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May 12, 2006
Social Science and Design Questions
Posted by Ross Mayfield
Last week Liz organized the Microsoft Research Social Computing Symposium. I shared some raw notes here, and here is a good gaming summary, but most of the activity was in a private Socialtext wiki. Among other things, Clay and danah held a session on the lingering questions in our field. This should tease out what work is already done or in progress, but I thought they may be thought provoking at the least:
Social Science Questions
* How can we measure the success of different types of online communities, and their survival and prodictivity and various criteria?
* Coates: which community software is more successful in which environments?
* What are the boundry conditions for mobile and pervasive (social) computing systems?
* To what extend, in what ways, at what rate/time scal will mobile and/or pervasive systems change the way humans interact socially?
* Do natives of social media systems have a different notion of themselves as individuals and abour their relation to broader social groups?
* What are the mechanisms that cause people to act, mark up, buy or sell bits they care about online?
* What tips people to try something, what’s enough to bring value?
* Does the “regular public” want to connect with people othey do not know? (outside the context of dating)
* What level of visual representation of the body is necessary to trigger mirror neurons
* Are the online community members of tomorrow going to be more or less participatory than today’s? And why?
* What impact do computer/video games have on the everyday habits and routines of the gamers?
* Is society becoming more or less individualized?
* How can we use the computational ability of our machines to transform communication?
* How can we get access to behavioral (server logs) and attitudinal data (survey data) from large scale worlds?
Design Questions
* What elements of MMOG can be adapted to web applications?
* How can we build virtual worlds/spaces where we can operate parallel servers with slightly variable rulesets?
* … so that we can change one experimental condition and obverve the response by the inhabitants?
* What are the barriers to contributing to social group ointeraction (social bookmarking, wikis)?
* …What are the steps to mitigate the barriers?
* How do we make memories portable?
* How do we use social judgement to surfae what your peers care or are interested in? What the crowd is interested in?
* How can communities support veterans going off topic together an new commers seeking topical information and connections?
What lingering questions do you have for possible research?
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1. Chris Francovich on May 18, 2006 10:50 AM writes...
Following up on the 'mirror neurons' point. I would like to suggest that this inquiry go beyond visual representations to an index of meaningful associations that can be represented visually. I remember reading a paper a few years ago by Thomas Erickson and Wendy A. Kellogg called Social Translucence: Using Minimalist Visualizations of Social Activity to Support Collective Interaction (In Designing Information Spaces: The Social Navigation Approach (eds. K. Höök, D. Benyon, A Munroe), Springer-Verlag: London, 2003, pp. 17-41)
In this paper the authors describe the possibility of our 'awareness' of others in a virtual social space being keyed by virtual proximity and reputation.
So one can see at a glance who has spoken (written something)(recency is indicated by proximity to the center of a circle (the social space)) and how much their posts are being read/responded to - (reputation indicated by the size of the person's icon)....
My interest is on using asynchronous communication to develop deep understanding and shared meaning. I think people can do this really well asynchronously but we have to find out what will draw our attention and then intention to the space.
My understanding of this phenomena (and the place of mirror neurons in it) is primarily form GH Mead and Ecological Psychology in general.
Respectfully,
Chris
Permalink to Comment2. Fred Stutzman on May 19, 2006 4:00 PM writes...
Without a question, emergent social aspects as adopted by the net-natives are going to guide software development over the next ten years. What factors - be they design, social integration, usability or outcomes - are the most important.
There's a real chasm emerging between how different age ranges approach identity-sharing and sociality on the net; the 20-year olds of today won't be product managers at large firms for at least a few more years. Until then, do we design blind?
How can we discover and isolate these social aspect factors, so we can understand their appeal, and better design software around them? This is a key question - we're designing social software based on our intuition of the world. The fact is, though, we as humans approach the world with structural expectations. These needs and expectations could be built in to social design patterns, but they need to be discovered, analyzed and documented. This area will keep us up to our ears in research for the next ten years, but understanding this is essential.
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