We can no longer make sense of social software and related applications from a user-centric model—at least not the model that has come out of cognitive science. That model has insisted on a rational user, a goal-oriented user interested in achieving his or her objectives. An application would either satisfy or confound the user, and designers could set about improving UX and UI until users were all happy.
• We often end up engaging in something that wasn’t on our minds when we started.
• Transactions are not discrete, they’re ongoing and episodic.
• More often than not we’re communicating with others, and communication clearly exceeds rational actor models of analysis (it’s psychological, it’s meaning-based, it involves self, other, performance, and so on).
• Interaction with others is mediated and so therefore we need new practices and new etiquettes, or codes of conduct and behavior (even when these are tacit, as most of them are).
• These technologies seem to have a relationship of observation and supplementation to real cultural phenomena and practices. Online dating does not replace dating. Online discussions do not replace real conversation. And the topics found in many of these services relate to real world news as if they are commentary on it.
• These tools enable direct interaction with others but often in a kind of public context.
• The activity on these applications is captured and then used by them, making social media dynamic (updated as they’re used): in short, a production medium that records as it produces.
• Much of the social dynamic here, because it’s rooted in social action, involves attention: paying attention, sharing attention, getting attention. Attention is the scarcity of these economies, not goods and materials.
• Where user interaction with non-communicating and non-social media is discrete, social interaction is ongoing. User actions don’t end with a function or operation’s conclusion; they solicit response from others. It is other users that pick up and continue a user’s action (that action being a communicative one: blog posting, video posting, commenting, etc.)
• These media are distribution media as well as content media, and their distribution is handled in part by web protocols, in part by communication (email, sharing, etc.), making them quick to create or to lose audiences.
• Any medium of experience structures experience according to its intervention in reality. Some part of our interaction is with the medium itself. For this reason we can’t ignore such simple things as pictures, text, links, etc., anymore than architects would ignore differences between surface materials like concrete, stone, glass, and wood. (Not to mention 50’s era carpeting.)
• It’s possible that social media operate in a kind of tolerable and sustained failure mode, by which I mean that people often get engaged because they can’t tell what’s happened to their participation (dates don’t happen; jobs aren’t obtained; friends don’t communicate; blogs aren’t commented on). But the possibility of missing an opportunity, combined with the fact that there’s no way to know what’s going on online besides going online to check, creates traffic in and of itself!
I could make more distinctions here but the point should be clear now: architecture, design, and implementation of these things puts them in a category of their own, an admixture of social and technical practices best approached from a socio-technical orientation.
