Paper Reading #30

Life "modes" in social media

Authors:	Fatih Kursat Ozenc	Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
	Shelly D. Farnham	Yahoo!, Sunnyvale, California, USA

Proceeding 

CHI '11 Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on Human factors in computing systems 

 

Summary

• Hypothesis - The researchers suggest that people interact in different ways based on their social contexts of their life. These life facets can include work, school, and home environments. They also believe if that online interactions could be oriented against these facets, then the interactions will be more effective.

• Content -

1. Modes of the self - different life facets afford different "modes" people interact within.
2. Focused sharing - Broadcasting information is generally disliked compared to the idea of focused sharing, which allows information to be shared with only a few people instead of everyone.
3. Mobile Me - A theme that many users explain their online interactions as being based on mobile interfaces.

• Methods - 16 participants were asked to perform a two hour interview to help them understand the facets of their life. There were 3 specific goals:

1. Life mapping activity - Participants were asked to draw out parts of their lives and tell how they handle transitions from different states online, as well as how they communicate.
2. Need validation session - Theoretical situations were presented to the participants and they were asked to identify possible problems and how they would handle them.
3. Visual metaphors ranking activity - Users were asked to rank how the best way to visualize their life facets.

• Results - For the life mapping activity, many of the participants drew a social meme map or a chronological map to visualize their lives. For the social meme maps, most of them start from the idea of "me" and spread outwards to family, work, and social facets. These categories were then further split up. Chronological maps were able to more accurately show transition states but lacked the detail that social meme maps could separate. For the color coding activity of marking communication practices, the closer the participant was to a person, the more likely it was that the participant would mark the possible communication channels in multiple ways. However, others were much more specific on how they communicated, avoiding crossover. For working environments, it was found that most people segmented their work and social life. For example many participants had an email specifically for work, personal, and junk email. Crossing the segmentations of their life facets were usually done by physically moving from one location to another, or by the passage of time.

Discussion
Many people simply ignore their life facets when communicating online. Historically this can have disastrous consequences, such as and employee badmouthing their boss on Facebook after they have become friends. Social networking sites now are implementing functionality that allows emulation of personal life facets in ways more normal for humans, such as Google and Facebook, but use may or may not catch on due to the different environment online interaction provides at the time. I think the researchers bring up a very good idea that is currently changing how people interact online. However, since different interactions with different people in different life facets is a generalization of the concept of privacy, and with more and more technology, there seems to be less privacy available. I do not think that a single mode of interaction is possible with humans, but it would simplify the process considerably.