Graduating on the Installment Plan

Stine Gotved is a sociologist specializing in cyberculture. She received a PhD from UCLA and was a visiting scholar at MIT, and she currently resides in her native Denmark. Originally an academic , she has since left the field for consulting, citing the state of academic research as “gone from bad to worse.”

Her research focuses on ”the interplay between humans, new communication technology, and workplace culture,” and it includes investigations of on online fan communities built around J.R.R. Tolkien’s fiction.

Her LinkedIn profile can be found here.

Gotved contends that, despite the robust corpus of qualitative research on online communities, there is still a long way to go toward wrapping our heads around the ways that we behave in cyberspace.  In response, she attempts to fill the vacuum with a triangular model of cybersocial reality that incorporates dimensions of actor-network theory, time, and space.

Similar to Turkle, Gotved sees little need for a distinction between on- and offline realities; the one informs the other. In fact, Gotved notes that, “although the design takes its departure from the need to know more about the online part in particular, all the categories could be use in a systematic approach to offline life as well.”


Basic Triangle

The first iteration of Gotved’s triangle is formed by combining the following three influences:

• Culture:  This element represents the values that individuals and groups bring to their interactions in cyberspace; it symbolizes the “fluid processes of meaning and commonality.” Culture plays a role in the unity we feel online (think music message boards) as well as the tensions (think the flames directed at this post pointed out by Nancy Baym).
• Structure: The shape of the technology, the interface, and the hierarchies embodied online are elements of structure. Netiquette and protocol arises at the intersection with culture.
• Interaction: Gotved uses this feature of cybersocial reality as the base of her triangle, and it includes interactions between humans and machines in any combination. Gotved grants computers in the network the same agency as human users.

Adding Time to the Triangle

The next iteration of Gotved’s triangle adds the dimension of time, situating the basic categories within the following temporal categories:

• Meaning: This section is layered over culture, and it represents the “processes and memories of those processes.” The way that we interact online has a lot to do with our history with the medium (newbies, oldies).
• Orientation: This section is layered over structure, and it represents the way that time’s influence changes in cyberspace. Communication travels immediately across the “flattened” landscape online. The technology we use changes how we experience time in online spaces (archives, IM, Skype all may relay the same message, but at different rates).
• Regulation: This section is layered over interaction, and it represents “time’s primary role in interaction.”  Just as time is a fundamental factor in how we communicate (Good morning!) offline, so it is online. Everything from the speeds of our connections to the length of time between responses in online communications influences our interactions.

Adding Space to the Triangle

The three original categories are once more extended into the dimension of space:

• Re/construction: This is “the spatial dimension of culture,” and it manifests in the metaphors that we use to communicate in and about cyberspace. We think about cyberspace as if it were a physical space, and we use spatial metaphors to describe it.
• Visibility:  This section is layered over structure and orientation, and it represents the actual space of the interface, software, and screen. The way we experience an online environment is impacted by the real estate through which we interact with and view it. This blog looks different on an iPhone browser than it does on a laptop, and it “feels” different with a mouse than with a keypad.
• Practice: This section describes the spatial considerations that impact online interactions, including notions of proximity and hierarchy. Cyberspace collapses the physical spaces between participants, but we can still experience distance (see that building waaaay over there?).

The complete triangle looks like this:

This just in: Great slidedeck from Gotved’s presentation on this material can be downloaded from this page.

Morville examines the challenges of maintaining accessible design in the miasma of ambient advertising on the Web, giving special attention to the “push and pull” that accompany designing for the competing needs of consumers and marketers.

• Push describes the efforts of advertisers to propel their goods, ideas, and services into the consumer’s focus. This can be done tastefully, as in the sponsored advertisements that Google generates and discretely displays among results based on the user’s keyword searches, or it can manifest as ultra-pushy spam and pop-ups.

• Pull, conversely, describes the consumer’s ability to choose the information that occupies their focus . It might be accomplished through product search on Amazon.com or via proactively following breadcrumb-like links toward desired offerings.

“In the absence of push, we lose our inspiration for pull”

Although the dichotomy of push/pull seems to imply opposition, Moreville argues that they are interdependent concepts that accentuate the user experience when they work in concert. When we subscribe to the push of RSS feeds or mailing lists, we “assume the cost of noise in return for the value of signal” and use the same filtering skills that we use in daily offline conversation to pull the relevant bits to the forefront.

So, even if we shrink from the pushiest calls for our attention, we need a bit of unsolicited motivation to guide us toward interesting content in the nearly infinite marketplace made possible by the Web. Moreville points out that modern consumers have increased buying power, information, and variety online, and successful sellers must respond to the new shape of the market by making their offerings more usable (pull!), not just more visible (push!).

“Today’s attention economy requires a…new balance between push and pull”

Moreville describes the tension between marketers and designers in the “attention economy” of the Web. Efforts to push an idea forward can hit a point where they frustrate users and drive them away from the message. Regardless of how attractive the image, the experience is ultimately responsible for the user’s impressions; in fact, Moreville says that “the only time [the users] really notice our site is when they become lost or stuck.”

This being the case, usability is a fundamental component of an effective push for consumer attention. Users are going to beat feet if they don’t have a way to pull what they already want from your site. A successful application of the push/pull dynamic means that the offering is made easy to find when the user reaches for it and easy to use when they’ve grabbed it.

“Findability isn’t limited to pull”

Though making the content easy to find when users go looking for it is important, Moreville says that it’s no good to sit quietly and wait for your offerings to be found. Personalizing your messages can be an effective way to snag consumer attention by tailoring the message to target their interests and needs. Personalized push is most successful when it targets needs that are static and shallow, as in weather reports aimed at the user’s Zip Code, or when it is based on metrics derived from longstanding relationships with the user, as in product suggestions based on rental histories on Netflix.

In other instances, it can be challenging due to factors such as ambiguities of behavior, time, and language. If I search for MMA, should I be targeted with ads for kickboxing gyms, fight tickets, or the Massachusetts Municipal Association?

Moreville comments that “we are increasingly able to control our experiences and focus our attention.” This is to say that we are learning to pull more effectively and better filter the push, thereby giving the most findable resources on the Web, those resources that come to us most ably when we pull for them, the advantage.