Scott Counts

Mobile social software: Will it radically change or simply augment the way we interact?

Biography
I am a Researcher in the Social Computing Group at Microsoft Research. My research and interests lie in determining psychological meanings and mental models of online social behavior in order to facilitate online social interactions and networks. Current projects focus on lightweight media sharing to facilitate social presence, and using shared physical spaces as common ground for virtual communities and interactions. I received my Ph.D. in Social and Personality Psychology from the University of Washington in 2002. There I studied personality and the unique and stable patterns of emotion and behavior each person shows in response to social situations. In my spare time I enjoy outdoor sports, particularly snowboarding.

Position Paper
The functionality of today’s mobile and ubiquitous devices means that for the first time we have communication and capture devices with enough computing power to use social software beyond voice and SMS while the user is in her social environment. This is very significant, with a number of unique advantages over desktop social software. As researchers and practitioners spend valuable time, effort, and money to create mobile social software and the corresponding social experiences, it is critical to think about the extent to which we should create totally new social interaction methods versus augmenting existing practices? On the one hand, our research is about creating new interaction modes. On the other hand, new interaction modes can only be so radical or they risk being out of touch with fundamental human social practices. Some of the absolutely ripe research opportunities lie in finding that boundary between helping people extend their social reach and technology that is just socially unsettling.

Location-based services for mobile devices are an area of current interest where the boundaries will need sorting out. The confluence of social networks, socially derived metadata, and location information on a mobile device has the potential to truly alter the way groups form around interest and activities, the way we extend our social circles, the way we spend our social time. First consider the radical outcomes. Mobile social software soon will be able to in vivo suggest the physical world hangouts where any given user is most likely to meet a similar other. Given this, social group formation could become much more dynamic than it is today. Imagine being a chess fanatic teenager growing up in a world in which your mobile device notifies you when a fellow chess fanatic is within a half a mile of you. Socializing becomes fluid to the point of constantly shifting social circles based on interest overlap, activities, and location.

Socializing through these ad-hoc social groups, however, requires a shift in people’s social psychology so substantial it is hard to imagine it taking place. We are accustomed to building social circles slowly, letting the trust build over time. A more realistic use of location-based services in social software works with existing social circles. For example, the same social software could simply notify you when your friends (or possibly friends of friends, a la Dodgeball++) are nearby. What this provides is a much more fluid interaction between a person and his or her social network and is a logical extension of the flexible, mobile rendezvousing seen with teenagers today.

Another realistic scenario is that mobile social software augments ad hoc social encounters, helping us grow those into longer term relationships if we desire. This use of social software circumvents the issue that digital social networks often lack a sense of social context that is tied to our physical world social lives (when did we meet, where were we, who were we with, what were we doing). Augmenting our social lives in this way allows us to use our highly evolved social abilities for physical world social interactions to alter our self-presentation to constantly changing social contexts. This concept was tested in the Social Computing Group with a project called Trace, in which people at social events were provided with a privacy-protected digital connection to fellow event-attendees after the event. The user experience was simple (receive an email with links to ‘profile’ pages of other people from a social event the previous night), but surprisingly compelling and heavily used. That two people were in the same social situation at the same time is meaningful social information that mobile social software can provide, and is an example of augmenting existing human social behavior patterns rather than altering them.

In general then, if you look at the technologies that are catching on today, such as Dodgeball and UPOC, they seem a little more in the augmentation category, although Dodgeball could be fairly radical. Understanding the tipping point of where something becomes too radical is an interesting question for researchers and an important one for practitioners.

Back to Social Computing Symposium 2005