretations of intent, motive, interest, and so on of course occur online, and indeed can enrich the experience with a touch of play, self-reference, and so on. But as is the case of the comedian who tells a joke about a pope in an airplane telling a story about an ace fighter pilot.... frames can be layered and embedded within one another, and we come out the other end for the most part still making sense.

I bring all of this up because it informs how we read and interpret, and thus also design, anticipate, and model, social media user experiences and social practices. Users provide more than just information and at the same time are less than informing. Our models need to interpret, for example, whether a user has recommended a movie to somebody, in front of a community, to be shared among friends, because she enjoys writing reviews, has a reputable movie blog, is considered (or believes herself to be considered) a movie expert, or believes in the principle of contributing reviews to the common good.

Would we get this from the review itself? Not likely. From envelope information (to whom it's addressed, how messaged, where posted, how delivered)? From comments and their agreement/disagreement? From past movies reviewed? From movie categories covered (e.g. new releases vs film noir). I belabor the point -- it's complex (though do-able). In all cases, however, agency is neither explicit nor stated. ("I hereby submit this movie review to this esteemed blog for the sake of my reputation as a budding film noir critic and blogging habitue".)...

Designing social media to engage users is much simpler than accurately interpreting their actions, for design succeeds as long as users are compelled by their own experience. Users will remain engaged even if the experience is riddled with theft, robbery, and deception. To wit, Vegas. Social interaction designers don't need to know what compels a user, as long as they understand that there is a range of users, and that their system facilitates communication and interaction, as well as an experience of presence which varies user by user, and which leads to social practices in the aggregate. Users work with what is given, on the screen and architecturally, as well as with those others who are present, and participating. Online interactions don't have to be efficient, or even effective, to be rewarding.

But like the anthropologist studying a culture from the outside, or an archaelogist interpreting the meanings of cultural artifacts and found objects, analytical software, as a non-participant, is confronted with a more profound challenge: reverse engineering the artifacts, button presses, posts, comments, ratings, bookmarks and so on left behind by users whose mindfulness or mindlessness would be impossible to measure, and at times difficult to distinguish.

Information about what users do is not available in the information about what users have done.

This is where I tack differently from models based more squarely in data analysis and user activity tacking and measurement. Those methods, and I'm not a qualified statistician, may observe the disaggregated and yet predict in the aggregate, and successfully so, if we are to place any faith whatsoever in the long tail. Metrics may serve purposes of campaign analysis and even management. But engagement (social media marketing) tools would require a communicable messaging and engagement platform. The difference? Agency. Communicable engagement seeks not the acceptance of the user but his or her participation -- it anticipates the significance of agency.

I so strongly believe that social analytics ought to be rooted in an intersubjective framework of action, and not one of information gathering alone, that I'll close with a few quotes from Erving Goffman, master observer of social interactions and mentor in spirit:

"Given a speaker's need to know whether his message has been received, and if so, whether or not it has been passably understood, and given a recipient's need to show that he has received the message and correctly—given these very fundamental requirements of talk as a communication system—we have the essential rationale for the very existence of adjacency pairs, that is, for the organization of talk into two-part exchanges. We have an understanding of why any next utterance after a question is examined for how it might be an answer." Erving Goffman, Forms of Talk, P. 12

"Note that insofar as participants in an encounter morally commit themselves to keeping conversational channels open and in good working order, whatever binds by virtue of system constraints will bind also by virtue of ritual ones. The satisfaction of ritual constraints safeguards not only feelings but communication, too." Erving Goffman, Forms of Talk, p. 18

"And just as system constraints will always condition how talk is managed, so, too, will ritual ones. Observe that unlike grammatical constraints, system and ritual ones open up the possibility of corrective action as part of these very constraints. Grammars do not have rules for managing what happens when rules are broken." Erving Goffman, Forms of Talk, 21

"Uttered words have utterers; utterances, however, have subjects (implied or explicit), and although these may designate the utterer, there is nothing in the syntax of utterances to require this coincidence." Erving Goffman, Forms of Talk 3

"The rules of conduct which bind the actor and the recipient together are the bindings of society. But many of the acts which are guided by these rules occur infrequently or take a long time for their consummation. Opportunities to affirm the moral order and the society could therefore be rare. It is here that ceremonial rules play their social function, for many of the acts which are guided by these rules last but a brief moment, involve no substantive outlay, and can be performed in every social interaction. Whatever the activity and however profanely instrumental, it can afford many opportunities for minor ceremonies as long as other persons are present. Through these observances, guided by ceremonial obligations and expectations, a constant flow of indulgences is spread through society, with others who are present constantly reminding the individual that he must keep himself together as a well demeaned person and affirm the sacred quality of these others. The gestures which we sometimes call empty are perhaps in fact the fullest things of all." Erving Goffman, Interaction Ritual, 91




To put this simply, if it were Prime Suspect (or my favorite, Cracker), vs CSI -- I'd pick Prime Suspect.

Save This Page

The Not Being here of Twitter, and No Being here of Friendfeed

People are again afoot, around the world, in protest. Protesting against (Iraq, Paris, Haiti), protesting for (China, South Korea, Irvine, CA). Pro-tests by Chinese students at American universities for Chinese pride. Con-tests in Iraq against American "occupiers." Marching, gathering, mobbing, to launch waves of protest, or encircling, rioting, stalking, to counter and disrupt. Protesters united, in expressions of support, or opposition. What binds them is a commonality of purpose, and commonality of identity.

...

Tribal, institutional, chaotic, swelling, faltering, people in numbers large and small, inspired, desperate, at the brink of panic and rising to their feet, humanity in motion propelled forward by the high-pressure flux of frustration that screams between the rock and the hard place, a river of individual intensities brought together by historical necessity and the collective inevitability of a shared insistence that the future not be what it's becoming to so many, suddenly and at once: a void, and elsewhere.

...

Where else but in the river of information and flow of collective consciousnesses does culture form by dint of link and aggregate through disintermediation? Presence that is absence, being there where there is no there there. Feeds fed into rivers and yet each of us stands in his own stream. That curious crowd that can be seen but cannot be seen looking back. The propagation of messages that only rarely circulate and loop, falling into runs and rounds, and which more often than not fade out as a trail does when it's tail is long.

...

Audiences -- the reason we're here, and for why we speak, in front of or alongside, amongst and in between. Gaps are hard to fill online, though they are what our media paper over and interconnect. Echoes in a chamber of webbing, ribbons of time coming undone, discontinuous, cut, deferred, and delayed. The Self, interrupted.

...

Friendfeed, aggregation of disaggregated talk, confuses me. I don't feel in the river, as I do with Twitter. With Twitter, while it flows too strongly and loud, I feel as if I'm standing in the same stream as everyone else. And while I know this is false, it's an illusion that twitter's display successfully maintains. Friendfeed is not all of the river, and not all of those who stand in the river that I know flows through twitter. It remarks to me that my friends have posted, which is impersonal and distant, and though I holler like all others to tweet on twitter, I'd rather hear the hollering than read a report.

...

Crowds do according to how they are moved. Markets make as they are made. Production produces by how it is produced. We live in the communication age. Talk is our production, the communicating self informs. Information is our market. Meaning is the means of our production. Disrupted and disaggregated, we go social to re-mediate our meaning.

...

Bound no longer to the earth, it is up to us to bind with one another.

Save This Page

Influencers, Promoters, Inviters and other social media user types

I happened on a local bookstore going out of business yesterday and raided the psychology section, picking up a number of cardinal texts at $2.98 a pop. One of them was Please Understand Me, by David Keirsey and Marilyn Bates, of the Keirsey personality test. Actually, they call it temperament, not personalities. Reading the complete descriptions of what makes up INTFs and ENTPs et al was a real eye-opener, not to mention an entertaining and insightful read.

Character types, modified to account for the effects of social media and related technologies on interaction and communication, and taking into account users' communication styles, relationship preferences, and sense of self and self image, could be a powerful addition to current efforts to architect social analytics and conversation analytics programs.

The state of the art in measuring and making use of social media users and social graphs still centers on relatively straight-forward views of influence, attention, intention, and social capital. While these are more easily measured on closed social networks, a model for analysis of distributed social media tools, including twitter and feed-based apps, is clearly on a lot of people's minds. PR, marketing, advertising, branding, and customer service industries all want in on social media, and whether they stand by the sidelines watching, tracking, and monitoring, or jump into the river of conversation and engage, analytical tools and engagement applications will be essential. Nobody, but nobody, could possibly manage to be in the flow everywhere and at all times.

Traditional mass media approaches to audience metrics may have given us the right questions, and brought us to an appropriate starting point. But social media approaches will be needed now if we're to make proper sense of audience behavior. And here's where character psychologists like Keirsey might be of help.

I have an approach to social interaction design that takes conventional view of user experience and interaction design and extends it to social media users. With an eye to interpersonal dynamics, communication, and social practices, I like to call user behaviors "competencies." Each of us, as users interacts with social media and with others using it according to personal preferences, tastes, and most importantly, perceptions and interpretations. Our social skills online are social competencies. But each of us is different in our uses and, as psychologists would say, our behavior is informed by our psychology.

While this might be looking down the road a couple years, wouldn't an effective social analytics tool, and engagement platform (say, for advertisers and marketers) use not only social metric data but also psychological and personality models? Take the concept of the influencer, for example. As it stands today, an influencer is a well connected, credible, trusted, and active. He or she may also be on topic. That's not currently in the model, but should and probably will be, shortly, as we fold in not only who the person is but what s/he talks about (with credibility). So we might add expert to influencer.

But there are other kinds of user types, too, whose role in conversation can benefit specific marketing, branding, or advertising interests. There's the expert. The inviter. The emcee. The connector. The artist. The follower. And more. Keirsey has 16 types, I've got a similar number, tho based around communication and presencing styles. The inviter, for example, would serve the needs of event promoters. The follower, the needs of PR and news dissemination. The expert validates new products. The emcee gathers together like-minded friends, and would benefit branding or entertainment rollouts.

This is a new medium, and it begs for appropriate analysis. The metrics used in mass media measurement serve the purposes of a medium in which two-way and friend or peer-network constrained interactions don't exist. The future is engagement. Granted, masses of data will have to be mine and modeled. But isn't that what we're good at?

There's consistency in psychology, and applied appropriately and insightfully, durability in behavior and relationships. The noise will subside if we can wise up and if we put users first. If we fail, the doors blow open and a river of spam will inundate the flow. Either way, the mass marketplace is going to enter the stream.

Keirsey temperament overview see:
http://www.simpletone.com/cdi/aharon/types.htm

Save This Page

Groundswell Social Technographics quiz, or Some of the Above

Take this social technographics quiz and see whether you agree with the results. I can't agree with mine, but that's probably because I found it hard! Several of the questions were for women (I checked male but the quiz isnt gendered), and frankly it's hard for me to answer anything other than "hire a planner" when asked to imagine that I'm a bride getting worked up for the big day.

There weren't any "none of the above" choices, and the questions and multiple choice answers were highly specific. I agree that "self-reporting" what you think you are may be less accurate than a contextualize question (if you were at a party...), but some of these survey questions offered a tough set of responses.

No wonder I came out as a spectator. I think by the criteria used in this survey, creators are those who want to tell everyone about what they did, think, like, no matter who's listening, and even think about it when they're not online. I'd call those addicts!

On a more serious note, the idea of user personalities is hugely compelling. But the way to organize them, IMHO, is around

--how people communicate (do they talk about themselves, do they like to know who they are talking to, do they like to talk about or with, competitively or consensually),

--how they feel (whether they are sensitive to how they feel online, how they think others see them),

--how they relate (do they get the attention of others because people follow them; because they pay attention to their friends and colleagues, or because they are often group/social participants)

Because blogs, talk tools like twitter, profile-based sites, ratings and review services, mobile and location services, rich media content sites, collaborative writing/editing sites, and commerce/trade sites all offer different ways of engaging. Not all of them require the post-centric contributions covered in this technographic profile survey.

It's a provocative little survey though. And I'm sure there will be some good progress made this year in developing psych profiles for social media users. (I'd share mine right now if they were ready -- but they need more work yet.)

Discover Your Groundswell Social Technographics Profile Your Result: Spectator   Thanks to you, the Collectors, Critics and Creators have an audience. Because you consume the content others produce, marketers try to influence your Groundswell Social Demographic group by reaching the Creators and Critics. With 48% of the US online population, you Spectators represent the largest Groundswell Social Demographics group. Thanks for keeping socialTNT in business :)
Inactive
Creator
Collector
Critic
Joiner
Discover Your Groundswell Social Technographics Profile See All Our Quizzes

Take the quiz

Save This Page

Senior Fellow at SNCR this year!

Hi folks,

I'm pleased to announce that I"ll be a Senior Fellow at the Society for New Communications Research this year!

I'll be focusing on research in a couple areas: social media marketing and advertising, and end user experiences. Both may fuel work in social analytics, contingent on research findings and industry interest.

I'm currently deep in a white paper on the psychology of the user experience of social media and will make it available as soon as I'm finished. It's a deep reading of the encounter users have with the social interface, the many possible interpretations and motivations that comprise user activity, and the core personality types found online. Of everything I've done to date, this one has been the most interesting and I'm looking forward to feedback!

a

Save This Page

Social technology's transparency among teens

It's no surprise that many of today's youths exercise a their social skills through social media technologies. They've got a kind of socio-technical competence that would make many of us look like complete hacks. That's interesting to me. What happens to a person's competence in face to face interactions if she or he spends a great deal of time in mediated interactions? If, as a recent study claims, these technologies are truly transparent (a software designer's dream!), is their absence in face to face encounters noticeable? Are teens more likely to be shy in real life?

It's much easier to control one's own face if it's not in front of somebody else. We can hide behind our emotions if there's a screen to represent them instead. Flirtatious gestures, suggestive comments, messages, emoticons, jokes, and so on present the personal with the technical help of what amounts to a technical communication system. Codes, idioms, genres, forms of writing, posting, commenting and so on remove affect and flatten out differences, rendering communication somewhat less communicative...

It would be interesting to know if a new generation is becoming more shy in face to face situations.

And this is truly just hypothesizing out loud.. Is it possible that if the demands of getting through face to face encounters with successs, being and feeling liked and recognized while making others comfortable during some shared facetime -- without recourse to the screen and the imaginary sense of remote control that it can bestow upon its users -- is it possible that a reliance on technical mediation of the social could produce real symptoms?

Just as parents shrink at the communicative risks and unknowns, the faux pas that might lurk behind every dialog box and mouseclick... Would a dependence on the props of social media be seen and heard in conversation malaprops and stagefright?

If so, what a sad thing it would be. We get to know each other best in person.



Excerpts from The virtual generation by Jo Chandler, August 14, 2007


"As a new global survey of 18,000 youths commissioned by MTV and MSN has found, while today's youth are engrossed in a constant conversation, almost 40 per cent do not even notice the technology that enables it. This is despite a similar number saying that checking their mobiles is the first and last task of every day; two-thirds of them saying that checking who is online is their first priority whenever they boot up; and all of them using email or instant messaging every time they log in. They have skills that would have classified them as computer nerds a decade ago, but they don't regard themselves as technophiles. This is just their country."
....

"For girls, it is mostly about the social networks, with the music and tricks an add-on. For the boys it is the opposite. They enjoy the process of creating and sharing music and imagery and jokes - hence their love of YouTube; playing virtual games and invisible wars; breaking codes and deciphering clues to allow them to better understand and manipulate the technology."

....

"AS TEENAGERS' virtual networks expand, their real worlds contract. "We put more and more money into pastoral care, into communicating with each other, but when it comes to communicating face to face, we are poorer than we have ever been," says Shelford principal Pam Chessell.

....

She says the task of 15-year-olds is to begin to find and define themselves. But "teenagers are so immersed in their fabricated virtual identities that these become real to them"."

....

"They get bored so quickly. They need this gadgetry. They need to keep the balance of books and technology."

Save This Page

I can see (myself) for miles and miles and....

I don't normally write personal posts. But last night, during one of those proverbial late-night-staring-at-the-ceiling attempts to sweep the cobwebs from the corners of my mind in order to prepare it for rest, I had what felt like a small-to-middling realization. I remembered realizing, out on the playa one night at Burning Man, that I'd lived all my life unable to tell the difference between anger and resentment. Coming from others, I mean. That when a person was angry with my I immediately thought they resented me. What mattered of course was how this affect my response.
I realized last night, thinking about this project to define the "user" of social software as a user in conversation with him/herself as much as with "real" others, realized that there are some emotions that are easily mistaken online. Really big, important emotions. Though they're not really emotions; they're aspects of communication that involve emotion. But it's precisely because they're not expressed, they're read, that they are easily confused. Empathy and projection. A person might be empathetic or sympathetic, compassionate, in an email, or post, or comment. That would be our reading, our impression. But the person being compassionate might be projecting. Transactional Analysts described these kinds of phenomena as "crossed transactions."
For example: Bossman: Mary, get me a hundred copies of this report by lunch please. Mary: You don't own me you know! I do have other things to do! (They were a bit less PC back then; but you probably recognize the dynamic. Think of Chloe in 24). TA would have called this an adult-child transaction, wherein Mary responds as a child to a demanding parent.
So the thing that hit me was that there are certain kinds of communications, affective or emotionally rich ones, that are handled in face to face talk by use of body language, face, and of course the fact within seconds we can establish, by walking up or down the ladder of intensity and risk, each other's intentions. But in blogging, commenting, emailing, (less so in IM -- because it cycles through short turns and is actually connected to another person), we are required to read/interpret the intention behind what others say. And so we can read them generously, that is assigning to their words what seem to be their intentions. Or we can read them internally, that is through our own emotional complexes, including of course all the things we tend to hear because we're sensitive to them.
Some of the most important aspects of communication, those having to do with interest, with liking a person, with being acknowledged, ignored, agreed with or disagreed with, are essentially up for grabs. If we have emotional cobwebs and detritus, and I don't know a soul who doesn't, we recognize/encounter our own crap in other's words, and assign it to them (unless we're enlightened, in which case we can catch ourselves before answering!). Same with ideals, fantasies, wishes, etc: we might believe they mean it (when in fact *they're* engaged perhaps with their own idealizations). This would explain the tendency in dating sites for people to ascend the ramp to intimacy at great speed, only to then fall from the peak disastrously and walk away in great disappointment. The medium engages us with our own means of understanding another's intentions, but brackets their ability to correct where our heading.

Save This Page

The Opacity of Users in Transparent Technologies

Social software and social media sites present an interesting challenge to those of us interested in the user experience. Where the user experience in "conventional" software can be examined according to assumptions we (know how to) make about the user's goals, needs, and objectives, when it comes to social media we have to think outside the proverbial box.

The conventional view taken up in the world of software draws a straight and unbroken line from the user to the software application. The user's agency is goal-directed, values success and effectiveness, and engaged in needs-oriented activity (e.g. transferring funds online). But in social software sites, the user uses the "software" to engage with other users.

The user's activity is an encounter with the world of meanings produced by other users participating in some form of organized, structured, formal or informal "interaction." At times the user simply reads the contributions of others. At times s/he communicates with those others. At times s/he is in a self-reflective mode, aware of how things reflect on him/herself. At times s/he becomes immersed in an online encounter and is taken up with it.

Each of these variations--and I've sketched only a handful--involves a complex set of relationships, real and possible, among known or familiar, present or absent, individual, group, or collective, identified or anonymous participants. Investigating this matrix creates immense and radical challenges to UI, UX, and interaction designers. Psychology, sociology, economics, and anthropology each suggest theoretical approaches worth considering. But few of them can accommodate the medium, the technology itself, without upsetting some of the fundamental positions from which they are argued.

The intervention of a communication and publishing medium and the substitution of interaction tools functioning asynchronously --often through text, image, and sometimes video, but always involving a representation of the user's presence--requires us to think differently about what users are up to when they head online. These technologies shift ourselves away from ourselves, giving us a screen on which are painted words, statements, links, lists, pictures and whatnot, in place the other (person) him or herself.

If we are to make progress on the user psychology and relation to his experience of social media, we need to accept the basic fact that the "social" in social media is optimistic, perhaps deceptively so. Sure, we encounter others online. We "talk" to them through our blogs and comments. We "collaborate" with them, sharing files, bookmarking and tagging sites, creating photo sets, group blogs, and more. But communication that is mediated neither unfolds like it does when it is face to face--when people take an interest in each other as well as a shared social encounter--nor does interaction move through the rhythms, speeds, or intensities of activity that are possible in a live situation.

A new set of relations is emerging. They are not the obvious ones, those we've described until now as organizing activity on social media sites like those that serve dating, career networking, learning, socializing, buying/selling or other themed social practices. This new set involves the self to him or herself. It engages psychological factors like projection, introjection, transference, internalization, externalization, and so on.

It involves relations of number, from the couple to the triad/triangle, to clans, tribes, groups, crowds, and audiences. It might engage in the shifting and circulating economy of attention, of debts and gifts, governed by etiquette or set in a chaotic classroom melee. It can compel a user to an insight of self-realization, or develop into a fascination with an other (user). It might be organized or informed by acts of communication, suggestion, flirtation, admiration, appreciation, and these might become known through blog posts, emails, comments, discussions, messages or other gestural substitutes such as those offered as icons at many social software sites. And there are many more possibilities.

But they all engage a relation of self with self, and involve an impression of the other that is founded on the other's own attempt to present/express him or herself. All of this culminates in an enormously-varied experience of developing awareness of the other and of oneself at the same time, sometimes as a reflection off the other, sometimes as a projection of one's interpretation of the other. Interpretation and projection, substitution and displacement, talk as conversation and as its short-form exchanges--all unfold on a ribbon of time itself unreeling through discontinuities, fragments, segments, chains, and aborted episodes that do not come together so much as occur concurrently.

The social world online is a hall of mirrors in which it's hard to hold an image standing still, let alone in motion. More on this in the next few weeks.


Technorati tags: blogging, design, media, interaction design, social interaction design, social media, social networks, social software, sociology, theory, tagging, user generated, web 2.0, web

Save This Page

Eric Berne's Games People Play and social media

I've been busy working on several papers lately... blogging's been sparse at best... here's the first of three of the papers... reading notes on Eric Berne's notion of the transaction and the emotional "stroke"... must rest...

From the reading notes:
Eric Berne's Games People Play, popular during its time but no less fascinating and perhaps even relevant to a theory of mediated interaction, is a wonderful reading of the transactions of emotional "strokes" among people interacting with one another. For Berne, human interaction is always engaged in this fundamental exchange (his theory is exchangist, I think), one that seems to have an effect on the body and on personal well-being as well as having its obvious effect on emotional and psychological dispositions. Though we would have to conjecture as to how human interaction can even communicate with biological systems, I see no reason to so here: it's pretty obvious that we are capable of making each other feel good, as we're capable of truly stressing each other out also. That our moods affect our health is well, just as obvious.

What then of the interactions that occur when we're not face to face? What of Berne's stroke? Let's, for the challenge of it, take this fuzzy but genuine insight, this notion that we communicate in order to provision ourselves and others with a feeling of membership and well-being that has no content itself but is instead the subtext of all content of communication, and map its transposition into mediated social interaction.


Reading Notes: Eric Berne's Games People Play PDF, 17 pages. Eric Berne's work on transactional analysis has long fascinated me for its insights into a dimension of interaction that involves basic emotional acknowledgment and recognition: a dimension that would seem diminished by the online interactions and communication that occur without face to face transactions, but which might nonetheless motivate our interactions nonetheless. If it were the case that online interactions attempt to get at the emotional stuff of life that's not immediately present, perhaps through substitute signs, gestures, the use of etiquette or other displacements and substitions, then we could claim that the online world is thin, but offers promise. A lot can be done with ASCII.

All my reading notes are here.

Technorati tags: folksonomy, information architecture, interaction-design, interaction design, psychology social media, social-media-marketing, social-media, social-software, interaction design, social interaction design, social media, social network, social network marketing, social network strategy, social networking, social software, sxd, tagging, user-experience, user experience, web 2.0, web-20, web 3.0, web, web2-0, web2.0,

Save This Page

Alfred Schutz, F2F, Social Software, and Streams of Consciousness

“If I wish to observe one of my own lived experiences, I must perform a reflective Act of attention. But in this case, what I will behold is a past experience, not one presently occurring. Since this holds true for all Acts of attention to my own experiences, I know it holds true for the other person as well. You are in the same position as I am: you can observe only your past, already-lived-through experiences. Now, whenever I have an experience of you, this is still my own experience. However, this experience, while uniquely my own, still has its signitively grasped intentional object, a lived experience of yours which you are having at this very moment. In order to observe a lived experience of my own, I must attend to it reflectively. By no means, however, need I attend reflectively to my lived experience of you in order to observe your lived experience. On the contrary, by merely “looking” I can grasp even those of your lived experiences which you have not yet noticed and which are for you still prephenomenal and undifferentiated. This means that, whereas I can observe my own lived experiences only after they are over and done with. I can observe yours as they actually take place. This in turn implies that you and I are in a specific sense “simultaneous,” that we “coexist,” that our respective streams of consciousness intersect. To be sure, these are merely images and are inadequate since they are spatial. However, recourse to spatial imagery at this point is deeply rooted. We are concerned with the synchronism of two streams of consciousness here, my own and yours. In trying to understand this synchronism we can hardly ignore the fact that when you and I are in the natural attitude we perceive ourselves and each other as psychophysical unities.” Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World, 103

• How important is simultaneity to meaning?


• How important is it to interaction?


• How important is it for the "binding" that occurs between interactants when they are in a cooperative type of interaction?


• How important is it for the exchange of truth, for displays and confirmations of sincerity and authenticity, between interactants?


• Does culture change when we participate in asynchronous activities, when our interactions involve less actual being together, less coordination of our interaction in shared space and time, less in terms of getting on the same page emotionally, or of creating a mood, disposition, and common attitude?


• How critical is this moment of shared stream of consciousness, as described here by Schutz, to the production of human relations?


• How much of it can be leveraged as a basis of interaction when interaction cannot be face to face and must be mediated? Or is every asynchronous and technically-mediated interaction a tiny death, a departure from home, a lesser version of the real human experience?


• As it is in the philosophical duel between Isabbelle Huppert and Lily Tomlin/Dustin Hoffman in the film I Heart Huckabees, the question (or one question) seems to be: are we all connected, or is there an infinitessimally small but ever-present gap and space between us? Does the shared stream of consciousness described here really happen, or does it only seem to happen?

Technorati tags: asynchronous,
communication,
f2f,
information architecture,
interaction-design,
interaction design,
social interaction
social-media-marketing,
social-media,
social-software,
social interaction design,
social media,
social network,
social network marketing,
social network strategy,
social networking,
social software,
UI,
user-experience,
user experience,
web 2.0,
web-20,
web,
web2-0,
web2.0

Save This Page

Of You, Me, Mini-Me, Mass Media, and ... Mini Media

We think about social media, and social software (sites like Myspace.com, Friendster.net, Tribe.net) in different ways, but usually as software, or as a communication tool, online application or site. Though it was there the whole time, MySpace.com's growing presence in marketing boardrooms, butcher paper flapping on its easel as that giant sucking sound down on the street whines up to a terrible shrieking pitch as times a changing start blowing in the wind, has people truly nerve racked....
Notice that Myspace.com doesn't have "users," it has "kids." Software is for users. Kids, they have tools. Technologies. They have MySpace.com, and theirSpace indeed threatens mass media and for very good reason.
Modern marketing turns tall tales around a kind of language and grammar that, together with its images, celebs, experts, and trend-setters, can circulate messages that, when instructions are followed to repeat as necessary, accrue truthiness. Truthiness that's really a cognitive lapse of reason, a suspense of disbelief allowing us to believe these commercial messages, leading us ultimately to consume. In other words, because marketing speack doesn't come from a friend, marketing messages, and the mass media they're circulated through, have to do two things simultaneously: establish trust and believability in the source, and convey trust that they're telling the truth. Neither kinds of trust pre-exist the relationships we have with commerce, in other words, it's earned every time (and the media have become very good at it).
TheirSpace is a place where that kind of marketing isn't welcome. If the "kids" are going to launch a band, they'll launch one of their own, and they'll do it on theirSpace with theirFriends and theirWords. Marketers of course want in and want a piece of the action. They're worried that mass media may be losing its appeal in this "IM generation." Are we to believe that all it took was a crappy little social networking site to make the mass media giants wobbly?
Well, yes. Because MySpace is a tool of conversation, talk, genuine street-level hanging-out where commercial messaging is poo-pooed and laughed at. Like you wouldnt make a friend of Kraft singles would you, on a singles' site? Duh.
So I propose that add another term to our list of descriptors for social software: mini media. In fact we could nod to the grammatical necessities of urls like MySpace for fun: "MiniMedia."
Social software is a kind of mini mass media in which culture happens, as it does in the mass media, but through participation, profiles, social interaction, and so on. The critical difference being that the relationships are based on "friendship" (of varying thicknesses) and the talk is not commercial, it's just normal speech-like talk. This isn't your average software. It's a social system, it's got some amount of mass media in it, and while you may experience it through your browser, it's not just software, or web, or application.
MiniMedia, what do you think?

More soon on what a talk system and MiniMedia like MySpace means for the mass media, marketing, and messaging.

Technorati tags: Technorati tags: social-media-marketing,
advertising,
marketing,
mass media,
myspace,
social media
social-media,
social-software,
social interaction design,
social media,
social network,
social network marketing,
social network strategy,
social networking,
social software,
web 2.0,
web-20,
web,
web2-0,
web2.0

Save This Page

Podcasts and Podcasting on my mind

They say that hearing is the first of our senses to come to our awareness -- as our mother's heart beats through the early months of our lives. Marshall McLuhan, a mentor of mine and for a long time, "patron saint" of Wired magazine, made a career out of distinguishing media according to fundamental and primary relationships to our natural senses. His basic position: our perceptions of the world vary by the modes in which we perceive it, and cultures have preferences for the eye, the ear, the voice, the body, and so on (actually that pretty much covers it).

McLuhan wrote that Russians were incensed at our U2 over flights because they didn't like to be looked in on by spies; in contrast, Americans were outraged to find our Moscow embassy bugged from floor to ceiling, because we don't like to be listened in on. He wrote that some politicians would have failed during the TV era, that others were made by TV, an observation now famously used to describe the Kennedy-Nixon debates.

Along comes podcasting. Video blogging. Ipods that play video. Cell phones that play video. Televisions that don't play either (internet-based podcasts or videos). Media are getting mixed and mashed up in a range of consumer products, most of which would of course like to become hits, trends, and market makers.

I do a lot of walking and train riding these days, mostly to get out into the sun, but also to stick a pair of earbuds into my ears and shut out the world. (Kidding about that last part). And I'd like to share some thoughts on podcasts that pick up where this thing kicked off. To wit, there are:


Podcasts of the intimate voice. These are the ones you hear that stop you cold, no matter what you're doing, the voice in your ears literally speaking to you through those little buds.

Podcasts of the radio. These are the ones that could be on the radio, they have the music and formatting of a radio broadcast and you can tell the speakers aren't addressing you specifically. They're really annoying if you have headphones on and the broadcasters aren''t that interesting because you literally can't think if you leave them in there. These podcasts remain on your iPod as new because you never finish them.

Podcasts of the living room. These are the ones you want to share, because they're funny, accurate, familiar, and you enjoy grabbing a friend by the shirt to say "check this out." Whatever it is, you know what it is. These are the ones, too, that are the marketer's social marketing grail. (They'd like to know what it is that you know, but you can't tell them because it's like beauty: you know it when you see it.)

Podcasts of the event. These are the ones that put you in the stadium, the comedy club, on the conference floor, or in the hallway for snacks and refreshments.

Podcasts of the interview. Whether you enjoy these or not depends on the interviewer and interviewee, because an interview must be among the most hit-and-miss formats of information gathering that exists. All information is supplied as an answer to a question. If the questioner doesn't understand what his/her interviewee knows, how to approach it, with sensitivity for the person as well as a sense of the connection s/he's making with the audience, the podcast interview winds becomes more like a two-person conversation.

Podcasts of the speech. Speeches can be great podcast material, as long as the speaker's neither a mime nor a visual presenter, for the speaker is addressing an audience not unlike a radio audience. There's less danger that you will feel either like an eavesdropper or bystander, though there is a greater chance that you'll suffer memories of your sister's third grade Nutcracker ritual (meaning that this was an event you might have attended from the back row, aisle... Speakers can take a long time to get to their point, and podcasts provide us all with a virtual lectern.

Production-Consumption gap. There's a gap between production of media content and its consumption, a gap opened long ago when we ceased manufacturing things ourselves and handed the process over to industrial means of production instead (recall the Luddites who smashed looms because the sense their social threat). Now, this gap is interesting when what's produced is not an object, but entertainment. Add recording technology, and you have a fundamental dislocation of production and consumption: a slip-fault unique to production/recording media (and now also distribution media) that explains all the points we listed above.

The product is not produced in front of those who will later consume it. It is produced by participants: people engaged in an activity, talking, acting, filming, playing music, whatever it is is irrelevant. The separation of the podcast audience from the event is possible only when recordings are involved.

The consumption of media objects is also interesting: the thing consumed is consumed by our giving it our attention. (Hence the efforts of attentiontrust.org.) Giving attention to something as an audience member, but not of the live event, is of course asking for a lot. We've come to expect a certain professionalism, expertise, investment in production value etc from our media consumables. Well, as was said of the electric guitar (in relation to music and who makes it), we can all make media now. The results so far have been maddening, shocking, really interesting, even profoundly intimate and moving.

But you don't know which you're going to get when you spin the little podwheel. Here, then, enters another interesting McLuhanism, though I've made it my own and can't recall any longer how it was first put together. Attention is time, it's given over time, and while it can ramp up and cool off, approach and then ease back, get wide-eyed, glazed over, and weepy, it's only over time that it takes shape and form as a relation. Attention is user engagement; user participation (of a sort). That's why it's paid, taken, stolen, or given: attention is the new labor, and our surplus of it is as short now as our surplus of labor was when we scraped coal off tunnel walls.

Media content is informative. In fact much of it is information, and is meant to be consumed as information. A lot of podcasts participate in this economy, too. Given that attention takes time (as it takes time to pay attention), consumers get frustrated at not knowing what's coming. The dissociation of production/recording/consumption appears again and this time combines with our sensory modes (above): we get meta-information about a recording, text, tv or motion picture show, either by previewing the thing first, by using commentary given us in another medium, by hearing about it from others, so that we can gauge whether or not we want to give it our attention.

Podcasts, being often from a new source, ask more of a leap of faith; if they're no good we'll quit them (they're often free, so no big deal). Social networks and sites that rate, list, recommend and other-wise provide the meta information we need help too. Personal recommendations can be very strong influences. Fundamentally though, and unlike video, podcasts consume a great deal of our attention because they take time, they get into our head (try writing while following an interview podcast), and there's often nothing telling us where it's headed or whether the whole thing is worth it (i don't know what's on my iPod till I'm a block from home).

If you're in marketing, and you wish to market with podcasts, be they user-generated podcasts or something else, keep your audiences in mind. Because you're asking them to have you in their minds.

Technorati tags: audio,
iPod,
marketing,
meme,
podcasting,
social media
social-media-marketing,
social-media,
social-software,
social interaction design,
social media,
social network,
social network marketing,
social network strategy,
social networking,
social software,
viral,
web 2.0,
web-20,
web,
web2-0,
web2.0

Save This Page