Gravity7: Social Interaction Design by Adrian Chan

SXD: The construction of objective relations and operations

2010-02-05T05:46:00.001-08:00

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.

News and speed: are we better informed?

2010-02-03T09:44:00.000-08:00

The acceleration of news delivery towards its degree zero — instantaneity — is inevitable. It belongs to the very concept and reality of news itself. The newest news is the news that just arrived now. No news could be sooner, or faster, than this news now. Now is the zero point of news. When it comes to news, realtime is just another way of saying Now.

News seeks ever faster speeds. "This just in" announces new news, redundant as it may sound. Our culture, for better or worse, places a high value on the novelty of news, the newness of news. Call it the "newsworthiness of now." As the media's staple ingredient, however, it's an empty calorie. Fuel good enough for baseline metabolic functioning, but little more.

News value informs what is newsworthy. When deemed to be newsworthy, news is issued as news and its novelty makes it so. In this way a piece of information acquires an additional value, a cultural valence, from which it attracts attention and by order of which it is set into distribution. The audience, which receives news, circulates news further in a fashion as old as the art of storytelling itself.

It is in this manner that mediated information becomes news in the mass medium, and becomes social fact in the social medium — irrespective of the inherent quality or claim actually wagered by the news item. Why is this?

Well, for starters there is no such thing as intrinsic value. Media by definition create reality. They do this in part by covering real events, of course, but in their coverage they produce a reality of their own. One that is observed, interpreted, and narrated.

The question then becomes: If mass and social media both serve to produce and circulate news in realtime (their respective means of doing so being increasingly less distinct), what is knowledge? What is it to be informed, and what is the relationship between information, being informed, and knowledge and being knowledgeable?

A social fact is information that, by being news validated socially (by its travels through social media), exists as fact because it has been observed. Social observation online involves posting, tweeting, re-tweeting, linking, and so on. Social facts come into existence in this way — and once in existence, can accrue a life story according to their ability to survive and persist past being new news.

At what point then does a culture produce knowledge from information? How is knowledge created from news?

It would seem that knowledge should be more than fact, more than news. That it ought to have validity for what it claims. That it make a claim upon the individual on the basis of being valid, for reasons that connect to more than what has been claimed.

Only claims that can be accepted or rejected as being agreeable fall into this category — statements not of fact (which are true or false), but of validity (which are right or wrong). Knowledge would be information that is not just true but which is useful because they can bind people by means of agreement about something — not just recognition of fact.

In the midst of the realtime revolution, and the rapid acceleration of news, we might ask whether we become more knowledgeable? Does the realtime web accelerate the production of knowledge? Or does it just speed up the distribution of news, and lend a hand in surfacing and establishing what constitute the social facts of our online worlds?

We might conjecture that realtime detracts from the sustained attention and effort demanded of knowledge production, by distraction as well as by sheer noise and confusion. Or we might suppose that realtime is imply the power law at work, and a means in some cases of vetting and surfacing the social facts that matter — after which perhaps knowledge forms along the tail.

This is an open question, and I don't take sides and can see the merits of either perspective. There is also a third possibility. It is that the distribution of news in realtime, rapidly and broadly laying down layer upon layer of social sediment (fertile, as well as the, uh, crap), not only grounds mediated social realities but also supplies communication with opportunities for connection.

Perhaps, by means of this third possibility, social news serves as a vehicle for relating and connecting. A common stock of information with which to discuss the stuff that really matters. The notion would then be that news has value as a form, for it is helping to build a shared cultural language — a requirement all the more acute in open and diversified populations like those of social media. Such that when events and of consequence occur, communication already has its legs.

Algorithmic authority: critical reflections

2010-02-02T10:35:00.000-08:00

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

2010-02-01T11:03:00.000-08:00

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.

Brief thoughts on discourse networks

2010-01-30T12:58:00.000-08:00

Every age has its metaphors. Ideas or notions around which related phenomena seem to crystallize easily. Descriptions and concepts that seem to explain what's going on by means of a waxing common sense, if not sound logic and reason. It's no accident that in our time, the term "network" frequently provides the strange attractor that gathers up all loose ends of the lineage of conceptual linkages, weaves a web or nets a nest of interconnected machine and social graphs. For interconnectedness is indeed the productive fabric of the internet age. Networks are its warp and woof, a smooth and flat space of decentralized meshwork, felt to replace the striated and hierarchical social patterns of yore.

But in the use of metaphor for conceptual illustration, logical argument should not be mistakenly ascribed to structure alone. Networks may handily account for non-hierarchical and flat organization, for distributed activities and even the tipping points and thresholds so often observed in the networked social processes of the day. This is not only the age of networks and networking. It is also the age of communication and mediated socialities, an era rapidly supplanting the information age that was its predecessor.

For this, there is already a rich post-structuralist field called "discourse networks." It's one of several disciplines interested in discursive regimes — talk in its large form, post meta-narratives, even post "subjectivity" and authors. Discourse networks seem a fitting approach to some of the pseudo-objective forms of talk currently produced by social tools by means of which communication transcends the individual to stretch relations across space and time.

For the emphasis should not be on the network but on the communication and action that it facilitates. Not on topologies but the subjectivities that networked relations enable. Socialities are not smooth and equally distributed, but are lumpen clumps — knots balled or fraying as if tufted by wear and use. It's not in the architecture of connections (networks) but in the distribution of statements and responses that networked socialities bind their relations and fashion their fabrics. Discourse networks — not topological, but sociological. Try that on for size.

SxD: Primary and Secondary Frames

2010-01-29T15:17:00.000-08:00

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.

Social media in the enterprise: formal v informal sociality

2010-01-06T09:39:00.000-08:00

Social media will continue to penetrate the enterprise in 2010. And if past discussions are any indication, we should be able to look forward to a healthy discussion around similarities and differences between consumer-facing social media, and social media as deployed behind the firewall.

We can agree, I think, that in each case, it's as much the users that makes social media work as it is the tools themselves. No social media application functions without its users. In fact, all social media require the tacit and implicit cooperation of their users — and are evolved and iterated on the basis of use.

Whether you believe that the tool/technology comes first, and initiates changes within a social field; or that social needs and interests develop for which tools are then created to address those needs, you will need interaction models that account for both tool features and uses as well as corresponding user and social practices. Implementing social media, whether for use in the consumer space or in the enterprise, works only to the extent that implementation leverages these social processes.

In other words, a good interaction model is as important, if not more, as your functionality spec. Developing that model is a matter of articulating not just what you want from social media use, but how it actually unfolds in practice. And the dynamics of the workplace social are entirely different from the dynamics of the open social: what creates order in the open social field can lead to disorder in the workplace.

But the consumer social "space" is organized and works differently than the enterprise space. Where in consumer-facing social media the challenge is to create and sustain self-reinforcing social practices (user adoption > commercial hit), the enterprise social space actually presents possible strategies of resistance.

Open and consumer social spaces take work to get organized, constant activity to sustain interest and involvement, and social differentiation so that users can easily individualize themselves and become invested therein.

By contrast, "closed" corporate social spaces, even if they are semi-transparent to the outside, are already functionally organized and differentiated. The social dynamics of water cooler conversation usually serve to infiltrate functional organization with normal and natural social interests.

Social relationships pre-exist social tools in the enterprise, and the kinds of workplace social relations that most companies seem interested in leveraging are those which have formed personally, not by role, position, or function. Social media tools are usually pitched as a means of extracting value from the informal, not the formal, social workplace relationships.

But because these relationships pre-exist the introduction of social media tools, they are as likely to subvert and resist employer social tools as they are to welcome them.

Where the task, simplified, in consumer social media applications is to seed self-perpetuating social dynamics, the task in the enterprise may be to span gaps in the organizational chart and to erode calcification in the ranks.

So there is an important distinction to be made then between formally structured and organized social relations, and informally structured relations.

In open social media spaces, sociality emerges around informal relations that may become increasingly formalized, as social differentiation and complexity develop over time. (Twitter lists are a direct example of this: it took three years for the soft and informal emergence of groups referenced by tweeting practices like #FF to become architecturally formalized as a list feature.)
In closed social spaces, the formal sociality organized by workplace relations and job functions stands to benefit from the know how (information, knowledge) and communicative practices of informal social practices.

It can seem that social media in the open port directly to social media behind the walls. That the social is what these two use cases have in common. But there is no such thing as a generic "social." All forms of social organization exist only because relationships "exist" and are maintained by communication and interaction.

This is a pretty straightforward point — but one worth making. For tools in themselves are not capable either of organizing new relations nor of re-organizing existing relations.

[Just for fun, we can compare and contrast the social organization parodied in the workplace comedies The Office and 30 Rock. In The Office, a farcical and incompetent leader struggles to contain and shepherd his baffled employees, who bandage their disbelief by organizing in spite of, through, around, and without their comedic leader — hence the use of one-on-one on-camera confessional interviews with employees, used to disclose plots, wranglings, conflicts etc.

In 30 Rock, a comedy unfolds amidst an organization's effort to stage a successful comedy, the joke being that reality itself is more funny than the show made for television. Actual employee shenanigans trump the scripted humor, and work is itself more funny than the comedy the work is supposed to produce. Informal comedy, in other words, is better than the comedy attempted by means of formal comedy writing.

Employees are always smarter than the organization — and today, more brazen.)

Broken social (online) scenes

2010-01-05T13:35:00.000-08:00

I've just gotten off a skype call with friend and colleague, and fellow sxdsalon member Thomas Vander Wal. Thomas and I pick up the virtual phone about every month or six weeks to tie up loose conversational threads. We usually manage to get into a two hour tangle, after which we have new threads to tie up, half of which are actually knots.

I enjoy talking to Thomas in part because there simply aren't that many social media theory and concept geeks out there. Thomas' experience and history in the field is deeper than mine, and his memory for past efforts and themes is scarily present to hand for him.

We get into conversations about conceptual models, of which there are few for social media. We compare these models to the social media sold by evangelists. The paint has now dried on the standard social media pitch — it awaits either a fresh coat, a new audience, or a new product. The social media pitch is something I will never be able to do well — it takes a level of salesmanship and enthusiasm that I neither possess, nor if I did, could convincingly embody. The conceptual model, owing to observation, reflection, and questioning, is more my style — and Thomas'.

But as conceptual builders, we recognize our models sometimes floundering on the shores of reality, breaking apart or struggling to stay afloat where the industry currents and waves of adoption churn. Concepts don't surf.

I enjoy these conversations in spite of the fact that it is impossible to solve anything with them, for the simple reason that our mutual commitment to deeper insight, revelatory explanations, incisive observations, if I may be so bold (in a baroque sort of way), is inspired by failures. Failures of the models to map to realities. Failures of concepts to reflect actual practices. And failures of actual uses, use cases, and users to meet the predictions of models.

The theory of social interaction will never describe social media in practice perfectly. It's an impossibility. No explanation or theory of social media can map to social media in an actual context of use — specific and particular. The generalization can never explain the particular.

But neither can a generalization be drawn from a particular.

I feel good about the year ahead. There may be some serious limitations to the value and potential for theorizing social interaction online. There are certainly real limits on how much of that theorizing can be translated into practical design guidelines. But the industry and marketplace want for better and deeper explanations. Explanations that are conceptually informed but specific to a particular (client) context. There's a forensic dimension to this — a touch of detective work, of participatory observation and ethnography. For which we will need both social and architectural, that is user- and tool-oriented descriptions.

The reason for which I enjoy the birds nests, the gordian knots, the loose ends and aporias of conversation as mutual entanglement.

Life offline, and why I do it

2010-01-04T12:30:00.000-08:00

Greetings, and a happy new year. I am back after a prolonged absence from blogging, tweeting, status updating and online socializing. I took what was almost a month away from social media, and spent my time instead reading, taking notes, and catching up with friends in person.

I like to do this every year, and recommend it to those of you who use social media on a daily basis. Just being away from the scene is revealing. Not using social media is even more interesting. And reclaiming the long stretches of uninterrupted time with which you can read and really, properly focus and think -- is in fact rewarding.

I often say that we learn what our social tools do by turning them off. For it's when they're off that we realize what we are missing. And by realizing what we miss, we're made aware of how they have become second nature to us.

Well I have long had a difficult relationship with twitter. I prefer, if I'm to write, room for at least a couple parenthetical remarks, a couple disclaimers, perhaps a self-referential pun or poke, and a clear reference. Can't do those in twitter, and so I find it a difficult medium. Just doesn't suit either my writing style nor my conversation style.

The twitter break was great, insofar as I realized how much of my head goes to maintaining the realtime stream. Even those cycles, which run in the background, are a draw on the energy I normally need to focus and develop new thoughts and ideas. Twitter is a particular draw on me because as a conversation tool its "threads" are ongoing and incomplete. As it turns out, my own proclivity for interactions, and my personal style of conversation, are ill-served by the imperfect continuity of discontinuous attention, and stuttering conversation, and the ambiguous incompletion of much talk started and passed around twitter.

That said, it hurt not to be on twitter. I missed out on a lot of contact and communication, from the lively and regular local social media scene to direct and private conversations. You can be offline for a long time before the phone starts ringing!

It's good to be back. My absence was self-imposed, and had become somewhat uncomfortable. Not being online had forced me out into cafes, long walks, time spent in the company of people but not necessarily in the company of friends. I learned that too much social media is connecting but in a reified and isolating manner. What we do with our faces, voices, our eyes and ears, in person, really and truly is different. I'm stating the obvious when I say that social media are no substitute for the real thing.

I'll be less interested in social media qua social media this year than in the past couple years. I've reached my own personal fascination with mediation and how it works. And I have learned that much of what interested me in the past was my own desire to make the technology more interesting to talk and think about. I will be more engaged this year with what can be done through and with social media.

We face real problems -- problems that will be solved only by means of massively coordinated action, distributed information sharing, ongoing communication built on trust, on cooperation, on respect and on some degree of mutually reciprocated understanding. We won't get there without use of the internet -- the diversity and complexity of problems and of the response needed to address and solve those problems require use of information sharing technologies.

I believe social media can be useful in local social efforts and action, in distributed learning, sharing, and resource coordination, and in global collective action. If some of this involves the status update and the tweet, then that is interesting. And compelling.

The distinction between mass and social media has now blurred significantly. Each now borrows and re-appropriates forms from the other; each now copies and reinterprets modes of production from the other. I've said often that in the communication age, our talk is itself a commodity, and our social media, a means of production. A vast, rich, interconnected and active system of images, messages, news, and information now exists within which individuals can become brands, celebrities, experts, and so on. I sincerely hope that a lot of this effort is ultimately translated into offline behavior change and forward-looking wisdom.

The distorting effects of social media are high, the arbitrariness of connection and the ambiguity of intent are high. The dependability and commitment of participation and engagement are low, and transient conversations and interactions frequently leave little behind. We have yet to prove that social media are capable of creating real value beyond impressions, real knowledge beyond information, real relationships beyond the interaction, real communication beyond talk. Those outcomes and byproducts of these social media means of production would presumably be measured in the real world. It is important that we not mistake our symptoms for our outcomes.

I really enjoyed taking a month away from active blogging, tweeting, and facebooking (I kept up with google readering). I am sure many of you took breaks to spend time with family and friends over the holidays. This year should be a good one. If not better economically than 09, it should be a year in which to get more real about social media. Less personal branding, less ego, fame, and celebrity. More social media in the workplace, the organization, and learning environment. Less social media for itself and more social media for something else.

We are at that place in the medium's "evolutionary" timeline that begs for better and harder thinking. Less selling, pitching, evangelizing, and more problem solving. It's less sexy now. It's more common and ordinary. As we all know, however, with social technologies it's the social that makes them interesting. This becomes even more the case the less interesting the tech is as tech and for tech's sake.

I'll be paying attention to this. And we will be talking about this over on sxdsalon.org, the group I set up with Adina Levin and others end of last year to talk social interaction design. I intend to continue to articulate the ways in which social practices develop and grow around use of social media tools -- practices best understood with use of insights from sociology, anthropology, psychology, media theory, and linguistics. But with help of the group's members we will also push forward design, research, and implementation ideas. It should be a good year for social interaction design.

This was not meant to be more than a brief note. I hope I didn't lose you -- with this or with my absence. May it be a good, productive, and rewarding year.

Cheers,
Adrian Chan

Lunch for good, food for thought

2009-11-30T11:16:00.000-08:00

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.

Social search and advertising: Google's endgame?

2009-10-27T10:42:00.000-07:00

A few weeks back, Jeremiah Owyang wrote a piece "Revealing Google's Stealth Social Network Play." In it he detailed the tactical benefits of a combined of Google Reader, Wave, and Sidewiki in a back-door strategy aimed at social networking. And more to the point, to realizing the advertising opportunities around social networking.

Google has been neither a leader nor a even a decent case study in social networking. It's home-grown social network, Orkut, is popular elsewhere but not here. Open Social is still very real, but is largely invisible to the public. And when it comes to making use of the social graph, Google profiles are a distant cousin to Facebook and even Linkedin profiles. Google's products seem to betray a distinct affinity for information over the more popular and user-friendly experiences that have resulted in the conversational turn in social networking: Facebook status and activity feeds, and twitter.

But with Google Wave, Jeremiah's observation looks spot on. Wave not only facilitates a potentially game-changing departure from old-school email, but also supports the export and re-embedding of "wavelets" outside the Wave experience. These wavelets function as apps, and some of the early extensions featured have already begun to spark interest among developers who see Wave as an application platform turbo-charged by access to Google search, contacts/address book, and distributability. If successful, Google Wave is poised to serve as a platform for distributed social networking.

Brynn Evans writes today about Google social search, in Why There's Nothing to Fear in Social Search. Social search may seem innocuous enough, and the video posted on the company's blog contains a not-so-subtle pitch for Google profiles (the more you related sites and services you add, the better Google can serve you!), but the flip side of an improved search experience is of course advertising. Namely, social advertising.

Now, this is a nut that many have failed to crack, try as they have. But Facebook's failed Beacon was a sign of things to come. There's money in the feed. Feed-based advertising, which I liken to product placement in mainstream media, promises (for now) to leverage the rich social context and realtime conversational power of activity feeds and twitter. Now that twitter has offloaded its advertising problem to Microsoft's Bing and Google, it can worry about making twitter a richer experience, while delegating advertising to the search engines. But reconstructing the conversation, as Adina Levin notes in her post Search the conversation, and as many of the semantic, sentiment, and influence relevance companies I've spoken with will attest, is all the more difficult the shorter the message and the thinner the relationship.

Which is possibly where Wave might create more than a ripple for Google's alogorithmagicians and data miners. Google has lacked access to the information that can be extracted from mined social actions. Wavelets, embedded on end-user and brand blogs, sites, and elsewhere (eg phones, participating social networks), could be used to create an index of social activity. For wave interactions are captured by Google (which hosts the original wavelet and sees all interactions that occur on it).

A social action index built on the back end of Wave could be combined with search indexes of conversational messages from twitter (and possibly other activity feeds: Myspace, Facebook?). Add to those, indexing of blog comments and sidewiki, Google reader subscriptions and its comments, likes, and shares, plus the rich social graph information provided by Google contacts, and you have what looks to me like a distributed, decentralized, gold-mine of search queries, documents, conversations, relationships, and activities. All built on an advertising platform.

If Google could auction off ads in realtime, for printing to the page around conversations, filtered and qualified by social interaction data and constrained perhaps by relationships, it could conceivably personalize targeted advertising and also push a new class of social sales and offers to the user's social graph. That is, reaching friends through those most trusted and respected for their influence in their areas of expertise.

The grail of advertising is not one to one relationships with customers, but access through the right person to a whole network of friends. In or around their own words and at the time most likely to get attention. Realtime is solving the attention problem by capturing it when it's being paid. But it takes a company with a lot of social data to connect the dots and provide social relevance. Google is looking a lot smarter of late.

Realtime streams: now and then

2009-10-08T08:40:00.000-07:00

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

Brands, and putting twitter word of mouth in context

2009-10-06T12:39:00.000-07:00

An interesting study of twitter's viability for eWom, or electronic Word of Mouth marketing, has been making the rounds (Twitter Power:Tweets as Electronic Word of Mouth
). The research involved analysis of 150,000 tweets, treated as natural language expressions, or "talk". The aim of the research was to study tweets in which brands are mentioned for a number of attributes relevant to brands, including sentiment, purpose, frequency, and so on.

I found this interesting for several reasons. First was that I've been arguing of late that the conversational turn in social media (twitter, status updates, et al) makes everyday speech into a commodity. That the medium's translation of talk into a form that can be captured, saved, studied, mined, and so on only points to the further use of consumers for marketing purposes. (While I don't personally like this, it has a whiff of inevitability about it. The frontier having shifted from what we consume to what we say.)

This research is a rich study of the tweet in its commodity form: removed from the context of twitter user relationships and from any kind of transactional or conversational context. (Tweets used were extracted for their mention of a brand names studied.)

Secondly, the research finds that "most tweets that mention a brand do so as a secondary focus." I described this in much less precise terms last week, arguing that brands might focus less on how they are reflected in consumer sentiment and more on how the consumer seems to identify with and through brands in online social contexts. The research seems to have found, in other words, that brands are not the sole object of tweets that mention them. Brands are mentioned in passing, in conversation, yes, but not with the intent of soliciting interaction with the brand.

Interestingly, the research cites an assumption examined elsewhere that "consumers engaged in relationships with brands in a manner similar to the personal relationship they formed with people," adding that in online branding "These brand relationships may be the result of participation in brand communities."

I think there are nuances here worth some investigation. A brand's significance to a consumer may in fact have little in common with human relationships. Of course this changes if the brand community manager and consumer interact online. But the "brand" seems to me more likely to involve values, interests, and personal as well as social meanings associated with a brand but not directly caused by it.

Perceptions, reputation, trust, admiration, coveting... these are aspects of human relationships but are not in themselves relationships (to me, at least). And I think they are shaped socially, not in direct reflection on the brand's messaging and image-making.

Also of interest to brands in this study would be the preponderance of positive sentiments expressed in tweets that mention brands: "more than 80% of the tweets that mentioned one of these brands expressed no sentiment. This indicates that people are using Twitter for general information, asking questions, other information-seeking and -sharing activities about brands or products, in addition to expressing opinions about brands or products. Of the 268,662 tweets expressing sentiment, more than 52% of the individual tweets were expressions of positive sentiment, while ≈33% of tweets were negative expressions of opinion."

If I were a brand manager I would want to see these tweets in context. A research or monitoring tool able to show me context of conversation and something of the relationships that leap to life in the course of that conversation.

And I think it's important here to note that "relationships" can be fleeting, transient, and as they often are in conversational media, a sign of the medium's "coincidensity" and speed.

Referring to the brand model of Esch, Langner, Schmitt, & Geus, the authors write of online consumers, that "current purchases were affected by brand image directly and by brand awareness indirectly."

This will be obvious to a brand manager, but current twitter and social media analytics tools can derail the most disciplined analyst. Mentions are the most easily captured signs of social media relevance to branding. But "indirect awareness," which I read as "socially-mediated branding," is harder to track and quantify. Lest the ROI debate threaten to rear its head here, I still think that a softer, more subjective, "sociability" review belong to the social brand's marketing efforts.

Of the four types of brand-relevant tweeting listed here, for example, it would be interesting to know who sentiments were shared with; who was information solicited from; who was it provided to; and in what was the brand comment a reference to?

Furthermore, and I know that these questions aren't yet supported by tools, and so don't scale well: can the brand learn from how it is identified with, whether its social standing is increasing or slipping, or what kind of person the band information is sought from? Are users with social status, fame, success, knowledge, credibility as experts or reputations as critics, solicited or offered brand-relevant tweets?

I suspect that the types of expression listed here would need to be read closely for how they are addressed, and for how they might reflect on their authors. For tweets that mention brands are often a reflection of social relevance. A tweet asking for ticket information on a band is also a sign of an excited concert-goer: a sign of support and interest as much as the need for information.

"Sentiment: the expression of opinion concerning a brand, including company, product, or service. The sentiment could be either positive or negative.
Information Seeking: the expression of a desire to address some gap in data, information, or knowledge concerning some brand, including company, product, or service.
Information Providing: providing data, information, or knowledge concerning some brand, including company, product, or service.
Comment: the use of a brand, including company, product, or service, in a tweet where the brand was not the primary focus."

It's good to see research on this, and especially good to see research that regards tweets as utterances. If we are ascending the ladder of meaning and complexity from the word through the search phrase, on to the utterance, then perhaps it's not so far out to hope we will reach the rung of conversation in the not-so-distant future.

More from Twitter Power:Tweets as Electronic Word of Mouth:

They report that: "Of the 14,200 random tweets, 386 tweets (2.7%) contained mention of one of the brands or products from our list (Table 1). There were 2,700 tweets (19.0%) that mentioned some brand or product, inclusive of the brands that we used in this study."

And of greater interest to brands, would be the preponderance of positive sentiments expressed: "more than 80% of the tweets that mentioned one of these brands expressed no sentiment. This indicates that people are using Twitter for general information, asking questions, other information-seeking and -sharing activities about brands or products, in addition to expressing opinions about brands or products. Of the 268,662 tweets expressing sentiment, more than 52% of the individual tweets were expressions of positive sentiment, while ?33% of tweets were negative expressions of opinion. This is in line with prior work such as that of Anderson (1998), who showed that there was a U-shape relationship between customer satisfaction and the inclination to engage in WOM transfers. This suggests that extremely positive and satisfied and extremely negative customers are more likely to provide information relative to consumers with more moderate experiences."

"As can be seen from Table 7, most tweets that mention a brand do so as a secondary focus. These tweets account for just under half of the branding tweets in this sample. Users expressed brand sentiment in 22% of the tweets. Interestingly, 29%of the tweets were providing or seeking information concerning some brand. This shows that there is considerable use of microblogging as an information source. This would indicate several avenues for companies, including monitoring microblogging sites for brand management (i.e., sentiment), to address customer questions directly (i.e., information seeking), and monitoring information dissemination concerning company products (i.e., information providing)."

Social media, converging streams?

2009-10-06T08:35:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite books about community is a work by Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti called Crowds and Power. It's a beautiful and thoroughly insightful study on people assembled in different ways and for a kaleidoscopic set of reasons. I turn to the book often when thinking about how social media both separate and connect us, using it as an imaginary frontier of sorts for what mediated crowds might or could do.

A piece by Tim Leberecht reminded me of Canetti this morning. Got me thinking about converging streams and how conversational media sometimes produce that effect of being together at the same time.

Which is really a matter of paying attention at the same time, more than of being together, for the medium only connects across our individual spaces and times. The Germans have a nice word for the sense of being with others: "Mitsein." "Being with" is contrasted with contiguity, or being "next to" or adjacent to one another. We're not in one another's stream of consciousness when we are just next to one another; we are when we are "with" one another.

There is no "Mitsein" online, but there is a sense of something that approximates it. But it comes not through being together. It comes through talk. Talk that indicates we are here and now, paying attention. The response is its signal flare.

In a medium so perfectly suited for a kind of self-talk, or talking aloud in front of others, it might be strange that there are occasions when we get a sense of Mitsein. Approximated, of course, in the medium's own peculiar kind of proximity, or proximate intimacy. An "approximity" perhaps. A blend of the real and the imagined, of memory and expectation.

Verbal communication, not the language of bodies sharing space as in Crowds and Power, produces this approximation online. The kind of talk that appeals for a response. The kind of talk that runs out a line with hooks.

Hooks are important for conversation. I much prefer dialog to monolog. Hooks, in the form of "and you?" strung out along the thread of a good conversation are what call me into the world of people. I listen, I pay more attention, when conversation is drawn by the two of us. I like interruptions and clipped sentences, finishing one another's thoughts, and mutual effort of threading out a good line together.

I wonder if the brief moments of simultaneity that pass now and then across our webbed social spaces will result in stream convergence. If the community of talk media might lie not in distributing messages but in the sense of sharing time. And if the point of doing more to make streams — of messages and update and activities — more interesting is also to create more hooks by which to connect them. If streams, like people, not only want the greater flow of the river but also the shared flow of time.

Social Interaction Design: Ratings

2009-10-05T11:35:00.001-07:00

I had other things in mind for this morning until a client sent me an article in today's Wall Street Journal about online ratings. She, like many others running review and ratings-based sites, is "suffering" from excessively generous end user ratings. The article, which surveys a number of online properties, cites the tendency to 4.3: On the Internet, Everyone's a Critic But They're Not Very Critical.

Offering up a number of anecdotes as reasons for the broken state of online ratings, the article's authors pretty much capture what many of us get intuitively about why online ratings really don't work.

I thought I'd break this down from a social interaction design perspective to get at some of the causes of this.

First and foremost is the fact that most online systems built to capture user tastes, preferences, and interests engender bias. And online media amplify bias, for a number of reasons.

This bias originates with the user's intention, which goes unknown and is not captured in the rating system itself. The reasons a user may have for rating something can be many: a mood, attitude, a personal interest, a habit of use, interest in getting attention, building a profile, promoting a product, and so on.

Social media, because they provide indirect visibility in front of a mediated public, amplify any distortion baked into the selection itself (a selection being the act of rating something). This amplification is explained in part by the de-coupling of selective acts (rating) from consequences and outcomes.

Selections are de-coupled from personal consequences, which excuses a certain lack of accountability and responsibility. Selections are de-coupled from their context of use, which range from personal utility to social promotion. And selections are de-coupled from social implications, which removes the user from his or her contribution to a social outcome (eg, highly-rated items look popular).

Consider the reasons a user may have for making a selection (rating something). They include:

personal recollection (like favoriting)
to inform a recommendation engine (so that it can make better personal recommendations)
because the item is a favorite (sharing favorites)
because the social system has no accountability
because it always creates the possibility of recognition for the user
because it promotes the item
because it's nice (socially; possibly karmic)
because it's a gesture about how the user felt

Social selections are thus encumbered by ambiguity: of intent, of meaning, of relevance, and of use.

Can these be addressed and resolved by better system design? Or can they only be resolved by social means?

It might be possible to couple ratings with outcomes. This would involve new sets of selections and activities made available to other users and used to create consequences. Users would then consider these consequences when making a rating selection.

Contexts of use could be distinguished, so that users rate with greater purpose. This would involve creating new views of rated content, such as "rate your favorite item this wk," "rate your favorite genre," "rate your personal favorite," "rate which you think is the best," and so on. Each of these distinctions, if followed by users (!) would specify the selection by means of a different social purpose.

It might be possible to reduce ambiguity by means of some cross-referencing achieved by algorithms and relationships set up in the data structure. Without detailing these, they would probably include means by which to distinguish:

the bias of the user him or herself, measured in terms of personal tastes
the domain expertise of the user, as demonstrated by ratings provided by the user on other items and in which categories/genres/domains
the social communication and signaling style of the user, which would reveal some of his/her relation to the social space
use by other users and the public, as a measure of relevance

Cross references could then be applied when aggregating ratings, used to filter and sort the ratings sourced for averaged results. Theoretically, the system would be able to identify experts, promoters, favoriters, and others by their practices.

Social solutions might be created to supply distinctions among the different kinds of social capital involved in ratings. Such as:

the user's expertise (domain knowledge)
trust capital, or the user's standing within his/her social graph
credibility capital, or the user's believability, as measured in loyalty perhaps
reputation capital, or the tendency of the user's ratings to be referred to and cited beyond his/her immediate social graph

Finally, ratings systems can diversify possibilities for making selections, and separate communication from ratings selections so that ratings are used less for visibility and attention-seeking reasons (eg users who rate a lot).

There are too many kinds of socially-themed activities and practices in which ratings play a part for me to delve into this here. But each theme could be examined for the social benefits of ratings, for how they attribute value to the user, add value to content, and distinguish social content items to result in shared social and cultural resources. Those distinctions could be used to isolate different rating and qualification systems so that they are tighter and less biased.

Recent related posts:

Twitter, Google Wave, and Online Talk

2009-10-02T11:08:00.000-07:00

This post is a reflection on some questions raised by Adina Levin in a post on Google Wave dated July. I haven't myself used the product, so this is not a product review but is instead a continuation of some of the thoughts Adina raised around Wave's social models. I'll speak here more to the ongoing innovation in conversation tools rather than attempt even educated guesses as to Wave itself. I should also say that this post is un-premeditated and off the cuff.

Wave is a communication tool. In that, it will be compared to twitter. But there seem to be substantial differences between the two, as many (some) will no doubt have experienced from using Wave. Regardless of Google's strategic interest in launching Wave (as a response to twitter or not), they seem to bear resemblance only in their contributions to the conversational trend in social tools and social media.

Twitter creates a mediated public, and this means that twitter users are not only using it for communication but for social reasons also. As I tried to show in a recent post (Social media: the attention economy explained), the user's awareness of this public results in incidental social effects, byproducts, and outcomes.

Communication in twitter is not just a matter of talking to people but of being seen talking by the public — or at least being aware that one's communication may be seen. The tweet itself thus takes on two forms. One, the statement itself, which may be described as communication (what a person says). And secondly, the commodity form of the tweet, which is an artifact of digitally mediated communication and which results in statements being re-distributable.

As I've written elsewhere, this makes many conversational tools a means of production: of the self, of relationships, of visibility, presence, status, and so on. In the communication age, these tools are an intrinsic part of the attention economy and of the manufacture, if you will, of a mediated self: one that is extended across time and space, represented and captured online.

Note that the "Self" is always extended across time and space through relationships; but media offer the possibility of representing this extension. This means that distribution becomes as important a factor in a social tool's use as communication (talking with the purpose of reaching understanding with somebody about something).

The tweet as commodity form plays into and allows many social and cultural practices involving social visibility, status, reputation, and other aspects of individual identity and social position. Redistribution of the commodity form of the tweet, as seen in retweeting "influencers," sharing news, linking to blog posts and sites, announcing one's activities, engaging in social rituals such as #followfriday, social and event pics, declarations of gratitude — all these social activities are achieved using direct and indirect acts of communication.

They use both forms. Loosely coupled or un-coupled linguistic statements; and the commodity form of the tweet, whereby the tweet is essentially a social object, and the act of distributing it supplements its meaning.

The meaning of an act of communication, the stated meaning of the tweet in other words, is the communicative act. The commodity form is the meaning the tweet has that's not in the statement but obtains from its use. A retweet is a statement retweeted and thus the act of retweeting is a social act which has its own social meanings above and beyond what the retweeted tweet actually says.

Twitter thrives on the supplementary meanings that are produced in the wake of its unique discontinuities: de-coupled conversational turns, out of synch and time, each experienced in a view particular to the user's own selection of followers. In contrast to Wave, twitter is a disaggregated social space. Each of us has his or her own window onto a social world taken in through stretches of thin but durable attention streamtime.

These social acts, which are virtually unlimited in possibility given twitter's open structure and lack of social design (no groups, virtually no functional syntax, no navigation besides chronological, etc) result in a highly inefficient social space rich in ambiguities that are as compelling and engaging as they are frustrating.

My position on this is that ambiguities of social action and intent, as well as of linguistic meanings, are the fuel of conversational media. For the greater the ambiguity of intent and meaning, the more social relationships and interpersonal handling (interaction) has to do. The more it has to do, the richer the social possibilities.

Social conventions and practices supply understanding to compensate for design inadequacies. In short, loss of context is addressed by social action and emerging practices. Practices provide a different type of context, one not of design but of interaction.

Google Wave seems intended to capture conversation in its context. It is not a public social tool, and not likely to engender the types of social visibility, identity, status, and so on that have made twitter what it is. As such, it seems interested in providing a functional improvement to conversation, by means of design, by means of containing the audience, by means of capturing and offering playback of past conversation.

Adina writes: "Wave is a toolset with even more flexibility than a wiki, with even more interactive content. This poses even greater challenges to help people understand how to use it and be productive."

I would object somewhat to the suggestion that conversational tools ought to be designed with productivity in mind. And to the idea that the tool has a way of being used. Conversation itself has structure and organization, both internally (linguistic statements have grammar, syntax, and semantic stabilities) and pragmatically (conversations involve moves, turns, and many selections that expose how participants interpret what's going on).

Adina addresses Wave's threading: "When there are comments interspersed between paragraphs in email/forum threads, it can be difficult for newcomers to get the gist of what has occurred. But there is a time-honored way to bring people up to speed — summarize the conversation to date. The summary has a social purpose, too, it steers the discussion toward a state of current understanding." I beg to differ, again, on the last point. I don't believe there is such a thing as "current understanding."

Conversation is itself an action system. Communication, say a statement, that is not answered is only an observed act of communication. Communication that is picked up is social action. The act of responding to, or picking up, a statement is an act. It has linguistic meaning (what's said in the response) and it has social meaning (to those participating). So from the perspective of mediated social interaction, conversation is more than reaching consensus ("current understanding") about what's been said so far.

Many participants, in fact, will have relational interest in the conversation to date. Not just what has been said but who said it, to whom, how, and so on. This is the drama and performance of talk, and has a great deal of social relevance to participants as well as to those who use the playback feature.

Adina raises good questions about Wave's social models, and directly poses the matter of groups: "The differences between these models make a vast difference between how the tools are used and what they are good for." Again, I wonder whether groups are even the right design approach in conversational tools. It could be that we need to think in terms of social action, interaction, and conversation rather than groups.

Groups aggregate an audience (participants included in the group), capture attention, provide social inclusion (and exclusion), and create a place or context for communication. Wave might make some of this irrelevant (I would need to use it to better understand design implications and models).

I have a preference for thinking in terms of frames of experience and interaction, over abstracted social models, and particularly those that imply containers. For in conversational tools, the interactions can have order and organization (for example, they have temporal order: a matter clearly addressed in Wave) without need for audience containers (groups, pages, place). Context can be created ad hoc as messages are threaded, arranged, re-aggregated, and so on.

That's about all I wanted to say. Conversational tools are in part such a rich turn in social media's evolution because the act of talking in front of others, in a form that can be redistributed and stored, will always engage social interests. All statements have a double meaning. That of the statement and that of the act of making the statement. It belongs to communication itself that we can tell the difference between the statement and its production (utterance and the uttering of the utterance). So for this reason, open public social spaces always enjoy the social play of ambiguity: of intended meaning and of the social act of making, circulating, referencing statements (and their authors!).

Wave seems to want to streamline the conversational experience. I cant see how it would possibly relate then to the unique sociality of twitter. That it might offer up possibilities not only for use of conversation, but for meta functionalities derived from the observation, visualization, navigation and analytics of conversation seems, however very clear. But that would be a different post entirely!

Foursquare vs Yelp: Recommendations and Reviews

2009-10-01T10:02:00.000-07:00

Foursquare and Yelp are each sites that capitalize on user-contributed reviews and recommendations. Users contribute their favorite places and things to do, spotlighting best-kept secrets and customer favorites. Users get visibility and even some amount of notoriety for their contributions. Their enthusiasm for, or against, a merchant can have substantial repercussions for businesses. In the age of social media, might sometimes makes right, whether the customer is "right" or not.

Social interaction models: Yelp and Foursquare
Yelp and Foursquare offer an interesting comparison in the use of social interaction models. For each of them has had to create a compelling and engaging social experience, and has done so with some degree of success.

Yelp has done it with a slight twist on reviews. Yelp's reviews may be associated with a business, but are in fact as much about their authors as they are the business reviewed. On Yelp, users can profile their tastes, interests, habits, and opinions through the places they frequent. In this way, Yelp makes it easy for users to talk about themselves without having to fill in the "about me" box so common to un-themed profiles.

Foursquare does it with a combination of recommendations and offline activity check-ins. Users leave short posts recommending things to try or do at a location, and then separately check in to locations they visit. In a sense, Foursquare extends the practice of reviews by going mobile: Foursquare can be used to find friends on the go. But it substitutes the recommendation for the review, and in its focus on messaging over review writing, seems more closely aligned to social interactions and relationships than to reviewer taste profiling and publishing.

Yelp's interaction models: extracting the value add
From a social interaction design perspective, the differences between Yelp and Foursquare are interesting. Each site is designed to capture users interested in real places.

Yelp captures interests in particular places and makes connections to other similar places: it turns the individual user's subjective interest into an objective "type" of interest, and constructs relationships that are then surfaced as a directory of sorts.

For example, interest in one Chinese restaurant can be used to create links to other Chinese restaurants. Yelp can get as specific with this as it's able to subdivide interests. Theoretically, it could get down to specific dishes, to service, price, ambience, and so on. It could do this (and does in some attributes, like price) by means of structuring form input at the review, or by extracting meta data by mining text (less reliable).

This is the essential practice of end-user review sites, and rests on the assumption that subjective review content can be translated into common social values. I call this "taste making," for it by-and-large corresponds to the role played by media in our culture, relying in this case on local and "authentic" experts over accredited or branded (mass media) experts.

Bias in the model
The transformation of subjective interests (values held by the individual user) into some form of socially valid tastes and opinions is undermined, however, by the introduction of bias in the social practice of reviews. Bias enters the system because reviews not only serve to describe a business, but to express individual user personality also.

In any social system, the user's interest in making an impression, and being seen (popularity, respect, credibility, or other form of social rank), introduces a second incentive to the core activity. If the core activity is the "review," then motives corresponding to the system's social architecture distort behavior. And indeed, popularity, leaderboard rank, visibility, follower count, and any number of similar social effects can be motivating to users for whom online interactions serve personal and psychological interests (which is not only commonplace, but deeply sticky).

Whether the user is interested and motivated by trust, reputation, celebrity, credibility, intellect, experience, or something else, will factor into his or her habits and online social participation styles. Engaging with these motives is essential to participation, but also contributes to the social bias and distortion of social content. No amount of filtering, sorting, or ordering user contributions can eliminate bias if it has been introduced by the motivating attributes of a social system.

Separating social interaction from content production
What Yelp has done, and which was smart (if unintended, I don't know), was to offer symbolic and gestural tokens and icons to users for use in communicating with each other. This not only had the effect of building social relationships (compliments are great ice breakers) — it also offloads social interaction and communication into a separate social system. Users need not speak to each other in their reviews, but can do this by means of tokens. Reciprocity, as a social norm, then comes into play and encourages positive social behaviors. And exchange and gift economies come into play as a social mechanism governing the use of these tokens.

(Note that in many social systems, these tokens are an unlimited social resource; if there were limited numbers of tokens available to users, competition for possession of tokens for social rank would govern the dynamic.)

Foursquare's interaction model: social activity
Now let's look at Foursquare. In contrast to Yelp, Foursquare users profile themselves by where they have been, and to some degree by what they have done (insofar as they post a statement about it.) A look at Foursquare posts shows that consensus seems to emerge quickly around points of interest. Users may be more inclined to agree with one another on what makes a place good. But that's not likely the reason for the uniformity of their posts. More likely is that the form here is the recommendation, not the review.

Recommendations are intrinsically more social: they are directed at an audience. And on Foursquare, the audience is those who are going to a venues, not those who are comparing venues (by review shopping). Not only are recommendations addressed to people (reviews being written for a public), they are most likely to cite the best thing to do.

And indeed, Foursquare seems more interested in cultivating social activity than in building a community of experts. Social activity benefits Foursquare by motivating users to check in to a venue when they are there, which in turn provides presence and location information useful to the mobile user.

Foursquare was built in the era of twitter, and takes inspiration more from tweeting than from writing. It serves communication and social connectedness; this, again, is clear from the site's emphasis on friends and followers.

To help serve this purpose, the game-like aspect of Foursquare has been implemented well. A variety of badges provide two social functions: differentiating individual users from the user population overall (users differentiated by having a badge), and identifying user interests (by what the badge means). As with Yelp, the ambiguity involved in what a badge means can be compelling in itself (in Foursquare: is she a "player," or does she just travel with male friends? Did she mean to look like a player or is that Foursquare's doing?)

The interest here is a social interest. Foursquare attracts users who enjoy playing: for mayor, for stats, for badges, and to a lesser extent, for friends. Because social gaming and games suspend the normal conventions of social interaction while at the same time putting real relationships into play, there are endless variations Foursquare can roll out in the future.

For example, the site could embrace interests of users to whom pure social games are less appealing, and instead address their inclination to be taste makers, demonstrate expertise, display their depth of local experience or knowledge, and more. Foursquare could provide modalities to end users to bring attention to these other user personality types. Photographers might twitpic scenes and situations grabbed on location. Contests could be staged for "best of" category, including discoveries, best-kept secrets, and the more obvious local favorites. City walks could be extracted from local mayors for tips on a great first date, things to do on a family visit, or bartenders and service staff who are fun to talk to.

Frames of social activity
The advantage earned by Foursquare obtains from channelling social activity into social games. These games generate participation, offer a compelling engagement model, are fast and relatively quick and easy, and can be used as an interaction system for many different kinds of content.

From a social interaction design perspective, games are frames: interaction and user experience are framed by the game. All social situations involve a frame of some kind, whether mediated online or not. This frame supplies participants with an idea of What's going on and How to proceed, both critical aspects to social interaction.

Use of a frame other than that intrinsic to the content itself provides other, and new, things to do. Therein lies the innovation of socially-mediated experiences: experience frames that leverage and extend relationships, forms of talk (questions, recommendations, etc), interactions with tokens (eg social gifts), gestures (eg compliments), and so on. Social interaction designers can use frames to organize social interaction around content, and thereby offload some of the social motives from content left behind, improving its value to non-participating users. Or the opposite: to concentrate social motives into communication in order to thicken a system's social sticky. Every frame brings with it new ways to capture user interests and motivations.

Conclusion and implications
Interaction models that directly relate to users and what they find interesting, and not concepts like "community" or the "social graph," are in my opinion the more precise approach to designing and leveraging social media. Since all social media involve some variation on talk and talking, interactions can be structured and organized by design and their outcomes ordered and presented to lay emphasis and focus on the aspects and social dynamics that propel a social system forward. We do this best, I think, not by abstracting models but by aligning them closer to user experiences. The richer our understanding of what users are like and what they do, the better our interaction models will be.

Socially-mediated branding: Revangelism?

2009-09-30T12:18:00.001-07:00

I have been talking about socially-mediated branding without having really offered a description of what I mean by it. In follow up to yesterday's post on consumers and their identification with brands, I want to just unpack this idea a bit further.

I consider socially-mediated branding the smart business response to the disruptive effects of social media. It is a call to businesses not to reclaim control over their brand identity across social media as powerful new channels, but rather a suggestion that marketing, PR, advertising and other brand-related efforts shift their frame of perspective when considering the social media space. Namely, that brands see themselves from the consumer's perspective. And try to find there what interests the consumer about the brand.

I suggested yesterday that brands might think not in terms of brand or consumer identity, but in terms of how we identify with each other (brands and consumers). Brands ought to start from what the brand means to the consumer, and let that inform what the consumer means to the brand. Not the other way around.

I made it sound simple. Consumers identify with some aspect of a brand, and that's the basis from which they might express their tastes and interests online. Faceted branding and conversational strategies with multiple story lines would then factor into brand strategies as a smart and pro-active integration of social media into brand messaging. Different strokes for different folks.

And in examining the brand's sociability, a business might also be pro-active by listening and learning from how its audience picks up the brand in talk amongst friends and peers. This approach is qualitative, subjective, and contingent on the brand's own sensitivities and perceptiveness, not to simple mentions and responses but of what interests consumers. Social media give away an incredible amount of information. But the real meaning of what all that information offers a brand can only be read by humans and made actionable by flexible organizations.

The fact that people talk to each other using social media, and that they offer up what matters to them in the process, represents a massive improvement in what any organization can know about itself. Not just in how much of its own brand image is seen, but in how its brand message has conversational value. Brand sociability, in short.

But not all consumers identify directly with a brand. Take, for example, Disney versus, say, a tire company. Well clearly Disney's got it pretty good insofar as sociability is concerned. It's an experience brand. It's entertaining, and it's fun — and it's for the whole family. The tire company, on the other hand, is woefully disadvantaged by comparison. I don't identify with the tires on my car any more than I suspect you do — unless you have a penchant for the weekend tractor pull competition or an expensive fantasy involving F1 track racing and the flutter of the checkered flag.

If one of us were at a tire company in social media branding, and spotted this post, it would be ridiculous if we ran upstairs and proclaimed: "let's sponsor this blog!" Blogger relations would be driving blind if they took this post and drew the conclusion that I was a tire blogger. That I have mentioned tires doesn't mean I have a tire relationship, nor even a passing interest in tires.

But I did recently have an experience with a tire company. Traveling to hog island for an all day feast of freshly-farmed oysters, our crew sustained a high-speed flat. After what seemed like eons of tense this-is-not-my-family roadside pleas and ultimatums delivered to a hapless rental agency customer service agent, I proffered the alternative to immediate rental car replacement. Which was to drive on the donut to a tire shop and just have the tire replaced instead of the car.

Which went over so swimmingly that we were hardly late to our destination, relaxed, and dare I say, soon happy as clams. I still don't have a relationship with a tire company but I have had a memorable experience with a flat tire. Now as it turned out, the imminent violence manifest in our sudden appearance at Big O tires warranted a canny move on the part of the manager in charge that morning. To wit, we were bumped to the front of the line, hoisted and affixed while no less than one loyal local was left longer to wait.

And we found the place using an iPhone. There was no app for that, but google maps, but if it hadn't been for that we might have spent even more time placing desperate customer service calls, and coming ever and more speedily closer to the brink of family outing meltdown.

So if you or I were at Big O tire company in the social media marketing department of one, reading this post might suggest a different take-away. Flat tire is the experience — not tire, tire treads, or tire technology. We might run upstairs and a across the floor to the marketing department and proclaim: "Flat tires! That's the consumer experience related to online! To hell with blogger relations (wait, that's me), let's ask to use this guy's story and see if we can find more. People tell stories about flats, not tires!"

We might then bank around the corner and ask for a moment with the IT group. "Big O tire locations: Do we have an app for that?" Hey, ho, no we don't! And perhaps zip up to the C suite and declare: "Here's this guy who had a flat tire, the rental car agency reps dropped the ball, and we solved their problem. I'm thinking, why doesn't the rental car agency realize how much it could save if it offered to cover tire replacements with us. Instead of shipping out a tow truck, why not we and the rental car agency roll out a new tire program: share the cost and market together. Rental car customer service reps will have locations and numbers of Big O tire shops, and offer to help get the customer first in line in case of emergency flats?"

That would be organizational learning, of the kind that we often mean when talking about social business design. Learning from the consumer's experience and stories, rethinking the experience and finding inspiration. And we could take this further, for there are many other consumer tales out there, including the ones about the tractor pull and the checkered flag.

And I haven't even unpacked some of the other ways in which consumers relate and identify, not with the brand directly perhaps but with what its product means. The crushing power of the monster tire, or high performance precision of the Formula 1 racing treads. The teamwork of the pit stop, the rumble of a lowrider, the car modifications of a Pimp My Car, the green branding of recycling retired tires. All of which are much more social than the personal tale told here.

So socially-mediated branding capitalizes on the re-tale-ability of retail stories originating in the marketplace, amongst consumers whose experiences and interests are authentic and authentically told. I'm tempted to call this "revangelism." Or brand evangelism retold.

Socially-mediated branding: identify yourself

2009-09-29T13:13:00.000-07:00

If one did a semantic analysis of the language I use in my blog posts of late, I'd not be surprised if two of the words I use most are "many" and "different." I much prefer many and different to "one" and "the same." Which is where I think there are some ideas worth noting about identity online. Identity says to me "one" and "the same."

We think of identity as the identity of a person. But people are far from one thing only, just as identity is far from always the same. In fact we could debate, and many do, whether or not there even is such a thing as identity.

It's been said, I don't recall by whom, that we experience ourselves as complex and differentiated, but that we see others as whole. I don't know if this tendency also permeates how we think of users and consumers. But in the interest of pushing a little on the assumptions we in social media make about the user and his or her interests, I'd like to unpack this a bit.

Philosophically, I'm more interested in becoming than being. Much more interesting, to me, is not the identity of who we are, but the question of how we become. For we become not by staying the same, but by relating to something different. If identity is a valid concept, then to me it is still a process. If identity ever "is," then it becomes so by identifying.

The aims of socially-mediated branding are to capitalize on the many and different ways in which companies can leverage relationships. Relationships through which consumers identify themselves, with or through a brand, friends and peers, values, and other kinds of interests.

The relationship is formed on the basis of identifying with something. This might be the brand itself, or its products, but also its principles, reputation, or values. In the case of a popular brand, and a lifestyle brand in particular, this relation usually involves relating to social perceptions of the brand.

Brand identity is not how the brand sees itself but how consumers relate to it: how they identify with it, and which facet or brand attribute it is that interests them (again: product, brand, values, reputation, etc).

Let's take the example of a user interested in a football team. We say the fan identifies with the team. If this fan is a particularly fanatic one, then this identification may even be called an identity. It's not who the person is, but how he or she sees themselves.

Identity might also be how the person represents him or herself to others, may be clear in how they talk, and will most certainly be involved in who they relate to and how. Other fans will be said to have the same identity. Fans relate to each other as fans of the same team, sharing a common identity.

Identity then is social. How we see ourselves is social. We see our own identities reflected in the social scenes we relate to and with which we identify. It's never enough to ask "what's the consumer's passion" and stop there. Passion is social. It is expressed in how the person relates to others and to the social world of things that he or she identifies with.

We have left the information age and are now in the age of communication. That's where our technologies and "industries" currently show much of the most interesting innovation. And in this age of rapidly socializing media, communication itself becomes a commodity.

Online talk, once it's been captured, can be circulated and distributed, and can attract the value and attention that drives non-money social economies. As social currency spent, and as social capital accumulated, communication on social media represents a very disruptive shift to the uses of media for marketing, branding, and sales.

Whether we like it or not, the commodification of communication by means of social media will be used. It will be used to the consumer's advantage, in some cases and by some brands. And exploited in others. This is how media work, when bound to the math of the bottom line.

As users identify themselves by means of media, as their relationships expose both individual tastes and preferences, as well as social affinities and common social identities, we should be advised that identity is not a fixed property. It is a work in progress and always in play. A dynamic of social identifications by which many and different relationships take shape through interactions and communication.

Brand identities, too, are socially determined. And brands interested in socially-mediated branding would be well advised to spend less on their identity. The brand's view of its identity is not the same as the consumer's. Brands, instead of communicating their identity, and identifying themselves, would do well to embrace the dynamic of identity through identification. Which is, in short, to identify with their consumers.

The sociability spec: documenting social interaction requirements

2009-09-28T06:24:00.000-07:00

The social interaction requirements doc
We're all familiar with the MRD and PRD, documents used to set market and product requirements for a new software application or service. For social media products, I think there's another piece of documentation worth writing. I have call it the social interaction requirements document (SxRD?). This document details the sociability of a product, service, or even campaign, and serves to capture social dimensions.

There are a couple reasons I think this document might stand apart from the other two. First, it is used to align business needs with user social practices that will support those needs. And secondly, it forces a user-centric appreciation of a product's social utilities. Who will use it, why, for what, and what will be the social outcomes of their participation? Not features and functionality, but support of relationships, interactions, and communication.

These aspects of a social media product's use are so critical that a separate brief written from user perspectives can be essential to getting the social mix right. In contrast to use cases seen from the product or business perspective, sociability starts with user interests and personalities.

For reasons similar to those that apply for social media products and services, brand campaigns and marketing efforts can be served by addressing social requirements also. For these focus on the conversation space and the many kinds of interactions and communication users adopt through tools that the campaign will depend upon. Again, the point of the document is to frame the business perspective in social terms: from within the social diversity of an audience's many members.

Set goals
The document should begin, as do the others, with your organizational goals. These should include what you want to achieve with your social media product, service, or campaign. Identify outcomes you wish to achieve, for your own benefit as well as that of users. Set metrics for success, and select means by which to measure them. These may be simple and freely available analytics (such Google alerts and analytics), or third party applications. If you wish to measure the impact of traffic produced across social media, as well as influential blogs and users it's coming from, there are many tools by which to measure that, too.

Having set goals and objectives for social outcomes, now recognize that reaching them depends upon user participation. Not just of individual users, but in social practices and participation that builds on its own. This is where objective metrics and analytics should be complemented by a more subjective interpretation and review of social outcomes: in short, a sociability assessment.

Sociablity
The sociability assessment will be used to help align you with user interests. Because users will engage with your site for reasons not just beyond your control and direct influence, but out of interests they themselves bring to the experience, insight into this aspect of social media participation is key. It takes many different kinds of users, with different habits around using, interacting, and communicating with friends and others through social media. The dynamics of their interactions will determine whether your efforts are successful.

Sociability applies not just to social media apps and sites, but to brands and their campaigns, also. In the case of applications, it's a description of social usability. In the case of brands, and use of social media for campaign purposes, it's a description of the audience and marketplace focused on how members relate, interact, and communicate. Not from a market segmentation perspective, but according to how users actually use social media, and for what.

Real users, not user categories
This approach goes a level deeper than the categories often used to group social media users. Take the category of "creators," for example. While many users may belong to the "creators" category, the term describes a group and doesn't explain motives, behaviors, and social participation.

There are, of course, many reasons a user's activity in social media might result in content created. But they're different, and if understood in terms of the user's interests and personality, can align you with how core personalities help to galvanize and sustain your audience's engagement. After all, users interact not just with content and features, but with each other.

Interest users take in each other, in making contact, developing relationships, giving and getting attention — these and many more of the features of social interaction are the reason that "creators" get up in the morning. (This includes the mere perception of being visible, relevant, and socially involved, too.) To create, for somebody; or for an idea, belief, value, principle; for reputation or standing, or out of a sense of reciprocity, group membership, or expectation. Not "I'm a creator, thus I must arise and create as it is who I am!"

User interests and personalities
Not all users are alike, and their reasons for using social media vary by site or tool as well as by interest and more. Some professional experts, for example, may be more inclined to use twitter for the purpose of soap-boxing (nothing wrong with that!), building an audience and reputation. Others may use Wikipedia to collaborate around getting the story right, say on topics of deep personal interest. Where the expert may pursue and defend his or her opinion, the Wikipedian may care more about accuracy and objectivity. Each is personally invested, but with attention being driven differently, and resulting in different kinds of content created.

Likewise, the expert or pundit can draw an audience of fans, where the Wikipedian does not. This is not to say that experts just get more attention and personal branding; Wikipedians presumably take pride in getting the story right — a quality that may reflect their values and belief in collaboration for the greater good. What is important is that some types of users go well together. Experts attract fans, fans supply the audience and reputation by which the expert is motivated. Combinations can lead to dynamics that fuel rapid adoption, or which corrupt and endanger it.

Causes and effects
Many other social media applications, from review and recommendation sites to conversational tools and social games, attract and serve different kinds of users for reasons related to their different ways of producing sociability. Social dynamics not only provide the attention, followings, conversation, and other kinds of interactions that in turn generate more content and participation. They are the dynamo and engine of any social media success.

Brands should recognize this, and supplement their use of analytics tools and metrics with sociability descriptions. Tools don't (yet) provide analysis of these distinctions, let alone suggest ways to leverage the nuances beneath the "soft stuff" of social media. And while numbers may be a measure of results, but reveal little of their inner workings. Effects can be quantified, but causes will always take a human evaluation. The rising importance of community managers is a step in the right direction, although community managers can get close to their communities and may do well to step up occasionally for an "objective" review of site, service, or campaign engagement.

Conclusion
The art of the social interaction design requirements spec, and of sociability assessments performed after product launch and over the course of a campaign, complements the science of quantitative analysis. Nowhere else does a medium offer so much information about what's going on than in social media. But it's not for this reason alone that you might take a big picture look at the sociability of your business, and build the soft skills by which to understand how user engagement, thick or thin, passing or lasting, can be sustaining and sustained.

For more on sociability for brands, see: Sociability review

Social Interaction Design: Leaderboard

2009-09-25T11:11:00.001-07:00

11.
On the heels of a bit of to-and-fro with Josh Porter (@bokardo) and Adina Levin (@alevin) on leaderboards as used in social media, I have to confess that Josh may be right. Designers do influence users. That is, insofar as my writing this can be construed as a reflection of a designer's influence on me. This is in the spirti of collegial discussion. ;-)

The leaderboard debate is not a new one. I don't mean to bring it all back up here. I want, instead, to show that the leaderboard in social media may be different than the leaderboard in non-social media. Or, outside of game contexts, leaderboards in social media may work in ways extrinsic to their implementation for game use.

10.
I'm going to focus on leaderboards used to rank people. Say, Top Users, one through ten. One is the important number here. One is made possible by two through ten. Two through ten make One the Top of the List. One, alone, is just One of something. But in a ranked list One through Ten are an Order. Two through ten want to be One. One is the best, and there is no better than One. One arranges two through ten in descending order, all being less than One and all aspiring to become One.

9.
The representational system used by a leaderboard is "Numbers." The ranking is the Ordering of Numbers. But is there more than a numerical order at work here? More than the Order of One through Ten?

Numbers have a numerical order from One to Ten., but not a signifying system of One is better than Ten. In other words, the value of the number is not the meaning of the number. So then the Order of the List must be more than numberical, even though it orders numbers.

8.
The Order of numbers, then, is not contained in the numbers themselves. Numbers must be put in order. But what is that order if it's not just the numerical order of One through Ten? Do the numbers mean something other than their number? Or does the Order supply meaning more that that of ordered numbers?

As we have said, One matters most. So let's look at Two. What is Two? Is it half as good as One? How about Seven? Is Seven six places from the Best or three places from the Bottom? Is the difference between One and Two the same as that between Nine and Ten? If the answers are ambiguous, then certainly we're not going to find the Order of the Leaderboard in the numbers, for numbers themselves have an unambiguous numerical relation known by the quantities expressed by the number.

Notice that the numbers at the extremes matter the most. For example, Two and Nine matter more than, say, Four or Six. Two is Nearly the Best, and Nine is Nearly the Bottom. We say Next to First Place or Next to Last; or we say Second Place and Second to Last. These expressions suggest that the numerical value is not as important as its relative position. Again, number is not the meaning. Perhaps, then, it is Position.

7.
Position is not a Quantity, but a relation. It takes two or more Numbers to get a relation. Nor is Position numerical, even if it is represented by a Number. Perhaps the Order of the numbers creates Positions among the numbers.

6.
So let's shfit from the Number to the Position, from One through Ten to First through Last. Let's assume that the user wants to get away from nearly falling off the list (Last) and move up to First Place.

Not only is Position relative, as ordered by the List. It is dynamic: any Numbe below One wants to be different, wants to be higher. Better. Last Place seeks First Place.

To peg the meaning of a number even on Relative Position, then, would be missing out on the List's dynamic. Changing Position counts. There is only one First Position, whereas there are nine Other Positions. The Order contains a shortage: there can only be one Best. And competition: there are nine other Positions aspiring to First.

5.
If Position is relative, and the Order is dynamic, what's moves the dynamic? Is it a dynamic of ordered numbers only?

Let's say that I want to improve my position and get into First Place. Do I care about Second? Fifth? What if I am Last? Would I rather not be on the List at all?

I know that even if I would rather not be on the List, than be on it in Last Place, I want to increase my Position.

Is this what moves the dynamic? Something that's not in the Numbers themselves, the Numerical list, or the Order of Relative Positions?

Why do I want to improve my Position, and best of all, get First Place? Is it because that's what the List means? Or possibly because it's what everyone else wants too? Social Ranking, not Numerical Ranking?

4.
So, if my motive is to make the list, my incentives and inclinations are to do things that improve my Position. Motivated by Social Ranking and by making the List, my actions can now be explained by an incentive to keep my position, and if possible, improve it. Is Five an incentive? Seven? No, Relative Position is what motives me.

So, then the numbers don't explain my actions. The ordering system does. Well, in part. In part, only, because we have said that it's neither the Numbers nor the Ordering of Relative Positions, but the social Ranking represented.

If what is on screen represents the ranking of a Social group, then perhaps it's not really the Numbers in the List but my identification with the Social Group. Perhaps the Meaning of the Order, and of its dynamic, isn't in fact in the List or its Numbers but in What it Means to Me.

If the Ordering system involves reaching First Place, then to some extent it must matter that in First Place I am Ahead of the Others. Ahead of Everyone Else, I'm Number One. This is a Position I have and Nobody Else does.

Surely this is social, then. The Order relates numbers in relative Position to one another, and relates me to the Social Group it ranks. The Relative Position represented by Numbers is also a list of Social Positions that are relevant to me.

3.
The incentive on which I choose to pursue Number One is now likely a reflection of my orientation towards the social group ranked. So, if I don't care about the social group, I don't mind not being in the ranking.

So it's not just the Ranking itself, but the social group referred to in the ranking. It matters what the Social means to me. What it's about is Who is in it and Who sees it. Presumably, those who see it can be in it. But perhaps not all who can see it can be in it. So there is social distinction involved in Making the List.

My incentive, now, is presumably a reflection of Where I See Myself vis-a-vis others Who can be on the List. It is a reflection of my Self Perception within a Social context — as represented by the ordering of People on a List. So my incentive must involve My Position within the Social group.

2.
Then surely it matters Who else is on the List. If this is the case, the List is about my Relative position among People I have some Feeling about. And this, even if I don't know them.

And if I don't care about the People on the List, or about Who sees the List, then I may not want to pursue my own Rank. And if I dislike the People who are on the List, if I think the List or the Site that it's on is unimportant, then I probably don't care about being on the List.

1.
Nowhere, then, is there an Incentive that clearly belongs to the List, to its Numbers, to the People on it, or Who can see it. There is just its relevance to me: my incentives are internal.

Incentives are what one may describe as causes of User Action. The Leaderboard itself "has" or possesses no Incentives in an objective and universal sense. What produces the Incentive is the user's Recognition of what it means, socially; and how much it matters, personally.

Leaderboards work, and they do work, not for reasons intrinsic to the design or functionality of the Leaderboard, but for reasons internal to the people to whom they matter. Incentives belong to people and are represented using functional design methods that depend on individual interests and social relevance for their success.

Social media: the attention economy explained

2009-09-23T11:30:00.001-07:00

I started wondering last evening what twitter would be like if in addition to followers we could also see who was actually being paid attention to. The groups many of us use in clients like Tweetdeck or Seesmic, for example. So in the midst all of our positive talk of transparency and authenticity, I found myself chuckling at the opacity we in fact rely on to make it through the day.

There's nothing wrong with this, and while some may see a cynical twist or twitter's dirty little secret (nobody's listening!), I see instead perfectly reasonable social media coping mechanisms. ;-)

Social media's two audiences
Social behaviors are shaped and informed by design, but not explained by design. The obvious reason that none of us can see each other's twitter usage (groups, or subsets of followers actually viewed and paid attention to) is that if designed into twitter, activity would change instantly and radically. This is not just a matter of privacy, but a deeply social matter.

Reflecting on this last night led me to thinking about the social and public space constructed across all social media. There are, in mediated social contexts, always two audiences.

There is an audience we'll call social, and which we describe in terms of proximity: it's a internalized social world of friends, peers, colleagues: known individuals.
And there is a second, anonymous public, which is not internalized but is imagined.

Any person known belongs in the social and is potentially present. Any anonymous individual, because we don't yet know them (as soon as we do, they move to the internalized social world), is possibly present.

Potential and possible relations
Potential social relations become active relations, or interactions, when we communicate. Possible relations become actual relations, based on the action of following, when we are seen and found.

I think the doubling of audience could go far in explaining the power of social media.

We know, for example, that the probability of actually having a conversation is less in social media than it is face to face. There's simply a lot more at our command in face to face situations by means of which to have conversation. However, face to face situations limit us, of course, to those in our presence. Social media may reduce the probability of having real conversation but increase the opportunities for creating conversation.

This seems, to me, the main reason we use social media. Not mass, but mini media. Or, "me"-dia, in the context of social, not mass audiences. The distinction between social and mass media being that relations are possible in the former, not so in the latter. (This is changing as mass incorporates social.)

The medium's three modes: mirror, surface, window
Back then to attention, and the veil of nondisclosure from behind which we engage in social media. I like to say that the social interface has three modes: mirror, surface, and window.

We see ourselves reflected in social media: this is it's mirror mode.
We consume content of all kinds off the screen — sites, apps, communication — all using the screen as a presentation layer: this is its surface mode.
And we talk to each other through social media: this is its window mode

Modes of attention
Social presence, proximity, and attention are then each implicated in a mediated social context that has ways of seeing and ways of being seen.

Consider this, for example. We enjoy accumulating followers, seeing ourselves referred to, commented to, and otherwise being made visible. Doesn't matter whether this involves acknowledgment, recognition, or validation; the point is that the medium does create a kind of social visibility. Call it, for simplicity's sake, "being paid attention to."

Well, attention doesn't correlate with actually engaging in conversation. Many of us sometimes ignore a request for communication, for whatever reason. It's part of daily life; in real life it's called "civil inattention," and is handled by acknowledging others in ways that also indicate to them "I see you, recognize you, but I'm not available to interact." Simply put, politeness.

Now, consider the social media space. Attention paid to others may not be visible to them. But if it's given, such as by taking any action recorded and captured by the medium and surfaced by design, then this action can have two social outcomes, not one. This is the power of the medium, and the net effect of the doubled audience mentioned above.

Social actions, social relations
One translates as the potential for further social action. The other translates into the possibility for social relation. For the social world already has relations but has activity only on the basis of user actions. And the public world has activity but lacks the connection until a relation is established.

A social action has been made which can be picked up by any user who sees it: potential for further action
A social action increases the user's visibility: the possibility of being seen

The possibility of being seen is motive enough, for some. While communication is no more probable, the possibility is there. As they say of the lottery: your odds of winning increase dramatically if you buy a ticket.

The power of this second audience, the public, which creates infinite possibilities and which is motivation for much of what we do, explains a lot of how the attention economy works.

Perceived and transactional influence
Attention, interestingly, is described in economic terms: paid, spent, given, taken. Note that the first two are zero sum and involve the temporality of attention. Paying attention takes our time. The second two are non-zero sum and transactional.

Giving and getting attention is the simplest social action. Nothing yet has to be said or communicated verbally: attention can be given a person, and that in itself, is socially meaningful.

Now consider how we attend to the attention economy in social media. Brands, as well as users, watch and attend to it. Brands, as well as users, transact in it.

Social capital, the perceived value of a brand or individual, collects attention paid and spent on that brand or person. Call this perceived influence.
Social currency, the transacted value of a brand or individual, is attention given and taken by the brand or person by means of social actions. Call this transactional influence.

Unfortunately, perceived influence, which is just social observation, is grossly under-rated. It's much more difficult to measure because there's no action taken. Brands can't see the value in it for it's not in the numbers provided by metrics and analytics tools. For it lies behind the veil of personal social media use, in the activity of paying attention to twitter, or more specifically, to the users we actually follow.

I say this is unfortunate because i think much social action is preceded by long periods of social observation. Consider the difference it would make, to brands and to users, if all social media were split screen interfaces: what I see and what you see. Real life social situations are like this: I see you looking at me, and can see reflected in your face something of how you see me (what you think of me).

Motives explained by the social and the public
The dual public also helps to explain many of our motives in using social media. Again, our actions can lead to potential further action, and if not, are at least possibly seen. Tweets, like comments, reflect these motives.

For example:

Tweets or comments intended to get attention from the author
Tweets or comments soliciting or appealing for direct response
Tweets or comments that are a direct response
Tweets or comments that continue a conversational run or thread
Tweets or comments intended to garner attention to their author

We could break each of these down and show that for each, the user's motive may be to appeal to the author's attention, to get visibility in front of the public, to solicit a response, or to respond. Tweets and comments, in other words are not just that: (Nothing is explained if we describe social action by its form of content.)

Summary
To conclude, then, I think that the fact that any use of social media can have outcomes in two distinct audiences may explain its uniqueness as a medium, and its use by brands and individuals alike. That the attention economy involves both looking and being seen, posting and responding, would explain why motives for participating in social media reflect to the "presence" of two audiences. These are properties particular to the sociality of the medium, and to the sociability of its uses.

Activity Streams: Realtime and Streamtime

2009-09-22T09:43:00.000-07:00

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.

Sociability: Usability for Social Media

2009-09-21T12:47:00.000-07:00

People who know me personally are familiar with my baroque inclinations for turning simple things into brid"s nests of complexity. I'm drawn to what lies behind, below, before, and because of anything that has to do with people. For reasons I have spent much of my life working through, I am naturally and insatiably interested in what people mean — much more than what I mean to people.

This makes me a pretty good accidental observer and, incidentally, analyst too. So when I work with social media clients — often application providers who "need" their users to get involved in their product or service — I always start from the perspective of their users. Product descriptions, such as "our platform is for ____" just tell me what the client wants. I might use his or her business interests to figure out what will count as a success (note to consultants: it's not about you!). I will usually quickly assess what a client's view of his or her users is, in fact, and even better, why he or she thinks users would want to use the product.

User experience, a term that bounces around within the hollows of my cranium, and the user, whose reflection I catch as if I am negotiating a hall of mirrors, are first and foremost the key to social media success. It's strikes me as paradoxical that the user experience profession really doesn't offer a description of the many experiences users have of social media. For uses we have a great deal of description; but for experience, relatively little. (The term "user" gives away our bias: use.)

My first deliverable to clients is usually an accounting of different user personalities and interests, specific to the ways in which their experiences of a company's "social" may be engaging, disengaging, effective, ineffective, and so on. In all honesty, I don't even use those terms. I simply describe the experiences.

My personality types are then means to think through the product or service from different angles. Not personas, for they are a fiction and a target audience, but personalities. Because each of us is limited by our own experience and, naturally, inclined to think others are more or less like us.

I'm going to start offering and pitching (softly) a Sociability review to clients. I'd like to do this not only for social applications but for businesses using social media, also. Sociability, because I think the usability issues of social media are social. And because I continually encounter the question "How do we get our users to do ___? "

One doesn't get users to do anything, of course. One provides something the users know how to do and are interested in doing already. The Sociability review will probably take the form of a description. No high-falutin social interaction design theory, just a close reading of user contributions, of their interactions and communication, for insights into their motives and interests.

I don't know who will pay for this, but it won't cost much, as I have lived and breathed social and web for longer than I care to admit. And deeply — always and tirelessly reflecting on what it's like for the other person. So this won't be difficult. Even better, is that it will be interesting. I don't think there are many folks out there who use deeply social analyses, or who wonder by nature at what lies beneath the social habits and practices that make up our daily lives. And who do social media analysis.

These media are to me all about the social that envelopes and embraces them, when they succeed, or the social that struggles and stumbles, when they fail. And insofar as social works only by the tacit and implicit engagement of users who "get it," I think a Sociability assessment could be a valued addition to the usual marketing requirements and product specs we have relied upon for so long to define and steer design and development.

I'm putting my interests and passion for social theory to use. Theory development is an intellectual pursuit. The practice of it is where it comes to life. So the door is open. I'll hang out the shingle later. I like this idea. Now to see if clients do, too.

Social Interaction Design: Structure

2009-09-17T12:37:00.001-07:00

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.