Strengthening Community with Embodied Social Networks

Social Network Systems have become highly applicable to everyday life, but continue to remain on the desktop for most users. This paper reports on initial analysis of groups interacting with a social network system in the real-world, in this case a conference setting. The system, Polyphonet Conference, and its RFID card interface together allows rich interaction between users. Ethnographic observation of user interaction, with the use of video data collected at the time of use, was used to assess what social benefits may be afforded by the system. This paper suggests that the act of adding to one’s network may in itself help to generate and strengthen community. Using the notion of folk computing, community is seen to be generated particularly well when it occurs via the embodied action afforded by a combination of virtual web-mining and subsequent user authorship.