Making Sense: Random thoughts on Web 2.0, information foraging, sensemaking, cognition, HCI, CSCW,.......

Technology-Mediated Social Participation

Sun, 6 Dec 2009 10:39:17 -0800

I just wrote a blog post on the PARC blog about the upcoming Workshop on Technology-Mediated-Social Participation and the upcoming PARC Forum Panel on the Future of Technology-Mediate Social Participation. Here is an excerpt:

Over the past few years I’ve felt that something really powerful was happening in the interstices between what was going on in the digital world and what was going on in the sciences – especially the social/behavioral and computer sciences.

The Web was becoming increasingly social with millions of people participating in huge online communities and movements: everything from World of Warcraft to Wikipedia to presidential campaigns. Not only that, but research scientists themselves seemed to be getting more “social”: computer scientists were collaborating with social scientists and psychologists to understand massive networks of human-to-human interactions, and psychologists were getting together with economists to study the “social mind” as opposed to the “isolated rational mind.” Suddenly, there is a whole set of new phenomena that we’ve just never seen or understood before.

Much of this has to do with the fact that really massive amounts of finely grained data about human online behavior provide an un-mined goldmine for scientists, and they now have the data-mining and network science tools to start digging.

Harnessing this psychological and social machinery

Social mechanics and dynamics are involved in everything from spreading happiness and obesity to generating new innovations. New kinds of network-based technologies can be used to harness this psychological and social machinery in radically new and more effective ways (e.g., the Iowa Electronic Markets; reCaptcha). Who would have thought that simple architectures for participation (e.g., Wikipedia, SourceForge, Innocentive) could rival the scale of results previously achieved only by massive private or public works projects?

Unfortunately, we’ve got some really big problems: global warming, the economy, terrorism, war, polarization, incivility, a loss of “community” – to name just a few. Maybe the insights and technologies around those new social-computational architectures can be harnessed in ways that address some of these big problems? Perhaps new citizen science communities to accelerate evidence-based medicine to promote health and save money, or innovation networks to discover new climate solutions?

Most social technology efforts fail

While we can get excited about the possibilities, we also have to be realistic. For every utopian outcome one can imagine, there are real-world undercurrents that need to be considered – just think of the diverse stakeholders and agendas of those in medicine or climate change. Furthermore, only a minuscule percentage of the population actively contributes to even the most successful systems. Most social technology efforts fail: for every Wikipedia, there are thousands of dead or dying wikis.

The truth of the matter is that we really understand very little about how or why new social-computational systems work.

Towards a science of technology-mediated social participation

I believe we need to develop a deeper science and education about technology-mediated social participation. It needs to promote:

(1) new theories that are rich and encompassing enough to provide practical guidance on how to design an online community,
(2) new examples of socio-technical architectures that harness more people in complex, engaging, and productive ways, and
(3) new methods and infrastructures to promote the study of online interaction, while protecting people and stakeholders.

There’s a whole thorny set of issues and opportunities within each of these topics.

National Initiative for Social Participation

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 15:37:55 -0700

There’s been a lot of hype about social media, social networking, open source, etc. as a solution to society’s woes and as a new paradigm for innovation, discovery, and collective intelligence. The not-so-secret dirty secret is that most online communities die a wimpering death before they ever mature (see this recent New York Times article based on Tom Malone’s work). There’s no reason why our approach to the development of new architectures for social participation has to be like medieval architecture for cathedrals: ambitious but prone to collapse. We can be more scientific, and we can do better.

Ben Shneiderman, myself, and a number of other researchers have been working on an effort we call a National Initiative for Social Participation. A common aim is to promote a large-scale collective effort to develop a richer and deeper scientific understanding of technology mediated social participation systems, with an aim towards addressing national priorities. Our white paper begins:

We believe that technology-mediated social participation can be harnessed for remarkable social benefits especially as related to national priorities. Existing social media technologies often designed for discretionary and playful activities can be redesigned and repurposed to produce profound transformations in healthcare, community safety, disaster response, life-long learning, business innovation, energy sustainability, environmental protection, and other important national priorities.

How social media affects memory

Sun, 12 Apr 2009 12:39:28 -0700

How distracting are social media? Does the effort that goes into tagging articles actually distract the user from reading? Erica Naone wrote a post about work by Raluca Budiu and members of our group that I summarized in this post .

Naone reports:

Budiu found that adding tags cut into the time that each user spent actually reading an article in the first place. In other words, paying attention to tags came at the cost of paying attention to the text.
Another part of Budiu's work involves finding ways to reduce the cost of participation in social media. She investigated a tagging system designed at the Palo Alto Research Center called SparTag.us, which lets users click words in an article to create tags, rather than typing them in at the end. The idea was that SparTag.us would help users engage more with an article, but at a lower cost. Budiu found that SparTag.us didn't reduce recall. In fact, it enhanced a user's ability to recognize particular sentences.

How Individuals do Social Search

Thu, 9 Apr 2009 15:23:07 -0700

Brynn Evans just presented her work (with Sanjay Kairam and I) at CHI 2009 on expert “social searchers” and the impact of using social tools on answering complex questions. She got people who heavily use social tools like IM, Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, etc, and who also had a lot of social network connections. They were asked to solve complicated “Google-hard” questions (that could be easily found on the Web). They were video taped as they tried to answer these questions, and many of them used multiple tools and many strategies. When people fired off questions to big networks of people (e.g., twitter), they spent a lot of time up-front formulating the questions. When they interacted with specific contacted (e.g., over IM or chat) they spent a lot of time discussing, absorbing, and integrating the information they got back. The different methods involved different strategies and seemed to have an impact on the quality of the answers they put together.

The poster has some interesting visualizations of the dynamics of the social search behaviors as well as the elements of knowledge that were built up.

To get answers to complex problem, people often use other people as information sources. These days it’s things like Twitter, Facebook, IM and a long list of other services. Studies show that scientists also rely on their colleagues for information at the “core” of their field and PEW reports show that social search is pervasive even among people using old fashioned technologies like email.

Another thing that comes out of Brynn’s work is that the individuals used a dazzling array of tools and methods. No single tools did the job, which is an interesting issue for the design of new tools and services.

Observing Brain Activity in Free-Moving Humans

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 10:30:30 -0800

Enormous progress has been made over the past 15-20 years because of brain imaging technologies such as fMRI. But fMRI technology constrains the kinds of behavior that humans can perform while being studied. (See the image at left for example.) However, the Office of Naval Research has been funding research to use technologies based on EEG recording to do non-invasive recordings of brain and body while people are fully mobile.