Hi, my name is Ryan Louie, and I’m a PhD Student at Northwestern University.
I’d like to talk about a way of connecting that is very different than current social media.
So, when friends and family are co-located, they can easily engage in shared experiences
and activities more regularly. For example, classmates can join
each other at the local coffee shop to drink and study; and neighbors might bump into each other
while waiting for the train and catch up. When people are physically distant,
they often rely technologies like social media to connect them.
And while browsing social media posts on social media feeds make it easier to keep up with each
other’s lives, social media hardly supports engaging in shared experiences. Users are mostly
passively scrolling and viewing what has already happened in people’s lives and experiences.
Some more recent social apps, like TikTok, do support engaging in shared activities
when users can create short videos of a shared activity that build on the creation of others.
But even here, connecting through TikToks is not easy. Users must recognize how their situation,
like having a bowl of a snacks, allows participating in shared activities or challenges,
like where users are participating in a “snacking on junk food while exercising” challenge.
So, instead, let me show you a way of socially connecting that
we envisioned, that is quite a bit different. So imagine two friends living in different
cities could share a virtual “cheers”, where one was having an evening beer in Chicago
and the other a morning tea in Taiwan. And what happens is that this experience
is it identifies moments when people share similar situations across distance,
and then structures shared activities, like making this Half Half Cheers photo, in these moments.
We call them Opportunistic Collective Experiences, or OCEs for short.
And unlike social media, everything is a shared experience.
And unlike Tiktok, identifying and structuring the activity is entirely facilitated by the system.
So, I’d like to introduce you to these, our three contributions with OCEs.
First, a set of design guidelines that help create OCEs effective for connecting.
Second, Cerebro, our computational platform, for interacting, building, and executing OCEs.
And third, results from a study with college alumni in which we show that OCEs promoted
engaging in socially connecting shared experiences and activities.
In the time we have left, I'd like to touch on each of these contributions.
Let me talk about designing an OCE. An OCE that is designed poorly can
fail to establish the interactional grounding necessary to connect.
So for example, this OCE has two people take a picture of their
environment where it’s both raining for them. Here, this experience is unlikely to be connecting
because the prompt for taking a picture is quite general, so people people might
not attend to the same stimuli or do similar activities, making it hard to
see the similarities across their situations. Nor are they taking photos as part of in an
activity, like contributing towards a shared goal, or creating a shared artifact.
In contrast, an OCE designed effectively would use people’s shared situation to facilitate a
more socially connecting interaction. People in this one could take similar
actions across their situations to highlight the shared experience,
such as looking down and stomping in a puddle. And through this Half Half photo, they are
creating a shared artifact that highlights the interdependence across individual activities.
So, our second contribution is Cerebro, a platform consisting of 3 parts:
First, a mobile app for users to interact in an OCE.
Second, an API that helps creators, in which it abstracts away the annoying details of
monitoring user situations and coordinating participation,
so these creators can write short simple code describing the shared situations and activities.
Third, we have this Execution engine backend that handles these execution details.
So we deployed Cerebro with college alumni, and our results showed that OCEs were more connecting
than posts and replies, and about as connecting as direct messaging.
we measured this in terms of “sharing similar experiences & engaging in joint activities”
and second entitativity, or “a sense of feeling part of a group”.
Hearing what participants said about OCEs are most revealing.
While in contrast, the second quote describes that for Collective Experiences,
there’s this common goal, and it really highlights how shared experiences are connecting,
while post and individual… and individual posts… are really just about people really feeling
involved in their separate lives rather than people feeling involved in thier shared lives.
So, I’d like to conclude by highlighting that OCEs support engaging in this way because
they structure ways in engage in shared experiences and activities at distance.
And second, OCEs make it easier to find opportunities to actively engage
by using a system to identify the opportune moments and facilitate these interactions.
We hope our work contributes to a vision for the future in which we can easily engage in new,
shared experiences at distance -- instead of just scrolling through
each other’s individual lives and experiences. Thank you.