Stephanie Booth’s report on Stowe Boyd’s recent talk @LIFT yesterday has hit on several of the themes I have been running with.
Some of those thoughts are based around what you could call the ’sociable blind eye’. That’s the ‘blind eye’ that we tend to use in uncomfortable social situations. The ’sociable blind eye’ allows us to minimise social discomfort and enjoyably participate in social experiences. (~We’ll have a look at enjoyably disrupting social experiences another day ;-)
Most of the time the ’sociable blind eye’ is so habitual, natural and automatic that we are not even aware that we are doing it. We are only aware that we are enjoying company and thus we subconsciously learn these habits by positive reinforcement.
In short, hosting and participating in a successful gatherings depends in some part on our ability to quickly turn a ’sociable blind eye’ at the appropriate moment. Well that, and the possible availability of alcohol.
One side effect of the importance of the ’social blind eye’ in mediating pleasant social interaction is that our get togethers are richly packed with all sorts of absurdities and contradictions. Observers embracing these absurdities and contradictions are rewarded with a rich and ever replenishing source of comedy material. Those unfortunates that shun this reality, on the other hand, may be prone to suffer lifelong sentences of teenage existential angst.
So what’s this to do with building social applications? Well, social applications tend to be built in a rational manner, assuming rational desires and needs of their users, expressed and executed in a rational manner. See also danah boyd’s “Autistic social software”. Instead we need to be building social applications that embody the absurdities and contradictions that are essential to pleasant social interactions. We need to be building social applications that embody the ’sociable blind eye’ and other key elements of social interactions and all that these elements entail.
Reading the report of Stowe’s talk at LIFT, it’s clear that he is beginning to form a list of some of these contradictions and absurdities in his basic design principles.
Bullet points are lifted from the report on his talk.
- One of Stowe’s pet peeves: Groups and Groupings
- Groupings are ad hoc assemblages of peope with similar interests (from my point of view). (My buddy list categorisation.)
My comments: Wasn’t at the presentation so don’t know what he was getting at here but it may be the (easily overlooked) fact that groups (and networks) only exist in a snapshot of a live vibrant emergent social systems. That is, they don’t really exist as entities with the permanency that we’d like to imagine. We like to reinforce the idea that groups exist while the truth is that any defined group or networks are normally just a snapshot, a moment frozen in time. Even the most solemn of social partnerships such as marriage dissolve at a rate that indicates the ephemerality of most of our connections. If we didn’t routinely work at countering this reality with positivity routines such as the teenage ‘best friends forever’ to the adult ‘this time I think I’ve found the one’ we’d have far lesser chance of achieving/creating/finding the reality we seek. Hope really does spring eternal and enrich the lives of the many. However, groups do not really exist as we’d like to think they do.
- Networks are asymmetric, accept it. Everybody is not equal in a group. The groups are always to some extent asymmetric.
- Groups try to be symmetric.
My comments: Yet, we often like to act like everyone is equal. Especially in informal social interactions. There may well be an explicit ‘pecking order’ in any get together but we tend to avoid acknowledging this explicitly or unneccessarily. To do so can be something of a serious faux pas. For example, it is common for an unwritten directive to exist that forbids any member of a get together from explicitly acknowledging one person as the leader of the group. And this directive often comes from the leader themselves.
- Power Laws
- Accept and work with the imbalance of power.
- There will always be people with more power than others, get over it. The recommendation of somebody with more swarmth should count more than that of one with no swarmth. But careful! The people decide who has more swarmth. And you need to constantly counter the games. Natural social systems are self-policient (sp?).
- ….
Building social applications: Moving forward
We need to embody the contradictions and absurdities that are part and parcel of successful social occasions into our applications.
And, we need to do so in such a way as to continue to allow our users to remain wilfully blind to their existence.
That means that all of us building social applications need not to:
- Perceive that which is habitually ignored by the “social blind eye”.
- Accept those realities that we habitually and willfully ignore(As Stowe says “Get over it”)
- Embrace and embody these insights so that they inform our designs in a most fundamental way.
- Last but not least. Make the explicit existence of these new design elements disappear once again from the user’s views.
To expand and finish on that final point, if you want to engineer smooth social interactions it is imperative that your machinations are not too obvious. Social interaction is best lubricated by the conceit that everything is happening in a most natural, flowing manner. A good host will typically go to every effort to make a gathering feel unforced and natural (less awkward and less clunky) and to conceal the planning and machinations involved in the arrangements. And good guests will usually reciprocate in appreciation, cooperate and turn a ’social blind eye’ to anything that might expose such a conceit. As builders of social applications we need to play our part in a similar almost analogous contract. We need to facilitate social interaction by understanding what makes for good social occasions, provide the platforms for this interaction and then blend our machinations and designs into the background so that we can get out of the way and let them at it!