Marshall McLuhan taught us that every medium uses a previous medium as its content. The same applies to social media. But in any social technology the progression of technology and design innovation is accompanied by the increasing complexity of the social practices it enables. This is as true of the stirrup (Mongol warriors, jousting, cattle-herding, equestrian games) as it is of television (reformatted radio plays, stand-up routines, comedy shows, soaps, reality tv) and, most recently, securitized investment vehicles (asset-backed, mortgage-backed, credit default swaps, derived credit swaps, synthetics, even cubed derivatives). At each stage in the “evolution” of the technology, social uses and practices enable corresponding cultural “progress” of increased complexity.

The history of social media began with Geocities, as a simple form of homesteading: establishing an address, or Here I Am. It moved through identity-based sites: or This is Me, such as Friendster. (This was in part why Friendster suffered through Fakesters — it was trading in the attributes of personal identity: trust, friendship, authenticity, etc.). Then came communities: early social networks based on discussions, such as Tribe, and This is What I Think. In the next phase the social network came to the fore: MySpace, Facebook, each of which thematize the social currency or value of social capital, based on more or less real relationships and testing the symbolic and “real” meaning of relatedness: This is Who Likes Me (and Who is Like Me). Today we are animating the face, and extending the face beyond the page.

At each stage of development, a socio-technical dynamic drives what will succeed or fail. This dynamic is like a governing principle of social technology design, and it articulates both design and use together: for each stage of social technology evolution, social practices complexify in increasing order of self-reference. With each stage, previous social practices become available (as references) to new practices. Established social customs and conventions, in other words, can either be practiced “directly” or become embedded and referenced in newer ones. Subsequent levels of social complexity make each new socio-technical practice possible.

we can suppose that the next round will involve presentation layer innovations and meta-level practices

Identity, for example, which is an important theme of dating sites. The early years of dating sites established conventions, meanings, playful and serious behaviors, etiquette, and so on. They saw the emergence of subcultures among online daters, from lurkers to stalkers, late night hook-ups to eharmony’s bureaucratization of romantic compatibility, etc. In its earliest days, dating sites suffered from the stigma that a) nobody’s real, truthful, or sincere on dating sites and b) they’re a means of last resort. But in the ten or so years that they have been around, it’s become understood that some 20% of a profile is inflated, but that everyone does this — and in part because we want to like ourselves, too. Gross lies and deceptions are less common now in online dating; it simply doesn’t pay to misrepresent oneself.

Online dating is now a theme or practice available to other social media. Indeed many, if not most Facebook apps, play in the flirtation and with the subtleties of symbolic and linguistic interaction that enable higher-order social games. Facebook social apps use practices already explored and sedimented out of several years of precipitating socio-technical discovery and experimentation. In this way social conventions can continually reference themselves, making an ever-growing landscape of technical features viable.

If we take status and activity feeds and their applications as another example, we can see this evolution at work and imagine where it goes next.

If it is likely that on-going innovation will kick off with the next level, or layer, up from today’s application interfaces and user practices, we can suppose that the next round will involve presentation layer innovations and meta-level practices. By meta I mean observing the “world” or activity produced through social media. If today’s twitter is for tweeting, meta Twitter would be for watching the world of Twitter.

This progression has already occurred in social networking sites (consider the number of facebook apps that report on facebook user activity, their demo or friend data, social rank, popularity, etc.). The next round of lifestreaming apps will mine usage to construct and represent the feed-based world of activity. Designers will design new and compelling ways to show this activity and make it interesting in the dimensions of social use that can be compelling: presence; activity; social rank; social networks; location; notifications; topics; and so on. Some of these are already off the ground: tag clouds and hashtags for topicality; counters for popularity and rank; twittervision for location; and so on.

With each iteration of social media sites, tools, and applications, designs leverage the familiar for the purpose of something new. We have tried to show here that it is possible to identify aspects of social interaction, social activities, the acts that comprise them, and social technology forms commonly used in social practices. Now, while a designer doesn’t need theory to practice design work any more than a musician needs music theory to play a tune, I hope to have demonstrated that a framework for social interaction design can help organize the field of social media design. One could write further on other social media tools and practices, and identify the modes of use implicated in design choices. And apply these insights to bigger goals, such as new business opportunities and uses for social media. But that would be a separate undertaking — and a separate primer!

Image by Elvire-r

We have covered just three forms of social action common to one kind of social media application. There are others more important to social networking, profile-based sites, mobile, and other kinds of social media. They include the form of self-presentation (profiles), the form of social networking (friends and friends of friends), the form of social gaming (apps, widgets, and games), to mention just three. But our goal here was to use lifestreaming applications as an introduction to applied social interaction design, and we chose to focus on temporality, audience presence, and communication.

Design choices made will shape whether or not questions are answered personally, by friends, by experts, or by anyone.

Now within each of these forms are design formats. These are more specific and particular than broad forms of mediated social action. We don’t have the time here to detail each, but we would be selling the framework short if we failed to at least mention some examples and explicate how a design language might be described for several of them.

We will take just some of the formats of the form of communication as examples. As noted, lifestreaming applications are fairly unstructured and open. But communication, and social talk in particular, can be very structured. According to Erving Goffman, forms of talk in face to face social encounters include such diverse examples as intimacies, pastimes, games, rituals, and ceremonies, in increasing degrees of structure and organization. Intimacies are highly personal and private, and are navigated by participants by means of personality and individual character, competence, and preference. Rituals, on the other hand, can be virtually devoid of personal qualities and will often rely heavily on role, position, authority, and so on. Lacking the context demanded of rituals, online social interactions by nature tend to emphasize higher degrees of personal handling. But some degree of ritualization does seem to have emerged around conventional online behaviors, especially greetings, acknowledgments, and other examples of interaction in which a preliminary acceptance or rejection sets up later communication.

Designers have of course been working with communication application design interfaces for years. And indeed, message envelope, priority, order and sorting, notifications and alerts, and other design conventions were established in email applications long before their adoption by social media. Similarly, groups, channels, and subscriptions share some number of design standards. And the design of chat, too, has influenced IM, and lifestreaming in turn (as have message boards and web-based discussion boards).

Users may be as or more interested in who is talking than in what she or he is saying

But there are ways to structure talk and communication that deal less specifically with message formatting and navigation and more with the structure of the kind of talk. Questions and answers, for example, are a structured kind of talk. Designers can use question and answer formats to facilitate and display these kinds of exchanges. The designer may also use conventions for the display questions and their answers, ratings, answer threading, answer categorizing, and more. There are some lifestreaming applications built around questions and answers, and there will certainly be more. In each, designers can choose how to route questions (publicly, to a social network, by design, or by text formatting), how to handle answers, how to make them searchable and browsable, how to tag or categorize them, qualify and rank them, verify, validate, accredit, relate them, and so on.

Design choices made will shape whether or not questions are answered personally, by friends, by experts, or by anyone. Those design choices will in turn shape whether or not questioning and answering is a social activity, a personal activity, or whether it serves the purpose of building new relationships, creating a knowledge base, surfacing experts, recommenders, and so on. Without going into the design white-boarding that might accompany these choices, we can see already that just one format of communication (QA) is richly textured and design-ready.

We could also take the example of symbolic exchanges, and of meta-communication in general. Here we deal not necessarily with what is said but with what is meant, and not in words but in hints, suggestions, solicitations, and other non-linguistic forms of symbolic interaction. Symbolic interaction on Twitter and on most lifestreaming apps is conducted with words. Twitter does not have an icon or smiley set available, as most IM and chat applications do. For this reason, the use of @name by convention solicits a written reciprocal acknowledgment. (Users can be nice, generous, or cold and unresponsive, or seem to be, depending.)

There is the example of what we call the message envelope: its urgency, priority, newness, subject, and addressing. Again, lifestreaming applications share the stripped-down design simplicity of flat messaging presentation. All messages look the same, even those that reply to or direct message a user. And there is no distinction between “normal” and “commercial” messages. These enhancements would be easy to imagine, regardless of whether we think they would be improvements to the application. These are important attributes of communication insofar as they tell about the message, conveying how important it is, time sensitive it is, and so on. Currently, lifestreaming apps simply show messages. But a meta-Twitter application that summarized twitter activity might be an interesting tool if it provided visual cues and notifications — sparing the user the need to read messages one by one.

In addition to structuring and organizing communication and messages, we can structure and organize the speakers or participants. Users may be as or more interested in who is talking than in what she or he is saying. Users can be grouped, by their relationships or by their affinity to topics and themes. And of course direct communication between members can be distinguished or separated from the rest of the stream of talk. The formats for these are emerging only now, and will evolve as social technologies proliferate and increasingly go mobile.

It would take significantly more time and space than we have here to outline and arrange the forms and formats of social action for social communication alone, let alone other forms and their related formats. And these would only address the interactions on social media. We are already seeing games and experiences that play with the meta-data and representation of online social interaction, and these would require their own frameworks of social action. For this reason we will stop here and conclude with a view to what comes next for social media.

We conclude this post in the next and final part.

Image by timparkinson

In order to proceed now with these examples, we need to develop our framework further to account for and describe what’s on the screen in terms of individual user experiences and aggregate social practices. We will do this on the basis of the social action systems touched on above. We will structure these social action systems into forms. While an imperfect term, “form” conveys the degree of structure and organization as well as materiality we are looking for. “Frames” could work also, or possibly “formats” — but both of those terms carry other connotations. Frames are used mostly with “perspectives” of experience; and formats for visual treatments or media forms. Our forms of social action will be user-centric, in that they will start from user activity and behavior, but will accommodate the resulting production of social content also. These forms will combine social media acts, actions, and activities, and provide us with an interpretive schema layered on top of conventional interface and design frameworks. Forms support the two major types of social action, but are material technical implementations, and so require slightly different treatment. They have a several components, including: visual, functional, temporal, and content components. (Note that forms do not describe user intentions or motives—those require a psychological framework for user behaviors. The psychology of social media use practices will describe what users “think” is going on; forms will describe what we think is going on.)

The social media “forms” of social action most germane to lifestreaming and feed-based applications are temporal forms (for sustaining talk over time); forms of creating audience presence (a sense of presence is a must for any social conversation tool); and forms of communication (for identifying the what, where, and for whom of communication).

Temporal forms
Temporal forms are perhaps the most interesting, because they require some visualization of (past) time. All social media “design time” insofar as preserve past interactions and content, and all are used over time insofar as they become a part of regular habits and routines. But there are two kinds of time: lived time, and incremental time. Put differently, the time which has rhythm, pacing, speeds and intensities (boring, exciting); and the time we use to measure and which is all equal: minutes, hours, days. Time is a challenge for visual design languages. The “lived time” of social media lacks the continuity of face to face encounters, and is best described as discontinuous. Furthermore, it is asynchronous: interactions are out of synch, and what may be a highly-attentive stretch for one user could easily be out of step with his or her friends. (Members of dating sites and chat-oriented communities often have routines, such as after work and late night, which supply some of the sense of “being there” that comes with being together.)

In lifestreaming applications, content, usually posted messages and items, is displayed in order of newest to oldest — as is common to email, chat, and IM (messaging apps). Messages are browsed or read by means of paging back (Twitter over web) or scrolling down (Twitter in desktop application). Dipity, Swurl, and Twittervision exemplify several alternatives: left to right scrolling through a timeline; flipbook for flipping messages one at a time; and mapping for attaching messages to place. For the most part, however, the chronological form is adequate and little other navigation encumbers flow-oriented application design. It helps that Twitter is designed to be an app for “now,” or for present-tense communication. In fact Twitter archives do not stretch back more than a couple days on most clients.

Is this the only way to design time-based applications? Is an application like Twitter simple because our needs and uses for it are simple, or because content belongs to a now and a recent past — as opposed to sections, categories, pages, lists, and so on? Chronology is not the only means by which to structure or organize temporal activities. Talk, for example, uses turns as a means of organizing time when there are several participants involved. Turn-taking comes from face to face conversation, and structures participation such that a “round” of talk “sticks to the topic.” Participants “take the floor” to talk, then hand it to somebody else. And Twitter, notably, does not handle turn-taking well. Twitter’s open-ness and unstructured-ness preempts the visual continuity that commenting on Facebook status updates successfully provides. In fact Twitter is by some accounts leaving many of the benefits of serialized social interaction to others: Friendfeed and Facebook’s news, activity, and status feeds most significantly.

Serialization is visualized differently by several lifestreaming applications. These applications either provide alternative views of message archives, or complement the conventional message list with these alternatives. These visualizations include flip-books (page through messages), horizontal timelines, slideshows, and calendar views. Storytlr.com is an example of a lifestreaming service that invites users to create narratives out of their feeds, thus taking the “serialization” of daily activity streams literally and visually. (Facebook’s implementation of commenting builds comment threads, or “loops in time” attached to particular updates.) None of these create a different “temporality” but are different ways of viewing archives (the past).

Presence
Presence is the hidden dimension of the temporal continuity sustained during an open state of talk. In co-present social encounters, participants need to be in close enough proximity to be able to hear, if not see, one another. How then does an application like twitter establish this kind of presence? And since social media deal in non co-present interactions and encounters, are we not talking about a dimension better described for what it lacks than what it avails? Indeed, presence can only be signaled or indicated online — like temporality online, presence is discontinuous and asynchronous, or absent.

When we talk about presence in social media, we mean several things: the indication of a user’s presence; indication that the user may be paying attention; and indication that the user is available for communication or other interaction. A user’s state of presence may be indicated as “currently online” — as in case of synchronous or state-aware applications. Or it may simply be built into the assumption (social practice) of the application’s use. A user’s attentiveness, too, can be indicated or assumed, although indicating that a user is presently paying attention is of course difficult, barring use of live video/webcam. And a user’s presence availability for interaction, likewise, is indicated or assumed (we can usually tell when a user is active, and when s/he may simply have “checked in” but has not indicated active participation).

The fact that audience presence and interest is motivating to many users is clear from the amount of attention so many users pay to their stats.

Presence provides a ribbon of discontinuous attention across talk-based tools in general. But we can use the example of twitter to tease out a few observations of the particular modes of presence common to social media. For one, the less that is indicated, or made explicit, in the form of an application’s user presence status (“online now”), or as a user declaration (such as a question posted to twitter, which would suggest that the user will watch for replies), the greater the ambiguity raised with respect to presence, attentiveness, and availability. This may seem at first to be an inefficiency of the application. But as we have said, social media benefit from ambiguity: it can engage, motivate, and often captivate users. Ambiguity of presence then takes shape in user experiences like “is anyone here?”, “are you here?”, “did you get my message/see my post?”, “are you ignoring me or do you disagree with me, not like me, or simply not want to talk to me right now?” In face to face interactions, these are easily handled by facework, looking at and looking back, use of body language, and of course suggestive language and statements. They are not so easily handled on feed-based apps like twitter, and thus become a factor of the user experience and of emergent social practices. Ambiguity piques user interest. (The kind of interest piqued is a matter for an article on user psychology.)

Discontinuous temporality and presence through absence thus form the “situation” or context of talk-based tools, and their production of “time” in particular. Let’s move on then to the matter of assembling an audience. Unlike social networking sites, the audiences on many feed-based applications are open: in the form of a public timeline. Audiences are comprised of followers, friends, and a public. Indications of an audience’s membership and presence are critical to talk-based tools, for the obvious reason that users are interested in posting to audiences, either of known friends, individual users, or “everyone” at large. And users are not just interested in the audience, but in being seen by the audience. (Given the choice between being on stage with no audience, and being in an audience, there are those who would prefer being on stage.) The application can show the audience present for an interaction, or show the audience comprised of a user’s followers, or simply reference the “possible” audience by means of a user’s network, or the greater web in general. The fact that audience presence and interest is motivating to many users is clear from the amount of attention so many users pay to their stats. Audiences can be indicated by means of numbers of people, numbers of links, comments, numbers of views or visits, and even ratings, diggs, bookmarks, and so on. Again, there’s ambiguity between audience size and audience attentiveness and engagement, and again, this ambiguity can be motivating and compelling. Every social media user is compelled first and foremost by the possibility that his or her presence is noticed, acknowledged, distributed, and liked, for the simple reason that the user’s position and status in relation to other users is undermined by physical and temporal separation.

We could say much more about the differences between talk-based and feed-based applications and how they assemble audiences and indicate their presence. But for now, let’s just touch on the most recent development in gathering social media audiences: aggregation of distributed conversations. Applications like Friendfeed, SocialMedian, Swurl, and numerous others aggregate the “conversation space” by pulling in feeds and comments on feed items for convenient viewing and participation. Aggregators are tackling the problem of audience fragmentation created by the proliferation of social media applications and the acceleration of talk and commenting across them — and of the adoption of faster, shorter posts in an ecosystem of increasing proximity and presence. Unfortunately, aggregators only partially succeed, for their existence adds to the list of talk-based applications. Clearly, the need for a user-centric application interface to a user’s relevant friend, colleague, and topical news sources and feeds begs addressing. Destination sites all hope to become the few preferred means of getting this done.

Aggregators address the problem of audience presence by collecting incoming feeds and messages. However, for each aggregator to provide the use and social value promised on top of information value, it needs a user base of active members. The audience problem cannot be solved by aggregating pipelines alone.

Communication
Finally, feed and talk-based applications of course organize and facilitate communication. As we saw, communication may be direct or indirect. Messages are posted to a person or audience directly when they are addressed to that audience, or indirectly when they are just posted in front of an audience. Communication itself comprises message content (what is said) and meta-message communication (what is solicited, suggested, and implied beyond what’s stated in words themselves). Linguistic types exist that are common to social media, for example, simple declarations of fact, intent, and feeling; requests and questions; recommendations; invitations; greetings and sign-offs; and more. Some linguistic types are less common, for example: instructions, commands, orders, and special speech acts such as pronouncements (the “I do” of a wedding) and physical threats.

It’s a fact of communication that the information in the utterance is separate from the utterance itself, that in other words what is said is not said just in the saying of it. This distinction between “performing” speech and saying something opens up the intentional and interpretive possibilities for communication, and this is doubled again when a medium is involved. For the medium requires first that communication is captured, or rendered as an artifact. It’s the artifact that is posted/distributed, not the performance. Any recording of communication is thus already at one remove from the act of performing the communication.

There is a further dimension to communication critical to designing talk-based social media. It is the conversion of communication into an action system. Strictly defined, publishing is communication, but it requires no action. In social media, communication solicits action (interaction, or participation). An action system exists when communication is followed by the act of acceptance or rejection (of what is communicated). Here, too, ambiguity arises, for the communication can be accepted without being agreed with. In fact, it can be accepted without even being understood — either in terms of what it says or what its author intended. Furthermore, a person can acknowledge the person communicating and not in fact accept what is communicated, thus committing to communication without accepting its claims. Any of these aspects of communication may come into play with social media. Thus a tool like twitter can be many things to just as many people, according to the ways in which they tend to communicate, and according to the aspects of communication that compel or touch them the most.

In the next section we look at designing to different forms of social action, looking at communication in particular.

Image by voght

Let’s now take some examples of how social action systems describe the user and social interactions on social media. Because there are so many different kinds of applications out there, we will look at just one kind of social media application. We will take those that have attracted the most attention this year: feed, status, “micro-blogging,” and lifestreaming applications. These would include Facebook (although Facebook is also a social networking site), Twitter, Seesmic, Jaiku, Pownce, Dipity, Swurl, Tumblr, Soup.io, Dopplr, Friendfeed, Storyt.lr, Spokeo, and others). They include also the applications that interface with Twitter (Tweetdeck, Twhirl, etc.), and those that aggregate feeds as customized RSS readers (designed to simplify blog tracking, friend tracking, etc.).

Attention: this article is part of a series.

If the profile is a representation of one’s face, then the feed brings it to life — feeds are the medium’s “talkies.” Feed-based applications are more immediate, more conversational, more personal, and more mobile than profile-based networks. Some have reproduced aspects of social networking (followers, following, subscribing, grouping). Some are concerned with topicality and navigation of conversations by content. Some extend the user’s presence across devices, working with the rich possibilities of mediated social presence. Some extend the medium’s capacity for discovery, surfacing, and serendipity. Some seem designed to surface influencers, experts, recommenders, reviewers, and so on, while others enable co-accidental meetings (coincidental accidents, or accidental coincidences, whichever you prefer as a description of Loopt, Dopplr and geo-location services). Generally speaking, feed-based applications focus on the conversation flow, or stream, and do so with a lighter footprint than other community and networking sites. (I understand that social networks also have feeds and status messages — but there is little doubt that lifestreaming and aggregators are their own category.)

All “talkies” play in presence, presence availability, presence extension, audience membership, audience attention, “public” behavior, regionalization of public “spaces,” and other matters described by symbolic interactionism. Feed applications represent a speeding-up of communication across social media, and involve a nearer sense of proximity and presence than many earlier social media. They have audiences but those audiences are somewhat invisible and can be less organized than in online communities; many feed-based apps are designed around the individual user, and not around a network or community. There are thus social effects deriving from the many possible interpretations of what’s being said, why, to whom, for what purpose, in response to what, or whom, and so on — all aspects of symbolic and communicative action ripe for the designing.

The primary evolutionary step taken by feed-based applications comprises of two parts:

• the immediacy, proximity, and sustained attention of their users, which supply the necessary social preconditions for presence that makes their use relevant and rewarding;
• and the design innovation of the short-form verbal declaration, which provides a highly distributable, aggregate-able, extensible, and flexible presentation format and simplicity of user input from multiple applications and devices.

These applications are interesting because they point to a departure from page-based social networking and profile-based systems. Their emphasis on talk overthe profiles and rich media interactions can make them more appealing to the conversational audiences. Their blend of friend followers and public followers creates interesting opportunities for social talk, as in talk that is “addressed to friends” but “in front of everyone.” Their open-ness and unstructured-ness begs for (and creates opportunities for) more channeled, closed (Yammer being one) and structured variants (e.g. topical, typical — Q/A, location, recommendation, ecommerce — commercial, niche and similar types as have emerged on message boards and in discussion-based networks). (Of course it is also possible that some feed-based services will successfully layer on social networking, discussions, and profiling, thus reproducing variants on the success of Facebook and MySpace, but around short-form talk.)

Feed-based applications are loosely related to what Goffman calls an “open state of talk.” Open states of talk are the types of conversation that do not require full front-and-center attention from their participants. They often accompany a task, and are common among co-workers. The continuity of an open state of talk is not handled as much by direct and focused attention (of each participant on the other), but by their co-presence: participants are readily available to conversation when it picks up, as when it fades out. Feed-based applications bear some similarity to this form of conversation. Indeed, all asynchronous communication tools do, and point to an ubiquitization of networked presence and social awareness.

In the next part, we will look at forms of action common to feeds and lifestreaming, and begin to formalize our approach to designing screen and interaction. We will take three significant aspects of feeds and lifestreaming — temporality, presence, and communication — and examine ways in which social interaction design accommodates them. As we will see, the richer our understanding of the interface between user and social, between social and technical, the better we might anticipate the trajectories of any particular social technology.

]]> http://johnnyholland.org/2009/02/social-interaction-design-primer-ii-3-feeds-lifestreaming/feed/ 1 http://johnnyholland.org/2009/02/social-interaction-design-primer-ii-2-action-systems/ http://johnnyholland.org/2009/02/social-interaction-design-primer-ii-2-action-systems/#comments Tue, 03 Feb 2009 08:00:42 +0000 Adrian Chan http://johnnyholland.org/?p=904 We need an action system for our content/information system. Action systems traditionally belong to interaction designers, and they tend to [...]]]>

We need an action system for our content/information system. Action systems traditionally belong to interaction designers, and they tend to describe actions that are constrained and enabled by the user interface, as well as back-end architecture, features, and functionality. Action systems conventionally hew pretty closely to visual design languages, and there are many standard and conventional systems (including pattern languages) around for user behavior around UI elements, such as pulldowns, lists, multiple selection windows, form pages, wizards, and so on. Action systems describe the user interaction with what is on the screen, and with what the user’s (inter)action does: search > results; submit > preview; mouse over > popup, and so on. The screen can only display so much, so once a user begins to interact, her actions result in new content, windows, screens and so on.

Attention: this article is part of a series.

Action systems are particularly important because they shape and constrain user participation. Here Web 2.0 really differs from 1.0, because the action is with another user, or audience of users, and not with webpage alone. In social media, for example, the “call to action” is often a “call to interaction.” This mightbe a gestural (non-linguistic) interaction, or it might be a communicative (linguistic, video, audio) interaction. The call to interaction germane to social media is the reason we need to adapt some psychology to our framework of interaction: any user’s understanding of what the “call” or appeal means is in part individual/personal, and in part public/social. And of course the user’s own thoughts and understanding of any online interaction is a product of his or her unique style and competence in social interactions, and reflects his or her engagement with online media. This simply means that it is far more difficult to codify the appeals and calls to action on social media than on web 1.0.

The discrete sequences and steps involved in web 1.0 interactions are basic transactions: the user does X and the software/site verifies that X has been done. In web 2.0, the user does, or says X, not to the software application but to other user(s). The software application of course cannot verify what X meant to other users: action X is communicative, and social, and hence a matter of human relationships.

In social media, for example, the “call to action” is often a “call to interaction.”

Online social actions together form social activities. But how do we formalize the social activities on social media? Social media applications and sites can be grouped into categories, according to the theme of their activity. They can be grouped also by their shared interface approaches (page-based, desktop, mobile, etc.). We can group them according to their business model, industry, or other market-oriented utility. We can also group them by using broad interaction and communication types: messaging, feeds, blogging, social networking. Lately, it’s been common to group social media applications by industry terminology, as in: distributed conversations, aggregators, lifestreaming, social presencing, and so on.

These are all valid categories, and serve the purpose of describing and articulating differences well. But they are conceptual groups — none of them is user-centric, and none of them articulates differences of social action as it is intended and experienced by users. As you may have already guessed, I would like to therefore supplement these categories with the characteristics of user and social practices as required by a social interaction design framework.

We use sociology to describe social encounters. As the sociologist Erving Goffman puts it, in any social encounter, “in order to know how to proceed, we need to first know what is going on.” Goffman’s symbolic interactionism becomes incredibly layered and detailed in its analysis of “real” face to face situations, where body language, face, turn-taking, context, ritual, and more combine to “frame” what’s happening in any social encounter. However, social media’s bracketing out of the face, and of co-presence, creates its own characteristics, having as much to do with what’s not there as with what is there.

Our use of symbolic interactionism will borrow concepts specific to the framing of talk, but modified for the mediating transformation of online interaction. For now though, we can move on as long as we understand that a call to interaction is a call to interact socially, not just with a software application.
Action systems in social media are social action systems enabled by web-based or application-based design and interaction elements. The call to action designed into the screen is intended to engage, sustain, and perpetuate participation of individual users (having a “social” experience with other members). For example, where the conventional “user action” is entering text into a form (specifically, a text area), the “social action” may be blogging. Where the “user action” is browsing search results, the “social action” might be viewing potential online dates. And so on. The conventional description of the user act is too technical to capture the meaning of the act to the user, not to mention of the act in a social activity or social practice.

social action systems comprise of user acts, actions, activities, and facilitating social practices

Social action systems are built on the individual user act, which expresses or captures an action, understood over time as an activity. These acts anticipate a personal or social response, and are therefore very different from the “acts” described by conventional software interaction design. Individual and social activities combine in what we call “social practices.” The purpose of social interaction design is to organize and design individual user experience such that, when aggregated, social practices emerge. For example, LinkedIn is used to connect professional user profiles for the purpose of passive and active career/job networking with both colleagues and strangers. The user act may be writing text (using a form page); the action is updating a profile; the activity is maintaining a professional presence in a community of networkers; the social practice is professional online networking. The site where this happens, LinkedIn, is themed: professional networking.

Now, a dating site may use many of the same web design and page elements, buttons, menus, and may even also be organized around profiles, have a discussion board, provide member search by advanced filtering, and so on. But its theme is different, and thus behavior is different, as are codes of conduct and user expectations. Thus an interaction system for social media clearly exceeds what’s on screen. Social action systems should reflect the thematic social activity they support.

Having established that social action systems comprise of user acts, actions, activities, and facilitating social practices, let’s now take a look at two types of social action system.

It can be argued that all user activity on social media communicates — that it all can be understood to mean something to somebody else. But not all user activity is intended to communicate something in particular, or to a particular person. And there is little guarantee that what is intended is how it’s interpreted. Social interaction online includes two kinds of action: symbolic action and communication. What they have in common, and where they are fundamentally different from software interaction systems, is that they mean something. And not just that they mean something, but that what they mean was meant to mean something by another person. All social action is inter-subjective.

Symbolic action - is action or interaction on social media that does not specifically communicate a message to a recipient or audience. It may be a “social” form of individual activity, such as bookmarking, posting video, updating a member profile, or may be gestural, suggestive, or solicitous of a response without making a statement. Social media create ambiguities of user intention in unique ways, and these make for a very rich palette and repertoire of symbolic action.

Communication - is interaction that does communicate a message to a recipient or audience. Communication takes two forms: direct communication and indirect communication. Direct communication is messaging, emailing, writing/recording a communication for somebody (personal or public, individual or audience). Indirect communication is communication that occurs in front of an audience (it’s social) but which is not directly addressed to somebody in particular. Many examples of blogs, tweets, video posts, and so on, are indirect communication. Both solicit responses from others, and both are motivated by an interest in acknowledgment from others, implicitly or indirectly if not explicitly and directly.

Regardless of whether action online is symbolic or communicative, directly or indirectly, it is always social. Users know that there are other users, and are thus aware that what they do online is seen by others. This means that users themselves relate to how they are seen, and whether they are seen participating. Each user will have his or her own understanding of what their actions mean, how they look and appear (to themselves and to other), and this in turn will shape what he or she thinks works, for what, and with what consequences. Without this ambiguity, social media would be not only boring but lifeless.

In the next part of this post we will look at a a current trend in social media: feeds and lifestreaming. Using the status, activity, and news feed (this includes twitter and other lifestreaming apps) as examples of talk, we’ll examine some of the social aspects of both the tools and their uses.

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A few months ago my Social Interaction Design Primer was published on Johnny (check it out). In this primer I tried to create a solid ground for social interaction design. Since then I’ve thought, read and discussed a lot… which caused me to write this follow up, which is somewhat longer. So in the next week I will publish it in parts (five in total). Sit back and read my thoughts on why social interaction design should be taken serious.

Attention: this article is part of a series.

Introduction
I like to say that a film theorist is not necessary if you want to make a good film. I don’t know that a social interaction designer is necessary if you want to make a good social media application. But I have one compelling reason to argue the case: we are, in 2008, depending heavily on best practices and are deeply set in copy-cat design mode, neither of which are a substitute for the innovation we’re supposed to be good at. Maybe we engineer well. Maybe we finance, fund, and launch well. Maybe we socialize well. But the social engineering built into social media shouldn’t be copied from others for then it adds nothing, and if what is added is only a design or feature iteration, it won’t be long before we’re out of beta testers.

Social interaction design is user-centric by necessity and by choice, in keeping with conventional software design approaches.

In some ways all of us in social media design are involved in building the same application. But it’s as if each company has taken on a certain part, or version, of social media. As a result, we’re given to take our applications at face value, and to see in them what we have built and what works. But each application is designed, engineered, and populated — and myriad choices and compromises go into the final product.

Social interaction design may be a design theory, but in practice its aim is to help all of us to anticipate not only how our applications work when used, but where we are going, and how to get there. It is difficult to outline the invisible, and to describe the intangible. But that is what we have to do in the case of designing social media, not only because the “social” is just an aggregation of distributed individual user experiences and poorly coordinated and loosely-coupled user activities, but because as users we tend not to be self-aware of our motives and intentions in social interactions.

My aim in ’A Social Interaction Design Primer’ was to introduce some key concepts and briefly sketch their role in a user-centric design framework for social media. I was hoping to also make a case for social interaction design, if not as a relative of user experience and interaction design disciplines overall, then as an extension of them. What follows is an attempt to tease out the features of the hidden dimension of social media use, and to explicate them for the purposes of helping designers, engineers, and architects anticipate what their products do and how users will use them. Interaction mediated by technologies can be understood by means of social action theories. But we will need to modify them to take the mediation of the device into account. We will need to develop systems of social action and identify forms of common online social interactions. I will introduce some here, and hint at what might be involved in a more exhaustive grammar or framework for social interaction design.

Social interaction design is user-centric by necessity and by choice, in keeping with conventional software design approaches. But it is interested in more than just the user experience alone. For if design is to facilitate, lead, steer, structure, and organize social interactions, it must be able to anticipate what happens when more than one user is involved. To this end we draw heavily on psychology, sociology, media, and communication theories, mixing them together to get beyond the interaction of user with the interface and to the social practices that make social media successful (or not!).

Interests are not simply individual or personal interests, but are already social in nature: the user’s interest always solicits the interest of another user.

I touched on a high level theoretical approach to the social interface in the primer, describing it as having three modes: mirror, content surface, and window. I supplemented those with three modes of user engagement: with the Self, with an Other, and around a Relationship. I suggested that there are distinct user personality types for social media users organized around communication and interaction-oriented motives and interests. I have described these in terms of user competencies, and suggested that (online) social competencies are a more robust description of user behavior than conventional views of user needs and goals.

Interests are not simply individual or personal interests, but are already social in nature: the user’s interest always solicits the interest of another user. Social media interaction is simply much more “human,” ambiguous, messy, informal, open-ended, multi-layered, and contingent than the kind of user action modeling applied to conventional non-social interfaces (ATMs, stoves, books). This primer explicates the first primer and seeks to apply insights to social media application design.

What follows is going to get a bit involved, so I’ll begin with an overview of the theory’s application. The space is Web 2.0, the industry or market place is social media applications. These include web page-based apps as well as many others (desktop twitter apps, facebook social apps, widgets, and so on). The design approach is modified web design, and uses the features and functionality of the web 2.0 application engines (back-end) which enable social interaction and the social production of content and individual communication and interactions.

So let’s do a quick round up of the design elements with which we’re working. There is page layout, content organization, design and branding, navigation, information architecture, actions (forms, buttons, etc.), and so on. These are comprised of components that can be multi-purposed: buttons, containers, boxes, windows, lists, links, and so on.

Now, what distinguishes Web 2.0 from 1.0 is that application and site content is of and by people. Consequently, many of the Web 1.0 elements reflect their own use. Use can be shown by detailing it on the page, as in dynamically changing views (counts) to a profile, number of comments, members, and so on.It can be shown by dynamically changing the contents of a content block (e.g. tags). Or it can be shown by re-arranging content (as in ranking and leader-boards). In this way the web elements common to web 1.0 applications become social in web 2.0: they reflect their use by the site’s audience. Lists on social media, for example, usually update according to the number of clicks on the links in the list. A block of “new member” pictures changes as new members join. Social participation such as rating, submitting, linking, voting, and commenting will push submitted content higher, or lower, according to participation. Tags, too, reflect “folksonomic” logic as users use them to find content by keywords. In other words, social systems reflect their own use.

Gone is the evergreen or “static” organization of content. Social media are, in systems terms, “self-observing” or “second order” systems: they can observe and capture their own activity and dynamically re-present it back to users. Social interaction design, then, approaches online sites and tools as “social systems.” At a theoretical level, the challenge then becomes modeling and framing the system. At a practical and design level, the challenge involves features, architecture, and screen design such that social activity can be handled for the purpose of desired individual and social outcomes.

In the next part of this post we will examine social media action systems, and with them, learn a bit about how social media involve everyday social activity, but in a different way.

Image by victoriapeckham