I have a feeling this could turn into an interesting discussion! I'm
actually shaping up a follow-up piece to the primer on social
interaction design i blogged a couple weeks ago. My own theoretical
framework aside, however, a couple points, for clarification purposes.
--I don't think we should think of this as social engineering. We're
not designing prisons, classrooms, or political rallies here. There is
a social component of course to social media, but it's experienced by
the individual user. I think this is a critical aspect of social
interaction design. *It's not really social.*
--Realizing that the social interaction is only a mediated version of
face to face interaction, we are forced to deal with the medium
itself, which is good, because we're all designers. We build a social
architecture, if you will, and populate it. At best we can learn how
to anticipate consequences of aggregated user interactions, and steer
them by what we choose to put on the screen, where, why, and so on.
The analogy here to public spaces, urban architects, etc, is the best
I can come up with.
--We anticipate social interactions on social media best if we can see
how the aggregation of individual user experiences will produce
sustained social practices. That's what makes this social interaction
design: the extension of individual user experience to social
practice. Social practices, as viewed by sociologists, are self-
sustaining systems (i'm over simplifying here) -- designing an
application or site architecture to facilitate and in effect "produce"
those practices is the goal of the social interaction designer.
--The interesting part, and this is where the theory comes in, is in
fleshing out a framework for understanding what mediated social
interactions are like. And by this, not just "communication," because
there are other "social" phenomena at play. Some involve direct
communication, but many involve meta communication, and social
phenomena such as eavesdropping, lurking/stalking, gifting, exchanging/
trading, and so on. In other words we need a model of what the user
activity is, based on the user intention vis a vis another or other
users. This is often a case of what the user thinks she's doing, then
thinks she has done, and how it is interpreted by others. The social
practice emerges when a fairly stable set of codes, behaviors,
interpretations can be said to govern "what's going on."
--For example, in social media we have genres, or "themed activities."
Dating. Jobs. Status updates. Social games. News. Etc. We know how to
engage in each because they all derive from real world themes. The
social interaction designer would know that adding pics to LinkedIn
will produce some amount of bias -- that any time you have pics some
amount of flirtation results. Or that "top ten" lists, "most popular
member" lists, and other forms of leaderboard become self-fulfilling
activities: they structure user interaction.
--Where it gets more complicated is in trying to outline modes of the
"social" user experience. Because all social media are not used for
communication, and are not used in the same way. Forrester and others
have done a lot of work segmenting users into early/late adopters, as
a means of describing influences, followers, etc etc. That's
interesting, but tells us nothing about the user experience. It's an
outside observation of traffic and activity. I'm really interested in
describing the user experience, and for that we need psychology, but
one that's modified to account for mediated interaction, as well as
the view of self image and impression of others that results from
interacting with a medium that produces Representations, Images, and
Texts.
--A rich theoretical framework would be able to describe user motives
and behavior, as it is experienced by the user. We can't ever know
what a user experiences, and asking him would only get us a self
report, which is unreliable. Best we can do is theorize, and apply. On
the theory end, I still think we have three basic modes: Self, Other,
Relation. Social media present us with an Image of ourselves, and
that's a "social" experience even if it doesnt involve communication
at all. Social media present us with a representation of an Other
person, and what we think of that person is "socialized" by the medium/
context, whether we know that person or not. And then there are
relationships developed, maintained, and reproduced by online
interaction: so there is a form of social activity (it may mean
something different to each participant), that participants understand
not only in terms of themselves, or the other people, but in terms of
What's Going On.
--There is so much more, but i'll stop here. The challenge, as I see
it, is to flesh out the social field -- interaction stuff that's not
"on the screen" or that isn't literally there -- and to apply it with
a framework of individual and collective action systems, which would
include communication but also the "non-communicative," "indirect" and
even "self-engaged" social stuff.
Please hit me with questions, I think this is fascinating stuff.
The primer I posted is here:
http://www.gravity7.com/blog/media/2008/10/social-interaction-design-primer.html
But poke around my site, too. This is all I've been working on for the
past 3 years, so there's a lot there.
cheers,
adrian
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