Data-driven social interaction: The difference between analogue and digital part III

Data-driven social experience is an entirely new manner of social interaction, one that obscures our emotional connections to people. Data makes social relationships visible, knowable, and countable in unprecedented ways. But it does not — and cannot — convey the emotional experience of social interaction. I’ve already discussed how digital technologies transform text and time. Now I want to explore how “data” transforms social experience.

Take the notion of the “social network.” Most people (especially those that read blogs!) think these synonymous with Web sites like Facebook. Truth be told, social network analysis has existed for almost a century. We’ve all heard the term “six degrees of separation,” but most of us don’t know that was coined by none other that Stanley Milgram, of the “shock experiments” fame, when he tracked letters mailed around the world.

Social networks are exceedingly difficult to know from a quantitative perspective. We all live inside social networks but we have a very hard time knowing how these networks are constructed. We may know, for example, that our friend Jeff is friends with another one, Sarah, but we don’t know if Sarah knows Jeff’s partner Sam. Social network analysis is a set of methods designed to learn exactly that.

Now imagine your social network, as it is represented on Facebook (what, you’re not on Facebook?). Below is an image from Visual Complexity that renders a social network visibly but also very easily, simply by mining the data inherent in Facebook’s structure:

from Visual Complexity

Note how we instantly and easily know how institutions are connected, and through which people. Previously, researchers would have to conduct extensive and expensive surveys to get these data. Now these data are easily calculated and visualized by anyone with access to a social network online.

Some people are talking about this visualization as a piece of intellectual property. Alex Iskold on Mashable, for example, asks “Who owns the social map?” I go further and ask, “What does it mean that our social world is mappable?”

Our social world is now infiltrated by masses of data. These data inform us about the structure of our interactions with others in ways that we could not recall correctly if asked. Suddenly we can now see our social world reflected back to us, punctuated by  institutions, and social structures. When we see our social network through the eyes of data, we see the names of organizations, or the institutional affiliation of the people. We do not “see” the emotional experience that created our connections in the first place.

Suddenly, we may think we really are not that close with Jeff, because his partner Sam is really not friends with anyone I know. I can also see that Sarah and I have very few friends in common, which may lead me to think I don’t have much of a future friendship with her.

Those data crowd out the qualitative, embodied experience of the laughs I shared with Jeff and Sam at their cottage last summer. Those data obscure the fact that Sarah and I shared 3 long months as call centre employees together, a time that bonded us forever. A data-filled social world is one that masks the visceral, emotional experiences of face-to-face interaction.

Digital social life is revealed to us in fragmented, mashed up ways. Such ways were impossible before the freely available data on social networks, data that is now so ubiquitous, we don’t even see it.

The Difference Between Analogue And Digital Part II: Time

In an earlier post, I examined how text is transformed when it is created and shared in digital form. In this post, I argue that time itself is transformed when it is represented in digital format. To illustrate, consider my experiment with my Filofax.

Yes, I said Filofax. I still have one. I haven’t filled it with inserts in years, even though that was actually one of my favourite end-of-year rituals. I would make a special trip to the stationary store, just to buy the next year’s worth of calendar. In the process, I would review last year’s appointments, marvel at how much I had gotten done and how fast time had passed. I would linger over favourite appointments, which seemed, at the time, inconsequential, as recorded in my scribbled hand.

I bought a 2009 insert for my Filofax and inputted only two weeks’ worth of appointments. It took me 20 minutes.

Analogue time "reckoning"

The time it took me to enter in all these appointments was more than just scribbling. It was reviewing, remembering, considering. I could not physically enter overlapping appointments. There simply wasn’t room!

Now compare this to the same amount of time, as rendered by my iCal:

Digital Time "Reckoning"

There are overlapping appointments, my husband’s appointments easily inputted into mine, meetings from people I barely know, all dropped into my life automatically. Worse, I carry this around, automatically updating it, second by second, through my iPhone.

Sociologists use the term “time reckoning” to describe how we collectively understand time and make it intelligible to ourselves. There was a great hullabaloo about “clock time,” when clocks came to replace the seasons as our primary way of time reckoning. We forgot we didn’t know how long a minute actually was — we actually now think we can tell how long 23 minutes and 42 seconds is (spoiler: we can’t, especially when we’re enjoying ourselves!).

Now we have “digital” time reckoning, which bears almost no resemblance to how we actually experience time. If you have the misfortune of using time tracking software like TimeControl, then you will likely recognize this fantastical, farcical, FrankenTime:

Screenshot from Microsoft's TimeControl

According to this, a mythical interaction designer named Joseph Gardner spent 8 hours and 20 minutes on Sunday “design interface.” Ignoring the assault on proper grammar for a moment, let’s take a step back and understand what this means. First off, Poor Old Joe was working on Sunday. Notably, TimeControl allowed this kind of time use, despite the fact that it likely broke overtime laws. But secondly, how long is 8 hours and 20 minutes? Did Joe forgo the need for bathroom breaks? Was he glued to the chair for precisely 8 hours and 20 minutes? How long did he actually spend in that chair anyway?

Digital time allows to represent time in impossibly tiny fragments, and to work impossibly long hours. This kind of time would never be recorded in one’s Filofax — there simply isn’t room for all those hours. Moreover, the time it takes to record one’s time in a Filofax also requires one to contemplate the implications of 8 hours and 20 minutes of work on a Sunday.

In short, the difference between analogue and digital time is that digital time is even less like cognitively experienced time than “clock time.” Digital time can be schedule effortlessly, without any thought to the physical need for sleep, food, or relaxation. Digital time is a faster, manifold version of clock time, one that makes it possible for use have multiple, synchronous events.

Designing for conversations: the critical importance of turn taking

Hugh Dubberly and Paul Pangaro had a great post on Interactions magazine about designing for conversations. They propose to use how a conversation actually works to make interactions better. They rely heavily on Claude Shannon’s conversation model to help guide the conceptual model of interaction designs.

In Shannon’s model an information source selects a message from a known set of possible messages, for example, a dot or a dash, a letter of the alphabet, or a word or phrase from a list. Human communication often relies on context to limit the expected set of messages.

I applaud Dubberly and Pangaro’s attempts to use rigourous theory to support interaction design. But I’d have to agree with Peter Jones as he wrote in the comment section, that other philosophically informed communication theories are more robust when it comes to designing for conversation. Peter specifically mentions Winograd and Flores’s “conversation for action model” which relies on Habermas’s contention that you are acting when you communicate.

I’ll add to Peter’s critique. Garfinkel’s ethnomethodological approach gave way to “conversation analysis,” which posits that speakers use “indexical expressions” (or phrases that are fraught with meaning but are meaningful to the participants through unspoken means). Where in Dubberly and Pangaro’s article is the discussion of such expressions?

Where also is the notion of turn taking? Turn taking is a very significant component of a conversation. Try to have a trans-atlantic mobile phone conversation and you’ll see how important smooth turn taking is to meaningful conversation.

I would exhort interaction designers to continue to read and integrate theory into their mental models. But I would also discourage them from taking the short route; theories are debated for a reason. Interaction design ought to be a robust digital representation of those debates, and include all aspects.

The difference between analogue and digital Part I: Text

I have been thinking a great deal lately about the transformative effects of digital phenomena (See an earlier post I wrote about music on cell phones).

Digital text differs greatly from analogue text. For example, see my text below.

I wanted to complete this post entirely in analogue format but I found entirely too labourious. So add that to my list. Analogue text is:

• Not searchable
• High fidelity
• Full of personality
• Able to be hidden
• Labour intensive

Designers might wonder what this post has to do with design or with design research. Ask yourself: how do you share your work? How much of your work is a mashup? How much of it is findable? Would you rather it be hidden or out there for the world to Google?

Improving participation rates: research recruitment best practices

Those of you out there who’ve tried it know: recruiting research participants is HARD. Here are a few insights from the research to help you with better recuitment.

1. Personalized contact with respondents, followed by pre-contact and aggressive follow-up phone calls *: Don’t count on a form letter, email or random tweet to do the job. Capitalize on your personal relationship with that person. If you don’t have a personal relationship, ensure that you use the person’s name, and for God’s sake, spell it correctly!

   Once you’ve made initial contact, you are not done. Not by a long shot. Make sure you speak to the person (you can do this through IM or email if you’d like) to give them more information. They’re now interested. Don’t stop! One more step!

   Follow up 1 week after initial contact. Assuage any fears they may have. Answer any questions honestly. And above all, be available for more information.

2. External researchers with social capital are best**: University-based researchers have been shown to have the best participation rates, but you don’t have to be a professor.  Researcher Sister Marie Augusta Neal of Emmanuel College achieved a near perfect response rate because of her close ties to the respondents and their communities. The lesson here is, if you hire a consultant, make sure they’re trusted. Even better if they personally know the people to be recruited.
3. Monetary incentives have no effect, unless money is offered “no strings attached”***: Little known fact: the best way to use a monetary incentive is to offer it, up front, with absolutely no strings attached. The “free” money makes people feel more indebted socially. Evidence of this effect can be found in the book Freakonomics. Researchers found that daycare centres that levied late penalties on tardy parents actually had more of a late-pickup problem than those that levied no fine. Why? Because the parents reduced their relationship to the daycare as a mere transaction. Use the “gift economy” approach and ensure a feeling of indebtedness. My personal favourite is a coupon for a single iTunes song at $.99. It is cheap but appears to have great value. Offer it, up front, and then ask for participation

*  Cook, C., F. Heath, and R. Thompson. 2000. “A Meta-analysis of Response Rates in Web or Internet-based Surveys.” Educational and Psychological Measurement 60:821-836.

** Rogelberg, S., A. Luong, M. Sederburg, and D. Cristol. 2000. “Employee Attitude Surveys: Examining the Attitudes of Noncompliant Employees.” Journal of Applied Psychology 85:284-293.

***Hager, M., S. Wilson, T. Pollak, and P. Rooney. 2003. “Response Rates for Mail Surveys of Nonprofit Organizations: A Review and Empirical Test.” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 32:252-267. Singer, E. (2006) Introduction: Nonresponse Bias in Household Surveys. Public Opinion Quarterly, 70, 637-645

The evolution of qualitative sociology

The blog Economic Sociology has a great post on the “evolution” of qualitative sociology. They note, quite rightly, that the notion of “evolution” is implicit in much of social science, even if it has no bearing on the subject matter at hand. Many sociologists place quantitative research “on top” of the research “evolutionary ladder,” even when there is no such thing as a ladder when it comes to good research design. Interestingly, the fathers of sociology themselves would be on the “lower rung” of that methodological ladder:

The works of Marx and Weber, like virtually all the classic literature in the field, were based on qualitative, historical methodology (Durkheim’s quantitative study Suicide being a notable exception).

This post just reinforces to me why the design process is so important for social scientists. One must design a research project to solve contextual problems, just as one designs, say, a chair. You cannot “solve” questions of why or how by using quantitative methods. It is simply impossible.

Are why and how somehow “less than” questions than “how many” or “how fast”? I don’t think so. Indeed Economic Sociology points out that even Darwin was not concerned with “how many” but more with “how,” and few accuse him of being “unscientific.”

Open-access anthropology (and sociology): opening social research

May 1st is Open-Access Anthropology day. My contribution to this day:

It  is well past time to knock down the closed walls of the Ivory Tower.

Years ago, I worked on a project called The Public Knowledge Project. The principal investigator, Dr. John Willinsky, was actually a professor of literacy (and a distinguished one at that). John realized that university-based research was not getting into the hands of those outside the academy because academic journals are subscription only, for the most part.

John’s vision, and the vision of others, is to open up this research, make it available to people outside the university, and thereby make research much more meaningful, useful, and worthy.

I wholeheartedly agree. A former colleague of mine, Riva Soucie, has taken up the cause by founding New Social Inquiry, a open-access journal that is not only available for free, but is also ACCESSIBLE to non-researchers. Contexts magazine is also moving toward open-access research by offering regularly updated blogs (my favourite is the Visual Sociology blog).

Open-access isn’t just about open-source (although that’s part of it). It also means writing in accessible language and contextualizing the research for people who are not inside the academy.This is why I write this blog and why I call on all academics to blow down that Ivory Tower, and get out there. As Hubert Blumer once said in his famous article “What’s wrong with social theory?”:

Let us renounce the practice of taking in each other’s laundry.

Well put, Herbert!

Do you bill by the hour? Do you “hide” your time?

I examine the tools and processes I use to do my own work. Like many agency workers, I often bill by the hour. Check out my research on this phenomenon:

This paper is about time regimes that are typical in interactive agencies, as well as law firms, some construction companies and some management consultancies: the so-called “billable hour.” In this paper I ask how such a system is constructed, what tools are used to maintain it, and, most importantly, how do Web workers resist it?

More…

I invite comments to this discussion on my agencytime research blog. I am presenting this research at a conference in Edinburgh and wish to have insights from those who work under such time regimes.

Design thinking’s big problem

So-called “design thinking” is the new It-Girl of management theory. It purports to provide new ways for managers and companies to provide innovative, creative solutions to old problems. But design thinking alone will not solve these problems because a lack of creativity was never the issue.

The real issue is one of power.

Design is attractive to management because it is a de-politicized version of the well known socio-cultural critique of managerial practices. Design thinking is so popular because it raises only questions of “creativity” or “innovation” without ever questioning the legitimacy of managerial practice. Instead, design thinking aspires only to “better” management technique by investigating “contextual problems” or the truly innocuous “pain points.”

The inconvenient truth is that the science of management fails because it treats people as either mere inputs into the production process or as faceless “consumers” who have no real stake in outcomes. Design thinking allows for these truths to remain unaddressed, thereby avoiding any discussion of power itself. Workers are cast as something to be organized or “incented.” Consumers are to have their “needs met.” And neither group is granted a meaningful stake in the creative process.

Within this frame, design techniques attempt to solve managers’ typically tone-deaf executions of creativity without ever naming the root cause of workers’ and consumers’ dissatisfaction, which is their lack of meaningful participation in the design process. Managers’ ability to control both the organization of work and the availability of consumer goods is the true problem, not an inability to think “creatively.”

Managers have control over the working conditions under which creativity is supposed to happen, as well as the the distribution of the fruits of such labour. One significant reason workers’ creativity does not flow easily from studio or factory to consumers is because of management’s need to control costs and secure profits. Were it not for the profit motive, workers would be free to radically innovate continually and consumers would have unrestricted access to such new and innovative goods. But because profit stands as the pre-eminent benchmark of business success, both workers and consumers are thwarted in their pursuit of supplying and demanding innovative goods.

In other words, there is no shortgage of creative solutions to “unmet needs,” only a shortage of profitable ways to provide them.

Hence the inevitable ineffectiveness of design thinking, if applied in isolation to the problem of creativity. Designers must consider what role power plays in an organization’s inability to create innovative products. But more importantly, designers must be prepared to identify and name power and its sources (e.g., the pursuit of profit at the expense of innovation).They must not simply use ethnographic techniques to uncover “unmet needs”.

This is perhaps where designers will feel most out of their depth. It is a long leap from solving contextual problems to providing an analysis of inequality. All the more reason then, for designers to study the socio-cultural theory that underlies ethnography and other qualitative research methods.

In particular, designers should study feminist writers such as Canadian sociologist Dorothy Smith. Smith founded the method she calls “institutional ethnography,” which takes the standpoint of its participants and not that of the organization. This method frequently yields lived experiences that differ from the “official record” because it assumes that users of a technology, a product or a social policy lack meaningful access to those who record such records.

Ethnographic approaches are a good starting point for designers to cultivate empathy and hone observational skills. But it is in issues of power that rememdies to innovation bottlenecks will be broken.

Context, time and technology

Sometime ago I wrote about designing for time use. I’d like to expand on that post and discuss how contextual cues frequently are erased by poor technology design.

Poorly designed technology is like Vegas: you don’t know what time of day it is because it treats every minute exactly the same. Humans don’t experience time this way and good designers should recognize that.

As most qualitative researchers will tell you, context matters in research. Designers would agree: great design solves contextually contingent problems. One hidden contextual aspect is that of time. Technologies have a way of transforming time that designers should be aware of.

Digital technologies “calculate” time: Blackberrys, iPhones, iPods and Microsoft Outlook provide precise measurements of time. We know what 15 minutes is because our Outlook calendars tell us with the ubiquitous pop-up message.

But the human mind does not “calculate” time, it experiences it. Sometimes this is slow, sometimes this is fast. We know that great experiences have a “flow like” timeless quality about them, mostly because our minds do not record events in precise minutes and seconds. Instead, we “lose track of time” when we enjoy something, or time drags when we do not.

Contrast these two “timescapes” and you can see how disruptive technology can become. Humans don’t know how long 15 minutes is, so we organize our lives through contextual signals like “lunch time” or “bed time” or even “banana time.”

Blackberrys count minutes, seconds and even milliseconds. They tell us precisely when it is 3 p.m. EST, but they cannot tell us if it’s “time for lunch,” or “time to get a coffee.” Humans organize themselves around these subtle, contextually contingent cues and digital technologies disrupt the natural flow of time when they “count” time instead of monitor it.

Good technology design goes beyond usability to managing this fissure between human time and digital time. Indeed, research has shown that well designed technology offers flow-like states.