A Place to Belong (2.22.11)

                It doesn’t really matter what type of community you talk about – it’s hard to feel like a member if you don’t feel a sense of belonging. Chapter six in Tharon Howard’s Design to Thrive is all about belonging, which is the ever-important “B” of his RIBS heuristic. Dr. Howard describes belonging as something which can be generated in a community via “shared mythologies, shared stories of origin, shared symbols, and the cultural codes embedded in those symbols” (130). What seems important here is the concept of sharing. We identify ourselves in a particular way based, in large part, on the things we share with others or don’t share with others. I am a member of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). I consider myself a member of this large, religious community less because of the particular church into which I was confirmed (at about 14) or baptized (at about 1), but more because I share particular beliefs with the other members of the denomination. In other words, belonging is very much a cognitive exercise. It is certainly something I need to feel, but it is especially something I need to consciously acknowledge and accept.

                Dr. Howard also points out that those things which community designers include in online communities serve an “epideictic function” (130). Something is epideictic when it functions rhetorically or, more specifically, when it is intended to impress. Thus, being attentive to belonging requires designers to convince members of something. The interesting outcome, however, is of what we (prospective community members) are being convinced. It seems to me that it is and essentially must be one of two different things:  that we are a valued member of a community or that we want to be a valued member. I say “must” because both rhetorical movements are important. Dr. Howard does not outline this explicitly, but the implications of his suggested techniques and his discussion of initiation rituals and stories of origin seem clear.

The first rhetorical move is fairly obvious. An online community must convince me that I belong for me to experience a sense of belonging. Stories of origin, special rituals, symbols and codes are all elements of a community that can make it exclusive. Exclusivity is necessary for a sense of belonging because exclusivity defines who is and who is not a member of the community. By knowing/having/doing the things required of a community member, I can begin to identify myself as such a member and gain that sense of belonging. This isn’t anything new or special. Once again, online communities function in much the same way real-life communities do. For example, I’ve recently begun rock climbing, and rock climbers are definitely a community unto their own. I am clearly a novice, but the more I learn about the sport, technique, gear, etc, and the more often I participate, the less I feel like an outsider. In fact, the more I climb, the more I begin to identify myself as a recreational climber and as rock climbing as a part of my normal routine. The same can be said about the community of coupon-clippers on sites like afullcup.com. I briefly explored these sites and discovered that an enormous amount of time, practice, and know-how were required to become a real active member. In fact, although the community did not require me to do anything to use the site or to ask questions, I never felt a sense of belonging (I was too consumed by a sense of bewilderment). I did not identify myself with the other users of the site because I simply did not understand their language or the majority of their practices. Had I invested the time necessary to be versed in couponing, my participation in the community may have felt different.

Of course, all of this is a moot point if the online community fails to attract members, which brings us to our second point. While the techniques and concepts Dr. Howard offers, from leveling to origin stories, are vehicles for forming group identity, they are also incentive to adopt group identity. Once again, the key word is exclusivity. Like the World of Warcraft example given in Design to Thrive, giving people the opportunity to join elite communities can make that sense of belonging all the more desirable. I go rock climbing and see practiced climbers complete difficult routes and gain the praise of the rest of the community. I attempt to benefit from the many coupon sites online and find users that manage to save upwards of 80% on their groceries. These individuals are members who belong – they’ve got chops, and they’ve got the knowledge, background, and track-record that make them identifiable as community members. Ultimately, belonging comes down to not just belonging in the literal or logical sense (i.e. people who hate rock climbing, for example, do not exactly belong in the rock climbing community). It is about community response. Mythologies, leveling, origin stories and the like are useless unless the application is inherently social because we value not simply being a particular way (i.e. being someone with the skills or potential) but being seen by others in a particular way. Thus, it is not simply a matter of identifying with a story or gaining a sense of belonging for myself. It is equally as important that others likewise see and identify me as a member who belongs.

WE HAVE GIANT BRAINS THAT ARE DOING STUFF WE DON'T EVEN KNOW ABOUT (2.15.11)

In many ways, this week’s reading affirms what the previous readings have all been establishing:  that creating successful web-based communities is as much about psychology as it is technology. In fact, Susan Weinschenk introduces Neuro Web Design with an overview of the human brain, and she makes no illusions about how the science of the mind is a valuable tool when it comes to predicting, or more accurately, manipulating internet users’ behavior. However, I began this week with Design to Thrive and Dr. Howard’s chapter on remuneration, which is a nice starting point in terms of assessing the nature of human activity online (or in terms of successfully designing, i.e. attracting users to, an e-community).

Remuneration is basically the act of providing recompense or compensation. It is reimbursement. And it is a core element of Dr. Howard’s RIBS heuristic. Remuneration guarantees that the user will gain something from the online community in which he or she agrees to participate and, as a result, continue to participate in the community. As Dr. Howard points out, time is valuable, and an individual cannot be expected to invest time into an online activity unless they gain something of equal value from it. This concept exists, or should exist, at the core of community design.

However, as Dr. Howard illustrates with examples from AltaVista and Google, web-based communities, social networks, and/or online resources are often engineered for functionality and developed according to practical business models. This is not a bad thing. That these websites are designed around functionality and positive business practices first, however, is a bad thing. What Dr. Howard argues is that these elements are easy to address – not because they present simple problems, but because they offer salient ones, ones in which multiple people involved in website development will be particularly or specifically invested. What proves much more difficult is, in the midst of practical problems, the challenge of designing an e-community that offers its users adequate remuneration. In other words, communities should be approached with the primary goal of offering something valuable its community members. The business models and site-functionality should follow, but only inasmuch as they can serve a design which serves its users. In other words, business strategies and functionality are necessary for successful website design, but they are not enough to guarantee success.

So how does an online community or social network remunerate its users? Dr. Howard suggests that it does so by providing users with a worthwhile experience – an experience not tied exclusively to the performance of the site, but one which impacts the user on a personal level. Of course, all of this is rather nebulous, as is Dr. Howard’s most direct advice:  “the most important remuneration you have to offer is the experience of socially constructing meaning about topics and events your users want to understand” (57). These terms are all fairly general, and the concept they describe is not a little complicated. Nonetheless, the simple point at the center of this issue – its driving force if you will – remains this:  people want to be reminded that they are in community, to indulge their social tendencies and instincts, and to experientially affirm the information they are supposedly intended to believe is true. This is described as “meaning,” which is “neither immediately obvious nor intuitive; it emerges out of a social system of differential relationships” (56). In short, a person discovers something and absorbs it for his or herself (i.e. a new concept which, for the user, has value or significance) as a result of the relationship others have to that something. It is a differential system because, socially, we determine what something is not in order to identify what we believe it to be.  Now, before we fall into some kind of Saussurian madness, is a good time to relegate all of these ideas to a single term (well, two terms, one concept): cognitive dissonance. Social behavior allows people to overcome cognitive dissonance and to be confirmed in a community such that the individual can actively develop beliefs, activities, philosophies, etc for themself. What a successful web-based community will do, then, is provide a user with the tools for addressing cognitive dissonance and for finding the affirmation a community is intended to provide.

It is at this point that Weinschenk’s address of human brain activity becomes really interesting and surprisingly useful. She indicates that, in an overly simplistic model, our brains operate out of three different regions: the old brain, the mid brain, and the new brain. The new brain represents our conscious activities and conscious processes. The rest, which accounts for a surprising percentage of our actual behavior (emotional and instinctual), is unconscious. Weinschenk’s main argument is that the most effective and successful websites – the most clickable, to adopt her point of view – are those that engage all three parts of the brain. Thus, what Howard identifies through experience as necessary for community design, Weinschenk investigates psychologically and confirms, more or less, scientifically. Of course, the parallels here are not perfect and are not meant to be. Still, it is noteworthy that both of our authors agree that the first concern website manager and/or creators must have is for the human element, not the technological one. For example, Weinschenk looks at a variety of web sites, from retail to entertainment-based, and points out that those that experience more success manage to offer social validation, invoke the evolutionary (and perhaps socialized) need to reciprocate or to manage indebtedness, and to incite the fear or anxiety associated with scarcity.

[random example:  This is true to a certain extent. I rarely provide customer reviews on Amazon because I just can’t be         bothered. Of course , I feel guilty admitting this, which perhaps speaks to my inherent understanding that reciprocation is not only a social expectation but a moral issue (oddly enough, this inclination is clearly not as strong as my other, more lazy ones…). However, I will say that I have bought plane tickets on Priceline.com  after seeing how many tickets at a particular price are supposedly available. Clearly where guilt has a less powerful effect, greed will do. At least for me.]

              Ultimately, all of the strategies that she offers in her book are responding to the specific way human beings think, both consciously and unconsciously. Dr. Howard’s emphasis upon remuneration, though a more specific concept concerning a more specific type of website design, does the same thing. What this should, I believe, draw our attention to is just how deeply connected – emotionally, intuitively, mentally, consciously, unconsciously, etc. – that we are to the online word to which we are now so often connected. It is easy sometimes to consider the internet an amorphous, impersonal “space,” but we are deeply invested in it. And not just economically. And certainly not just socially, though this proves to have major repercussions for our personal, online experiences. Ultimately, though, we are invested personally. To be perfectly honest, I’m unsure as to what implications this fact has for our futures. But for the time being, it might be worth a little bit of (self) reflection.

A New World Order (2.8.11)

        This week’s reading concerned not the characteristics of online communities or social networks but instead what results from their seemingly uninhibited growth and widespread use. Both Here Comes Everybody and Design to Thrive, interestingly enough, draw comparisons between today’s technological, online revolution with the invention of Gutenberg’s printing press. This is no coincidence. What both Shirky and Howard pick up on in their respective books are the implications this type of technological advancement has for society. I hate to write “society” – it’s an overused terms that is nebulous to the point of uselessness – but the fact remains that entire societies are shaped by this kind of technology, which affects the social conditions and possibilities of the day. The effects are simply enormous.

        Shirky points out that mass amateurization is one of the more salient and society-changing effects. He explains that mass amateurization must be considered against professionalism which, by definition, includes a specialized minority of individuals. He writes that “a profession becomes, for its members, a way of understanding their world” (58), resulting in not only a specific body of knowledge, but also a biased one. This professional bias shapes in a major way how certain industries, particularly media industries, operate. As a result, the relationship we as everyday consumers have with media is affected. Shirky takes a close (and lengthy, I might add) look at how this is changing with the advent of social networks and online media outlets. He considers, for the most part, journalism. Professionals have held a privileged position in industries like journalism because journalists have, in a sense, been a commodity. To become published by the reigning news media outlets, a journalist must have the right qualifications, follow industry guidelines, understand a specific code of ethics, and produce work that their employers consider quality and valuable. The trend Shirky is tracing in light of social networking (and a slew of other web-based media outlets) is that, while journalists occupy a professional class all their own, the class of “amateur journalists” is growing enormously. The reason for this is simple: you don’t need to go through the “official channels” to publish your work. Now practically anyone with a computer and an internet connection can publish ideas to which, for all intents and purposes, the entire world can have access.

        This is of course not to say that anything posted on the internet will gain a massive audience. In fact, the opposite is true. There is so much media now available, that most of what exists online is only seen by a fraction of internet users. Nonetheless, this has major implications for the traditional flow of information. While material is, in professional settings, filtered and then published, the internet allows people to publish without any interference or oversight. “From now on,” Shirky writes, “news can break into public consciousness without the traditional press weighing in” (64). Wikipedia was a second important example offered in the Shirky’s book. A team of amateurs essentially provides the material required to make Wikipedia happen. It works because the content is understood as a process, not a product. Of course, filtering still happens. Now, it is simply up to the public at large, the prospective audience, to do the filtering. This is true on sites like Flickr.com or allpoetry.com, and especially true on Wikipedia where any and everyone can edit articles. Ultimately, amateurs now have publishing outlets at their disposal, but relatively few receive particularly grand amounts of attention. In other words, material put online receives an audience once the people determine that it deserves an audience.

        Shirky distinguishes this material from professional material – the difference between what you might discover on a blog and what you would read on the New York Time’s website – and specifies the former as user-generated content. However, many people who make use of the publishing capabilities offered by the internet are not looking for the kind of attention or necessarily the audience that traditional media outlets would generate. Wikipedia is proof of that. No money changes hands, and few if any contributors receive enormous amounts of credit for their work. It boils down to the goals and shared interest of the community that makes the site viable. It is important to those users, so it is worth pursuing without the promise of credit or. What is interesting, however, is that much of this material, particularly what is found on social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace, is not intended for wide audiences at all. It is essentially the equivalent of private conversations but “now it’s done in the same medium as professionally produced material” (86). What Shirky is closing in upon is the prevalence of these sites and their growing ubiquity, particularly among young people. Very soon, a generation that will not know what a world without these technological capabilities is like will be running, and most likely adapting, information industries for good. This is the point at which, according to Shirky, the technology becomes not simply ubiquitous but invisible.

        What I find so interesting, and admittedly troubling, about this revolution is the institutional affects it will undoubtedly have. Dr. Howard acknowledges this problem specifically, noting that “technologies may change rapidly, human beings don’t” (207). He also astutely points out that our thinking about technology needs to change. We can’t think technologically; we must think sociologically. (His example concerning Hiltz and Turoff proves that this type of thinking is effective, even in terms of predicting what the future of technology will look like because ultimately what technology does will shape and be shaped by the society into which it is introduced.) What I wonder, even more than what issues online community managers can expect to face as their communities continue to grow and continue to have more influence, is how our thinking about communications is going to change. Or, perhaps more specifically, if we are doing enough now to revolutionize our thinking along with our technology. (I realize that I’m spinning my wheels here, but I’ll land my point momentarily.)

        While I find the versatility of sites like Twitter and the ability of its users to affect real political change astounding (as Dr. Howard recognizes in Design to Thrive), I cannot help but recognize that we lack professional codes for handling this type of communication. I was a camp counselor a few years ago, and one of my campers friended on me Facebook once the summer ended. I now receive updates concerning her life constantly, including a very heated and very public argument between herself and a peer via status updates and comments. Granted, only friends of this girl will see these updates, but what business does a middle school student really have airing her dirty laundry for what I imagine are hundreds of “friends” to see online? Dr. Howard and Clay Shirky are both right to note that widespread publishing capabilities are changing society as we know it. But are we, individually, changing along with it? Are we educating young people, like my former camper, about privacy and about the appropriate ways to deal with anger? Or are we being inundated with ways to very publicly say what we think while still feeling anonymous? This is what concerns me. We publish ideas, even for a few people, on a massive and seemingly faceless online system, but we forget that what is published is often personal and is very much available to any interested audience. I am absolutely not advocating censorship or condescension of young people. I truly believe that increased freedom of expression is a good thing. Still, I cannot help but think that we sometimes use this as an excuse for avoiding some serious self-reflection and even more serious self-editing.