Ps AND QsSocializing at cross purposes

to the conversation I thought I was starting. However...to the interaction designer, “social” invoked “social Web applications” and all that it means for human interaction with voting (thumbs up and down), favoriting (stars), contact lists and buddy lists, followers, avatars and profiles, chat threading, commenting, recommendations, and view counts. It meant a discussion of icons that suggested (or were derivative of) those on successful social media sites and multimedia content upload and sharing. Talk poured forth about social games and questionnaires, pokes and winks and friending. Let me be clear. I love thinking about these issues, and have recently reviewed drafts for two excellent books about how to design interaction elements for social applications well— Building Social Web Applications by Gavin Bell and Designing Social Interfaces by Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone. But for the purposes of this meeting, tossing out all of these concepts was great, but it was also putting the cart before the horse. We’d get there, but not yet. To the computer scientist, “social” sparked sweet, seductive imaginings of the social graph. Wikipedia defines a social graph by explaining that “a social network is a social structure made of individuals (or organizations) called ‘nodes,’ which are tied (connected) by one or more speIndulge me for a moment. I have a series of jokes I want to tell you: How many social scientists does it take to change a lightbulb? None. They do not change lightbulbs; they search for the root cause of why the last one went out. How many simulationists does it take to change a lightbulb? There’s no finite number. Each one builds a fully validated model, but the light never actually goes on. How many statisticians does it take to change a lightbulb? We really don’t know yet. Our entire sample was skewed to the left. So what’s with the (not particularly funny) jokes? The point is that they play off particular ways of thinking. In doing so, they show us how different the world can appear, depending on your perspective. This was evident in a recent meeting. Reminiscent of another set of common (and usually also not funny) jokes involving different nationalities walking into a bar, there were six people in a room: an interaction designer, a statistician with an interest in behavioral modeling, a social scientist, a computer scientist, an self-described “back end with a touch of front end” engineer, and a business executive. We were brainstorming about accessing social Web applications from personal mobile devices. Two minutes into our conversation, I said, “We should start with some sound social principles.” This was my bland opening gambit, a preface. Or so I thought. I paused for a fraction of a second, took a breath and ... everyone started talking at once—like whippets chasing after the faux rabbit at a dog race, the conversation was off. Then it stopped, followed by blank looks. The problem was the word “social.” Sometime later, as I was contemplating what had happened, a quick perusal of the dictionary yielded these definitions of social: relating to human society and its members, living together or enjoying life in communities or organized groups, tending to move or live together in groups or colonies of the same kind, and living or liking to live with others, disposed to friendly intercourse. Etymologically, the word derives from the Latin socialis, meaning “united,” “living with others,” and sequi, meaning “follower,” which should make contemporary social Web application designers happy”. John Locke, the famous 17th-century philosopher, spoke of “social” as meaning “pertaining to society as a natural condition of human life.” And as an adjective, “social” creeps in over the years as: “social climber” (starting in 1926); “social work” (1890); “social worker” (1904); “social drink(ing)” (1976); “social studies” as an inclusive term for history, geography, economics (1938); and a concept close to our hearts in these hard times, “social security” as a “system of state support for needy citizens” (1908). That gelled with my P ot og ra p h by Q ui nn D om b ro w sk i