CHI 2011, Social Media and musings…

Conferences as big and wide in focus as CHI (Computer Human Interaction, the premier International Conference on HCI organized by ACM) always come as a whiff of fresh air. Particularly if you have been working on focused, defined projects for most parts, which is true for most of us in the industry. The predominantly academic focus of the conference ensures you witness a lot of futuristic ideas, open ended discussions, and of course some very interesting insights into how technology shapes and alters human behavior, sometimes in the most unexpected ways.

The picturesque location of the Convention Center on the waterfront of downtown Vancouver added a whole new dimension to the experience of CHI 2011. Not to mention the delight of serendipitously bumping into old colleagues, classmates and professors and coming across some of the brightest people in the field of HCI!

Not surprisingly, social media and the underlying theme of interconnectedness formed the crux of CHI this year. Mining social data and trying to get an insight into user behavioral patterns marked the core of several sessions, presenting some very interesting insights on user behavior on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, Location Sharing applications and Social Question Answering sites. One of the questions that emerged time and again is the tradeoff between the “social” aspects and the “content” based aspects of social media. Do people view, read and contribute because they find the content of a post interesting or because it pertains to their social circle? The most interesting impact was found to be on question answering forums where answers posted by “popular” users are rated high irrespective of the quality of content.

Facebook in particular has always intrigued me personally. There is a certain addictive quality to it which I believe has a lot to do with the “Saying things aloud to no-one in particular” paradigm of communication (well Twitter follows the same paradigm, it’s just that I haven’t gotten to using it much). What you say is out there for everyone to see, but does not demand anyone in particular to read or respond.  It’s less intrusive in a sense, even though the post is up there on everyone’s wall.

In this regard I particularly liked the presentation by Moira Burke, of HCI Institute of Carnegie Mellon presented an interesting study on Facebook usage and how the nature of interactions a person indulges in on Facebook impacts the creation of what the authors of the paper call  “social capital” (Burke, M., Kraut, R., and Marlow, C. (2011). Social capital on Facebook: Differentiating uses and users). In other words, they studied how what people do using Facebook contributes to their feeling of social well being and connectedness and on the perception of having a close social network that can be relied upon. All these factors sum up to form “social capital”.

It classifies interactions on Facebook into the following categories:

1)      Direct interpersonal communication – messaging, posting comments on someone’s post, posting on someone’s wall

2)      Passive consumption of content – reading, viewing photos and watching videos without participating in any conversation

3)      Broadcasting – Posting status, photos, links, etc

The study analyzes how each kind of interaction contributes to a feeling of social well-being, and interestingly shows that it is only the first kind that contributes significantly.

Now that’s interesting, because no one needs Facebook for one-to-one communication. Mail and Instant Messaging applications have been serving that purpose since before Facebook became a vogue. What is different here is that a lot of the interpersonal communication on Facebook is triggered by a broadcast (comments on a post) and this (along with posting on someone’s wall) is presumably more popular than the other two more conventional kinds of inter-personal communication that Facebook supports viz. messaging and chat. That makes me wonder if the unsolicited nature of comments on a post has a special role to play. Surely there is a value attached to getting a response from people simply by broadcasting a message directed at no one, as the response is completely voluntary and does not stem from a sense of courtesy or social obligation. But then again the responders could be driven solely by the content of the post rather than any social affect (eg. commenting on a link posted by someone we are only weakly connected to, simply because the content is of interest). Does purely content centric interaction play a role in building social capital equally? Would be interesting to come across literature on this!

And of course, with the introduction of tagging people on posts the distinction between broadcasts and inter-personal communication itself seems blurred! It’s kind of like talking to someone with the primary intention of being overheard by everyone else! It’s a kind of communication that in the “real” world of socialization would be considered weird and inappropriate. Perhaps online social networking has indeed altered our notion of privacy and perception of communication in general. We might slowly start experiencing its influence in our real life social behavior as well!

Advertisement