1. Computer-Mediated Communication
Media Richness and Social Translucence
September 2016

2. Projects and Assignment #1
Assignment 1 is a short ~2 page description of your group project idea and the division of labor within the group. We will send out a Google Doc to help facilitate a start. Thursday we will use a system in class to start pulling ideas into projects.
Due Thurs Sep 22nd at beginning of class (one assignment per group, 2 printed copies).
Groups will be signing up for a meeting with us to discuss the project ideas after we read them.
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Cheshire & King — Computer-Mediated Communication

3. Reminder…a few examples of project types:
Design, prototype (maybe build) a novel CMC system
Experiment using a CMC system
Analyze or visualize interaction in a CMC system
Research a specific CMC system or domain of systems and collect empirical data (interviews, small survey, etc).
…to address some type of problem
Importantly, everyone should:
(1) build on a well-articulated problem
(2) use this foundation to justify the solution
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Cheshire & King — Computer-Mediated Communication

4. Cheshire & King — Computer-Mediated Communication
Network views
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5. Cheshire & King — Computer-Mediated Communication
Vizster, Heer and Boyd: network viz of friendster (remember that one?)
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Cheshire & King — Computer-Mediated Communication

6. Cheshire & King — Computer-Mediated Communication
Vizster, Heer and Boyd
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7. Cheshire & King — Computer-Mediated Communication
Vizster, Heer and Boyd
The automatic community boundaries violate Erickson’s rule about letting the users do the interpretation. Note especially “algorithmically determined optimum.”
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Cheshire & King — Computer-Mediated Communication

8. Cheshire & King — Computer-Mediated Communication
Two different network views of same network data (Caltech Facebook Friends): Left is unfiltered, Right uses Simmelian Backbone filtering (using local ranking, extracting overlaps, etc)
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Cheshire & King — Computer-Mediated Communication

9. Cheshire & King — Computer-Mediated Communication
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Cheshire & King — Computer-Mediated Communication

10. Cheshire & King — Computer-Mediated Communication
Social Translucence
“Online social behavior must be made visible in order to facilitate awareness, which creates social spaces where we are accountable to one another.” – Gilbert 2012
“To design digital systems that support coherent behavior by making participants and their activities visible to one another” – Erickson and Kellogg (2000)
Gilbert 2012, CHI
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Cheshire & King — Computer-Mediated Communication

11. Social Translucence in Synchronous Chat: Chat Circles (Donath)
Note that Gilbert refers to Babble, which was related to the Chat Circles project.
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Cheshire & King — Computer-Mediated Communication

12. Temporality and spatiality
Utterances vanish after a few seconds
Hearing range: can see only nearby utterances
Movement traces, speech traces
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Cheshire & King — Computer-Mediated Communication

13. Cheshire & King — Computer-Mediated Communication
Erickson and Kellog’s point: parking lot is like social translucence– we see what other people are kind of doing before we make a decision to do something ourselves, and then plan accordingly (e.g., a lot of people shopping here…move on!)
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Cheshire & King — Computer-Mediated Communication

14. Social Translucence in Social Networks
Gilbert uses “Link Different”, a web app for allowing Twitter users to know how many of their followers already saw a link from someone else they follow. (e.g., virtual equivalent of..”should I tell this joke or did someone already tell it yesterday?”)
Andrew Head: “I am skeptical that the authors have yet showed the value of the questions of social translucence that they are proposing”
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Cheshire & King — Computer-Mediated Communication

15. Some key theories of mediated communication and “media richness”
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16. Cheshire & King — Computer-Mediated Communication
Media richness: “
[C]apacity to facilitate the formation of shared meaning within a given time interval.
Some types of messages might be conveyed more efficiently in one medium than in another.
The concepts of media richness come from early theories of ‘bandwidth’ (number of cues) and ‘social presence’ (how much like a f2f interaction) ”
— Dennis & Kinney
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Cheshire & King — Computer-Mediated Communication

17. Cheshire & King — Computer-Mediated Communication
A plausible ranking?
Richer
Face-to-face
Synchronous video
Synchronous audio / asynch. video
Synchronous text / asynch. audio
Richer media have greater “capacity to facilitate the formation of shared meaning within a given time interval.” (Dennis and Kinney)
Really, for thinking about “Equivocal” messages– e.g., ambiguous.
Asynchronous text
Leaner
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Cheshire & King — Computer-Mediated Communication

18. Cheshire & King — Computer-Mediated Communication
Elements of richness
Multiplicity of cues (bandwidth)
Immediacy of feedback
Use of natural language
Personal focus
Rich
— Immediacy of feedback
— Multiplicity of cues (like “bandwidth” from social presence theory)
— Use of natural language
— Personal focus (ability to adapt message to circumstances or nature of the receiver)
Bandwidth (ability to transmit cues)
Ability to give immediate feedback
Ability to support the use of natural or conversational language
Personal focus
Diagram shows dyadic communication, but could be larger group.
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Cheshire & King — Computer-Mediated Communication

19. Cheshire & King — Computer-Mediated Communication
Elements of richness
Multiplicity of cues (bandwidth)
Immediacy of feedback
Use of natural language
Personal focus
Lean
— Immediacy of feedback
— Multiplicity of cues (like “bandwidth” from social presence theory)
— Use of natural language
— Personal focus (ability to adapt message to circumstances or nature of the receiver)
Bandwidth (ability to transmit cues)
Ability to give immediate feedback
Ability to support the use of natural or conversational language
Personal focus
Diagram shows dyadic communication, but could be larger group. X
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Cheshire & King — Computer-Mediated Communication

20. Channels, cues, and signals
Channel Cue Signal
Channel: conduit for a particular type of info, e.g., channel for voice or text
Cue: “any feature of the world, animate or inanimate, that can be used ... as a guide to future action” (Donath 2007) — i.e., informative, not necessarily intentional
Signal: a cue meant to indicate an otherwise hidden quality
Recall that signals can be “conventional,” meaning they are a claim that could be faked, or “assessment,” meaning they are hard to fake because they require the quality that is signaled in order to produce the signal.
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Cheshire & King — Computer-Mediated Communication

21. Some types of social cues
Verbal
Non-verbal
Beyond FTF
Different levels of effort associated with different types of cues. Textual cues in particular incur a production cost to encode meaning equivalent to FTF – time spent typing, effort to compose in one pass.
Social presence — the sense that one is communicating with a real person. Tends to be reduced without verbal (aural) and non-verbal cues.
What kinds of cues are available in common forms of CMC?
Media with fewer cues are less friendly, more impersonal, more task-focused. But as we saw in the Walther et al. paper, even with fewer cues, social affinity can develop. And what is best for tasks is entirely unclear.
Textual
Production cost to encode meaning equivalent to FTF in text
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22. Cheshire & King — Computer-Mediated Communication
Feedback
Convey the receiver’s understanding to sender, who can adjust accordingly
Type of feedback
Acknowledgment — understanding
Repair — correction or clarification
Proxy — completion
Immediacy of feedback
Concurrent:  synchronous nods, mm-hmms
a.k.a. ‘backchannel’
Sequential:  brief interjection
What kinds of feedback are available in common forms of CMC? Online Forums? Wiki? Chat?
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23. Cheshire & King — Computer-Mediated Communication
Cues Filtered Out
Social presence: Lower bandwidth  Less warm, others seem less like people
Lack of non-verbal cues — disinhibition and hostility (e.g., flaming)
1:1 mapping between cues and social functions — missing cues, missing functions
unsealedprophecy.wordpress.com
Contrary to the claims of the CMC-utopians like Rheingold
SP: non-verbal cues make presence more salient, communication warmer. With lower bandwidth, people seem less warm, less like people, more like objects
Not without benefits -- Status cues and personality less potent
With the influence of status cues and personality reduced, dispassionate decision-making, based on facts and not feelings or personalities, may be easier.
Q: Is this the experience of online interaction?
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Cheshire & King — Computer-Mediated Communication

24. Social Information Processing (Cues Filtered In)
Walther (1992) re-examined early CMC research: “Given sufficient time and message exchanges for interpersonal impression formation and relationship development to accrue, and all other things being equal, relational [quality] in later periods of CMC and F2F communication will be the same.”
 Users compensate for attributes of CMC (e.g., emoticons to replace non-verbal affective displays)
Maybe it’s not about limitations or affordances of the medium at all.
People have the same motivation to reduce uncertainty and develop social relationships that they do offline – it just takes longer to do it online and may require compensating strategies convey social information with, say, just a textual channel. Time limits force task-oriented/less social behavior.
Thurlow and Brown — Communication Imperative — we are driven to communicate and interact. Remember affordances and appropriation? This compensation is a way of taking the affordances of the CMC medium — what it lets us do — and appropriating them to achieve our communication or relationship-development goals.
Other ways time comes into play:
-- Anticipated Future Interaction (Axelrod’s “shadow of the future”)
-- “Chronemics” — perceptions of and reactions to the timing of messages. Meaning may be encoded (or at least perceived) in how quickly you respond to an IM, or whether you are sending work s at 1 am.
We found that each additional day of delay in responding to an online dating message predicts a lower probability of getting another response from the person you’re corresponding with.
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Cheshire & King — Computer-Mediated Communication

25. Social Identity/Deindividuation Theory (Cues About Us, Not You or Me)
Anonymity in CMC leads to…
 “deindividuation”
 increased salience to group identity
“Over-interpreting” based on limited info could lead to greater social attraction based on in-group status; stereotyping of out-group.
SIDE Theory -- Still focused on cues filtered out, but whereas the Cues Filtered Out approaches are more focused on what’s missing, SIDE focuses on what fills the gap: essentially, that we fill in the blanks based on group identity.
Deindividuation: loss of awareness in groups (think of behavior in riots, if that helps!)
Overattribute characteristics based on perceived commonalities.
But: How does this apply to interactions at the personal rather than the social or group level? What about one-on-one (dyadic) interactions? Online romance?
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Cheshire & King — Computer-Mediated Communication

26. Media choice vs. Media use (Cues to Choose By)
What medium would you choose for a given task?
vs. What medium “performs” best?
Media Richness (the theory) originally examined media use and performance in organizations. Claim: Managers should choose medium based on task to be effective. More ambiguous tasks are more efficient in richer media.
But when might we actually want a “less rich” medium?
Original theory was about media USE/PERFORMANCE, but most of the early empirical investigations were about media CHOICE.
Equivocality — ambiguity. For example, evaluating job candidates vs. answering a factual question or solving a math problem.
WHY Less rich medium?? – e.g., For breaking up with someone or asking for extension – or something that threatens face (O’Sullivan)
Sometimes we have reasons other than maximal efficiency to choose a given medium.
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Cheshire & King — Computer-Mediated Communication

27. Hyperpersonal communication (Cues Bent and Twisted)
Contributing factors:
Selective self-presentation
Shared group membership
Channel effects (control)
Feedback effects (self-fulfilling prophecies)
Bottom line: Perceptions more extremely positive (or negative) than FTF in the face of limited information
Sometimes, CMC may be more socially oriented than FTF, and CMC relationships may develop more intensely and more quickly than FTF.
Socio-emotional content is included in CMC.
Emoticons, acronyms, action words in MUDs
New identity markers such as address or nick
Asking about identity (A/S/L)
Supplement with other media such as phone or IM
Selective self-presentation: Goffman’s impression management, giving vs. giving off (senders)
Shared group membership: Online, cues about group membership may become more salient (SIDE) (receivers)
Channel effects: Asynchronous CMC lets you carefully construct messages, re-read responses, free from distractions
Feedback effects: “self-fulfilling prophesies” — exaggerated behavior to meet exaggerated expectations
We don’t have to worry about things like holding our stomach in, whether we have spinach on our teeth, etc.
Self-fulfilling prophecies: They selectively self-present, so you like them, and they can tell that you like them, so they like you, and you can tell, so you like them more… etc.
Filling in the blanks optimistically or pessimistically.
“How senders select, receivers magnify, channels promote, and feedback increases enhanced and selective communication behaviors in CMC. Online communicators may exploit the capabilities of text-based, nonvisual interaction to form levels of affinity that would be unexpected in parallel offline interactions.”
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Cheshire & King — Computer-Mediated Communication

28. Cheshire & King — Computer-Mediated Communication“
The study of CMC effects is not best served by blanket statements about technology main effects on social, psychological, and interpersonal processes, nor by proclamations that online relationships are less rewarding than FTF ones. Rather, qualities of CMC are … more often the product of interesting and predictable interactions of several mutual influences than main effects of media.
— Walther et al. (2001) ”
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Cheshire & King — Computer-Mediated Communication