Developing Usable Experiences

Personality and opinion in social attachment

March 6th, 2009 7:46 am —  19 views

paper_notesAs the adoption of online social networking use continues, attention is being given to notions of design that attract, retain, and influence behavior. A prototypical online community has an active user base with design mechanisms built for attracting new members and allowing existing members to go on hiatus1.

A design alternative being seen in online communities where a member of the community can vote or rank on the contribution of another is very interesting to me. I’m writing about it in a paper this week but the whole notion has me thinking about what motivates people to interact online. Whether it’s a full, well thought out reply or an endearing remark about an ultrasound, what motivates someone to contribute? Is it easier to give a virtual thumbs-up on something someone shared than it is to write them an email or message them?

Regardless of your whatever internal barriers someone has to embracing social networking, if given a way to see acts of opinion by people you may have only met briefly, maybe never talked to directly, it is evidence of personality that will likely attract and keep your attention. And this attraction is a motivator to interact. Designs that allow people to show facets of their personality through the expression of opinion allow for points of attraction and thus the development of identity and bond-based attachments to social networks2

Maybe Weinberger is right when he talks about the digital order allows people to come together like molecules forming and splitting. Molecules form because of alignment and necessary attraction between atoms3.

Too much thinking so early in the morning perhaps. Time to go to work.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
  1. Often permanently. I never went back to Orkut. [↩]
  2. Incorporates ideas from a Ren, Kraut, and Kiesler paper titled, “Applying Common Identity and Bond Theory to Desing of Online Communities”  2007, Sage Publications. [↩]
  3. From “Everything is Miscellaneous” [↩]

Related Posts

Comment 

Comments

Leave a Reply




Subscribe without commenting