Designing the Situation: social display and social control

If you're one of the two or three people familiar with this blog, you might've noticed my preoccupation with the idea that we're often guided by social display considerations when using social functionality. Now, I'm not saying that we interact with each other only when there's social gain available. Our motivational schedule is incredibly complex and has yet to be adequately deciphered. Rather, the suggestion is that social perception considerations both motivate and constrain our actions to some extent. Basically, the fact that we care what people think when they can see what we do and how we do it impacts our behavior. That's obvious. The interesting question is what this means for design: what do the factors impacting social display – visibility of behavior; presumed "quality" of audience; knowledge of principles of evaluation; and knowledge of appropriate behaviors – mean for social functionality design?

Goffman and social display

Erving Goffman's classic takes on "defining the situation" and "face" more or less provide the popular understanding of social display. When interacting with others, we often negotiate the framing of the situation and the appropriate roles within that frame, hoping to settle on one that's somehow beneficial or preferred. We also strive to maintain beneficial and consistent roles across interactions, presenting a singular, valuable "face". So, from this simplified "Goffmanian" angle, we can say social display is about negotiating and maintaining preferred or valuable definitions and roles in interaction situations.

But a recognized limitation of Goffman's take is that it downplays the "macro" factors impacting interaction, i.e. imposed institutions, norms, etc. That is, it explicitly focuses on individual choice, leaving the factors constraining the choice of definition and role largely implicit or absent. But clearly we don't negotiate from scratch. We negotiate available or appropriate definitions, our choice set limited by imposed institutions, social conventions, and even the larger-scale normative frames embedding this specific negotiation.

Thus, insofar as display is about defining and maintaining a somehow beneficial social image but the means of doing so are bounded by the social/institutional/normative context, "design" of this context of interaction is important. When discussing social functionality, it's essential.

Social Control

Our deep desire for social display – i.e. "defining the situation" and maintaining "face" in Goffman's popular terminology – provides plenty of opportunities for designers. As it relates to social functionality design, display has two parts: expression and feedback. "Expression" names the tools, conventions and mechanisms by which the user acts, while "feedback" identifies the tools others use to express evaluation of the action, impose sanctions, etc. Here we're interested in how feedback constrains or impacts expression, how the expression behavior in social display is impacted by the afforded feedback behavior.

Institutional design is the branch of political science that studies how different sets of constraints and incentives structure and guide behavior in social interactions. These incentives and constraints often result in what we can call social control, the behavioral control arising from social obligations, expectations, norms, and positive/negative social sanctions. Whether we realize it or not, there's an element of "institutional design" in social functionality design: when we design for social interaction, we implicitly or explicitly impose obligations, incentives, sanctions, and many other means of social control. For example, we impose roles (e.g. sender/receiver); prime or engage norms (e.g. reciprocation via "likes"); and often provide sanctioning mechanisms (e.g. voting up / down, liking, commenting, etc.).

You can't design for social display without at least implicitly designing in social control. They're wickedly interdependent; use of expression mechanisms is fundamentally shaped by the behavior afforded by feedback mechanisms. Understanding that they're related and how they interact is key to designing good social functionality. "Operationalizing" these ideas for design, however, requires a good bit of fudging. Adapting (no doubt to their dismay) Geoffrey Brennan and Philip Pettit's work on the "economy of esteem", we can say that there are four major factors impacting social control through display.

Probability of visibility or publicity
The fact that somebody could see what you do, say, post, etc. significantly impacts your behavior. Whether you want to admit it or not, the potential for public scrutiny often changes your behavior, and, up to a limit, the more scrutiny the greater the change in behavior.

"Quality" of observers
Who happens to be the likely observer also impacts behavior. What you're willing to share with your friends on Facebook is often different from what you're willing to share with your colleagues on LinkedIn. Our behavior tends to shift across intended audiences, often depending on more or less informal social categorization schemes, e.g. friends, colleagues, fellow numismatists, etc.

Knowledge of "values" or principles of evaluation
We tend to tailor our behavior to fit presumed standards against which we'll be judged. The criteria of appropriate or estimable behavior varies between your professional blog and your pro-ana support group. Knowledge of the values "held" by the different groups gives you a more or less standard measures of your behavior.

Knowledge of appropriate behaviors
But understanding the principles against which our behavior is judged won't help much if you're new or otherwise clueless. In that case, you just need to know the appropriate behaviors, the actual behavioral norms in line with which you should act. Presumably, these will be reinforced by and consistent with the values. Most value systems, however, are "behaviorally degenerate", that is any number of actual behavioral patterns could "instantiate" the principles. So, knowing the actual behavioral ground rules is important to garnering the esteem (or avoiding the disesteem) promised by the principles, at least until the values undergirding the behavioral norms are somehow understood.

Clearly, designers have an impact on these factors. Design affects the potential visibility of every action, both through feature-level decisions (are user contributions by default publicly viewable or restricted to confirmed contacts?) and through strategic product decisions (is it about broadcast or narrowcast?). Similarly, design impacts audience "quality" insofar as the product may afford topic-based group formation; be focused on a narrow pursuit or interest; or provide light means of contact categorization. Similarly, the product can be "framed" more or less suggestively, automatically bringing to bear salient norms, roles, and corresponding values. Finally, we can design to make appropriate and inappropriate behavior more or less obvious, salient, valuable, and visible via various moderation and promotion mechanisms.

Social control = structural and normative control

So we have four big factors impacting design for social control. But they don't all seem to be the same sort of thing. That is, it seems like we have two different types of factors in our list. The first two – visibility of behavior and "quality" of observers – are pretty straightforwardly about the structure of the interaction space. They're primarily about how widely behavior is seen and by whom. The other two – principles of evaluation and behavioral norms – are fuzzier, properly "normative" factors. They're about what ought to get done or what's appropriate. Thus, I'll call the first two structural control factors and the last two normative control factors.

The relation between them is up for debate, but I prefer to see it as below.


Visibility and quality aren't opposites or poles on a continuum. You can have high membership and absolute visibility of behavior – meaning enormous publicity, which assumes all actions can be seen – yet still allow some sort of audience-quality control – users can expressly target a subgroup as intended audience. So I'll take visibility and quality to define a structural control design space within which you can plot the product. The focus may be on exclusivity – small audience / limited visibility but very high audience quality – or wide-open, general socialization – large audience / high visibility and little audience-quality control – or any combination of the two (although a low-quality, low-visibility product seems really hard to imagine).

But where your product falls in the structural control space suggests different available approaches to normative control. That is, the sort of structural control you want to design for suggests the sort of normative control focus you should pursue. High visibility / large audience but low audience-quality focus (northwest of the center diagonal in the image) suggests you should skew your normative control focus toward the behavioral: e.g. incentives, sanctions, and various invasive moderation techniques. At the other extreme, low visibility / small audience but high audience-quality focus (southeast of the center diagonal) suggests your normative control design should focus on shared principles or already existing "value systems": e.g. domain exclusivity, framing effects, and structural "assortativity" (for example, allowing users to select subgroups as intended audiences). Between these poles lies a tunable design space, the focus in the middle being equal between behavioral and principle-based control.

So… what now?

Too often in my business (UX design) we focus on whatever happens to work without trying to make sense of why it works or how it all might fit together. This model tries to address the important but often neglected fact that behavior is strongly motivated by social display and that the context of interaction impacts the means and quality of social display. If harnessed, the drive for social display can be great for your product, but it can also tear a social space apart if it isn't understood, channeled, ordered, or allowed to mature organically in a space providing the means for bottom-up norm negotiation. This model tries to articulate a way of thinking about design for social display: from where your product plots in the structural control design space, you can figure out the best means of normative control, mapped to more or less well understood patterns and mechanisms. In future posts I may return to this model, provide some case studies and provide more concrete suggestions.

Nice For a Price: esteem as a social incentive

Daily, enormous numbers of people interact in digitally mediated social groups. They usually behave prosocially, that is, they generally play nice with each other, often cooperate and sometimes even collaborate in the creation of a social good. As a result there's a lot of discussion around the sorts of stable social contracts groups can coordinate on; how new tools and designs for getting together impact and are impacted by these possible social contracts; and what sorts of incentives or motivations individuals have to play nice in the first place given that cooperating isn’t necessarily as easy, cheap or materially profitable as being a jerk.

This (way too long) post is all about motivations to join a group and act collectively. It’s the second post in a series (first one) trying to show that the recent focus on the deeply social or other-regarding nature of social and collective action groups online is too one-sided, simplistic and, frankly, ideological. Certainly we’re social animals with frequently benevolent motivations. But that doesn’t mean that we’ve no self-centered, broadly (as opposed to narrowly or materially) rational motivations. Extrinsic incentives, which we scheme to “maximize” in our limited way, abound in social situations. However, they’re mostly non-material things like esteem – the positive evaluation of your actions by the norm-based standards of your group – and status – deferential position in a social group. These are real motivations. Even Yochai Benkler, a genuine web utopianist, mentions them briefly in his Wealth of Networks. He says in passing that they’re part of our real motivational repertoire. But generally these issues are treated as either a dirty secret or beside the point. They’re neither. We need to really look at how these inescapable self-regarding motivations can help us be more prosocial and not just blame them when we’re antisocial.

Since it’s the most completely worked out account of the effects of social functionality on group creation and maintenance, I’ll focus on Clay Shirky’s excellent Here Comes Everybody. Smart as he is, I’m sure he understands the point about the value of broadly instrumental motivations for prosocial behavior. But the hero of his book is the genuine prosociality of humans freed from the limitations of “real world” organizational overhead by digital social functionality. And though he addresses self-serving, antisocial behavior like disinhibition and free-riding, he avoids talk of self-interested, extrinsic motivations for collective action almost entirely, focusing instead on intrinsic motivations such as vanity, self-esteem, true interest in the public good and simple innate pro-sociality. I agree with most of his conclusions, I just think he left out a huge factor that should inform thinking and design around online sociality.

Two Motivation Problems

There are two big problems of motivation here that are conceptually, but probably not practically, separable. First, there’s the motivation connected to the collective good some group’s trying to bring about, say, a high-quality, UGC encyclopedia like Wikipedia. Second, there’s the motivation to play nice, to make your contribution to the collective good you value in a way that the group approves of, like sticking to citable facts as opposed to stating an opinion when adding to a Wikipedia entry.

Riffing on a very useful distinction made by Clay Shirky in his latest book, we can divide our motivations between the group’s promise, whatever collective good or goal it’s trying to achieve, and the bargain, or the social contract within or through which the goal is to be achieved (he also distinguishes the tools, or the actual functionality the group employs to achieve the promise, but that’s for a different post). For Shirky, if you care about the goal embedded in the promise – e.g. collectively create a quality, UGC encyclopedia – and consider it actually attainable as it’s implicitly “stated,” then you’ll be motivated to contribute. Indeed, Shirky explicitly considers motivation only in regard to the promise: “The promise is the essential piece, the thing that convinces a potential user to become an actual user.”

In practice, it’s not so easy to separate the promise from the bargain. But in theory we can say that the promise is normatively degenerate. That is, you can achieve the promise through a variety of bargains. Although the details of the bargain have a huge impact on the viability of the promise, you could theoretically develop a quality, UGC encyclopedia without the exact same contributor/editor structure or implicit/explicit rule sets operating on Wikipedia. Again, they’re theoretically separable but probably not practically separable; it’s most likely the case that people don’t even know they “have” a goal or value the content of the promise until it’s articulated to them via the specific implicit promise couched in terms of some tentative, operating bargain. That is, the actual “articulation” of the promise in the context of the bargain probably creates people’s desire to reach the collective goal as much as it meets it. Also, bargains tend to be continually re-negotiated during the process of actively pursuing the promise.

Shirky would undoubtedly disagree, but it seems like the bargain impacts overall motivation in addition to the motivation arising from the promise. If you value the promise and think this group’s specific bargain is a decent way to achieve it, then you’ll be motivated to join this specific group or contribute to this particular collective good. But if the social environment in which you can contribute to your genuinely desired social good blows, then you’ll likely have to be a lot more motivated by that good to stick around. Similarly, if you're only moderately motivated by the promise, but the bargain offers something exciting in itself – say, the public adoration of your peers – then that might be enough to get you contribute when you otherwise wouldn't. Clearly, the bargain impacts overall motivation, positively or negatively, though some initial interest in the collective goal is probably necessary in the first place.

Anyway, one of the big arguments of Shirky’s book is that toady’s social functionality lowers the cost of contributing and collaborating to such a degree that people motivated by the same promise or goal – latent groups to use Shirky’s Mancur Olson-inspired term – can actually get together to do something about it. Even relatively weak goal motivation is no longer blocked from actually resulting in action since the overhead associated with coordination has dropped so dramatically; thanks to social functionality like wikis, blogs, tagging, cell phones, etc., it’s really “easy” to get dispersed people together to focus on some collectively defined good.

However, since the promise is “normatively degenerate,” i.e. can be achieved by means of a number of distinct social contracts or bargains, we still need to consider people’s motivation to comply with a specific bargain given the goal. What would make people choose one Bargain over another? Does the nature of the Bargain do anything to the overall motivation to contribute or cooperate? To answer these, we first need to say what a Bargain is. Fudging a little, we can say that Bargains, as little social contracts of sorts, are collections of norms

Why Comply?

Social norms are the implicit (but they can become explicit like some laws or codes) interaction rules that keep social groups from deteriorating into antisocial free-for-alls. They turn potentially state-of-nature, every-man-for-himself interactions into coordination games. Humans are social animals, but that doesn’t mean we always play nice. If it did, we’d rarely see any groups fall apart. Everybody would play nice by their group’s standards. As it is, though, we see a lot of antisocial, anti-normative behavior in contexts in which prosocial norms would be appropriate, particularly online. This suggests that we have a conditional preference for following norms. If the conditions are met, we play by the norms, otherwise it’s a melee. Obviously, the conditions under which we can generally induce a preference for social norm following on the part of most users should impact our designs for social spaces online and elsewhere.

Just to solidify everything, I’ll borrow (with slight fudging/modification) Cristina Bicchieri’s idea that there are three types of conditions which have to be met for someone to prefer following a norm in a given situation.

1. Empirical Condition: Do you expect the norm to be observed by most people in this sort of situation?
2. Normative Condition: Do you believe that most people expect or prefer you to follow it in this sort of situation?
3. Motivational Conditions: There are several of these and they relate to your reasons for complying given the truth of 1 and 2 above.

• Fear: Is your compliance solely based on fear of negative sanctions for non-compliance?
• Esteem: Is your compliance based on positive sanctions like praise and esteem?
• Reasonableness/Internalization: Is your compliance based on your assessment of the reasonableness of the norm or possibly on a non-reflective, conditioned expectation?

The first two are necessary existence conditions for the norm. If neither are met, even if there's ostensibly a norm in place you won’t follow it because either you don’t think everybody else will or you feel it’s not really expected of you. In any given situation the norm may not be salient, and thus people might not know they should be following it. So, designs for spaces in which you want users to coordinate on a cooperation-inducing social contract should include provision for making norms salient (e.g., user-rating of UGC, contribution sorting by quality, etc.). But salience isn’t really what interests me here. Let's look at the Motivational conditions, which are about the reasons for personal compliance provided the Empirical and Normative conditions are met. If you think we just have a basic preference to do as others do regardless of our relationship to them, then consider these supplementary.

Compliance out of fear of negative sanctions, from frowns to finger wagging to expulsion from the group, can be very powerful. Often people play by the rules because of perceived threat of force, even if it’s just social force in the form of conventionalized displays of displeasure (reprimands from admins, poorly rated UGC, banishment, etc.). This is the most widely recognized motivation in the literature. Clearly, it only operates under conditions of at least partial transparency or incomplete anonymity and some sort of publicity or public availability of contributions.

Viewing the norm as reasonable or maybe even internalizing it, renders compliance largely non-reflective. You don’t act out of fear or positive incentive, you just obey the norm. This motivation doesn’t have any observation conditions on the situation; you’d obey the norm in totally anonymous interactions.

Esteem motivated compliance is a little different from the other two. In this cases you obey because obeying results in a personal gain or good in addition to whatever motivations you take to be intrinsic (e.g. general preference for conformity). You get something of value from others – esteem – for acting appropriately or contributing at a high, group-defined standard. The esteem motive is related to the fear motive, particularly if we consider disesteem a negative sanction. And like the fear motive it requires limited anonymity and publicity of contributions.

If esteem is a sought after item in limited supply, then it can add to the overall motivation one has for contributing to the larger social good defined by the group’s Promise. If complying with a social contract and contributing at a high level relative to the group’s norms can generate esteem, then people already motivated by the group’s goal have additional motivation to work. They have been significantly incentivized beyond the presumably prosocial incentive of the collective good.

Even if the collective good is materially negligible or even costly to the individual, the esteem motivation associated with group norm compliance can incentivize behavior to bring about the collective good (provided overall motivation can be the aggregate of promise-based and bargain-based motivations). Basically, implementing the social contract in such a way that esteem can be accumulated (limited anonymity and institutionalized feedback channels, for example) can make selfish jerks work prosocially. However, it also makes people for whom the collective good is genuinely motivating even more motivated.

Obviously, there is considerable space for trouble here. Unethical, mistaken and outmoded norms can easily be perpetuated by esteem motivated compliance. Agreed. Our task as designers and theorists in this space is to figure out how these mechanisms work and whether or not they can be reliably used for prosocial ends. That's why I think the bias for consideration of intrinsic and clearly prosocial motives only is shortsighted. Esteem and other extrinsic non-material motivations operate in all social groups. Unless we face our less social, selfish selves and try to understand how they operate, we can't even begin to make design decisions that will allow us to channel this ignoble element in our character for proscocial – or at least not antisocial – ends.

A Note On Near Anonymity, Limited Publicity and Esteem... skip at will

You might think that the near anonymity and volume of contributions of UGC creations like Wikipedia would destroy the esteem motivation: if next to nobody knows who you are and the volume of contributions mitigates the publicity any specific addition gets, then no esteem accumulates. I don’t think this is the case for several reasons.

For one thing, a study of handwashing habits in public restrooms in New York city showed that the mere presence of an anonymous stranger increased handwashing from 40% to 80%. (Munger, K. and S. J. Harris. 1989. “Effects of an Observer on Handwashing in a Public Restroom. Perceptual and Motor Skills 69(3):733-734.) The anonymity of the esteemer doesn’t seem to matter, but most importantly it doesn’t seem to matter that the esteem-seeker is anonymous as well. The mere fact that someone – anyone – could judge, the normatively charged public situation influences behavior regardless of anonymity.

Also, in many esteem situations, relative anonymity and obscurity actually heighten the potential for esteem. Basically, in many situations in which esteem is at issue, the potential esteemer judges not just the action but also the disposition. If calculation is obvious and the desire for recognition glaring, then you’re likely to give less esteem than if the estimable act occurred “for itself,” as it were. The public forum in which esteem is judged and the conditions under which credit is claimed ("I did this" or "I did this for the group") has an impact on this dispositional judgment. Too public and too obviously about you and not the good, and it might be showing off. But in conditions of limited publicity and partial anonymity your estimable act gives the impression that you’re doing it for its own sake. That is, an estimable act in situations where the probability of being seen and personally esteemed is relatively low (and all the other members knows this) renders much greater esteem if it is in fact seen and identified. In this situation, it looks like the act arose from a natural disposition and not esteem seeking. Near anonymity and limited visibility in some sense optimize esteem, in the words of Geoffrey Brennan and Philip Pettit.

Finally, esteem doesn’t have to circle back and add to our personal pool of accumulated esteem for us to feel it in some measure. That is, esteem attaching to your online identity, which nobody knows is really you, has its own reward. Indeed, we don’t always want the esteem we receive in one arena to mingle with (or be contaminated by) the personal esteem (or disesteem) earned in another. It’s a form of esteem management. Additionally, if Kai Spiekermann is right and the esteem others are willing to give often has less to do with what you’ve done than who you are, anonymity can level the playing field a bit and allow esteem to flow more freely than it would under more transparent conditions.

Cultural Irony Ain't What It Used to Be

In the last post I discussed trend uptake among trendsetters, hipsters and regular joes. In evaluating whether or not to partake of a trend, members of each group consider both their peers’ evaluations as well as the prevalence of the trend in their “community.” I just wanted to show how cultural items could be moved from the periphery to the mainstream by the mutually interdependent choices of motivationally distinct cultural sub-groups.

But that post didn’t really address what happens after the trend peaks. Most trends end, but not all end the same way. In the next post I’ll look at one class of trend ends: the ironic embrace. However, before I can do that, I need to look more closely at the contentious and much discussed subject of cultural irony itself. In particular, we’ll look at what cultural irony is commonly believed to be, what it probably really is, how it has changed and why some trendsetters reacted to the change with calls for “earnestness and authenticity.”

The Myth of Cultural Irony

Irony seems to be bound up with intention. Specifically, cultural irony is assumed to be like literary irony in that it’s the often comic tension between specifically doing or saying one thing but meaning or intending some totally different, often opposed, thing. Cultural irony is valorized in the literature as a critical strategy in the sense of being a self-conscious critique or questioning gesture. Back in the early ‘80s, Paul Fussell used irony as an identifying feature of his “Class X,” the class of urban and urbane hipsters and intellectuals who use camp and kitsch as a critical cultural tactic. Cultural irony in this sense is embrace – of bible school t-shirts, Jean-Claude Van Damme or velvet paintings – with a self-conscious commentary attached. It’s not doing what’s normal to fit in, it’s doing what’s “normal” to point out (particularly, to point out supposed tackiness, baseness or all around inanity).

But about 10 (some say 15) years ago cultural irony transformed into a fashionable style. Trendsetters and hipsters had made the strategy so visible and its cachet so great that it finally caught on among the regular joes. Effectively, ironists’ self-aware embrace of the normal as a supposed critique of the “normal” was progressively replaced with a jokey cultural caricature, more reflexive than reflective, a fashionable scare-quoting of practically everything. The trendsetter’s strategic irony was overtaken by the regular joe’s purely stylistic version which mimicked some of the tropes and techniques of the earlier critical “ironists” without actually being critical. This caused some serious hand-wringing among the old ironic trendsetters and hipsters. As a result, a few years ago many trendsetters (and then hipsters) began advocating a return to earnestness.

Frankly, I don’t completely buy the above story of valiant and true trendsetting cultural ironists robbed of a vital critical technique by non-reflective, novelty-hungry cultural gluttons. I think it’s more likely that cultural irony is an in-group norm, which defines an esteem game. Let me elaborate.

The Game of Cultural Irony

Kierkegaard apparently claims that the greatest ironists want to be misunderstood. Half true. The greatest ironists want to be misunderstood by everyone, excluding a highly qualified and estimable few. That is, for irony to be ironic it has to allow the possibility of being taken at face value, but that possibility can’t be so overwhelmingly likely that absolutely no one gets the joke. Irony no one gets isn’t really ironic while irony everyone gets isn’t very good. The art comes in creating the aesthetic tension between appearance and intention; basically, coding so that the intention is hidden enough but still apparent to the initiate.

Like Kierkegaard’s great ironists, the greatest cultural ironists want to be understood by a sufficiently small and personally esteemed circle while being misunderstood by everyone else. In my preferred terms, they want to participate in a necessarily bounded esteem game that’s played by taking the appropriate attitude to pre-existing cultural artifacts.

Research on social group formation and identification suggests that they develop arbitrary conventions to increase both in-group cohesion and out-group difference. Consider styles of dress, types of music, uniforms, etc. and the presumed attitudes that go along with them. Sometimes these conventions develop into full-blown social norms with prescriptive impact (i.e. telling you what you’re expected to do in the ought to do sense of expectation). Among other things, norms – both conventions and social norms – define evaluative structures within social groups, i.e. esteem games within which members compete for esteem and evaluate each others’ performance in terms of the group’s prevailing normative standards.

My suggestion is that cultural irony is a norm: a coordinating set of strategies (conventions) for imbuing existing cultural artifacts (bands; t-shirts; cars; music styles; silly, cause-related rubber bracelets; etc.) with new, in-group determined meanings different from those of their original context. It may start with some sort of vague critical intent, but ultimately it stabilizes as one of several possible methods a self-consciously oppositional (counter-) cultural lineage manages to coordinate on for defining and evaluating in-group behaviors, attitudes and aesthetics. More simply, cultural irony is one of the many possible mechanisms a counter-cultural group can coordinate on to produce in-group cohesion and out-group difference. It's an internally coordinating means of external dissent. But once coordinated on, it determines an esteem game, a structure within which group members can attempt to gain esteem or status using various conventional strategies for appropriating and re-deploying other groups' cultural artifacts.

This story’s not as cool as the critical outsiders version, right? I agree, but think about it: Do you really think that all or even most of the culturally ironic fashion choices of trendsetters or hipsters through the ages – from today’s hip urbanites wearing funny thrift store tees touting middle American values to art savvy sophisticates collecting velvet paintings a couple of decades ago – were enacted with the sort of individual critical awareness that that story demands? No one really believes this. More often than not, our live choices are bounded by the coordinated conventions of our in-groups and those conventions are largely about heightening out-group difference. Sometimes we may more or less intentionally choose our in-group, but once chosen our actions tend to spring – not fully intentionally – from our desire to become and stay part of that group and our conditioned, group-appropriate expectations, esteem standards, dispositions or values. After a while – even if we're esteem seekers – we don’t reflect upon social norms and conventions, we act from within them. Generally it's only when we’re confused by a situation or a norm breaks down that we reflect on its content.

Also, it seems pretty clear that trendsetters and hipsters, within their in-groups, are just as motivated by esteem as everybody else, maybe even more so. Conventions and social norms are the strategies and standards of esteem games; they determine the viable moves as well as the criteria for evaluation.

So, the majority of trendsetting cultural ironists probably are not intentionally critiquing mass culture. Rather, they're participating in a group-defined and group-defining conventional game with others in their in-group. But cultural irony is in some sense critical. However, it is most often critical only at the strategic level – the level of in-group coordination on a mechanism of out-group differentiation – not the individual level. From a distance, the actions of cultural ironists appear critical because they re-define the cultural artifacts of other groups and times in order to define themselves. Yet at the level of personal choice, these actions are most often simply fashionable or conventional moves in an esteem game. Clearly, this is where the analogy between cultural and literary irony breaks down. Literary irony is also a convention, but it’s an intentionally selected one at the individual level. Cultural irony, on the other hand, is a norm coordinating consumption of and relations to cultural artifacts that is more often than not simply enacted rather than intentionally chosen.

Odds, Ends and Earnestness

Okay, but if cultural irony is a norm why and how did it spread like a trend? And if it was always a convention (like fashions), why does today’s fashionable cultural irony seem different from yesterday’s?

First of all we just need to notice that the spread of cultural irony seems to have the same structure as the trend curves model of the last post. It moved from trendsetters to hipsters and then, in its present form, to regular joes. By the time regular joes jumped on, trendsetters began moaning about the need for a return to earnestness (particularly the emo and indie rock kids of the early ‘90s).

Obviously, one group’s defining norm, which is a conventional and possibly prescriptive (i.e. ought) strategy, can be seen as simply an aspirational fashion by outsiders. That is, the emotionally charged, self-reinforcing and group-defining cultural mechanisms of one group can become the emulated fashion of another. Particularly if the object group has some sort of cultural cachet or is otherwise aspirational. How does this work? Well, remember that cultural irony is most likely critical only at the strategic level – the level of group coordination – but not really at the individual level. It stabilized as a mechanism by which oppositional groups defined themselves, but the people in the group tend to live it as simply a fashion. When it’s emulated it loses its original group defining function – its oppositional or critical function – effectively reducing to a fashion or a simple coordinating function. The differentiating function has washed out through context change – from the oppositional trendsetter context to the less self-conscious regular joe context – leaving only the coordinating function.

Certainly, regular joes can be culturally ironic. But remember that good cultural irony depends on some people getting it and others not getting it. Quality irony requires a certain oppositional – in-group vs. out-group; those who get it vs. those who don’t – stance, and for regular joes that oppositional component is largely missing. Cultural irony is reduced to a funny fashion that may commandeer cultural artifacts, but it’s not really about re-defining those artifacts for oppositional in-group/out-group games. Everybody gets it. Effectively, when everybody’s ironic, nobody really is. Maybe this accounts for the felt but seldom articulated difference between the currently fashionable cultural irony and the sainted old sort fondly remembered by now aged hipsters and critical theorists.

But few, if any, old school bohemians were ever really culturally ironic in the idealized sense of fully self-consciously critical. That stance rapidly became an internalized or estimable way that folks who dig the cultural cachet of the fringe gain esteem among their select peers. Those critics and hoary old hipsters pining for the glory days of critical irony are greatly overstating – and oversimplifying – their case. Basically, their kvetching is more a matter of wanting to maintain counter-cultural cachet and difference than real sorrow at the dumbing of irony. As predicted by the trend curves, when cultural irony caught on among the regular joes, the trendsetters started clamoring for something different – authenticity and earnestness in this case – effectively coordinating on a new esteem game. That game, however, doesn't yet seem to have caught on like irony did.

The Case of "Compulsive Disclosure" - Social Functionality and Norms

In the last post, I discussed the idea of “culture” and the norms that constitute it. You can think of norms in two complementary ways: as collectively converged upon mechanisms coordinating our repeated daily interactions and as affectively charged, behavior-reinforcing repositories of shared meaning and values. In this post I want to discuss how social functionality and social media impact our expectations and preferences in interactions, ultimately leading to convergence on new norms. Because it's pretty well entrenched and understood (if passe), I'll use blogging as my main example.

To older people, it’s alarming that younger people tend to be pretty easy and open with their personal information online. One reason may be that there are many more opportunities for sharing information online that are systematically legitimated, as in registration processes, profile development and online forms in general. But this sort of disclosure doesn’t have the “bare your soul” or “edit, please” quality that I’m interested in. What interests me is the use of social functionality to (effectively) broadcast what seem to be the most intimate and/or banal details of your life. A relatively familiar example is the hyper-frank "diary" blog sub-genre. People write these knowing that friends, acquaintances and strangers will read and respond. And both producers and consumers are not typically "outliers" or closet transgressors using anonymity as a means of catharsis. Rather, the vast majority of people sustaining the norm are “regular” folks baring their souls – often sharing what seem to be the most embarrassing, compromising and/or dull details of their lives – and owning up to it.

In face to face interactions or other real world self-presentations we tend to reserve most personal information about ourselves for our closest friends and family. Often, “opening up” is about displaying trust or forcing the hearer to feel as if they are somehow symbolically indebted or "down" with you. Clearly the norms of disclosure and relevance operating in “real life” aren’t the norms observed online. I don’t think this is only because blog posts are relatively anonymous and sort of like publishing, i.e. one-way. At some level, posts are intended to set the tone and define the situation for an ensuing interpersonal interaction in a public forum, albeit a relatively stilted one with no co-presence and formidable latency.

Anyway, under the old norms, the often wrenching (or incredibly dull) self-disclosure we see online would probably create discomfort and confusion as to how to understand the interaction offline. Under the new norm(s), however, it can generate praise, esteem, sympathy and positive normative response on at least some registers. Norms, by definition, carry their standards of value and evaluation with them. What has caused the stabilization of this norm of “compulsive disclosure?”

Nothing Like a Nice Bourdieu

Before looking at the case of compuslive disclosure, I'd like to suggest a mechanism by which an old norm may be nullified and new one developed without necessarily requiring everybody to be "true belivers" in the norm's values. In other words, a mechanism that lets me suggest how the counter-normative behavior of a small group of "outliers" – folks not operating by the norms of disclosure and relevance of the “real” world – can eventually result in the acceptance and stabilization of a new norm.

Following Learry Gagné, I return to Pierre Bourdieu for the mechanism. I’ve discussed this before. Effectively people seek symbolic gain in interactions, but importantly, the terms of that gain are set by the cultural milieu in which they’re operating. In Bourdieu’s terms you often have to use your cultural capital – your knowledge, skills and abilities in understanding and creating domain-appropriate cultural artifacts and situations – to gain symbolic capital – status, prestige, esteem or general recognition by your focal group.

Mechanisms like this create what Philip Petitt and Geoffrey Brennan call the economy of esteem. People engage in behaviors they wouldn't engage in were they not capable of gaining esteem from them. But they don't necessarily comply cynically. Esteem maintains the norm in the sense that people who aren't naturally "outliers" would cease the behavior were the norm no longer there to gain esteem from. But, they've internalized the norm to such an extent that their compliance is pretty much emotional or non-maximizing.

Does the Nature of Social Functionality Impact Norms?

Of course it does. Three properties of social media seem particularly relevant to the rapid stabilization of norms online.

1. The poster’s relatively low-costs (in time, money, attention, etc.) of forming a presence (blogging, posting a video, etc.)

2. The consumer’s low cost of switching and/or forwarding.

3. The ease and efficiency with which feedback accumulates from the consumer to the poster.

The first suggests that you’ll get relatively high volume of content, providing social and cultural “outliers” in particular an equalized platform. The relatively small number of people who really do have a need to bare their souls in a public forum – counter to the norms supported by the larger culture – now have a potentially much larger public forum.

The second suggests that people can zip between posters easily both because of the arbitrarily linked nature of the web and because of the conventions of social media content genres (short, easily digestible pieces, e.g. blog posts).

These two together give the "outliers" a forum and a mechanism for gaining an audience. Basically, the qualities of the medium allow potentially counter-normative behavior – behavior at the "edge" of normal – to be viewed from the center. The third helps solidify the self-disclosure sub-genre by providing a stabilizing and often legitimating feedback channel.

To unpack this a little, "outlier" producers – the people who naturally transgress against the "real world" norms – use the platform as a cathartic mechanism for logging their innermost feelings. The relative impoverishment of the context reduces the salience of applicable norms so the discomfort of witnessing the transgression isn't as acute as it would be in person. But norm transgression, in this case the enactment of intimate privacy in a public space, can be fascinating in itself and this appeals to a significant “outlier” subset within the audience.

So we have a platform that's just distinct enough from the real world to allow public transgression of dominant interaction norms without the crushing sanctions that would occur in the "real world." The platform also provides extensive means of getting this narrow-appeal content before appreciative eyes. Finally, the feedback channel largely provides validating evaluations of the transgressive performance (partly because of the self-selecting nature of the audience). Constant public transgression coupled with forwarding and positive, visible feedback via the third property effectively weakens the old norms while laying the normative framework for new ones. Enough exposure to a new way of framing an interaction or self-presentation coupled with public displays of acceptance and evaluation can create the sort of structures of expectation, preference and values that define new norms.

But what’s interesting beyond this formation of the norm among the “true believers” or "outliers," the folks who would break the old norm anyway, is the fact that the norm can stabilize among the mainstream. There is a lot more comfort with, expectation of, and preference for personal disclosure in some online contexts than there is in most offline contexts. Basically, I claim that the voiding of the offline norms was facilitated by the properties of the medium. They effectively amplified the dispositions of the “true believers” creating an environment in which new normative expectations – expectations of others expectations that conditionalize our preferences in situations – could stabilize and spread beyond the “true believers.”

The norm is adopted by the larger community because of user's expectations of other's expectations, i.e. the possibility of the earning or withholding of esteem. Considerations of esteem don’t enter into it for the “outliers” or true believers. They’re just that way; their behavior is a manifestation of their values. However, it does enter into it for the majority of people who perpetuate the norm, both as producers and consumers. They wouldn’t necessarily behave this way without the existence of the norm to generate esteem. The discomfort at transgression of the old norm is lost and a new set of normative standards – a set of felt preferences and eventually internalized ways of simply being in the world – replaces it. The normative standards provide mechanisms by which self-esteem and esteem can be gained, either consciously or rationally – for “posers” or cynics – and unconsciously or emotionally – for people who may not be outliers dispositionally, but adopt the norm “in good faith.” As long as no one knows everybody else’s true status – true believer, esteem seeker or poser – and the groups are effectively indistinguishable in behavior, then if esteem is flowing the norm will stabilize and perpetuate.

Clearly, the properties of social media have deep effects on the norms and (thus) culture online. Realizing this fact has important ramifications for how we design and deploy social functionality. We can see that we must design for the development of pro-social norms. We can also see how media and cultural dynamics interact in the abstract. But clearly even non-antisocial norms like compulsive disclosure can appear negative from the outside (though I personally don't think that they are). And because the norms that develop are the path dependent and immensely complex results of strategic negotiations and interactions among enormous numbers of actors, there’s no way you’ll be able to predict what norms will actually emerge. However, with this understanding you will be able to make non-judgmental sense of – and thus develop coherent, non-reactionary policy to address – the ones that do emerge.

Defining the Situation: Goffman, Social Functionality and Minicultures

When an individual enters into the presence of others, they commonly seek to acquire information about him or to bring into play information about him already possessed... Information about the individual helps to define the situation, enabling others to know in advance what he will expect of them and what they may expect of him. Informed in these ways, the others will know how best to act in order to call forth a desired response from him

That quote is from Erving Goffman’s classic, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. The book's basic claim is that human interactions are mediated by stagey appearances through which we imply – and from which others infer – our expectations, preferences, status, etc. We assume roles, staging presentations of ourselves, to ensure smooth, appropriately stable and beneficial interactions. The roles coordinate, structure and define our interactions as we negotiate a mutually agreeable definition of the situation.

Goffman was talking about face-to-face interactions, but I clearly agree with his main point as it pertains to digitally mediated interaction as well. When engaging with social functionality, we tend to throw out signals, intentionally and unintentionally, that indicate our expectations, preferences, etc. (i.e. "define the situation" in Goffman's terms) and coordinate our interactions with others. Display – a dimension of social functionality discussed in previous posts – is often about projecting a desirable position or estimable image, putting us in a position to get the most from our interactions. We then have to live up to or act consistently with that situation-defining image on pain of embarrassment, ridicule and situational discomfort.

However, situation definition in social interactions generally isn’t only determined by the people interacting. That is, there’s usually an externally imposed limit on the available “definitions.” Defining an interaction situation is sort of like declaring to each other what game we’re playing. I suggest, “Let’s play football” and you agree. We now roughly know what we can and can’t do. Our available strategies are bounded by the rules, but not wholly determined. We can still surprise each other and gain advantage within the game’s constitutive rules. Analogously, many interactions are about settling on the game to be played. But I claim the majority of interactions are about jockeying for advantage within an already determined meta-game. So, to sharpen the insight from Goffman's quote, I suggest that many of the broader aspects of most situations are already defined for us and the remaining definitional negotiations tend to be about fine-tuning or determining advantage. That is, we assume roles that are already defined and relatively definitive, we don't usually create the roles.

This is similar to what the philosopher of social science Don Ross suggests as the solution to the problem of game determination. In many social situations, culture handles this coordination: we more or less understand the expectations, obligations, etc. of the folks assuming the various roles in particular contexts because we’ve been conditioned to understand them. Understanding this stuff via conditioned expectations gets us past the cognitively intractable task of having to always figure out what game we’re playing first (i.e. what the best plan is given what others’ probable moves will be). In short, culture coordinates us on the arbitrary but stable games to be played while avoiding the destructive “state of nature” games in which we approach every interaction as if it were a mixed-motive game like the Prisoners Dilemma.

Designing as Defining

Social functionality, or the largely digital mechanisms that impact, amplify or alter our socialization online and off, are really weird if we think about them in terms of the ideas above. They’re generally anemic compared to face-to-face interaction spaces, providing only rudimentary means of interpersonal situation negotiation. Also, the cultural cues for defining situations – conventionally encoded in everything from architecture to tone of voice to uniforms and styles or dress, etc. – tend to be either missing or unconventionally signified. Social functionality tends to provide very limited and very strange means of “defining the situation” in the Goffman sense.

And even though recent public goods experiments show that people want to cooperate, it’s with a self-serving bias and conditional on others doing it in a way that can be observed. Reciprocation, cooperation and general decency tend to decrease on average over the long haul if not “structurally maintained”, i.e. if norms aren’t made salient. In situations involving social functionality, where there are few recognizable cultural institutions and coordination among individuals is tough, things can get messy quickly, devolving into potentially destructive mixed-motive situations where everyone acts like a selfish jerk.

Unlike the real world, though, systems incorporating social functionality have a third party in on the situation definition: the designer. Designers have a significant impact on the definition and – most importantly – maintenance of the situation. Design can help to stimulate the development of norms and the cobbling together of a simple “culture” within spaces employing social functionality. In particular, if the social functionality system isn’t a) structured for norm development or b) partially mapped onto an independently existing, institution embedding cultural group, it will often tear itself apart.

For example, in terms of structuring for norm development, Wikipedia’s use of Display inflected functionality coupled with iterative editing and negotiation mechanisms allows norms (in the sense of mutually held expectations of others’ expectations) to stabilize very quickly. This in turn keeps the majority of contentious entries from erupting into wholesale warfare. That is, the interactions are defined in terms of – bounded by – group developed norms of conduct and quality, the development of which was fostered by certain design decisions (essentially involving Display functionality, interestingly enough).

Wide open social spaces like MySpace and Facebook, on the other hand tend not to have this focused structure. Yet they also rely on a combination of positive and negative feedback mechanisms to help coordinate on norms. In particular, content can be tagged offensive or great; users can gain reputations and status; or they can get flagged and barred.

But stupid, antisocial behavior still arises because of the massive volume of users, the low join-and-drop overhead and the ease of anonymity. So, in terms of the second situation-defining design trick, I think we’ll find that the amount of disinhibition is inversely related to the closeness of the system’s mapping onto “real-world” networks. That is, if the system somehow extends or amplifies offline socialization, situation definitions from the real world can come to structure the interactions in the digital system. Situation definitions must be maintained if your real world friends are mixed in with your more tenuous “online only” friends. Similarly, but to a much lesser extent, systems that allow users to institute voluntary, displayable assortation – or self-grouping that can define some sort of in-group ethos – will also see significant norm development and stabilization.

Lurkers Aren’t Necessarily Free-riders

These are pretty obvious observations and have been put forward elsewhere, although without the theoretical structure of situation definition in terms of system-specific mini “cultures.” What’s interesting is that this allows us to look at things like “lurking” in a totally new light. Situation definition isn’t all about curbing jerky behavior. It’s also about determining appropriateness of interactions in subtler ways.

A while ago, people who cared about this stuff considered lurking – that is, partaking of the content on social sites without contributing any yourself – to be a from of free-riding on a public good. Lurkers were reaping the benefit without contributing to upkeep. Recently, however, some writers have begun to think of lurking in terms of cultural capital. On this view, many people lurk because they’re accumulating cultural capital, i.e. the skills, codes, knowledge, etc. that a user has for interpreting cultural artifacts. A significant proportion of lurking is about the user trying to figure out the community norms.

In our terms, lurkers are uncertain of situation definitions and the areas available for further negotiation. That is, they’re uncertain of the expectations of others and the proper way of expressing their own expectations and preferences so that will be understandable by others within the system and thus potentially beneficial to themselves. They don’t know how to act to coordinate on situation definitions that will be mutually understandable, useful and beneficial... or at least won’t result in discomfort.

So, designing for the emergence, stabilization and display of norms within systems utilizing social functionality can both curb disinhibition and more quickly convert lurkers into actors. Now, getting designers to realize that this is part of their job in a more than just “do what’s worked in the past” way – getting them to realize that social functionality design is embedded in and impacts cultural as well as social systems – is the really hard part.