Category: Social Software

I’m having a crisis of etiquette caused by what I believe to be bad user interface design. Basically it works like this. I look at my iChat buddy list (to the right) and I see a big list of people who are ‘green’ (indicating availability), ‘orange’ (indicating absence or idle-ness) or ‘red’ (indicating explicitly ‘away’, but still contactable if necessary).

Now my expectation of people on my iChat list is that if they are green they are currently using their computer at this precise moment. They’re actually looking at the screen. Which means that a ping to them should be incredibly unobtrusive but noticeable and should involve the absolute least number of keystrokes / interactions to be able to tell someone you’re busy and/or start a conversation with them. Actually, iChat doesn’t really handle that totally brilliantly in a range of ways, but the aspiration should remain. The ping should be non-invasive but immediately cognitively recognisable, and a response should be as simple as possible. It is with the understanding that the recipient’s experience will be something like this that we are able to ping our friends or colleagues without feeling like we’re being necessarily rude.

Except that this presumptive understanding of the experience of the person at the other end of the connection is starting to deteriorate. At least three or four of the people I have on my IM list are now accessing their IM via their hiptops. This changes the experience immediately – firstly because the recipient is now not necessarily engaged in a looking-at-a-screen-like activity. They could be walking in a fish market. They could be chatting to their mother on a phone. They could be driving a car. Secondly in order for them to react to the messages they’re receiving they have to physically move the device to a place where they can focus upon it. The casual ping is immediately an intrusive one. And then – of course – they have to find a way to respond to the ping – either by using slow phone-style or fold-out keyboards, or by changing their presence. None of these actions are simple or quick enough to make the experience of using a hip-top and responding to messages on a hip-top comparable with responding via a computer keyboard.

All of which would be fine if it wasn’t potentially difficult to distinguish between a person being rudely invasive and a device that encourages potentially invasive attempts at social intercourse… And if it wasn’t – in turn – difficult for the person sending a message to distinguish between a long silence that resembles some kind of ‘shunning’ activity and a long silence that is merely a consequence of circumstances or the difficulties in getting to your messaging. On both sides there are social problems that emerge because the behaviour of the interfaces is confused with the behaviour of the people at either end – the software/interface actually makes the person at the other end seem rude – and purely because there is a disparity between the social engagement one thinks one is engaging in and the consequence it might have.

The software attempts to compensate for this a little bit. Most of my friends that are using hip-tops use some kind of status message to convey that they are mobile – which would work more effectively if you couldn’t easily hide the status message to free up screen real-estate. In the meantime, the signifiers that actually tell you that someone is online completely overpower the signals that indicate their mobility.

So what’s the solution? Well ideally – since you’re looking at another form of engagement you’d distinguish it from the more conventional uses for IM. A separate scrollable container at the bottom of the screen or another buddy-list (a la the Rendezvous window) would compensate for some of these impediments – although probably at the cost of adding in more complexity. Probably the simplest solution would just be to revisit the particular presence indicators. In iChat then there might be two options: firstly an improvement of the portable devices to accurately reflect ‘available’ and ‘idle’, and secondly the creation of a new form of presence to go alongside ‘available’, ‘idle’ and ‘busy’. Either would be a useful corrective feature which could alleviate the social clumsiness of mobile IM.

Do other people have experiences like these? And if so, how do you resolve them? Do you leave it to social convention to work through problems like these, or is a simple UI or technological solution more simple? Any and all thoughts gratefully received…

In the Guardian article Four’s a crowd, cellist David Waterman talks about how to keep a string quartet together over many years without the interpersonal relationships forcing the group apart. I love articles like this – articles that don’t seem to have an overt relationship to how we build social software but nonetheless remind us of core lessons about the nature of groups. Lesson one: the thing that keeps groups together can be a mutual passion, but a mutual activity will bring them together even more strongly. Lesson two: that intensively creative groups seem to be necessarily relatively small. And that’s because – lesson three – there will always be tensions and forces within groups that will try to push them apart from one another. And here’s where social software comes in to the fore – because lesson four is that those tensions can almost always be ameliorated or even totally removed by the careful implementation of mechanisms that institute some form of process, some kind of system – or even some kind of politics. That’s how we can operate in a macro-social way, because we have instituted a system / structure within which we all operate.

If we’re looking for more evidence about the importance of structures and systems then perhaps we should look at what happens when some of those structures break down. A recent Wired article provides the perfect example. Imagine an office during a fire – it’s the kind of environment where the normal civil strategies of co-operation between individuals can disintegrate. And the consequence is that everyone suffers – like an enormous ultra-paranoid version of the Prisoner’s dilemma. And when that break occurs, when there is no hope that the individuals concerned will take the hopeful collaborative approach, how do we stop them destroying themselves? In the article, they try to mitigate the effects of this collapse of collaboration by abstracting the problems out from a rule space into a physical one. They remake the building so that these sudden collapses in the social rulespace change the context from one in which bad behaviour results in death to one in which it doesn’t.

All of this stuff has an enormous impact on the way we should be building our online social spaces – from helping us determine how such spaces should support and compensate for human social failings (on the one extreme), all the way through to finding ways of abstracting inter-human rules for exchange and behaviour, power and reputation into organic and evolving rule-sets and meta-rule-sets that can be encoded into software and built into the very structure of our online environments. A lot of the work we put into the first version of Barbelith is based specifically around these simple concepts – creating a space with an evolving, abstracted political structure that translates inter-human process into code, with the aspiration of generating an oligarchic political economy rather than a despotic one (metafilter) that requires strong consistent leadership or a capitalist one (slashdot) that can be gamed or unbalanced. The aspiration was to – in the process – find a different model in which an online community might be able to act decisively with fast intra-group policy-making and enacting structures. The eventual aspiration – a model that goes beyond oligarchic rule into democratic or even fully anarchic / distributed rule – a model that can create communities that can operate with the absolute minimum of external or top-down management and in which the ‘citizens’ are able to self-determine and self-enforce the rough structures of their own rule-making.

I was hoping to be able to get some of this together for a participant session at ETCon, but I don’t think that’s looking practical any more, so I think finally maybe it’s just best if I start pumping it out into the open and hope someone finds it as interesting as I do…

A few months ago I responded to a site that claimed The Internet is Shit with a reposte designed to illustrate that although our networks might contain difficult and unpleasant material, they also contain enough of value and facilitate enough legitimate and real communities to be able to state pretty conclusively that The Internet is not Shit. Note – not that it’s perfect, not that it doesn’t have flaws, not that bad things don’t go on in it, but that pound-for-pound it’s more useful and valuable and community-generating than it is useless or damaging or culture-destroying.

Over the last few days, the post has turned into a bit of an argumentative arena, with various posters weighing with positions on what constitutes utopian rhetoric versus what constitutes a reasonable and rational position about the possibilities of (among other things) online communities. Throughout this article various people – myself included – have stumbled in our logic, presented clumsy opinions and misunderstood each other. Nonetheless, I want to pick up one particular fragment of these arguments – a fragment that I feel strongly about and am prepared to fight vigorously about. It’s about the authenticity or otherwise of online ‘communities’. At a certain point in the debate, my sparring partner posts:

“We’re not talking about abstract information – which is expedited magnificently over the internet – we’re talking about flesh and blood people. An actual meeting is far more meaningful than tapping on a keyboard. It is substantially different. Physically congregating with other folk is the same as being on the internet as is reading a book about Tibet compared to actually going there. Or reading a menu and eating the food. You can’t reduce and flatten the physical, sensory, emotional, kinaesthetic and social world in that way.”

Now I’m going to agree with the premise that the particulars of the medium through which people communicate can add a timbre to a community and that they can faciliate certain parts of the exchange more effectively than others. On the other hand, I’d also argue that the qualities of the community space are supprted by the software that they run on, and that quite possibly that software hasn’t yet – in the ten/twenty years that it’s been being developed – quite achieved the elegance and sophistication that we take for granted in some other social spaces. But the one thing I will not stand for is this sense that online communities are somehow inauthentic because they are unphysical – or that the truncation in social ‘signal’ somehow reduces them down to a point of uselessness or redundancy. So excerpts from my reply follow:

Your analogies are hideously flawed for a start – if I communicate on the internet or by phone with someone, it’s not like a transcript of that person or a decription of that person. You’re talking as if whenever you talked to people who weren’t present physically (say via the telephone), that what you were actually doing was listening passively to bloody recordings! Of course they’re not – it’s not bloody radio! People are talking to each other!

Now obviously there are things that you can do in person that you can’t do physically online. It’s harder to guage someone’s mood, it’s harder to have sex with them, it’s harder to get intonation or a tone of voice. But it’s still communication! And the possibility of community still exists! I mean, there are many circumstances in which certain elements of the experience an interaction can be truncated – if you’re on a phone for example and can’t see the person concerned, or if they’re wearing sunglasses so you can’t see their eyes, or if you’re actually bloody deaf and are forced to lip-read, for Christ’s sake! But none of these things stop the possibilities of communication, and none of them stop people being supportive, helpful, useful, friendly or even forming communities through them. I work on the internet, and often my first experience of people is online. Sometimes my only experience of them is online. And yet we can be friends! Most of them have helped me out in some ways in the past, and I’ve helped most of them out in the past as well. Those I haven’t met, I’d like to and those I have I see regularly. But that our relationships have moved sometimes from purely online to a mix of both online and off doesn’t mean they weren’t real to begin with.

You talk about ‘tapping on a keyboard’ as if touching keys was the entire point. You’re confusing the method of communication with the communication itself. It would be like me saying, “There’s a substantial difference between communicating with someone (online) and just causing air to vibrate with your vocal chords”. It’s trivialising, innaccurate, clumsy and – frankly – stupid.

[I should apologise at this point for resorting to name calling in the final line – put it down to frustration.]

There’s a lot more to the argument that’s worth reading and talking abotu on the post itself, but I just thought I’d ask do people still think that the term ‘online community’ is necessarily an oxymoron? Do you really think that the fact you’re interacting through your fingers dramatically limits the strength of the relationships you can make?

I have to say, I’m vaguely appalled by the way that some people have become so obsessed by social networking services. Business 2.0 is the most recent drunken advocate to go all giddy about them, describing them as “technology of the year” (according to Many to Many). It’s like social software all over again – a vaguely useful concept/service with relatively intriguing possibilities emerges and gestures in roughly the right direction and all the pundits get caught up in the immediacy – the nowness of the thing rather than looking at the past (the millions of mailing lists, message-boards, instant messenger accounts, the bulletin boards, the MUDs and MOOs) or the possible futures that actually start hybridising these bits of technology together in more interesting and useful ways. And before anyone starts – yes, I know, it happened with weblogs too… And just like weblogs social networking tools are genuinely interesting and useful, just not in the trivial, money-grabbing, tedious, company-based and inflated way that many of these pundits / press seem to think.

Let me say this one more time. Friendster is interesting! Friendster is cool! Ryze is interesting! Ryze is even vaguely useful! But the functionality that these sites are based around has to be a component of something larger. The social-networking chunk will either go open-source, API or it’ll just start being built into other types of community site. The sites that exist at the moment only have value because of the volume of people who have registered on them – without that volume they’re the social software equivalent of the world’s most successful, well-executed and powerful login page or ‘shopping basket’ metaphor. It’ll all change when/if someone like Google buys them (there’s not really a whole lot of room for lots of these operating concurrently if all they do is connect people together in the way they’re doing at the moment, but connect it with something else…) but in the meantime technology of the year?! Are they mad?! Flashback twenty years – I think they’d have said the same bloody thing about the Rubik’s Cube…

So the BBC has launched a public pre-beta version of iCan – their attempt to help people re-engage with and self-organise around politics at an local/national/international level. The early stage makes it almost inevitable that there are going to be bugs – and bugs there are – but the idea seems sound and there’s considerable scope for iteration toward something profoundly useful and important. The non-beta version is a way off yet, but I can recommend that anyone who’s interested in starting a campaign or getting engaged around an issue try the site out and feedback into the development cycle. There’s a good few issues starting to populate the site already – including Kevin Marks’ campaign to get the BBC releasing audio as MP3 rather than Real, which is obviously interesting to me (working in R&D at BBC Radio and Music Interactive) but which – also obviously – I can’t really comment upon in the public sphere…

Matt Jones – who has worked on the project for the last couple of years – has written a post (It’s all about the tail) which tries to articulate some of the rationale for the endeavour, based on that old power law chestnut. This time the power law graph has “issues” on one axis and (I suppose) “amount of coverage” or “scale of political engagement” on the other. A tiny amount of national issues get massive amounts of coverage/engagement while a massive amount of smaller local issues get little or none.

The aims of iCan in this space seem to be two-fold – firstly that the tail should get ‘fatter’ ie. that there should be a way to encourage people to engage in the smaller, lower-rent difference-making. Secondly there’s an aspiration towards mobility – that smaller campaigns should be supported in their attempts to get larger, to transition into different scales of activity and to grow.

This latter objective does seem to come with some interesting provisos, however. There are some issues which are by necessity localised, there are some campaigns which will never and should never become national news or motivate hundreds of thousands of people. In a sense, then, iCan is about finding the best place on the power law for a campaign to live. It’s about facilitating the scale and type of engagement that will do the most good for people based upon the kind of issue that they bring to the table.

All of which brings me right back to the issue of weblogs (again), back to Clay Shirky’s article (again) and back to this issue of ‘inequality’. In the case of iCan, there seems to be an acceptance that there’s a difference of type between kinds of campaigns and that certain types will sit at different levels of the power curve. So of course the question arises, is there a difference of type between the weblogs at different points in their analogous curve and what does that mean for weblog inequality.

Any examination of the ‘top-linked’ weblogs brings you to the conclusion fairly quickly that they’re either highly subject-focused or totally subject-focused. Several of them are group weblogs as well. They are almost totally non-conversational. At the bottom end are the small focused, highly conversational clumps of weblogs used almost as mailing-list/group e-mail equivalents for friends, familes and small groups of people. This isn’t a question of quality – the latter type has no aspiration towards massive traffic and web-popularity, while the former model has aspirations towards a publishing model and a larger ‘mass market’.

That’s not to say of course that a conversational weblog will remain conversational or small and downplayed (any more than to say that all human beings are uniformly socially popular) or that the publishing model weblog will necessarily achieve Time magazine levels of success, but simply that the inherent qualities of each type of site make them ideally suited to different points in the power-law – that there are different kinds of interaction which work better at different scales.

In between of course, there are many variants of tone, personality and conversationalism – hybrids designed to operate at different ‘depths’ – some by choice or aspiration, some forced into new forms of interaction by dint of new forms of pressure. Any long-term weblogger is familiar with the changes in tone that come with the arrival into your online social scene of people from your real-world who you didn’t expect to read your writing – and many are equally familiar with the sensation that too much of your life is on display for the benefit of strangers. A trafficked personal site necessarily becomes less personal – more of a publishing style site eventually, as the author is slowly eroded by revealing themselves totally in the public sphere – just as the local campaign becomes less homely and more structured as it extends to the county or national level.

Which leaves us where? My argument would be the fairly obvious one that – in order to create a fair and useful (equal) space within which webloggers can operate, we should be thinking about how to build tools and mechanisms that will encourage movement along the arc of the power-law, helping sites responsively find a level of traffic and engagement that reflects what individuals are trying to achieve, and that we should find new ways (maybe new kinds of weblogs themselves) that help articulate what kind of activity a weblogger is aspiring towards, and help them move in those directions. The level of engagement that has been demonstrated by individual webloggers has clearly been one of many inspirations for iCan – now perhaps it’s our turn to be inspired in turn?

So what do you do when nothing else has worked and you’re left with a board that is at the mercy of a persistent troublemaker? There aren’t very many options. Firstly there’s taking the situation to the ISP or workplace of the person concerned. But if they’re that persistent, then it’s not unlikely to think that they’ll just take such a move as an escalation of hostilities. Contacting the police might be appropriate if you think you’ve got enough of a case to push for harrassment or something similar – but again, it’s more than likely that it would just be read as an escalation of hostilities – and that’s likely to make everything more serious and difficult to deal with in the long-term. At the other extreme, you have the option of just learning to live with them, but that comes with a range of costs – the most significant of which is that your authority (and those of the system you’ve built and the people who occupy it) has been openly challenged and you have failed to resolve the situation. This will encourage other trouble-makers either within the population of the board itself or real-life friends of the ‘conquering troll’ to come and populate your community. Backing down, fundamentally, is only an option if you were wrong in the first place. Under those circumstances you should confess pretty much immediately. This is embarrassing, but not normally catastrophic. Backing down when you’re right because you can’t enforce your decision – however – is.

One extreme – and totally uncommercial – solution is to build upon the social networks of individual culpability and responsibility that already exist within your community. For example – by making it impossible for the unregistered user to see what’s being posted, you limit their ability to check up on what people are saying about them. By making it impossible to register without having been directly invited, you not only get the benefits of a web of trust-style selection process for new members, but you also have someone responsible for bringing the new member into the midst of the community. That person can be held accountable if they invite someone particularly troubling inside. Unfortunately this has a number of problematic elements – firstly it’s commercial suicide if you’re running the board as part of a business (unless you are getting people to pay for your messageboard on the basis of who is on it), secondly it will increase the cliquey aspect of all online communities and finally it will mean that the content produced by your community’s members can’t easily be used as a resource for anyone other than the community members itself. Nonetheless, in many circumstances it can be the only practical way to move forward…