Roots of Web 2.0?
I’ve just finished reading an interesting journal paper called “Social Translucence: An Approach to Designing Systems that Support Social Processes” dated back in 2000 which relates strongly to the trends we’ve been seeing in the past 3-4 years on the web (think “Web 2.0″). Erickson says:
From our perspective, the digital world appears to be populated by technologies that impose walls between people, rather than by technologies that create windows between them. We suggest that understanding how to design digital systems so that they mesh with human behavior at the individual and collective levels is of immense importance. By allowing users to “see” one another, to make inferences about the activities of others, to imitate one another, we believe that digital systems can become environments in which new social forms can be invented, adopted, adapted, and propagated—eventually supporting the same sort of social innovation and diversity that can be observed in physically based cultures.
He was arguing that digital systems must be more like doors with a window in - we design so that people can see through a translucent window so that they can take in socially salient information, and act accordingly to social norms (i.e. push the door slowly if you see someone on the other side).
We can see this taking effect in an uncountable number of web communities. Youtube allows people to view favorites of other users, which helps you decide on whether you want to track that user’s videos or not. Digg.com ranks its web links by popularity, helping you decide which links are worth reading. Facebook shows you a user’s activity which, arguably, gives people an idea of the popularity of a person. Recently, Me.dium, a browser extension that shows you the people that are viewing similar pages to you and give you a mechanism to initiate a chat with them, shows how it now possible to feel like you’re browsing the web with someone else. Their catchphrase - “being around people changes everything” is scarily similar to what Erickson said in the paper. Even the visualisations used to show co-located presense is the same.
Are people inclined to talk to a person more if they show greater activity on social networking websites? Fakeyourspace.com shoves the truth in our face.
The questions that can be raised here include: what is the best approach for representing social information? Is it a mimetic text-based representation where the real world is represented as accurately as possible (e.g. MUD games), an abstract representation such as a visualisation, or a realistic representation (similar to video conferencing?).
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