John Tang discussed the importance of social cues for negotiating contact in computer-mediated communication [1]. In face-to-face situations, people use subtle social protocols and cues (e.g., gaze) to initiate and terminate conversations. Such cues are often poorly supported by computer-mediated communication tools. Recently, a common approach has been to provide automatic presence information to facilitate the initiation phase.
Tang recognizes that the social cues are also important for successfully avoiding conversations. For this purpose, automatic presence information can be overriden manually. For example, I can set my presence status to "away" if I'm not in the mood for conversations.
The problem with the manual presence status is that it is too explicit. It can be considered rude to have the presence status as "away" most of the time. In contrast, face-to-face situations allow more polite and graceful avoidance of conversations. Further, in face-to-face situations we can regulate our availability selectively - I might be available for some people but not for others.
The importance of faking availability was also discussed by Raento and Oulasvirta [2]. They listed ability to lie as one of their design principles for social awareness applications. This was also supported by Hancock et al. [3]. They conclude that lying is an important social practice for regulating conversation availability in instant messaging.
Feel free to discuss. Unless I'm busy.
[1] John C. Tang. 2007. Approaching and leave-taking: Negotiating contact in computer-mediated communication. ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact. 14, 1, Article 5.
[2] Mika Raento and Antti Oulasvirta. 2008. Designing for privacy and self-presentation in social awareness. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing 12, 7, pp. 527-542.
[3] Jeff Hancock, Jeremy Birnholtz, Natalya Bazarova, Jamie Guillory, Josh Perlin, and Barrett Amos. 2009. Butler lies: awareness, deception and design. In Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI '09), pp. 517-526.
I think this is a very important topic. People tend to put their status as busy or away even when they are in the computer doing nothing, this can be annoying for other users and create some tension or unhappiness.
ReplyDeleteIn Facebook is possible to be offline one group and online in other group which is quite handy, similar to what you comment about being available for some people but not for others. In any case, this can bring problems if other person finds out the typical "Why you talk to him and not to me?".
A good post. I wrote a post about the possible benefits of distance, and apparently I was slightly wrong: The importance of "antisociality" has been studied and supported also in HCI-research (now that I think of it, how could it not have been). I must look into these.
ReplyDeleteBut my question is still relevant: Is it possible achieve better results (in work) with virtual tools that "allow" us more freedom of behavior?