The news became public yesterday, Dr. Gary Marchionini has been appointed as the new Dean of the School of Information and Library Science at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I’m certain that he’ll be a strong driver in pushing our school to growth. One of the things he’s done that is close to the IA Community, is founding the IA Summit, and now he’s also the new president of its sponsoring organization, ASIS&T.
At my school, the semester has started, and I’m auditing a course on Usability Engineering. I’m very excited as I’d always want to study it formally. The course is taught by the head of Usability at SAP, he’s got a bunch of experience. One of the takeaways from yesterday’s class was Bob Baxley’s Model of the User Interface, very useful. Although I’d heard about Bob before, I had not seen this diagram.
On another note, I’ve received the IA Institute Progress Grant for this year that will help me complete my survey on Self-disclosure on Social Media, yay!
Today I’ve been feeling the urge to blog, which you can realize had not happened in some time. Besides the intense work at Grad School and related activities, settling in town and moving again after the first year, there’s something else that’s kept me busy, or really *someone* else.
So before posting about the other things I have on my mind right now, I should really stop for a second to let those of you who have not been following me closely on flickr, facebook or twitter: Two months ago my wife delivered our first son, a beautiful baby boy who we call Victor. He’s an amazing kid, has a really mellow temper.
Last year I started working on a project based on the question of how people see different online communication tools as affording different levels of intimacy: how they feel confident disclosing private information to their peers in different manner over different particular tools.
My first take on this question was to present a poster at the Memphis Information Architecture Summit, where I asked poster viewers to participate by marking their opinions of how they use these tools and how they see them used by the people they know. My poster includes images and captions taken from these same tools to depict the whole range of self-disclosure we can see on them, and I did not judge their disclosure level, leaving that to the eye of the beholder. These images and captions should evoke the participants to reflect on their own behavior and that of their online contacts.
There were about 30 respondents - they were variable across categories - and I later started transcribing their dots for analysis and some patterns start to emerge:
I had previously sketched a map of how the results could be displayed, and this included some of my intuitive approach of what I might find. I later composed the following chart by averaging the participants’ dots and placing them next to my predictions.
In the final chart, each platform or tool has two horizontal bars that depict their range of disclosure level, from the most intimate type of disclosure they support next to the axis, to the most open/formal/public types of discourse on their outer edge. Each blue bar represents the range covered by the averaged red dots to the averaged green dots for each category. The yellow bars show what I had initially drawn that could be found.
I had expected blogs and flickr to reach the highest levels of public discourse, as these are technically public (by large percent) and easily reached via search engines, sometimes even favored by them. I had also expected to find a wide range on these, as this is what I’ve observed over the years. The range covered by blogs and flickr was not as broad in the participants’ opinion as on my previous guess.
I had anticipated Facebook to show up as a system that is rather private in nature, as studies have shown a growing number of people who block their profiles to public access, and the vast majority of people with whom I interact with on it have closed profiles and tend to share lots of family moments, so I naturally expected it to be seen a lot more private than blogs, which also in large proportion are not password protected. However, my respondents marked Facebook on a mid-range of intimate disclosure.
Twitter shows a big difference as when I drew my chart I was mostly thinking of chatter between friends, but apparently my respondents were thinking of a much more public, professional-strategic use of this tool.
Email appeared as the most flexible tool in the eye of my respondents, and I should have probably anticipated this more carefully.
A big surprise for me was to see how flexible these participants found IM to be, as I am mostly used to using it for personal matters, and my guess on these results show that these participants are accustomed to using IM in professional settings as well.
My method for allowing people to mark their impressions on the poster was very informal and confusing, this ranges from the way they are asked to think about the issue to the way in which they had to mark it down on the poster with two colored pencils, one green, one red.
Besides the tactical difficulties of imagining this and plotting it on the chart, there’s a lot of variation on how people perceive their discourse to be intimate/public, in order to get proper measures, this will have to be operationalized in a much more formal and straightforward way.
I’ll now go on to build a proper survey to measure the usage more closely. It will include some demographic screening focused on usage experience, and some measures of self disclosure as a personality trait, as I expect people’s personality to have a strong influence on their levels of disclosure. Also, I will be asking about particular behaviors, not just reflection on how they judge their own disclosure.
… So I’m working on a Literature Review of Online Social Networks last night, and writing out the salient ideas of the key articles I’m collecting. I’m going through a piece by David Beer’s 2008 article from JCMC in response to Boyd and Ellisson’s more popular article on the previous number.
One of Beer’s most interesting point is how he stresses out that, at the extent to which the Web has permeated our lives in most parts of the world, it no longer make sense to establish a difference between online and offline friends as Boyd and Ellison do in their article, and - in my opinion - although they are right in explaining that the label ‘friends’ is used in some online social networks to describe relationships that don’t always represent what we would otherwise consider a friendship, this distinction is not a problem given by the nature of the relationships, but merely of the system’s design and its labeling.
Beer also points out another interesting thought: that OSNs could eventually transform the nature of friendship via the new dynamics these afford, this notion goes in hand with McLuhan’s famous words “We shape our tools, and then our tools shape us.”, yet more specifically Garrett’s take on this in terms of user experience design “When McLuhan said “we”, and when he said “us”, he was talking about the entire human race. But not everybody’s a shaper, right? The shapers are the people in this room, the people in this field. We shape those tools and then, the experiences that those tools create shape humanity itself. Think about the responsibility that entails.” (Garrett, 2009) And this relates to how if we label those links “friends” we can eventually lead to redefine the concept of friendship.
I just thought these were some iteresting connections to share, I’m still chewing on these ideas…
Last week my former boss, the Information Retrieval guru Ricardo Baeza published an article about the growth of Facebook in Chile, which currently includes over 4 million users, roughly one fourth of the country’s population. There he raises the question of why some rather small and non-develiped countries have been so strong to adopt social websites like Facebook. I don’t have an answer, but my suspicions lead to tight social clusters whithin society, fewer migrations within people’s lifetimes, and longer-lasting friendships. Supporting this data, we saw this week on Fred’s class a NYT map of Facebook’s growth, where Chile is clearly invaded by Facebook within this last year.
Last night, in Gary Marchionini’s class, we were recapping on the previous class about Information Architecture, and he shared with us some of his ideas about the whole IA/UX debate. He had some interesting thoughts that seemed quite sensible to me, and I had not seen from other people. I’m sure his farther position, and history in professorship give him an advantaged view. Some of these thoughts, bluntly paraphrasing, and adding from my own ideas:
This was my 5th time attending the IA Summit, I’ve always loved this conference because of the vibrant community it gathers and how people are quite open and generally warm. This time, what I bring back is mostly some deep thoughts that question how I’ve been managing my web presence and my career in general. As I put on my previous post, I saw many people giving great presentations that included things I’d been thinking and even talking about for the last few years. This leaves me with a bittersweet feeling as on one hand it’s great to see how much of a visionary I’ve been and how my intuitive thoughts are later proven to be right on track. The sour part is that I’ve not been loud enough to capitalize on my thoughts, although I did put my ideas out there, I was not heard by the community and they have just reached similar conclusions after longer roads.
One of the highlights of the Summit was Whitney Hess’s presentation on how to put your name out there. She did a wonderful job. I had heard her name a couple of times before, I met her last year in the Miami Summit and later made an important impact with her article on the 10 Most Common Misconceptions About User Experience Design. On her 1st IA Summit presentation, she made some great recommendations, some of which I’ve started to apply immediately.
At the same time, her presentation Evangelizing Yourself also made me realize that I’m not the only one in a similar position: there are several great people that have been members of the IA community for a long time and have some great ideas, yet are quiet and fly under the radar. Whitney’s presentation was a big encouragement for us to come out of our shells.
My poster presentation went very well, there were always people around me and they did not give me a chance to look at the other posters. I got enough people to participate in the mapping survey that some patterns started to emerge. There was a lot of confusion on how to draw the map, but I think that the results I got, plus the comments people gave me, were strong enough feedback to see that the topic is interesting to many people, and it even has some uses that I had not envisioned, so it seems like I’ll be working on this the next Fall term. Big thanks to everyone who marked their dots, I’ll be putting my results here soon!