Conversation Roundtable 1: Joan DiMicco & Alan Liu  

by: Katrina Kimport

 

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[Note: Please feel free to edit your comments.] 

 

Joan DiMicco presentation:

 

There has traditionally been a focus on user-centered design and needs.  But bringing together computer scientists etc., we can think about the tool itself, not just the user needs.  We can control the type of communication going on.  The question emerges for HCI: what do you intend for the user to believe about each other? Know about each other?  How do we design with intentionality?  What does it mean if we do? 

 

For example, we can create systems that encourage deception or that encourage collaboration.  (For example, gaming systems offer persuasion, rewards, etc.)

 

Alan Liu presentation:

Introduces his personal pseudo-blog.  As a scholar trained and most interested in looking at objects, was intrigued by how in his blog work, he finds himself tinkering more and more with the background content and not just the “objects.”

 

He finds that “a template is a person, it’s an identity.” On blogs with multiple links, we have not just a blog as person, but blog as a community, as multiple people.

 

Finally, with software such as xobni (www.xozbni.com), a system of filtering Outlook, software tries to sort by ways that are useful for people.

 

Personal statement: we want in some form to be able to carry around our personal community, our treasured community of others, with us.  Right now, we’re restricted to sidebars of a webpage, but what about in the future when you can bring that community with you in a computer, in an augmented reality, etc.  Social sidebar could still/should still (?) be carried around with us.  And there’s no reason the “honored dead” cannot come with us.  Our treasured community is customizable, portable, etc.

 

Open Discussion: “The Nature and Future of Social Computing (together with all its warts and problems)”

 

Larry: importance of considering the differences between ends targeted

Liz: do we really need authenticity?  Is it overvalued by academics?

Leah: thinking about library experience of documentary history

Carol: distinction between documentary history and social history

Nancy: over-valorization of friendship in social networking.  We interact with people in non-social ways all the time. (e.g., scholars in the humanities who work with dead writers).  Some things that I don’t want to know about my students.  What is the purpose of social computing if it’s not about looking for someone to date or go drinking with?

Alan: thinking about purpose of deception.

Miriam: in some realms, need to rely on traditional forms of authority (e.g., medical decisions).  But on the social side, the types of desired authority are different (e.g., when buying a car).  Idea of what’s credible, who’s credible shifts as we move through different environments.  In facebook, authority hinges on, say, popularity or appearance.  To become more credible, you need to use deception: include only those photos that make you look attractive.

Alan: About more than just deception management, about PR, etc.

Joan: it’s all about identity management.  Vision of the sidebar with you all the time—want different sidebars all the time.  Want multiple sidebars, multiple blogs, etc.  Everything gets nuanced.  Pre-social networking, you did that all without thinking about it.  But now, you only get one sidebar on your blog.  If you’re going to deceive, how do you even deceive for the right audience?

Bill: question of economy and economics.  We have a limited amount of attention and time.  What are the economic costs of inclusion in the “sidebar”?  A link is “association” but social linking has to be reciprocal—how much do we want to commit to other interfaces?  Deception, avatars, etc. are ways to manage economics.  Because you’re not identified, someone can’t reach you.  How do we weave economics and reciprocity into this issue?

Alan: new plans will require lots of costs, interoperability, etc.

Jim: assigning a tag to something requires effort.

Kevin: how do we distill this into a set of research problems? Aspect of performance—how does the real time experience impact your use of the system?

Alan: what are the technical requirements?

Tad: move beyond designing for the user, design the inter-personal space, designing the space between individuals.  The question is what are the rules about how people interaction.  Joan placed that responsibility with the designer.  Example of wikipedia: there are extensive rules, enacted through the community.  What are the guidelines governing interaction in a social computing space?  Do users have access to those rules?

Alla: think contextually.  At this time in my life, maybe I want to play around with different identities.  At other times, maybe I just want one identity.  We need to build tools that are flexible enough to allow people to change things around.

Leah: we always assume that the people who use these systems are like us.  But these things cross boundaries all the time.  How people communicate and participate differs in different places, at different times?  This creates more boundaries.  Network isn’t unique and isolated—there are weak links out to other networks.

Alan: can a system create boundaries around communities?  Can it suggest a certain quotient of “differentness”? Is there a way that the sidebar can be comfortably extended?   How in the future are we going to be able to discern between experts and “other”?

Carol: would want program that would show activity among the different sidebars

Jim: can we reverse engineer “sidebar”?  Is it a substitute for “community”?  Are we thinking about individuals (with a sidebar) instead of communities—what’s wrong here?  This is a FaceBook centric way of thinking about social computing.

Alan: better to have a team-based social metaphor.

Liz: added a piece to the wiki: “A professor’s impression of FaceBook.”  FaceBook levels the layering of interaction.  I would defend hierarchy (respect, deferral). Sometimes in academic communities, we’re connected to people with whom we profoundly disagree.

Miriam: visualizations of wiki edit histories show disagreement.

Larry: give thought to general categories we’re using. Social computing can refer to people and avatars, but it can also refer to the documents they produce and the processes they use to produce the documents.

Alan: what gets counted as people in a community

Nancy: why would you want to do a visualization?  It’s interesting, but kind of limited. Nuance lost.  Info going in is limited—it’s a snapshot.  How informative is it for me, about myself? And then how do you look at someone else?  Don’t know which of the people you agree with or disagree with.

Pablo: what if there was no person, just desires. Just collections of collections.

Carol: thinking about issue of “what are people?” Are dead people people? Part of a memorial service is about forgetting—forget the disputes, remember the virtues.  Memory is not of people but of interactions…Traditions shift, become relevant for the contemporary time.

Leah: question of forgetting comes from different people for different reasons.

Alan: do we want to make relationships explicit and articulate (by user) or let the computer figure it out?  Should we annotate and read content, or have program filter relevance etc. based on parameters?  Academics seem to be more interested in annotating, but maybe not that’s not possible?

Ben: technically, it’s hard to remove information.  Hard to delete a Facebook profile, for example.  Unless there’s hardware with a timer than allows you to delete memory, nearly impossible to delete information.

Tobias: My work with John was designed to expose the background systems of trust etc. and help the user understand the impact. Our drive is to give the user more power and understanding , but acknowledge that it’s limited. 

Nancy: well, forgetting isn’t that hard.  How many people remember friendster? Applications replace each other.  There is a time dimension and a fad dimension. In flickr use, users have a very refined criteria of which images go on each site, which conversations are on email, on IM, on twitter, etc. There are whole components of their lives that we’re not looking at—we are highly distributed in cyberspace.

Alan: hard to see social computing without lens of current applications.  Is it possible and desirable to think about social computing in a device- and software-neutral way? (That’s the task of Bluesky.)

Bruce: Twitter use at S by SW. Audience speaks back to (protests) panels, speakers, etc.

Alan: value of collaboration in person + simultaneously online.  Example of working in a room on a Google Doc with a number of grant writers.

Miriam: revisit issue of how are we defining social computing. What do we lose when we stick everything together under social computing?  What about grouping them along various dimensions?  Might help us think more clearly about some of the issues and problems. Which forms of social computing seem to have the wings, are the future of where social computing might go?

Alan: social computing working definition: deployment of network communication systems for the purposes of allowing communities of people to interact within a domain of knowledge for one or more goals.

Andrew: think about second-order level of social computing.  What can we get out of social computing? Example of wheresgeorge.com.  Can use that data to think about how a pandemic would emerge—this is where people move. Remind us to think about other applications that are not immediately apparent but are useful.

Kevin: think about extremes of machine- and person-developed.  But there is a lot of chaotic behavior.  It is hard to predict what’s going to happen in the future. But we can study and formalize the different attributes that people look at.