9/24 Reading

Chapter Four of Design to Thrive is constructed in a way so you understand what remuneration, the title of the chapter, is and why it is important. Howard provides a basic definition of this term: “the commonsense observation that individuals remain members of a social network when there is a clear benefit for doing so.” In other words, what makes someone stick to a social networking site or community? What makes them want to come back, rather than abandon the site completely and never return? It’s a simple concept, with complex undertones. According to Howard, it’s the experience.

Remuneration as a user experience. Howard brings up the user experience because remuneration is very much invested in this topic. When comparing the search engine AltaVista to Google, the two engines are extremely different in terms of page functionality. AltaVista had “an excessive range of entry point options” while Google capitalized on the simplicity of one entry point.

Remuneration does not equal functionality or the business model. I thought this was another important section to highlight. The experience doesn’t take into account the millions of coding behind the site itself therefore Howard’s point: “functionality is not a sufficient condition for remuneration.” The user is usually preoccupied with what they are getting out of the site, rather than what goes in to create the site which is why remuneration is such a separate facet when talking about successful (or unsuccessful) websites: it’s all about the user.

Howard provides a useful checklist of twelve techniques in this chapter which go as follows: 1) make the text editor fun; add emoticons, 2) use a subscription application form, 3) mentors teach, 4) seed the discussion, 5) use stars to show membership contribution levels, 6) rank the value of members’ messages, 7) remove the fear factor by providing examples of how to participate, 8) create a safe environment by sending out “tickle” messages, 9) create a regular event, 10) don’t automatically archive, 11) discourage attempts to send conversation to other blogs, Web sites, or discussion groups, 12) ban redistribution servers and cross-posting

The one I identified with the most with was technique number 5 about membership contribution levels. In high school my friends and I create an online forum where we would discuss certain topics like games and movies. (When I say “my friends and I” I really mean I butted into the group as the only girl because I wanted to be a part of the “guys group” that my friends created!) Anyway, we were ranked on contribution levels and I remember posting on everything, all the time, just being the most annoying person ever to catch up to their levels. (Essentially, a "troll"!)

9/17 Reading

“Technology Changes Rapidly; Humans Don’t” is the titled of Chapter 8 of Howard’s Design to Thrive where he takes a look at how “social networks and online communities have the potential to effect economic, political, and social changes far beyond the expectations of their designers, and that kind of “success” can ironically threaten the sustainability of a community (199).

Howard points us to the social networking site, Twitter, in an attempt to demonstrate the unseen power that its founders did not anticipate: Evan Williams, co-founder and CEO of Twitter, said to his colleagues that he “never anticipated the many, many uses which would evolve from this simple system.” Williams founded the site as a way in which friends could share updates with other friends but as Howard points out, the 2009 Iranian election protests were all over Twittersphere from disgruntled native protesters and Western support. The political sphere was so affected that “the U.S. State Department asked Twitter to delay shutting down the service for a scheduled maintenance event in order to continue to allow Iranians to continue to share information on the system…”

It is interesting to see the predictions made by Turnoff and Hiltz in the 70s under the Nixon administration where they worked to build EMISARY pertaining to emergency preparedness. As Howard writes, “In hindsight, Hiltz and Turoff’s predictions were mind-bogglingly prophetic.” As the title of the chapter says, technology changes rapidly, so they weren’t thinking about that per say, but more the drive of human need for communication and how evolving technology would facilitate that need.

Howard then talks of past in order that we may better look ahead, particularly pricing. In the past, books were reserved for the “uber-wealthy,” the ones that could pay for them. With the printing press, reduced costs of materials, and others, literacy became wide-spread. With this too, brings the origins of copyrights and other restrictive actions.

A glance in the future brings us four areas of consideration: 1) copyright and intellectual property 2) disciplinary control vs individual creativity 3) visual, technological, and new media literacies and 4) decision-making contexts for future markets.

“Communities and networks of the future will need to market themselves based on their ability to help members make more creative and better-informed decisions rather than the size of their use base.”

The importance and significance of RIBS is not only in past and present, but rooted in the future as we head towards the unknown of technological bounds. He mentions that the it will be the quality of user experience that will replace the quantity of connections as the measure of success. We can already see this statement today. I had a Myspace a long time ago, and so did many others. I never log on anymore because there is nothing I can get off of it that I find useful or worth my time. Networkers need to acknowledge the user in which their community/network is being built around, in order to not only draw them in, but keep them coming.

9/10 Reading

Chapter 6 of Made to Stick is entitled “Stories,” a chapter that’s based on the appeal of stories and how exactly they operate and succeed within our mind. On page 206 Heath and Heath write, “The story’s power, then, is twofold: It provides simulation (knowledge about how to act) and inspiration (motivation to act).”

Shop Talk in the Xerox Lunchroom was particularly significant for me as I describe in the next paragraph following this one. The excerpt they provide from the shop talk itself is humorous because it demonstrates a very different atmosphere, a very specific one. The authors were gracious enough to provide explanatory comments in brackets so we, a very general audience, could follow the point of the story and why it was even a story. The misleading E053 error is one that could have been sent out through the company’s email system, notifying workers of this specific error but that would have not have had the same effect as this transfer of information through means of storytelling. Because the tellers had those around them that could follow along easily, they chose to make it interesting and entertaining by including the troublesome error and how they went about finding the problem and eventually fixing it, “in other words, this story is party entertainment and part instruction” (208).

What really struck me about the Shop Talk section is the statement on page 207, “We want to talk to other people about the things that we have in common.” I instantly thought of English majors at Clemson University. One thing I like about this department is that it’s small enough to where you see the same people throughout your four (ish) years here: classmates and professors! (Whether that’s a good or bad thing is up to debate..!) I’ve talked to so many classmates about professors at Clemson, and they know and can actually visualize the professors and their mannerisms. This makes us a small community in a large university.

There is a mental simulation that initiates in an audience that is hearing the story.  Heath and Heath include a study done by researchers on UCLA students concerning stressful times in their lives asking different groups to envision different time periods pertaining to the stress. Those that looked back and simulated past events to move forward, came out the most positive and the most prepared. Mental simulation works in different ways: helps us manage emotions, helps with problem-solving, and can also build skills. (213).

“The takeway is simple: Mental simulation is not as good as actually doing something, but it’s the next best thing” (213).

What I took away from Jared’s story is that the success came from these key aspects: Simple (eat subs and lose weight), Unexpected (a guy lost a ton of weight by eating fast food!), Concrete (think of the oversized pants..), Credible (same kind of antiauthority truthfulness that we saw with the Pam Laffin antismoking campaign, Emotional (we care more about an individual than a mass), and it’s a story (our protagonist overcomes big odds to triumph). (222-223)

9/3 Reading

In Chapter 3 of Gillin’s Secrets, he divulges his best ways in finding certain topics entangled in the World Wide Web. On page 41 he states, “The first step to social media engagement is social media awareness. That means learning what’s being said about your company, people and products.” It’s easier said than done though. I, for one, wasn’t aware that Google indexes less than 20% of the web (42). I assumed, like probably most of the rest of the population, that Google was the end all be all of website search engines.

Gillin does a great job in communicating how to search effectively on the web. By mainly using one particular topic surrounding Quebec, Canada, he is able to walk us through all the different sites and ways we could go about finding information on this one particular location. He also points out that sometimes it’s not about where you do your searching, but how you are phrasing your search. For example: using italics and searching “best Quebec hotels” gives you a measly 7 results on Google in comparison to the 2.3 million results when you lose the italics.

It is also interesting to the see how some of the most popular social bookmarking sites aren’t even the most functional. It’s all about user opinions though as Gillin points out with the bookmarking site Del.icio.us on page 55.

Chapter 3 of Howard’s Design to Thrive is entitled “Why Invest in Social Networks and Online Communities?” He starts by giving ten reasons as to why you should build these social networks and communities and then going into more detail of each one as the chapter progresses.

On page 30 he discusses the point: enhance and sustain intellectual capital. This section struck me because it was exactly something I had just been a part of, but didn’t think twice about. In that section he talks of a problem he was faced with where he was able to log into his closed, private community of professionals pertaining to usability testing and user experience design in order to obtain valuable solutions from his colleagues in a very short amount of time thus saving him (and his client) time and money.

That situation reminds me of the time where I was in the process of changing phones and wanted to be able to use a certain phone with a certain company. From an open online forum, I was able to pour over mountains of data in order to learn about the differences between unlocking and jailbreaking, as well as the crucial differences between carriers that ran off GSM or CDMA. The data I was able to take in proved useful as it helped me make the best cost efficient decision for my cell phone and what kind of future it would have.