Section 4 Social Glue

Transcription

1 Section 4 Social Glue

2 Introduction: Social Glue Elisabeth F. Churchill Social glue is a term that has increased in usage in the last few years. Although I cannot find the earliest use of or reference to the term, in its common use, social glue is central to the notion of Shared Encounters, the title of this volume of research chapters. A brief review of results from an internet search suggests that the term is primarily used in contexts where people s feeling of social connection is strengthened through a shared experience which may or may not be facilitated by technology. Much of the work in the area of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and related research areas has focused on the creation of such connections through video connections (Harrison 2009), blogs (Herring et al. 2004; Nardi et al. 2004), text and graphical virtual worlds (Churchill and Bly 1999; Churchill et al. 2001; Erickson and Kellogg 2000), and cell phones (Brown et al. 2001; Ito et al., 2005). More recently, public space displays have been used to provide possibilities for establishing connections and coordinating the use of space itself for facilitating and managing social encounters (Churchill et al. 2003; Churchill et al. 2004; Churchill and Nelson, 2009; O Hara et al. 2003). Stepping back, it may behoove us to think about what the term social glue actually means. The Princeton Wordnet 1 definition of social underscores relating to others, the establishment and maintenance of living with others, the fostering of communal activities, and the creation of assemblies and colonies. Definitions of glue emphasize joining, adhering and attaching, and the fixing and cementing together of things that would otherwise be separate. Putting these words and their definitions together, we see that in order for communication technology to be considered as a social glue, it must bring people together and hold them fast in some social dynamic. And, the experience of being together, of sharing something, should produce some bond (another word often E.F. Churchill ( ) Yahoo! Research, 2821 Mission College Blvd, Santa Clara, CA 95054, USA churchill@acm.org 1 Princeton Wordnet: wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn 229

3 230 E.F. Churchill used when adhering one thing to another) between people. We certainly know from psychology and sociology much about social bonds; a bond is a connection to another person or other people. Bonds imply certain forms of affiliation and are often strengthened by shared stories, reciprocal behaviors, and behavioral demonstrations of predictability, reliability, consistency and accountability, and adherence to social obligations. Appropriately, in this section, all the chapters are focused on the intentional design of social activity to foster social bonds or connections and/or the therapeutic benefits of being so connected. All in some way describe technologies that orient around storytelling and around the orientation of people to known or imagined others. Central vehicles for the shared experiences or encounters are stories, and all the chapters in some way address the relationships between the mediated and digital connections that are fostered and their effects on people s physical, real-world activities. Assessments of success depend on evaluation criteria and on the metrics and measurements that are collected. In addition to problematizing the words social glue, I want to make a distinction that was also provoked by my reading of the chapters. The social glue can be the technology itself, where the technology is the glue that adheres people to each other and/or to social places. Here, the technology can be seen as the adhesive or the facilitation for strengthening the tie. Or, from another perspective, the social glue could refer to the actions people take toward each other, and it is these actions that cement their relationship(s). Such actions may be facilitated by the technologies that are discussed in these chapters, but they could also take place without the technology, where the participants collocated. Of course, this is an artificial distinction; we know that technologies and human actors cannot be so completely separated (Bijker and Law 1992). But I find it a useful analytic stance. One implies that the removal of the technology may dissolve the connection between the people; the other suggests that the people will find other means to connect, should one technology be removed. One says provide the channel and the connection will be made, but without it, it won t. Here, connections will be made when previously there were none. The other says this technology may be better than others, but some form of technology will be used to connect, because the volition, the desire, and the social connection exists, but has no form of expression. This matters. Why? Because it dictates something about whether a technology will be successful or not, what criteria for success are established, the likely forms of uptake and adaptation of the technology, and ultimately the potential for personal transformation or for the transformation of the social connections overall. We should ask ourselves: Are we trying to make a bond where none existed, or are we trying to strengthen one that already exists? Are we aware that a technology designed as social glue can in fact be a solvent, can dissolve those bonds that exist socially as members become aware of the lack of locality, the lack of closeness and copacetic feelings, the conflict and clash of roles revealed? Along these lines, in earlier work across many contexts, my collaborators and I have found that the introduction of new social technologies is fundamentally situated

4 Introduction: Social Glue 231 not only in the social relationships that already exist, but also the socio-technical infrastructure of place, the location of placement, that already exists. These affect how a technology is received, adopted, adapted, and ultimately owned (Churchill and Nelson 2009; Shamma et al. 2009). These points are nicely reflected in the first chapter of this section, entitled Making Glue: Public Authoring in Urban Tapestries by Karen Martin. The author intentionally set out to build a system that would act as social glue, to strengthen the relationships or bonds between members of a community. The author present two case studies; both take place in different communities in the London area of the United Kingdom. In one instance, the author felt the technology resulted in strong engagement and positive reactions from users. Martin makes the useful distinction between communities into which a technology is introduced and a community which is specifically convened for the research that is, which is made up of people who are in some ways invested in, or bonded to, the research agenda or the research objects in this case the mobile technologies and storytelling devices. The author illustrate how engagement and participation by members of the convened community involved subtle and explicit incentives to participate and disincentives for nonparticipation you don t want to appear to be a nonteam player. By contrast, in a local community where no such convened and invested group exists, the author found considerably more difficulties in fostering uptake. The intended users represented members from different stakeholder groups; but also potential users did not necessarily see the obvious benefits of using the system and any potential benefit did not offset the costs of using the system (learning the technology, taking the time to contribute, and so on). Andrea Grimes chapter, Sharing Personal Reflections on Health Locally, deals with a somewhat different aspect of social glue how reflecting on other s stories and the telling of one s own stories can bring about changes in someone s behavior. Grimes describes an application, EatWell, which was designed specifically to encourage healthy dietary practices by residents in low-income African American communities in Atlanta, GA. Participants can tell their own stories of healthy eating behaviors and can listen to stories told by others. The telling of personal stories brings out a notion of reputation and accountability key ingredients for how humans orient to each other and how they determine whether or not to continue to feel part of, or members within a community. Interestingly, in this case, neither the narrator nor the listener is known to each other. This differs from the use of blogs, where the narrator is often known, while the audience is made up on unknown readers. Turning to blogging, in the chapter entitled MoBlogs, Sharing Situations, and Lived Life, Connor Graham Mark Rouncefield and Christine Satchell describe a blogging study involving smokers. The authors studied four people trying to stop smoking, and addressed the ways their adoption of a technology for blogging about their smoking habit fits into their everyday lives. Curiously, while smoking cessation did not result from the exercise, the bloggers reported a sense of reaching out to others and sharing their experiences. The sense of being part of a group or community of people who smoke led to self reflection both I am not alone, but also I want to hide because I failed to give up. This showed up in positive and negative

5 232 E.F. Churchill ways being happy to tell one s story and being ashamed that the attempt to cease smoking had failed. In the fourth of the chapters in this section, Katharine Willis, Kenton O Hara, Thierry Giles, and Mike Marianek discuss the importance of place structuring the ways in which we share experiences with others. The chapter addresses why people share knowledge about places. Following a detailed discussion of the literature on the synchronous and asynchronous sharing of place, the authors offer three case studies: a street game called Hide and Seek, where people follow comments created by others; an application for children to explore attractions in a zoo; and a study of geocaching. All these look at how digital annotations created by people can change others experience of place the sociality expressed in these scripted experiences may or may not entail, actually making a connection with the content authors, but in each case that which is transformed is the social space itself. What is interesting about all four chapters in this section is that they reveal just how much the adoption and adaptation of a technology for social connection cannot be predetermined by the designers. They all also illustrate how much work it takes to make the system work even in the most basic of ways. All the chapters reveal the sheer amount of work the researchers and system developers put into the creation of the technology, its introduction to the community in question, and to assessing its ongoing uptake and adoption. They also illustrate how difficult it is to conduct research that attempts to assess the impact of introducing strangers, bonding familiars, and precipitating personal and social journeys (addiction, diet; storytelling and co-present navigation through social space). A difference between the cases studied can be seen between the creation of connection in structured vs. unstructured ways (structured games vs. ad hoc encounters). What holds these chapters together is that they all illustrate the complexity of the socio-technical emergence of connection and personal/group transformation. And, as the authors eloquently remind us through their case studies, one cannot script the transformation one can only set the stage for its emergence. References Bijker WB & Law J (1992) Shaping technology / building society: studies in sociotechnical change. MIT Press, Massachusetts Brown B, Harper R & Green N (Eds) (2001) Wireless world. Springer, London Churchill EF & Bly S (1999) Virtual environments at work: ongoing use of MUDs in the workplace. In: Georgakopoulos D, Prinz W & Wolf AL (eds) Proceedings of WACC 99, ACM Press, New York. DOI= Churchill EF, Girgensohn A, Nelson L & Lee A (2004) Information cities: blending digital and physical spaces for ubiquitous community participation. Commun. ACM 47, 2 (Feb. 2004), ACM Press, New York. DOI= Churchill EF & Nelson L (2009 to appear) Information flows in a gallery-work-entertainment space: the effect of a digital bulletin board on social encounters. Human Organization 68(2),

6 Introduction: Social Glue 233 Churchill EF, Nelson L & Denoue L (2003) Multimedia fliers: informal information sharing with digital community bulletin boards. In: Huysman M, Wenger E & Wulf V (eds) communities and technologies. Kluwer Academic Publishers, The Netherlands Churchill EF, Snowdon D & Munro A (eds) (2001) Collaborative virtual environments: digital places and spaces for interaction. Springer Verlag, London Erickson T & Kellogg WA (2000) Social translucence: an approach to designing systems that support social processes. ACM Transactions of Computer-Human Interaction, 7, 1 (Mar. 2000), DOI= O Hara K, Perry M, Churchill EF & Russell R (Eds) (2003) Public and situated displays: social and interactional aspects of shared display technologies. Kluwer Academic Publishers, London Harrison S (Ed) (2009) Media spaces: 20+ Years of mediated life. Springer, London Ito M, Okabe D & Matsuda M (Eds) (2005) Personal, portable, pedestrian: mobile phones in japanese life. MIT Press, Massachusetts Herring S, Scheidt L, Bonus S & Wright E (2004) Bridging the gap: a genre analysis of weblogs. In: Proceedings of HICSS , January 05-08, 2004 Nardi BA, Schiano DJ & Gumbrecht M (2004) Blogging as social activity, or, would you let 900 Million people read your diary? In: Proceedings of CSCW 2004, ACM Press, New York. DOI= Shamma DA, Churchill EF, Bobb N & Fukuda M (2009) Spinning online: a case study of internet broadcasting by DJs. In: Proceedings of Communities and Technologies, June 25-27, 2009