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. … »

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.

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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.) … »

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.).
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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. … »