Social Media: Paradigm Shift?

Is social interaction a paradigm shift in web and online media design? Or less a paradigm shift and more just a nudge in the direction of the social? Though it doesn't really matter how or which we characterize "it," it's a change in approach. For the designer it's a shift away from individual user practices to social practices, from discrete software interactions and the software application's satisfaction of user transactions to talk and communication, which are ongoing and may not be "goal oriented." Human factors in social media are social factors also. The software's mediation of interaction and presentation of users through activity and profiles, posts and appeals involves user psychology, imagination, and the mediation of audiences that can sense presence across space and time.

Shift of paradigm

From individual users to social practices
User provides content, and content is people
Grounded in the personal, biographical, and the everyday
Personally and socially meaningful activities and mediated forms of talk and interaction
New modes of organizing attention
New forms of value and differentiation
New channels for messaging
New means of capturing audiences

The Social Paradigm

User as a social Self
User as self-interested and interested in others
All activity is social (visible to some others)
Interaction is Participation
Participation is a form of talk
Talk has new forms and languages
New forms include posts, comments, reviews, ratings, gestures and tokens, votes, links, badges, video
New forms are distributable and communicable

Social is represented

Social media must create and represent social interaction and community
There are no direct faces or interactions — only text, images, video, audio, and structured activities captured in media of re-presentation
Users behave according to what they believe is going on and what they believe matters to the audience
Users establish a relation to the audience and community based on its users, themes, and identity

Social networking

Social networks are the maintenance and sustaining of personal and professional relationships on social media
Social networks limit content access to known, familiar, and trusted associations
Relationships embody trust in the first degree
Relationships extend confidence in the second degree
Social networks expand content access while limiting results

Paradoxes

Social = anti-social
Communication = non-communicative
Self = Self Image
Other = Imagined Other
Presence = Absence
Identity = Changing
Personal tastes are highly social
Utility can be useless

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Home page messaging

Social media sites have to show and tell what they are about
The social media site's theme describes its social practices, audience, features, content with familiar thematic language, visuals, navigation, and features
Users want to see what other users are up to
Marketing language may describe the platform, but newcomers are usually more interested in who's using the service, for what, and how it's doing
Users are interested in the site's success and popularity
The brand is out of your hands and in the user's, where it's always been. Marketing messages on the home page should be combined with real user content

Token Gestures

All cultures practice the exchange of tokens that bear and carry meanings, communicate interest and count as personal and social transactions
The token gestures common among social media are a form of language and belong to a kind of social interaction
They cue, signal, indicate users' interests in one another
They indicate users' interests in social media content, and like badges, can be accummulated to communicate personality quickly
They can be used to distinguish among user and content qualities and characteristics
Some are given, some earned, some collected
Simple gestures are approval and affirmation, acceptance: variations on a vote "yes"
Expressive gestures signal affection, interest, curiosity, a desire to connect, or to communicate: variations on "I like you" and "Do you like me?"
Tokens that can be passed around, given, shared, and accepted form a special class of social objects
Have recognizable and stable meanings to competent users (may be common or specialized tokens)
Accompanied by ambiguity of intent and motive (the token's meaning may be codified while the user's motive for using it may not)
This can double up the meaning of interaction and communication, allowing the recipients of tokens to respond to the token or to the user behind its use
Their use and circulation can be easily counted, tracked, and measured
They can qualify relationships and social interests
Tokens may be limited or limitless, counted or not, private or public

SxD Presentations

Overview of SxD

SxD as design

SxD in Theory

SxD Site Audit