In this interview we're going to read Tom Erickson.
Tom is an interaction designer
and researcher and he works for IBM.
He works in the social computing
group at Watson Lab in
New York and he's actually been working there since '97.
And before that he worked
9 years for Apple, so he
is an expert on social computing.
And this is what we're going to talk about today.
So Tom, what is social computing?
Sure, so social computing
are systems that support
social behavior among people within
the system and then make
use of that behavior for various purposes.
So it can
range from systems that
just make use of a few things.
So like, take Amazon.
You go to Amazon and they
have people rate, you know, reviews of books.
And then other people come along, and
as they read them they say,
I like this or I don't
like this.
And so there are 2 levels
of social computing.
One is simply, you
can look at a book and you
can see how many people liked
it and how many people didn't and read the reviews.
And then you can also judge
something about the quality of your
reviews by seeing, you know,
how many people thought this was a good review or not.
And Amazon actually has
done something I think that's
quite nice which is, one
of the types of reviews they
foreground is, the most
liked critical review.
That's a review where they didn't
give it a top rating, but a
lot of people still found it useful.
And I always try
to go right for that, that review.
Are there different kind, different types of social computing?
Yeah, so there are
a couple of answers to that.
One has to do with how social computing surfaces in the system.
So when I just described Amazon. That gives us a
few social computing mechanisms in it.
Right.
You could get rid of
the reviews, you could
get rid of the, you know,
liking or disliking ratings.
And Amazon would still be
pretty much the same, it'd be
a place to go and buy
books or other things.
But other types of
systems are don't just use social computing mechanisms.
But they're fundamentally social computing
things so take something
like you the economical example
is Workipedia where, you know,
it's all produced by
the contributors so they produce the content.
They, you know, edit it.
They assess quality.
So on and so forth.
So, that's sort of almost pure social
computing and that it's all
coming through users and it's
all shaped by social interaction among users.
Another way to distinguish
between types of social computing
systems is, this
is something I've been puzzling over.
I mostly like examples, and
I tend to avoid
defining things formally.
But one of the continuums that
you can look at social
computing systems along, has to
do with the type
of interactions that are happening .
So, in Wikipedia for
example, the content
that is being produced, where the
knowledge that is being produced
or the wisdom of the crowd,
if you like to think
of it that way, is coming
through conversational interaction.
Right?
Let's contrast that with another
type of social computing computing system.
One example i'm very fond
of is that of an online auction.
So, there you have something for
sale, you have an audience of
people who want it and the
way in, what people do is they go in and they place a bid.
And you know, I bid
for something, and then you see
that somebody has bid so
much for it and you want it more, so you bid a bit more.
And so the interaction is very simple, right?
You're simply placing a
bid of a certain value.
And those repeated interactions
auctions are, in a sense
a way of socially computing a
price for something, right?
And auctions are very useful things.
So, if you have a rare piece of art.
You know, how do you figure out what that costs, right?
And the answer is you
let people socially figure it out.
We often hear the term social media.
And can you tell us, in
your opinion, what is the
difference between social media and social computing?
That's a hard one.
I see social computing as a very general term.
I mean, the
way I think about social computing is,
I think of groups of
people, who are
actually collectively computing something,
where I mean "computing" fairly broadly.
It might be figuring out the price for something, like you do in the auction.
It might be composing an
encyclopedia article, as you do in Wikipedia.
But in some sense, at
a very general level, that's all a computation.
Right?
Or a market is another type of computation.
We all collectively, you know,
place bids for things and
you know, that shapes the
price of commodities or whatever it is you're buying and selling.
So computing, I
think, covers a large range
of territory where, so
in a market, we're anonymous to one another, right?
And that's actually important because don't
want people conspiring to fix the market.
They don't want us conspiring to,
you know, I'll bid, I think
they call them shills
in auction, where you insert people
who are false bidders to sort of drive the price up.
Yup. Right?
So in social computing systems,
you might have cases where people are interacting a lot.
Very deeply getting to know
one another like in Wikipedia,
or you might have a very, almost
an anonymous type of interaction
where all I know about you is that you've just outbid me.
And how am I going to react to that?
So I think social
media, the way I
think of the term, has to
do with people actually having
a rich communication among them.
Right?
So, Wikipedia, it's not
all social media but for example the talk pages.
Yeah.
Are purely social media.
Whereas an in eBay auction,
I wouldn't call that social media.
Okay.
So it's actually a scale and
you can say it's more or less social.
Yes, yes.
You know, and you
can imagine that you know,
you could take an online auction system.
I don't know to what extent eBay does this.
I haven't looked at it in a while.
But you can imagine creating some
kind of online community of customers
who are, say, interested in, you know,
some type of art that they collect through eBay.
And so you might have
little place where there's, you know,
very rich social interaction.
That would be social media.
But then you have other niches:
the auction where people go in,
and they're anonymous, and all you do is bid, right?
So you can compose
all these different things together depending
on the type of interaction you want to support.
Yeah.
Can you pick out one main goal of social computing?
Well for me the main goal
is in face
to face situations at least in
the ones that work well.
They're interesting.
They have a life to them.
They give a bit of energy.
They have some spontaneity.
To me, they're, you know,
a good face to face situation,
where you're with people and things are happening.
It's just energizing and alive
and it's, I think
something that's very fundamentally human, right.
At the base we are social
creatures and we get something
from that interaction and so,
I guess, when I think
of the sort of primary goal
for social computing, it's to
create online places or
applications or even services,
call them what you may, that
have some of that life to them.
That you know, is fundamental to being human.
Can you give us some examples of
some of the methods and
theories you use to approach this goal?
Let's start with the theory.
I draw on a couple areas of theory.
One is actually, for
a couple of decades I've been
very interested in urban design.
And then also there's a
body of anthropology that studies
behavior in public places.
So perhaps the best,
most famous example of this
is William White who wrote a couple of books.
So, one called The Social Life of
Small Urban Spaces and then
a larger book that includes
that actually, called City, Return
to the Center.
And White looked very closely
at how people interacted in
public spaces and he
observed a lot of interesting
things that I think have
direct applicability to online systems.
So, one thing he talked about, he called triangulation.
And by triangulation, what
he meant is, something would
happen in a public
space that would cause
2 people who didn't know one another, to start talking.
Right?
So it might be
walking down the street and
seeing a juggler, or somebody
walking a new puppy down the street.
That often get people
to stop and, oh what a
nice puppy, and there's a
focus for the interaction and there's
a reason for people to approach and begin talking.
So that's one
example of that type of work.
In addition to,
so there's, so urban designers
think a lot about how to
structure spaces so that
they can support that kind of interaction.
There is a Danish architect
by the name of Jan Gehl
who has a book
called Life Between Buildings and
he has some very interesting ways
of thinking about public space.
He designed things and
he thinks about things in
terms of interactive radiuses.
So he talks about
how far, he talks
about a radius. He says
if you're within this distance,
let's say it's 50 meters, I
don't remember what his numbers
are, you'll be able
to notice somebody
that you weren't expecting to see,
but you know.
If you go into a place looking
for somebody whom you expect
to know, you can see them
at a longer distance, maybe, you know, 150 meters.
And so he looks at
spaces in terms of the
types of interactions they might
support and how close you
would have to be to get that interaction.
So that's another interesting
way of thinking about
designing either face to
face situations or online spaces
which is, what do you
have to provide to make
a particular type of interaction possible.
And in urban settings,
what you want is, you want
a space to afford many different types of interactions.
Right?
So a good public
square for example has places
where people can meet one another.
Right?
I'll meet you by the big clock.
Or I'll meet you by the statue of so and so.
Can you translate that to a social computing system?
A very good question.
Often you can't.
But you might well
want to. So, certainly
there are 3D online environment like
set up life, right? So
now we can't say let's go
into second life and here is,
you know, the second life
URL that we can meet at.
Or, you know, if we build
the environment, yes meet by
the upside down purple pyramid.
So that's one thing.
To go further back in history,
looking at things like IRC, right?
So you could agree to
meet somebody in a particular
IRC channel at a particular time.
So you can do that.
Or an online community
where you have, you know, general
conferences and withing conferences you have topics.
Right?
Oh, let's go and talk in this topic.
Okay.
So if we take a
step back, how did
research into social computing start?
Are you asking about the field in general or?
Yeah, the field in general.
Well, I would trace it back
to I guess the study of online communities.
I mean, you know, social computing is a relatively recent term.
I don't know exactly when it
started but certainly not
as a name that
people used commonly before the
late '90s at the earliest.
But, you know
computing in the sense that you
have systems that are trying to
support social behavior among their
users and to make that
behavior either produce
useful things or make it
useful on it's own.
That certainly goes way back to online communities.
I think the earliest
online community, back then
they called it computer conferencing, was
Murray Turoff's system used
in the U.S. in the '70s.
And that was a private system
actually used to administer the U.S.
wage and price control freeze of
the Nixon era.
So that probably was
not social computing, that was
just a bunch of policy people
trying to sort of regulate things. But
not long after that, you
saw the emergence of more
public online communities, I don't think
I can pull the history out of
my head, but there were some early chat communities.
Turoff went on and
built a system called Eyes
of the New Jersey Institute of Technology.
There was a system called
Planet by Folks at
the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto.
There was something at Michigan.
So back
in late '70s, early '80s, there were a
lot of online communities emerging and
certainly that's where you can
see the beginning of what I'd call social computing research.
Because you have lots
of people, they're interacting and you're
trying to understand what on earth is going on?
And you start to see the beginnings of people self organizing.
Or people, orself-organizations fragmenting.
So you have the emergence of flaming.
Right?
And, you know, various types
of cyber vandalism where
people are sort of working
counter to online order.
So I think it all
goes back to that era.
Thank you so much, Tom for
sharing some of your knowledge and perspective on social computing.
It's been very interesting.
You're most welcome.
It's a great pleasure.
Thanks.
If you want to know more
about how to put these insights
into use when you're actually
designing interactive products, you
should have a look at our second interview with Tom.
You could also take a look
at the chapter he has written
at patronactiondesign.org, and you
also could find other videos
and other chapters written by other important leaders and inventors.
Thanks for watching.