A big piece of SIP was that the rate of social information transmission is lower than other, more cue-rich media (like face-to-face), but over time just as much social information can be transmitted through a text-based channel. It then goes on to suggest that this is possible because users adapt the limited medium of text in ways that enable richer communication using what have come to be called CMC cues (e.g. capitalization, letter repetition, emoticons, chronemics, etc.). I call this the temporal cue density hypothesis, and it’s what I’m working on empirically testing now.

Studies that look for CMC-cue effects on social outcomes such as trust, likability, and rapport (e.g., Byron & Baldridge, 2007, Walther & D’Addario, 2001) generally work like this:

• show someone a message
• ask them what they thought of the message sender
• manipulate the cues
• show someone else the message
• ask them what they thought of the message sender
• do math

Now, the simplicity of this story may be about to be disrupted. Studies like these all have an implicit underlying assumption: all, or at least most, people within a culture interpret social cues in similar ways [1]. Therefore, interpretation of CMC cues is assumed to be universal.

Cyberasociality is an empirically-backed concept proposed by Zeynep Tufekci which states that one’s inability or unwillingness to feel socially engaged by online media is a fundamental social-psychological, or even perceptual, trait of that person.

She describes it this way: language is a primarily aural construct, with reading and writing added on top as a brain-hack of visual symbolic abstraction, and some people, regardless of other cognitive abilities, have difficulty reading because of dyslexia. In much the same way, sociality evolved as a primarily — and primally — face-to-face ability. Like literacy, being social in text with abstract representations of other people is a brain hack, and one that not everyone’s brain is equally suited to perform.

If this is true, the very conception of online social norms as, well, normative may be broken.

1. This type of study does often test for interactions with personality traits like extraversion, but in light of Cyberasociality, those traits may not be the real reason for differences between subjects in the same experimental condition.

In this post, though, I want to address the other side of an internal debate: why I am still on Facebook. The primary reason is that, put simply, I derive utility from the service. Lately, the cost–benefit analysis has been coming down on the side of keeping my account open. (The other reason, of course, is that I need to have access to Facebook professionally.)

Being relatively new to a community, Facebook plays three important roles: phatic, event awareness, and ad-hoc organizational.

Many of the people I’ve been meeting, I’ve met through events in the Jewish community. That means I’m affiliating myself with a community that I’ll only see once a week, and that is at least forty-five minutes away by train. The phatic function of Facebook posts can be a way to establish stronger connections — or at the very least help ensure I exist more than just once a week.

Chicago has a rather dynamic community; there’s almost always some sort of service or dinner or event to attend on Friday nights. The way to find out about these events, though, is almost exclusively through Facebook. Finding out about a group or organization and Liking it is, if not the only way, certainly the most efficient way to stay in the loop about goings-on. Plus, many request RSVPs so they can plan appropriately. Ad-hoc organizing (e.g. “Anyone want to go to…”) happens less often, but it does happen, usually in the realm of finding out about shows to attend.

And of course, as one whose academic interests span the user interfaces, social behavior, and broader implications of systems like Facebook, I do have something of a professional obligation to at least keep tabs on what’s happening in the world of Facebook. Or at least that’s what I tell myself. ;)

Personally, though, I eagerly await the day I feel comfortable enough to close my Facebook account.

At the other end of the spectrum, historically speaking, was SMS. Being mobile, it was assumed that one was always connected (and therefore available) via SMS; therefore, presence was unnecessary. Yet people aren’t (or at least don’t want to be) always available.

Now that the nominal assumption is one of connectedness, connectedness and availability can no longer be assumed to be the same. And because connectedness is the assumed state, it doesn’t need to be advertised.

This, it seems to me, sets the historical context for a new (except for BBM) trend displacing presence: notifications of engagement. Rather than explicitly articulated status, action (or inaction) by the receiver signal availability to the sender. They do away with status, but provide the social transparency needed to manage sender expectations. Or, more simply, the sender can see whether their message has been received and read.

While right now this is almost exclusively used in mobile-to-mobile systems (BBM, Kik, Whatsapp, etc.), it has always bothered me that there is no desktop client for any of these systems. Finally, Apple — who pioneered FaceTime’s always-available-no-presence-like-a-telephone availability — is poised to bring such a system to the desktop (as well as iOS) with iMessage [1]. It’s instant messaging, without presence, with delivery, read, and typing notifications, that works on the desktop and mobile devices.

Personally, I can’t wait.

1. Fanboy alert

But that’s not what I came here to talk about. I want to talk about Avatar. Yes, the movie with the blue people set on Pandora. The deep-seated appeal of this singular cultural artifact becomes clear when looked at in the historical context of the cybernetic- and LSD-Influenced counterculture as well as, later, the digerati.

Two overarching concepts from the culture Turner describes permeate the movie. First is the cybernetic view of individuals — biological and otherwise — as nodes in a network, sensing, transmitting, receiving, and reacting to surrounding conditions in a giant feedback loop, just as the control system of an electromechanical device is, in the literal, electrical engineering sense of the word, a feedback loop. This, in an explicit way, is the very structure of Pandora’s biology, spiritualized by the native people, and romanticized by humans.

The second concept is disembodiment. Whether it was through electronic music (in the 1960s sense), strobe lights, and drugs, or later with networked computing and computer-mediated communication, Turner claims that many in the communalist-counterculture–turned-technoelite sought to leave the confines of the body for “an opportunity to feel a psychic union with others”. As a modern (or hypermodern, cyberpunk) interpretation of the word “avatar” would suggest, Avatar lets us imagine what it’d be like not only to become disembodied, only to reappear in a networked, interconnected virtual reality or cyberspace (whatever those words even mean anymore), but to actually leave one’s human body for a genuine alternative reality in which such connectedness is not only the norm, but real, meaningful, and organic.

But disembodiment is a non-ideal solution to the connectedness people seek. Because human biology lacks the networking hardware of Pandora’s life (c’mon, the pairing of a hunter with his bird is exactly like trying to pair with a Bluetooth device, complete with epic struggle), people use technology to escape their bodies and connect with others. But without that limitation, the protagonist of Avatar ultimately stops experiencing the cyberbiological world through technologically mediated disembodiment, and comes to fully embody that deep, network-like connection with all beings on Pandora.

Google and Facebook have been working on some interesting projects lately that try to group and otherwise organize people's communication based on the way each company feels people conceptualize their communication. Though email threads weren't new, even back in 2004 when Gmail came out, "conversations" that included sent messages were a unique [citation needed] addition. So, message organization 1: conversations.

Then Google came out with Wave, which obviously didn't last long and wasn't the revolution Google was hoping for. I believe this was because email and instant messaging have traditionally come with different expectations about normative behavior, and the choice of one or the other can be a strong signaling mechanism. Formality, expected length of response, how long is acceptable before responding, and even implied tie strength all play a role in media choice [citation needed]. Google Wave collapsed these two media into one, eliminating the communicative power embedded in media choice alone, confusing users in the process. This is message organization 2: conversations on steroids. Everything is still threaded more or less by conversation, but it becomes less dependent on media choice.

Recently, Facebook began rolling out its new messaging system. This system does two interesting things. First, rather than thread by conversation, it threads by recipient, much the way the SMS app on the iPhone does. Second, while not as unique from a design standpoint, it goes farther than Wave did in its attempt to almost completely abstract the message away from the medium. Their whole pitch was basically that it would let you send a message to a person, without having to think about what medium you were using. In theory, this sounds great, but they forgot that, like I said, different media do actually have different affordances, and media choice can be an almost active participant in a conversation. To write a long-form email, a quick hello, or a social coordination message (SMS-style) all in the same interface just doesn't make sense to me, especially when the sender can't know what kind of device the recipient will be using.

In a small concession to this awkwardness that I think speaks volumes about the way people really use different communication channels, Facebook did add two checkboxes in the messaging interface:

One lets the sender decide whether or not to send the message to the recipient's mobile phone, and the other essentially changes it from IM/SMS mode (press return/enter to send) to long-form mode (press return/enter to insert a line break). These completely change the nature of the medium, and I'm not convinced they should ever have been combined in the first place.

Assuming a conversation/people dichotomy for message organization, how does usage context play a role? Is the conversation model more appropriate in a task-oriented environment, which email often is, and is the person-no-matter-the-medium model more appropriate to social contexts? Maybe. But I'm going to stop here.

And of course, I need to bump George Lakoff's book Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind to the top of my reading list now.

As close ties have become weaker and fewer [1] [2] and the concept of friendship more explicitly and publicly articulated [3], I can't help but wonder if opportunities for "girl talk" have become fewer. Girls listing their real-life girlfriends on OkCupid provides a way to articulate those ties and provide a social object [4] (the profile) around which to engage in conversation about boys and dating in general.

As not-a-girl, I can't speak first hand to any of this, so comments/discussion are welcome.

1. Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone. 2001
2. Akst, Daniel. America: Land of Loners?". In The Wilson Quarterly. Summer 2010
3. Larsen, M.C. Understanding Social Networking : On Young People’s Construction and Co-construction of Identity Online. 2007.
4. Engeström, Jyri. Bookmarks, Babies, Barack... and other social objects. 2008.

For those of you who may not know, I’m a bit of a weather nerd, so when a tornado watch went up Friday afternoon, I was pretty excited. After taking Bubby out to dinner, I put on a movie (Fiddler on the Roof, just to be stereotypical), but, of course, I had to keep abreast of any potentially severe weather conditions. Out of this came my favorite interaction of the whole weekend.

As we were watching the movie, I pulled out my iPhone to check the latest watch/warning/advisory and mesoscale discussion issues from the Storm Prediction Center, the latest statements from the local National Weather Service office, and, of course, radar. I explained to Bubby that I was checking the weather, at which point she simply looked out the window, listened to a peal of thunder, and shrugged her shoulders, saying, “It’s bad,” as if to say What do you want to do about it?.

And that, to me, is representative of the difference between my data-driven generation and previous generations. On one hand, having data can be both insightful and actionable. But on the other hand, is our reliance on sensors, data, and computer modeling enabling our detachment from the observable world? What has been gained — and what has been lost — by my getting weather data that was collected by ground-based and satellite sensors, sent to the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma, run through computer models, and sent over fiber optic cables to servers that let me retrieve aggregate and interpreted data on my phone, when looking out the window can clearly tell us that the weather is bad?

Even today, the NWS recognizes the fallibility of sensors, relying on storm reports from thousands of trained weather spotters, most of whom use amateur radio, a technology that probably deserves its own blog post for its incredible power despite — and because — it does not rely on any large communications infrastructure.

To be sure, forecasting saves many lives. But was forecasting of acute severe weather events really that bad before humans had even urbanized? I heard it said on the BBC the other day that at one time, some people could tell what species a tree belonged to just by listening to the wind rustling its leaves. I bet those people knew when a storm was coming, too.

"The maximum size for a text message is 160 characters, which takes 140 bytes because there are only 7 bits per character in the text messaging system, and we assume the average price for a text message is [about 10 cents]. There are 1,048,576 bytes in a megabyte, so that's 1 million/140 = 7490 text messages to transmit one megabyte. At 10 cents each, that's [$734] per MB - or about 4.4 times more expensive than the 'most pessimistic' estimate for Hubble Space Telescope transmission costs [of $166 per megabyte]."

So basically, consumers have allowed mobile phone companies to charge literally astronomical rates to send a text message: we pay at least 4.4 times as much to send a text message than NASA does to download data from the Hubble Space Telescope (in cost per unit data, anyway). I can't believe we put up with that. Disgusting, I think.