Why Socialize through Technology?

As a field of practice the design of social technologies (also known as Social Computing to the academics and Social Media to the marketers) is fairly young, developing just over the past ten years into a reasonably coherent set of approaches and problems. In 2000, everyone used email, virtual reality was on the decline as a popular topic, online community was on the incline, and Instant Messaging was just beginning to spread like wildfire. Some of the first lessons learned from early social software were that a) the primary reason people used social technologies was to interact with friends and family, not to meet new people, and b) extremely lightweight technologies such as email and IM were much more effective than immersive, 3D technologies for achieving this goal (Farnham et al. 2002). Researchers (Farnham et al. 2004, Wellman & Haythornthwaite, 2002; Nie, 2001; Katz & Rice, 2002) were finding across a number of studies that contrary to the prevailing fears, the use of social technologies appeared to be enhancing people’s access to and satisfaction with their social lives.

Social technologies have the potential of shaping the very nature of real life social dynamics. We need not think simply in terms of how they supplement face-to-face social interactions, or how we overcome the deficiencies of computer mediated social interactions. Social technologies provide many advantages above and beyond those found in face-to-face environments.

Communication irrespective of time or location. The primary advantage of many social technologies is the ability to communicate with any one irrespective of time or location. This and related topics on the use of computer-mediated communication has been reviewed quite thoroughly in the CMC literature (Walther, 1996).

Access to more people. Through the Internet people have a heretofore unheard of access to others, both in terms of sheer numbers and in terms of specialized interests and skills. Matchmaking tools such as online dating sites, community sites, or social networking sites provide opportunities to find dating partners, sources of knowledge, or fellow hobbyists with interests too unique too be found locally. People may be more selective about whom they develop meaningful relationships with, and they may have an increased number of weak social ties (Granovetter, 1982). As Katz and Rice (2002) argue, access to the Internet opens up channels for users to build social capital, lowering barriers to finding a group that shares their interests and the ability to more easily participate in groups.

More frequent, or continuous access. Through Internet and mobile technologies people have continuous access to and awareness of people they care about. They may at any time or place access friends, family and coworkers. A person with a cell phone and/or a computer with broadband connection need never feel alone again. As we saw several years ago, even through tragedies such as 9/11, people may keep in contact with their loved ones.

People are more likely to develop meaningful relationships through the increased frequency of exposure to others through social technology. Past research has shown that co-location is one of the strongest predictors of whether two people become friends, because it affords frequent, serendipitous interactions (Brehm & Kassin, 1996). People use social technology to enable both virtual serendipity, increasing the likelihood of their casually bumping into each other online through IM, email, and online journals, and real serendipity, increasing the likelihood of bumping into each other face to face through broadcasts of their intended activities and locations. In our own studies of social uses of technology we have found that for those online the use of email and IM are important features of relationship maintenance and development, and positively correlates with quality of life measures (Farnham et al., 2004). Even if people do not actively access their social circles through social technologies, possessing access can still serve to increase satisfaction with their social lives, simply by fostering feelings of connectedness to one’s social circle (Warnock & Farnham, 2004).

Increased volume of communication. Through social technologies people may communicate with a much larger audience than they could face to face or through the phone. Emails, blogs, and digital media are easily replicable and shared with masses of people. Where once the average person might have access to 15 minutes of fame through radio or television, he now has continuous access to an audience through digital broadcast communications. This increased level of communication between groups of people also enables accelerated community development.

Increased opportunities for social mobilization. Given the ease of moment to moment communication across time and location with large numbers of people, individuals and groups have an amazing capacity to dynamically mobilize into social actions (Rheingold, 2002). They might use these technologies to coordinate a social group to meet on a Saturday night (Keyani & Farnham, ????), arrange an impromptu performance art project such as sitting on a red couch at noon in an urban street, or mobilize fundraising and volunteer efforts after a tsunami decimates an entire region of the global environment.

Emergent, collective communication. Another, similar phenomenon emerging from social technologies is that of large scale, collective communication, where whole groups of people communicate indirectly through online information systems. An example of this effect is the Google “bombing” that occurred prior to the 2000 United States presidential elections — where many people deliberately linked to a biography of George Bush through the descriptive key words “miserable failure”, so that any searches in Google on the key words “miserable failure” would bring up a biography of George Bush. In response, a whole other set of people linked to biographies of Jimmy Carter and Michael Moore off the term “miserable failure”, so they appeared as close seconds in the Google search results. This form of Google bombing war is much more than just implicit voting on the value of online content. It indicates a higher order level of conversation between networked collections of people, a give and take of the reinterpretation of information on a large, collective scale.

Historical access. Most social technologies have the ability to save and archive both direct communication, and shared digital content. These persistent conversations (Erickson, 1999), digital archives, and transaction histories [35] enable the user to not only access historical information, extending their personal memory, so to speak, but also make inferences about the value and meaning of patterns in social structures and the information embedded in these social structures.

Lightweight authoring. Social technologies (such as blogs) provide people with increased opportunities to share digital content in both the form of text and rich media. People may not only collaborate around this digital media, either face-to-face or over time and place, this form of “micropublishing” enables the democratization of content more globally: That is, any person may share information or opinions that any other person may access, it is not in the hands of centralized media or political agencies.

Accelerated collaboration and knowledge development around democratized shared content. Increasingly we see that whole collections of people are able to accelerate their collaborative knowledge development. The transfer of information and ideas is almost immediate through web technologies such as the blog. For many, print media seems obsolete because of the lag in time between when an event occurs and when the news of the event is received. Similarly large scale conversations develop ideas at an accelerated pace, to the extent that those on the cutting edge of a knowledge domain will be left behind [36] if they are not tracking online knowledge sharing systems.

Social Technologies Defined

Social technologies fall into two categories. The first involves any situation where interactions between more than one human are mediated or enhanced through technology — that is, technology is the vehicle through which the interaction occurs, such as over the phone or on email, or technology enhances face to face interactions, such as looking up a profile in Facebook on your iphone even while you are talking to the person.
The other category of social technologies is the social enhancement of information technology. Social information provides meaningful context to informational resources such as a book, photos, or web sites. For example, the expertise of the books’ author, how often photos appear in peoples’ favorites list, and how often and who visits a web site all indicate the value of that resource to others.

Why Now? New Technology Affordances
In the past decade social technologies have become an integral part of people’s day to day lives for a number of reasons. The primary reason is the increased penetration of social technologies: a very large percentage of people has access to the Internet, uses email, or has a cell phone. People may communicate with each other at all times either from the desktop, their laptops and devices through wi-fi networks, and their cell phone through the ubiquity of cell towers. In addition to the increase in communication technologies, there has also been a transformation from print to digital media that allows people to share meaningful content (pictures, videos, music) online.

Using Technology for Social Interactions

• http://wiki.realityallstarz.com/index.php/Image:1day1.jpgImpact (numbers from 2007)
  • 73% of adult Americans go online
    • 90% email
    • 80% seek out information
    • 60% buy online
    • 50% IM
    • 30% play gameshttp://wiki.realityallstarz.com/images/f/fd/3day1.jpg
    • 20% create content
    • 10% seek out others (probably increased since report)
  • 100 million on MySpace (80% of all social networks)
  • YouTube delivers 100 million videos a day

  
  

Social Enhancement of Information Technology

With the increased digitization of informational resources, there is also an increased prevalence of persistent social information (who authored it, who used it when and for how long), affording the capacity for complex processing. This complex processing augments how we search, filter, and organize information. Where the Internet has created an information glut, overpowering people with the sheer volume of consumable content, tools such as social networking analysis and collaborative filtering help users find the content they most care about because their friends and people like them also care about it.

All of these factors — the ubiquity of social technology and digitization of content we care about — is fundamentally transforming how we behave as social beings. As social technology practictioners, we face the challenge of on the one hand naturally mapping social dynamics into social technologies, and on the other hand hoping to enhance or transform how humans behave through technology — all while never losing sight of the fact that humans are fundamentally social animals and require face-to-face interactions to achieve happiness.

What is Web 2.0?

The term “Web 2.0″ emerged as as a term to describe emerging design patterns and business models in 2005. See http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html for a full explanation of Web 2.0.
The main idea behind Web 2.0 is that for creators of Internet technology, the collective experience of the web has become much like a platform — except rather than developed by one large company (such as Windows is developed by Microsoft) it is distributed over thousands of smaller organizations and individuals. Developing applications on the Web 2.0 platform has distinct characteristics relative to more traditional platforms. For example, data standardization plays a key role, the software cycle from release to new release is extremely short, very sophisticated applications may emerge with lightweight effort, and the applications are run and expressed through any number of devices.

Communication Technologies are Ubiquitous

Most of the social technologies we describe are built on Web 2.0. The web serves a primary tool for awareness of, access to, and communication with others. Through the power of Internet technologies social interactions may occur at any time (sync hronously or asynchronously), at any place (not requiring co-location), and involving many of people at a time. With Web 2.0 style of technology, however we see increased integration of communication and collaboration tools, where people and their social meta-data play a key role, and where standardization of data across applications enable social interoperability. In this context, users play a key role in generating content, democratizing the Internet outside of any editorial controls, and entirely new genres of information gathering have developed as we learn to harness the collective intelligence of the masses. Perhaps most powerfully for civic and political action, new social technologies provide opportuniies for mega-collaboration and coordination.

In the following chapters, we will delve in greater depths not only theory and best practices, but also the Web 2.0 tools to be taken into consideration when creating social technologies.

Recommended Readings

These readings provide an introduction to the space from several perspectives.

Books and Papers

• Davies, W. You Don’t Know Me, but…Social Capitol and Social Software. ISociety(2003).
• Madden, M. America’s Online Pursuits: The Changing Picture of Who’s Online and What They Do. Pew Internet & American Life Project (2003).
• Wallace, P (2001). Psychology of the Internet. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.
• Preece, J. (2000). Online Communities: Designing usability, supporting sociability.
• Rheingold, H. (2002). Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution.

Blogs

• Many 2 Many: A Group Weblog on Social Software. http://many.corante.com
• SmartMobs: The Next Social Revolution. http://www.smartmobs.com
• Mashable.com: Social Networking News. http://www.mashable.com
• danah Boyd’s apophenia: Making Connections Where None Previously Existed. http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/
• Progammable Web. http://www.programmableweb.com/
• Tim O’Reilly on Web 2.0: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html

References

web 2.0: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html
Brehm, S. & Kassin, S. (1996). Social Psychology. 3rd edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Erickson, T. (1999). Persistent Conversation: An Introduction. JCMC 4(4) June 1999.

Farnham, S., Cheng, L., Stone, L., Zaner-Godsey, M., Hibbeln, C, Syrjala, K., Clark, A., & Abrams, J. (2002). HutchWorld: Clinical Study of Computer-Mediated Social Support for Cancer Patients and Their Caregivers . In Proceedings of CHI 2002, Minneapolis , April 2002.

Farnham, S., Kelly, S.U., Portnoy, W., & Schwartz, J.L.K. Wallop: Designing Social Software for Co-located Social Networks. In Proceedings of HICSS-37, Hawaii (2004).

Granovetter, M. The Strength of Weak Ties: A Network Theory Revisited. In L. Marsden and N. Lin (Eds.) Social Structure and Network Analysis. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, pp. 105-130, 1982.

Katz, J.E. and Rice, R.E. (2002). Social Consequences of Internet Use. MIT Press.

Keyani, P., & Farnham, S.(In Press). Swarm: Text Messaging Designed to Enhance Social Coordination. In Harper, R., Palen, L., Taylor, A. (Eds.) The Inside Text: Social, Cultural, and Design Perspectives on SMS.

Nie, N.H. Sociability, Interpersonal Relations, and the Internet: Reconciling Conflicting Findings. American Behavioral Scientist 45, 3 (2001), 420-435.

Rheingold, H. Smart Mobs: The Next Revolution. Perseus Publishing, Cambridge, MA, 2002.

Walther, J. B. Computer-mediated communication: Impersonal, interpersonal, and hyperpersonal interaction. Communication Research, 23 (1996), 3-43.

Warnock, D., & Farnham, S. (2004). Different Strokes for Different Folks?: Extraversion and the effects of access to and use of social technology on relationship satisfaction. Unpublished paper.

Wellman, B., Haythornthwaite, Eds.. (2002). The Internet in Everyday Life. Oxford: Blackwell.