Social Proxies

I have been interested in social proxy approach to support online social interactions. The concept seems simple: by visualizing some socially salient aspects such as participants' presence and activities in an online setting, it keeps participants aware of each other and makes it easy to maintain social accountability in online context, which it is usually considered to be more difficult than face to face situations. While the concept is simple, the design space inspired by this concept is not small. It can be explored in terms of different dimensions. What are relevant socially salient aspects? Social presence and activities certainly are, what else? How shall these social aspects be visualized? What is the balance between visibility and privacy? What are genres of social interactions, such as lectures, meetings, nothing talks, etc? What are appropriate social proxies to support these different genres?

Erickson's recent paper "Cooperation Among Strangers: Visualizing Norms as a Means of Supporting Cooperation in Online Systems" proposes some new social proxies with particular emphasis on exploiting the power of social norms by providing visual cues as a reminder to support online cooperation. Unlike previsou social proxies as in Babble and Task Proxy, the proxy is specifically designed to reflect some asymmetry and diversity inherent in certain social interactions, such as a lecture where the lecturer and the audience play asymmetrical roles or a meeting where a variety of activities are involved such as brainstorming in front of a white board, private concentration and active discussions. These genres of social interactions have certain social structure maintained by some social norms, and for online settings, the visualization reflecting and supporting the maintainence of this structure becomes desirable for participants to behave according to the social norms.

This is certainly a step further towards more sophisticated online interaction systems. I also have a strong feeling it has become more and more like an online place, rather than simply online space. At the same time, it also opens up more research questions to me: Who is going to decide what norms and how the structure should be visualized, designers or users? Should designers take the role to highlighten certain norms and structures, such as preassigning some places for social interactions? This could be both empowering and limiting since I believe the assumption of one single social interaction genre might not be the reality. The reality is more dynamic and sublte, just like a room can be either a classroom or meeting room, where the social interaction is defined by social properties not the physical ones. How can the online place be designed to support the dynamic and flexible properties in face to face interaction? Or we might just leave this to users to specify? But will users take specific effort to specify that in their online environment? As revealed by some studies of cities (city: rediscovering the center), people tend to select the site of social interactions right in or very close to the pedestrian flow. While it seems an obvious misbehavior because their social interactions will obstruct the traffic flow, I think it is understandable in some sense: because some specific effort made to step away from the traffic flow will make the social interaction appear too serious, and might not fit the casual social interactions arisen from an serendipidous encounter between acquantences on a street. In online context, will users bother to make this specific effort such as assign or assume certain roles in order to exert some social pressure?

Another interesting issue this paper brings up is social cooperation among STRANGERS. Most of researchers in CMC tend to assume social interaction within social networks, and social interaction among strangers tend to attract less attention. The concept of strangers is interesting. Does it simply mean the first time social interaction, or it include all social interactions where offline part of social interactions is absent? If we only meet online, but have interact for while, does it still count as social interaction among strangers? There are cerntainly some interesting things to look at. While this paper brings up strangers, it seems that it does not explicitly address how special is social cooperation among strangers rather than friends or coworkers. It sounds reasonable to believe that people rely more on formal and strong social norms among strangers than among friends. But is it true?