1. Rob Gleasure R.Gleasure@ucc.ie www.robgleasure.com
IS4446 Advanced Interaction Design Lecture 7: Designing the community 2 (trusting a group)
Rob Gleasure

2. Today’s session Semester 2 Week 1: Introduction
Week 2: Designing the interface 1 (perception)
Week 3: Designing the interface 2 (affordances)
Week 4: Designing the interface 3 (aesthetics and colour)
Week 5: Designing the interface 4 (aesthetics and form)
Week 6: Designing the community 1 (trusting a platform)
Week 7: Designing the community 2 (trusting a group)
Week 8: Designing the community 3 (boundaries)
Week 9: Designing the practices 1 (tools as mediators)
Week 10: Designing the practices 2 (social mediators)
Week 11: Designing the practices 3 (socio-materiality)
Week 12: Revision

3. Trust as enabler of a social economy
Trusting is part personal but mostly social (and reactive)
Allows people to act as a superorganism with capabilities that extend beyond those accessible to any one individual
Trust assumes an interaction is at least partly collaborative between trusting actors, rather than purely competitive
What happens when
Actors are collaborating towards different goals?
Some actors are more collaborative than others?

4. Trust vs. social capital
Most systems work on a combination of human capital, material capital, and social capital
Unlike the others, social capital exists only within the relationship between individuals
Social capital is made up of three parts
Social norms
Accepted ways of interacting and principles guiding behaviour
Information channels
Connections between individuals
Obligations and expectations
Accumulated reciprocity-based favours

5. Trust vs. social capital
These systems are mediated by trust (and social closure)
The more individuals trust the social economy, the more willing they will be to expend human capital (e.g. effort) and material capital (e.g. money) to accumulate social capital
This means systems get more powerful as they accumulate social norms, information channels, and obligations and expectations
Over time, these form sustainable social networks

6. Social networks =/= social media
Images from and

7. Trust and identity
The most powerful social networks ultimately determine our sense of identity
Identity is a complex social construct, again with a lot of research behind it
At a fundamental-level
Each person is made up of a stack of many different identities
Each identity corresponds to how you are in one of your social networks
Each social network requires you to take on a slightly different role, ergo to act slightly differently

8. Trust and identity
Images from

9. Trust, identity, and interaction
The more closely you can match your performance of your role with others’ expectations, the more trust they will have in you (for that role)
An individual’s core identity is defined not just by their range of identities, but also by the priorities of those identities
The more salient a particular role is for you, the more likely you will understand the expectations and garner trust within it
Less salient roles will likely get contaminated with perceived expectations from other networks, meaning you will act inappropriately in the less salient network and lose trust

10. Trusting a community? Trust can be one-to-one but also one-to-many
‘Symbolic interactionism’
How we communicate is based on the symbols we have at hand
Interaction is viewed as a performance, based on some vocabulary of symbols
The more closely our vocabulary of symbols match, the more we assume we understand one another
Sharing a group means sharing a common vocabulary

11. Archived contribution
The case of 4Chan
Archived contribution
Named profiles
4chan
Slides draws from hci.stanford.edu/publications/2011/chanthropology/4chan-icwsm.pptx

12. The case of 4Chan
Images from hci.stanford.edu/publications/2011/chanthropology/4chan-icwsm.pptx, images from

13. The case of 4Chan
Interesting discussion of 4chan’s appeal
In-jokes and indiscernible idioms are used to identify new users and established users
Has poured out into the world in unpredicted ways
Wikileaks
Arab springs (kinda… at a push)
Celebrity photo leaks

14. 4Chan
Image from

15. Small worlds in digital communities
The net result of this…
People form clusters, in the real world and online
Trust forms (and is formed within) networks of networks… of networks
This has implications for
Research
Marketing
Sales

16. Small worlds and trust in the flow of information
Anyone can contribute on the web (yay!), but this means the trustworthiness of individual contributions suffers
This means most people don’t search the web passively for new things, it would take too long and there’s too much rubbish out there
People connect with family, friends, colleagues, and other people whom they trust as a source of information, then content spreads among networks
Creates word-of-mouth-like dynamics to filter out informational noise

17. Example: Most recent 1000 tweets with ‘Bitcoin’

18. Most recent 1000 tweets with ‘Ethereum’

19. Most recent 1000 tweets with ‘litecoin’

20. Most recent 1000 tweets with ‘Monero’

21. An example from peer support groups on Facebook
Comparison of discussion on Facebook groups dedicated to supporting parents of pre-term babies
Based on 1,000 most recent posts
Table 1. Breakdown of sentiment polarity
negative
neutral
positive
Institution-driven Facebook pages
Group 3
117
174
709
Group 2
157
141
702
Group 1
112
153
735
Total
386
468
2146
Parent-driven Facebook pages
Group 5
325
266
409
Group 4 91 85
824
Group 6
344
223
433
760
574
1666

22. An example from Facebook (cont.)
Table 2. Breakdown of word frequency
Sample size (N)
Vocab. Size (V(N))
Baayen (P)
Words> times
Institution-driven Facebook pages
Group 3
20839
.00002 23
Group 2
18544 14
Group 1
18075 8
Total
57458
(avg.) 45
Parent-driven Facebook pages
Group 5
34525 41
Group 4
12447 7
Group 6
33534
.00001 37
80506 85

23. An example from Facebook (cont.)
Based on 100 most recent main posts and all comments
Table 3. Network statistics for replies in Facebook pages
Number of posters
Number of replies
Number of repliers
Group 1 2
113 79
Group 2 22
957
685
Group 3
1015
679
Total 26
2085
1443
Group 4 6 63 48
Group 5 NA
1522
910
Group 6
749
508 69
2334
1466
Table 4. Network statistics for replies in Facebook pages
Network density
Network reciprocity
Network diameter
Num. communities
Group 1 2 4
Group 2 49
Group 3 86
Total
(avg.)
(avg.)
3.3 (avg.)
139
Group 4 3
Group 5
183
Group 6
130
(avg.)
(avg.)
3 (avg.)
316

24. An example from Facebook (cont.)

25. Summary Ability to personalise connections
Ability to personalise language
Trust in group
Ability to see others’ connections
Ability to see others’ language

26. What do you think?
Image from

27. What do you think?
Image from

28. For forum discussion: Plynk
Image from

29. Readings
Coleman, J. S. (1988). Social capital in the creation of human capital. American Journal of Sociology, 94: S95-S120.
Stets, J. E., & Burke, P. J. (2000). Identity theory and social identity theory. Social Psychology Quarterly, 63(3),
Stryker, S. (2008). From Mead to a structural symbolic interactionism and beyond. Annual Review of Sociology, 34: