Connected Action
Menu
  • Services
    • Buy a social media network map and report
    • Training
    • Conferences
    • Data Reporting
    • Log in or Join us
    • Customize NodeXL
    • NodeXL
    • Marc Smith
    • About Us
  • Buy maps
    • Twitter Search Network Map and Report
    • Graph Server Twitter Search Network Map and Report
    • Other products and services
  • Sample maps
  • Blog
    • Books
    • NodeXL
    • Events
  • Newsletter
  • Videos
  • Contact
  • Log In

Mobile Social Software

Electrification of the Interaction Order, or, eGoffman

18FebMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

The great sociologist Erving Goffman wrote a number of influential works about a domain of social life he called the “interaction order”, the realm of interactions between people.  Goffman studied how interactions are structured in the most common settings like how people pass by each other in hallways, manage eye contact, or show that they are “together” with someone else.

Goffman did write about telephone conversations as well as the ways broadcasters altered the patterns of spoken interactions in radio transmissions but he died before mobile phones became popular or online Internet social spaces became mainstream.  Several scholars have applied Goffman to social interaction in cyberspace.  There are lots of possible connections: Goffman wrote at length about the ways people “present” their identities to one another as if we were all actors on a stage.  After decades of “reality TV” this is not the revolutionary thought it once was in Goffman’s day.  Today his work can be a guide to studying the ways people now use the Internet to create representations of themselves and interact with one another.  Profiles on social network systems and other kinds of Internet based media publication tools are a new kind of surface for displaying membership insignia and symbols of connections with other people.  Like clothing or landscaping, Internet media are a medium for self-expression and claims to membership in a number of demographics and sub-cultures.

It is no longer necessary to bring Goffman to the Internet; the Internet is coming to Goffman.  Goffman’s work has even more value in the coming years.  The main focus of his work was the minute details of face-to-face interactions.  Goffman relished the details of careful control of eye contact and posture, tone of voice and timing.  When applied to “online” media this aspect of Goffman’s work has been applied metaphorically to the interactions of avatars and user names.  It is certainly possible to extend Goffman into these Internet spaces.  But now Internet spaces are extending themselves into the Interaction Order.

Mobile Internet devices are now along for the ride in many of the situations Goffman wrote about: meetings and encounters between people which feature exchanges and evaluations of identity claims.  Mobile phones are becoming more general purpose networked mobile computers.  Today these devices remain end points of Internet data more than sources.  But increasingly mobile devices have sensors that allow them to measure physical states of their owners and the presence of others in proximity.  When my phone notices your phone and can tell that it is your phone new opportunities emerge for people interacting in the interaction order.

The “interaction order” has been very analog and few innovations have taken place there — with a few notable exceptions.  Speech and body adornment were both big innovations that gave humans a big advantage in the creation of complex societies.  Since those novel practices there have been few things that have dramatically altered the basic nature of human to human interaction in face-to-face situations.  It could be argued that refinements like amphitheaters increase the number of people who can usefully gather in one place and still hear one another.  Similarly, writing and printing altered the interaction order only to the extent that sitting side-by-side with someone looking at the same relatively rare books created a structured interaction space but not new ways of presenting who we are or reading one another’s claims.

Clocks and maps help people get to an interaction at the right time and in the right place, but they do not change the basic capacity to signal between people.  Phones and cell phones create new kinds of spaces for an interaction order – with novel rules, but they do not change face-to-face interaction as much as they pull people out of face-to-face interactions and into a network mediated interactions.

Goffman will have renewed value for those trying to understand the impact of mobile devices because for the first time networked digital machines are aware of social interactions and are able to alter how we interact with each other.  The Interaction Order is “electrified” when we bring devices into our interactions with other people and those devices help us display the right symbols to others and access the right symbols about others.

Posted in All posts, Medical sensors, Mobile Devices, Mobile Social Software, Sensors, Social Media, Sociology Tagged Goffman, Mobile Social Software, Sensors, Social Interaction 3 Comments

Help NodeXL create a Logo, win a free copy of Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction by Ben Shneiderman and Catherine Plaisant

18FebMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

NodeXL is growing in features and utility along with its user base.

As we just crossed the 5,000 download milestone, it seems time for the next phase in the evolution of all software projects: t-shirts.

We need an image, logo, or design that best reflects the NodeXL project and we would like your help!  If you have ideas, sketches or screen shots that you think could become a good logo for the project, please post them here!

We will pick among the best submissions and award a *FREE* copy of the 5th Edition of Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction by Ben Shneiderman and Catherine Plaisant to the one that inspires a logo for the project.

Designing the User Interface - 5th Edition
Designing the User Interface - 5th Edition

Submissions can be posted to the comments here or the discussion board on the NodeXL Codeplex Site at http://www.codeplex.com/nodexl

Thanks!

Posted in All posts, Conference, Interdisciplinary, Mobile Social Software, NodeXL, Social network, Technology, Visualization Tagged Analysis, Edge List, Excel, network, NodeXL, Social network, Visualization

Quantified Self – Meetup: Tuesday, January 27th, UC Berkeley School of Information

06JanMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

Kevin Kellys Quantified Self Blog

The next meeting of the “Quantified Self” group will be held on January 27th, 2009 at the University of California, Berkeley School of Information.

The group focuses on the emerging practice of recording lots of data about your physical state and activity.  Its where life logging meets populations of people grappling with illness or seeking optimal health.  The idea is that close records of our health will reveal connections between behaviors and outcomes, letting us change our behavior or at least detect early when things go wrong.  Others are just interested in detailed record keeping, an extension of detailed blogging or life streaming.  In many cases people are sharing these records with others, sometimes to get social support to meet a goal like running more miles or loosing more pounds.

I find the topic interesting for all these reasons and because the technologies for the “Quantified Self” are also going to be applied to the “Quantified Other” – sensors that record data about your body may ultimately notice that you are near other people.  It is when machines automatically notice when people are near people that I think the “QS” effort will have greatest impact.

Kevin Kelly has been blogging about “QS” on a blog of the same name. This will be the 3rd meeting of Quantified Self people.  I was able to attend the second meeting at the IDEO offices in San Francisco which had a great turn out of people and presentations of projects for assembling personal biographies and recording fleeting thoughts.  Hope to see you at the next meeting!

Posted in All posts, Community, Conference, Data Mining, Medical sensors, Mobile Devices, Mobile Social Software, Research, Sensors, Social Media, Social network, Technology Tagged Meetup Quantified Self Mobile Social Software Medical 1 Comment

Farewell to Microsoft after ten great years

29SepMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

Marc Smith at Microsoft ResearchAfter ten years at Microsoft Research I have decided it is time to move on.  My time at MSR has been a remarkable one.  I have had the opportunity to work with very smart and focused people intent on making technical strides on many defining aspects of computing.  It has been a pleasure to work with many talented people to bring better analysis of social media into the user generated content creation and consumption loop.  We built tools to data mine and visualize conversation repositories to give participants and managers better reports on their activities.  We discovered the ways participants in social media repositories perform different roles that can be identified by different patterns of computer-mediated interactions.   We applied those ideas to personal email triage and patterns of email usage.  We pushed ideas related to mobile devices and location based social networking and object annotation.  We built a number of tools for visualizing the patterns and (social) network structures in the data created by the use of computer-mediated interaction tools.  

These projects point towards a world in which computers and mobile devices do more than connect us to the network, they will sense the world around us and reason about both our location and who is with us.  Combined with back-end data mining, new mobile sensor studded devices are coming that will alter the nature of social interaction in its last, most analog hold out: face-to-face, co-present interaction.

I want to explore this change in the nature of what the sociologist Erving Goffman referred to as the “interaction order“.  We are living through the early stages of the “electrification of the interaction order”, a time in which the ways we interact with one another is changed dramatically by the availability of mobile social information networks.  Online social networking, content sharing and discussion systems have effects that are multiplied when channeled through a device carried by every person and active in every interaction, however fleeting.  

Imagine going to a business meeting or conference and having Facebook suggest that you link to the people you spent the longest time talking to.  Mobile social computing will add more content to the torrent already generated by “desktop” experiences.  Some projects are already digging into this area: good examples include companies and products like nTag.com, SpotMe.Com, and the many trail and path tracking applications now appearing in the iPhone AppStore.  Scott Counts and I wrote about a location based social networking application that demonstrated many of these features as well as search and matching features that have yet to appear in the first wave of production systems.

A first step in this direction is to focus more on the analytic back-ends that will be needed for the management of all forms of social media repositories.  Community analysis servers that provide a dashboard of community health and activity indicators will be a critical differentiating feature for community hosts, managers, and leading participants.  Successful communities will be those that can cultivate contribution the best while managing conflict at the lowest cost.  Once desktop bound social encounters are channeled through an analytics console more real-world events sensed by mobile devices can be added to the mix.  

I am looking forward to some time to push back and reflect more about these changes while looking around for new ways to explore them.  I will take some time to get my family settled into our new home in California.  I hope to catch up with many people!  I will also be visiting Yale, University of Maryland and Berkely for talks this fall.  I plan to attend the Microsoft Research Social Computing Symposium in Redmond (it will be good to be back!) and the Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM) in Sonoma.

My old masmith@microsoft.com email address is no longer active, so please contact me at marc.smith.email at gmail.com.  

I look forward to staying in touch with my many friends and colleagues at Microsoft while finding the time now to meet with a wide range of people interested in social media.

Posted in All posts, Mobile Devices, Mobile Social Software, Research, Shameless self-promotion, Social Media, Sociology, Visualization Tagged Analysis, Community, Farewell, Microsoft, MSR, Networks, Research, Social Media 5 Comments

Posts navigation

Newer Posts

Connected Action Services

  • Buy a social media network map
  • Log in or Join us
  • My Cart
  • Training
  • Conferences
  • Data Reporting
  • Customize NodeXL
  • Marc Smith
  • About Us

Subscribe to Connected Action

Get updates when there is new content from Connected Action.

Related content:

Twitter Facebookflickrlinkedin
slidesharedeliciousdeliciousVimeo


Social Media Research Foundation

Help support the Social Media Research Foundation

Book: Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL: Insights from a connected world

The book Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL: Insights from a connected world is now available from Morgan-Kaufman and Amazon.

Communities in Cyberspace

Communities in Cyberspace

Recent Posts

  • Buy a map
  • Book: Transparency in Social Media Edited by Sorin Matei, Martha Russell and Elisa Bertino – with a chapter on NodeXL
  • June 5, 2015: Personal Democracy Forum – Talk on taking pictures of virtual crowds
  • Trust issues and Excel: how to open other people’s NodeXL documents
  • May 1st, 2015 at LSU: NodeXL social media networks talk at the “Telling Stories and Using Visuals for Coastal Environmental Communication” workshop

Tags

2009 2010 2011 2013 2014 2015 Analysis Analytics April Chart Conference Data Event Excel graph June Lecture Map March Marc Smith May Media network NodeXL October Paper Presentation Research San Francisco SMRF SMRFoundation SNA social Social Media socialmedia Social Media Research Foundation Social network Sociology Talk Training Twitter University Video Visualization workshop

Categories

Archives

July 2022
M T W T F S S
 123
45678910
11121314151617
18192021222324
25262728293031
« Jul    

Transparency in Social Media

2015-07-30-Transparency in Social Media-Structures of Twitter Crowds and COnversations
Transparency in Social Media
Sorin Adam Matei, Martha G. Russell, Elisa Bertino

CÓMO ENCONTRAR LOS HASHTAGS MÁS POTENTES: Para convertir LEADS a VENTAS (SEOHashtag nº 1) (Spanish Edition)

Apply NodeXL in espanol!

CÓMO ENCONTRAR LOS HASHTAGS MÁS POTENTES - Para convertir LEADS a VENTAS (SEOHashtag nº 1) (Spanish Edition)
By: Vivian Francos from #SEOHashtag Comparto algunas de las mejores formas de elegir los hashtags más poderosos y
que puedan generar tráfico a tus redes sociales para aprovechar el poder del
hashtag.
Si quieres aumentar tus interacciones, debes aprender a utilizar los hashtags como herramienta.

https://amzn.to/305Hpsv

Networked


Networked By Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman

Social Media in the Public Sector

2015-07-31Social Media in the Public Sector-Cover
Ines Mergel

Ways of Knowing in HCI

2014-Ways of Knowing in HCI - Olson and Kellogg

The Virtual Community


Virtual Community

The Evolution of Cooperation


The Evolution of Cooperation

Governing the Commons


Governing the Commons

SmartMobs


SmartMobs

Networks, Crowds, and Markets


Networks, Crowds, and Markets

Development of Social Network Analysis


Development of Social Network Analysis: A Study in the Sociology of Science

Search

Services

  • Buy a social media network map
  • Log in or Join us
  • My Cart
  • Training
  • Conferences
  • Data Reporting
  • Customize NodeXL
  • Marc Smith
  • About Us
© 2022 Connected Action
AccessPress Parallax by AccessPress Themes
0

Your Cart