bjbjq Rikke: In this interview, we re going to meet Tom Erikson. Tom is an IT Interaction
designer and researcher at the IBM Watson lab in New York and he s working in the social
computing group. s been here since 1997 and before that, he worked for Apple for 9 years.
So Tom is actually the ideal person to tell us about social computing. So Tom, can you
tell us, isn t it easier to manipulate people on the online world than it is in the offline
world? Tom: In fact, let me give one of my favorite examples. This is not an online system
but I take a lot of examples from just an ordinary face-to-face interactions. So think
about how elections work. I presume Europe is very similar to the US in this regard.
When I go in to vote, I go into a polling place. There is a room, there are usually
three people or a organizing people, and then you come in, they give you a ballot out in
public, you walk over and there are booths. You go to the booth and it has sides so they
can t see who you re voting for. But on the other hand, the booth doesn t totally block
you out. Typically the sides only come down to about knee level, right? So you can look
and see whether the booth is occupied, and then you can look and see if there is only
one person in the booth. You finished voting, you come out, and you put your ballot in the
ballot box, which is out in public view. People can see that you re just putting in one ballot
not two or three, right? People can see in the voting booth that you are alone and therefore
not being influenced by someone else. One of the things that I think is very interesting
in designing system is how you mix visibility and privacy to achieve simple results. Because
you can have an invalid election if I say I m being forced to a particular way, or you
can have an invalid election if I can put or stuff the ballot box with multiple ballots.
So you design the system very carefully to support the process that you re doing with
it. Rikke: How would you check, translate that to a social computing system? Tom: Well
for example, it depends on what you are trying to do. Let s imagine that you have some online
system where you want to make some decisions or you want to brainstorm. There is some tests
that we know that works a bit better when you re anonymous. Example, brainstorming tends
to work together or better if people are mutually anonymous, because that suppresses the concerns
about looking stupid or saying something that somebody who is more powerful than you will
say. So we can imagine the system where you go in, and you brainstorm a bunch of ideas
and at that point, you are anonymous. Then, at some point maybe, you move to another phase
where people are identified. Then you have some discussions about some of the ideas and
try to integrate them and say, how do these fit together and what do you think of this
and so on and so forth. That s just one example of how you might have a system where in one
phase it s useful to be anonymous, in another phase it s useful to be identified. Rikke:
But I guess in the online world it would be easier to manipulate people because you can
hide things. Cause in the election process I can see, ok that s only one person, but
I guess you could cheat a little bit in the online space, couldn t you? Tom: You could,
right, and that s an interesting design decision. There s a difference between persuasion and
shaping behavior and manipulation. I think one of the key differences is how visible
you make the intention, right? So, if to me manipulation has to do with deceit. You re
not being up front on what you are doing. But if I just sit down and you know that I
m going to try to persuade you about something, that seems fair. If I instead try to secretly
bring you to a particular opinion without letting you know I m doing that, now that
s manipulation. Rikke: And it could be raising the bids also, in an auction. Tom: Yeah exactly,
and note that this stuff happens in real auctions too, so there is a concern about they have
the term showing. Rikke: Yah, cause it s easier to see in a real auction, like you can t put
the same person in all the time. It s more difficult in the real world you can say, because
they have to have lots of people coming in there and cheat. Tom: Yes. That s true. Rikke:
So it s easy a little bit in there, in the online world, I guess. Tom: It depends how
you design the system. Certainly, in a public internet systems which to become an active
member of the system all you need is an email address. I can have ten email addresses. It
s very easy to get them. There is a great paper by a guy whose name I can never remember
and Paul Resnick, called the Social Cost of Cheap Pseudonyms. It basically made the argument
that one of the problems that we have on online systems is that it s so easy to get an email
address and therefore get a new identity. So you don t need to take care of your identity
because you can draw the one and get another one. So, one solution to this might be to
provide identities that are more extensive or make it harder to get a second identity.
Sometimes this happens naturally. Somebody say gets onto Wikipedia or you re a seller
on eBay and after you are there for a while and you ve read a bunch of articles and made
some friends, or develop a reputation as a vendor of quality products, then you start
caring about your identity and you re going to be more reluctant to do something that
damages it. On the other hand, if you are there the first time, or maybe you just have
the take the chance on the person, and your taking a big chance because they don t have
anything invested on their identity. And that s some of the points of the cheap pseudonyms
paper makes, when identities are cheap, they are not as useful. Rikke: Do you have any
interesting or funny war stories of users finding out that they have actually been manipulated
on purpose? Tom: Yes, there are a couple of stories on that identity topic. Both of these
come from Babble. In the early days of Babble, we were just using it in my group at the IBM
and so we all knew one another. We had talks about things that were not deeply private,
things that we re looking as we have public talks about. And then one day, somebody new
showed up on Babble and I can t remember the name, but it just has some a generic name.
It threw us into consternation because we thought somebody new had hacked into babble.
One of the things that made babble a bit different from ordinary chat system is that the chat
stayed around forever. So somebody hacked in, and they could see everything we had ever
talked about there. Besides just being unhappy about somebody had hacked in, we were like,
oh my goodness what have we said? What is that person going to be reading? Well it turns
out that the chief programmer had, during the middle of the night decided, it would
be fun to create a bot. So it was just the bot logging in. The bot would log in to babble
and if somebody was there and nobody else was, it would say hello. He thought that would
be friendlier. And instead, it caused a little bit of a ruckus. Rikke: Yes, I can imagine.
So thank you very much Tom for sharing some of your knowledge and perspective on social
computing. It s been very interesting. And you can also of course read the chapter Tom
has written at HYPERLINK "http://www.interaction-design.org" www.interaction-design.org . Here, you can
find similar chapters all written by though leaders and inventors and you can find videos
like this one as well. Thanks for watching. Social Computing Visibility versus http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kB-FYnUk6F0
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