Posts Tagged: cognition

Thoughts — No Comments
30
Jul 08

Twitter, free-riders, and lived community

Yesterday, Twitter introduced some changes to their privacy model. Previously, if you employed privacy (kept your Twitters private), allowing someone to follow you forced reciprocation. That is, in turn, you were forced to follow your followers. Personally, this situation has always been troublesome: I’ve wanted to keep my Twitters private, mostly to prevent Google from indexing them – not because I’m sharing anything particularly salacious. However, as allowing followers had costs, I was forced to be selective about who was allowed in.

The particular costs of “fame” in Twitter are interesting, not only for their anachronistic nature (direct costs of fame on the web?), but the way they shape the system and uses. I’ve been forced to think of my Twitter stream as a budget. I may like you, and allow you to follow me, but if you post 30 Twitters a day you blow my information budget, and I’m forced to close the connection. I’ve wondered how the distributed cognitive processes of community have shaped norms around posting in response to budgeting. Since fame implies costs, and there is mutual understanding of these costs, have we evolved practice that shapes discourse to our information budgets?

Now that Twitter allows asymmetrical private following, it is interesting to think about how the site changes. At one level, Twitter becomes more like the rest of the web: when you subscribe to my RSS feed, there is no expectation that I’m reading yours. I can now “allow” high-producing followers without worry of my information budget. At face value, all of these things seem “good” and “normal.” It is also useful to think about the consequences of this change, as privacy practice has very literally shaped community in Twitter.

Dourish and Anderson, in the 2006 paper Collective Information Practice: Exploring Privacy and Security as a Social and Cultural Phenomena, describe privacy as a process, one “embedded in social and cultural contexts.” The authors present models of privacy – and I find the particular model of privacy as discursive practice applicable in the case of Twitter. The (admittedly brute-force) nature of privacy in Twitter has shaped our relations to one another, forcing the development of particular practice and strategies of community management. As fame has costs, our information budgets directly enforce our notions of community.

Interestingly, the costs of fame may have beneficial effects on community. To allow in private followers meant reciprocal information disclosure, a social information processing transaction. Within SIP, we develop our own strategies of reading-in, filtering, and information management – that is, we get to know our community. Like it or not, this forms tight bonds, feelings of closeness, and a unique form of community unlike others on the web. I don’t think that the privacy changes will disrupt community in a catastrophic way, but it is useful to think about how this reshaping of privacy to fit more “normal” patterns will shape the lived experience of those on Twitter. Our followers transform themselves from costs to free-riders, and privacy is reimagined from control of utterances and information budgets to simply control of utterances.

The point of this analysis is not to make value judgements about Twitter’s privacy practice, but rather to highlight how decisions about privacy shape the experience of technology. Dourish and Anderson argue that we should explore “privacy and security as social products rather than natural facts.” In this context, perhaps both the previous “forced reciprocal” and current “free-rider” approach to privacy in Twitter are equally arbitrary. Notably, the effects of either approaches on community will not be arbitrary, and this is the important takeaway for the interaction designer.

Cited:
Dourish, P. and Anderson, K. (2006). Collective Information Practice: Exploring Privacy and Security as Social and Cultural Phenomena. Human-Computer Interaction, 21(3), 319–342.

Thoughts — 4 Comments
10
Jul 08

Information Budgets and Shared Cognition

Compared to some people, I probably appear to be an extreme consumer of information. I follow a few hundred RSS feeds, 60-odd people on Twitter, belong to more listservs than I should, and so on. Compared to others – say uber-bloggers Robert Scoble or Mike Arrington – my information diet hardly registers. I’m always impressed by information omnivores, but I realize that my skills and time availability place me at a different space on the information consumption continuum.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about information consumption as a budgeting process. This is certainly not new – the earliest theories of information explored uncertainty reduction and budgeting. In the early days of the telegraph, Morse’s code, and the machines designed to use the code, were adopted because they transferred information more efficiently than Cooke’s machines. How we can fit the most information in the littlest amount of space/time is the essential challenge for many in the field.

Feeds – be they an RSS stream, Twitter or Facebook Newsfeeds, have driven the concept of budgeting home. Unlike an inbox, to which anyone has access, our feeds are managed, pruned, scoped and, most importantly, gatekept. When we subscribe to an RSS feed, or follow someone on Twitter, the information they send is equated into our budgets. If the person posts 100 blog posts or twitters a day, it is likely that we’re overloaded with information, that our budget is blown.

In the early days of Twitter, I noticed that my information budgets were consistently being blown. As new users joined the service, unaware of the norms and necessary economy of information, my personal information budget was a mess – I couldn’t keep up with the small number of people I tried to follow. However, over time, I’ve noticed a shift. Call it an acculturation, a calming, or perhaps an evolution – but information budgeting seems to have evolved among Twitterers. Of course, this does not apply to publicity-seekers, but I think that more or Twitter’s users are considering their followers information budgets when they cast off a new message.

Of course, short of data collection, I don’t have any way to prove my hypothesis, but it has stuck with me long enough that I thought I might investigate the cognitive underpinnings. In a chapter from Perspectives on Socially Shared Cognition, Krauss and Fussel write about Constructing Shared Communicative Environments. In a nascent communication environment, the communication process is influenced by the development of common grounds; our knowledge of our self, audience and context influence the communication processes. According to the authors, we “do indeed take the informational status of a listener into account” in creating messages.

In a face-to-face conversation, we’re always taking our audience into account. We watch for body language – rolling of the eyes, scrunching of the brow. These cues inform what we communicate and how we go about the communication process. How, then, do we read Twitter? Twitter is full of cues – we know who follows us, how many followers we have, we get direct messages. At the same time, Twitter is new. It is more a living discussion forum than it is a person-to-person IM conversation. With this new form, new behaviors must emerge.

Have we evolved our communication processes in Twitter? I think this is inarguable. We Twitter differently than we did six months ago, and new behaviors and fads are constantly emerging. But are we budgeting our communication, reflecting our desires for a more sensible information space? Has Twitter become more sensible to me because I’ve developed literacies, or have we simply decided that the space works better if we post less and stay on topic more? Again, I’m not sure this is happening, but I do think that our shared cognition – of our identities, the information budgets of self and others – affects our perceptions and behaviors.

The process of communicative evolution in social spaces is fascinating, and instructive for those who study information and communities. One wonders if processes of Gemeinschaft inform information budgeting, or vice versa. Krauss and Fussell note that our communication processes are continually informed by knowledge of audience and the rules of interaction. Notably, both of these are inherently evolutionary, a theory that fits nicely into our always-changing and ill-defined online spaces.

Research / Thoughts — 11 Comments
11
Jan 08

Social Network Clutter

Over the past few months, I’ve found myself increasingly frustrated when I load Facebook. My Newsfeed is a cluttered mess of ads, application spam, and despairingly little real information about my friends. I’ve dutifully clicked the thumbs up/thumbs down icons hundreds of times, giving Facebook a decent preference set, but the problem persists. Newsfeed, which used to inspire me as one of the most innovative information spaces, has quickly lost its utility through this signal/noise imbalance.

When I talk to others, they echo my problems. Newsfeed is “spammy”, you have to squint to find real information. Personally, I’ve found that my visits to Facebook are down as a result – each time I log in it sort of feels like I’ve been given an inbox that’s full of spam and I have to sort it. That is not a good feeling. In an effort to improve Newsfeed (and argue the value of such information spaces), I thought I might work through some of the problems of the proposition.

The fundamental proposition of Newsfeed, like a head’s up display, is to project relevant information to the information consumer in a singular place. Implicit in the projection is editorial control, where certain types of information are promoted and others left to their traditional spaces. Relevance should always be the goals of these spaces; if they are not relevant they pose outlying ability to damage the product. If I am wincing every time I log in to Facebook and see a huge list of spam, it is clear that Newsfeed is damaging my impressions of the product as whole. Designers of Newsfeed-type spaces should understand and adapt to this reality.

Of course, the challenge of a Newsfeed is the multidimensional nature of relevance. You may want information about when friends have added new friends, and I may want information about upcoming events. Arguably, we’re all going to want some individual combination, and to that extent Facebook allows one to tune their Newsfeed preferences. The problem with tuning, however, is that Facebook fails to respect my preferences, sending me miscellaneous stories when the system lacks stories that match my preferences. These non-opted-in stories are spam. Imagine this scenario: you set up your RSS reader, and you read all of your feeds and mark them read. Then you update your reader, but there are no new stories. Instead of just telling you this, your RSS reader finds you a bunch of random stories from blogs you aren’t subscribed to. It’s a broken proposition.

Newsfeed was designed to keep you interested, to keep you logging in again and again. Each time you’d be greeted with fresh information. This is a failure of assumption. I recheck my newsreader after I’ve read all my feeds – people will naturally go back to good information sources, even if there isn’t much information there. We’d rather know that there’s none of the information we’re looking for than tons of the information we aren’t.

Facebook Social Ads Not That GoodTo add insult to injury, my Newsfeed finds itself increasingly inundated with advertisements, such as my favorite one that urges me to go to dental school (hey, maybe Facebook knows something my brain will only figure out ten years from now). Advertisements in the Newsfeed, be they social or not, are also a failed proposition. First of all, they completely lack context, which my brain involuntarily processes as being the least-important item in the Newsfeed. Second, they compete with “good” information. I’m much more likely to click on pictures of my friends than some random Verizon ad, and that’s just the way it’s always going to be. Finally, they pollute the feed, devaluing the information space. It’s as if Google included sponsored links in their organic search results. Any self-respecting Googler would be horrified at that proposition; yes, it would have been lucrative, but it would completely destroy the trust in that information space.

Unfortunately, Facebook’s already polluted Newsfeed, so I’m not sure the trust/value can be regained. And I’m also pretty sure that they’re not going to change their approach any time soon – this short-term revenue is eclipsing the long-term value of creating a useful information space. That doesn’t stop me from wishing for a revamped Newsfeed, one that followed my rules, acted like my RSS reader, and understood the value of a trusted, relevant information space. If Facebook really is in it for the long haul, the Newsfeed should be a space I enjoy, not one I wince at and try to avoid.

Noticed / Thoughts — 2 Comments
4
Sep 07

Rheingold on Facebook

Howard Rheingold, a guy who knows a bit about virtual communities, has turned bearish on Facebook. And you know what, I can’t blame him. Rheingold says:

I am getting half a dozen Facebook friend requests a day from people who claim not to remember friending me. When I complained in my status message, another Facebooker told me that the “Friend Finder” overrides user privacy settings and spams friend requests via users’ gmail contact lists. Between that and the really awful message board feature that renders groups near meaningless, I’m beginning to conclude that Facebook growth will start slowing, then stagnate, and eventually it will die a slow death. It’s too much work to respond to friend requests, too little ability to set my own boundaries, too many silly apps, and not enough return on the investment of my time. They seriously should have taken the big money when it was offered. If Facebook founders think they are going to be the “social operating system of the web,” they are delusional. They won’t even be AOL. It’s definitely an interesting fad at that moment, and if I ignore all demands on my attention, it can be a useful broadcast channel. But as an online social network, it’s sinking itself.

Howard’s point about “return on investment” is essential. Facebook distanced itself from competition because it delivered relevant social information in a sleek, efficient manner. As networks expand and my messages and newsfeeds get spammed, I get a lot less signal per noise. Facebook should refocus on delivering relevant social information without spam. There is a very clear inverse relationship between spamminess and information utility – FB should be mindful of that.

Thoughts — 12 Comments
15
Aug 07

Newsweek and more sneaker metaphors

This week’s Newsweek features a cover story exploring the growth of Facebook. Following up his thoughtful piece on the class divide, I thought Steven Levy did a great job with the story. In the article I talk a little about how Facebook’s attempt to reinvent itself is changing the nature of the service; I’ve previously fleshed these thoughts out in a blog post entitled “Where are Facebook’s Early Adopters Going”.

As the Fall semester starts up anew, Facebook’s efforts to distance themselves from the college market grow more clear. Facebook has decided to drop support for classes, meaning that college students will now have to use a substandard third-party application if they want to see their fellow classmates. On a college campus, the browsing of classmates via “classes” was a core “information vector”, and many loved the feature as they learned more about the people sitting next to them. Now that this feature has been summarily executed, students will reap less informational value from Facebook. Granted, it’s a small change, but an important change; while the site clearly wants to distance itself from its core audience, I fail to see why they feel the need to penalize students.

Facebook’s attitude towards college students might be best summed up in this quote from the Newsweek article – it’s a spin job that would make Karl Rove proud: “Facebook did not change college life, but it changed the lives of the early adopters … many of whom were in college.” (Former COO Owen Van Natta). Yow. And as Facebook focuses its efforts on shutting out its core audience and appeasing the blogosphere, am I the only one left shaking his head and wondering? I get that Facebook wants an older audience, but it’s not like you see Nike leaving the basketball shoe market to compete with Florsheim.

Research / Thoughts — 11 Comments
10
Jul 07

Adopting Communication Practice

Over on the O’Reilly Radar Blog, I came across a piece by Peter Brantley entitled “Working in Facebook.” In it, Brantley discusses a topic I often think about – how we adopt and carry forward technical skills. He argues that the skills students are learning in social networking tools will remain with them as “normal” communications practice as they move forward in their career. He says:

First, this is a fundamentally important shift generationally in what we expect from our software productivity tools. The grad students and young faculty using Facebook have used MySpace, and been Facebook members through their whole adolescent and adult school experiences. They are taking this experience with them into their work. The work of the people that I see most often is in research and teaching. But the lesson is broader: this generation will be working collaboratively in tools like Facebook. In schools, in corporations, in small non-profits, in community centers – people will collaborate and work together in social applications. And that is going to be as natural to them as email and text messaging.

Second, regardless of the ultimate fate of Facebook, the set of characteristics that it has established – the sense of community; user control over the boundedness of openness; support for fine grained privacy controls; the ability to form ad-hoc groups with flexible administration; integration and linkage to external data resources and application spaces through a liberal and open API definition; socially promiscuous communication – these will be carried with us into future environments as expectations for online communities. Facebook is an empty wasteland for people who have not climbed over the hump of use. For those who have active community within it, it is this generation’s Lotus 1-2-3.

While I agree with Brantley’s premise, I take issue with a few points. First, Facebook has only been around since late 2004, and really only became broadly accessible in 2005 – certainly not enough time for grad students and young faculty to be users “through their whole adolescent and adult school experiences.” Furthermore, I find there is little academic collaboration inside of Facebook at the graduate level. Facebook acts as a social nexus to find and connect with fellow students, but I’d dispute that many of us are actively and meaningfully working in Facebook. Sure, we can create groups, but the Facebook groups tools are poor at best, and ill-equipped to serve academic needs.

However, the key is that Facebook is a point of centrality on a campus. From this point, well-designed tools could truly serve the student base – there’s a lot of opportunity to develop such tools with the Facebook API. This is certainly an area where monetizing the API is quite possible – the amount of money schools spend on substandard learning- and course-management tools is so immense that even a fraction of the market is extremely valuable.

Back to Brantley’s point, though, I too agree that the skills students develop using social networking tools will persist throughout their lives – both social and professional. The social communication tools we use when we’re developing relationships (say, during college) become the tools of a lifetime. The practice of communicating and forming identity in social networks are normal, and we will continue to use these skills going forward. For those not “socialized” in these tools, the adoption process will be challenging (though not unlike non-email users picking up email). However, this sort of communication – using social networks and associated techniques – is past the point of becoming normal. For a large swath, it is normal, and teachers and designers should work on incorporating these methodologies going forward – the are inevitable.

Thoughts — 6 Comments
15
Jun 07

In-Between Places

This morning, I was reading an interesting post from Chris Messina. In it, he talks about his in-between blogging behavior. Messina says:

I also screenshot as a way of in-between blogging, I guess. Y’know, like Twitter, Tumblr, Ma.gnolia, Plazes and Last.fm (among others) are all forms of in-between blogging. They’re where I am in the absences between longer posts (such as this one) where I record what I’m up to, what I’m seeing and what’s interesting to me.

As I sat back a little from that statement, I started wondering just when exactly blogging lost the battle for the in-between places. In the very beginning, we starting blogging because blogging made publishing easy; before blogging, we were marking up HTML and uploading it. With this revolution in simplicity came expectations – that we’d blog a certain way, that we’d have a set of links to famous bloggers on our blogs, etc. These expectations marked a recomplication of the medium, a depersonalization of sorts.

Another complication of blogging that arose was discoverability. If blogging is a personal medium, how do we find the blogs of people we care about (or are relevant to our interest areas). Looking at our feedreaders, we read the blogs of people we don’t know because it’s often hard to find bloggers we do know (San Francisco, you don’t count here). A blog search engine can find a million entries matching a certain word or topic, but it generally can’t find my friends or neighbors, or other people I care about.

Let me place a caveat by saying that these problems aren’t really deal-breakers to lots of people, and moreso there are lots of real world analogies. I don’t know John Markoff but I’ll always pay attention to his articles when I come across them. Many people don’t know Michale Arrington, but they enjoy Techcrunch, and the communities that grow up around these extremely central places.

However, as Messina describes, blogging is losing out to the in-between places. What are these in-between places? Well, they are social networks, the attention streams, Twitter, Tumblr, and so on. Unlike blogging, where your words are cast to an ether, these in-between spaces are inherently friend-centric. You explicitly build your networks in these services; furthermore, the onus isn’t on creating the networks of the largest size. Rather, the important thing is to create the network of most personal relevance to you. Compared to blogging, these spaces are less complicated and more relevant. To these networks, you can quickly and easily share the things more appropriate for the in-between: links you enjoy, quick updates, one-off thoughts. This is Dunbar’s grooming, an absolutely essential part of the friend maintenance process.

Rather than purely looking at this as blogging “losing”, we may consider these in-between tools as affording us new ways to enrich and deepen friendships. At the same time, they are places where the content is purely relevant to us, because the networks are made up of people we care about. This type of friend maintenance is something that many patterns of blogging don’t afford.

Examining my own behavior, I can identify a number of areas where blogging is losing to the in-between places. It seems that that places like Twitter and del.icio.us are moving from social backchannels to unique primary channels. This marks an advancement in the way we converse online; rather than using the brute-force, one-size-fits-all of blogging, we’re moving our conversations to the more relevant spaces. This transition is interesting and powerful, and it marks an advancement of our online communication behavior.

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