Week Two Discussion

CMC genres and the importance of design in establishing norms for users and usage

Class Discussion Questions (comments in parentheses to be expanded in class):

1) Do you agree that text will continue to be dominant as the lowest common denominator? (and what are the ramifications of your answer)

2) How much should we bet on the wisdom of crowds for driving design? (consider if CMCs can really facilitate political advisement from the masses)

3) How far can we automate our investigation of CMC design success with on-line applications? (consider Google's competency and the potential of PNNL glass box software).

4) Are the efficiencies of genres worth induced limits to our creativity? (consider Heinz Frankl’s early life memoir and the willingness of Barnes and Noble to stock)

Response to Readings

Identifying CMC genres facilitates growing a critical mass of users working together to establish norms for effective technology use and associates those norms with terms that can consistently be communicated to efficiently promote that use. But critical mass is not a panacea. Susan Herring suggests that massively used CMC technologies are evolving into blander tools with SMS messaging representing rock bottom. She suggests that historically the mass use of any technology tends to remove the radical edge away from cultural change and towards cultural assimilation. The masses have arrived through the immediacy of browser-based facilities, ubiquity of mobile devices, and entrenchment of text as the path to cross-pollenization among CMC genres. Although in the late 90s we were moving away from the medium driving the message, mobile devices are bringing us back toward it. Instead of using sophisticated CMC applications to embody and document an increasingly useful hive-mind knowledge base, we are growing our use of CMCs to facilitate our social lives in the real world - a perpendicular use that gives extroverts bandwidth. More than ever, I see the need for organization and moderation across facilities in cyberspace to help us make sense of our collective use. I wonder when the semantic Web and info-mining bots will help us facilitate the radical ideas that show merit for positive human and planetary impact irrespective of the stabilizing trend of the masses?

Software design significantly affects genre use. Preece and de Souza identify an Online Community Framework to help CMC technology designers assess whether CMC tool designs are as effective as possible in driving use towards intended purpose. The suggestion is obvious to match sociability and usability in order to facilitate each genre. If the focus is on building a better hive-mind knowledge base for humanity, the interface can suggest a thoughtful asynchronous participation. If the focus is on real-world social networking facilitation, the interface can suggest immediacy and opportunity for synchronous negotiation. Designers can pursue design clarity by observing users share aloud the inner dialogues they have when using technology, verifying the chosen sign systems and communications function as intended. Lemerich and Molder suggest CMCs can help users evolve their social being by demonstrating flexible identity construction instead of a consistent, engrained cognitive identity they maintain at all times. The Holy Grail of design might entail designers focusing on facilities that nudged users toward developing their best socially effective identity.

Overarching general design principles exist to help us improve CMCs. Brenda Laurel suggests an activity-based design focus promises the user a potential emotional response similar to participating in good drama. We decide an appropriate action we wish to take and the other actors (existing within the computer or manned by humans through other computers) arrange themselves appropriately to let us perform our desires. The more other humans are participating with us, the more the technology plays a role of plot consistency enforcer instead of trusted agent. We naturally desire a coherent plot to immerse us in the drama. CMC genres can follow appropriate plots, just as books and movies do, through representation in the interface - with a coherent personality for non-human functions. Don Norman’s rule of visibility suggests the interface anticipate appropriate actions and make the action visibly obvious for those purposes. Having a virtual representation (ideally a coherent metaphor for beginners) means inappropriate actions can lack a visible means of execution. Appropriate feedback (multimodal to increase immersion) reinforces positive action and curbs negative action. The stakes are raised as visual virtual environments confront issues of gender and race and users pay their way into the reality they wish to explore. The bottom line is that all the design dimensions work as one when driving human psychology, a true Gestalt phenomenon that must be congruent with genre in order to satisfy.