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.