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.

Quora, Norms, and Motivation

"I have managed to find a few interesting discussions on Quora lately, but WOW some people sure know how to spew business bullshit and buzzwords. The ego stroking, ‘look how smart I can write’ is one of the things that ends up turning me off to the network."
Jonathan More's 1/10/11 comment on the post "The Answer to this Quora? No." by Saneel Radia.

For a while now, from afar, I've been watching Quora, the much-discussed, newish Q&A platform. In addition to a mountain of press and glowing endorsements from some fancy people, it has also garnered some strikingly negative reviews. That's to be expected. The hype and bile cycle cranks up every time the next "next big thing" rounds the corner. Many gripes are of the "Google does it better" or "What am I supposed to do with this?" stripe. But seemingly petty reactions like the comment above point to a trickier issue, one about product framing, user motivations, and norms. In a nutshell, Quora is shackled to a norm-embedding "frame", i.e. it's a "Q&A platform". But it's also a social product, so it must provide an implicit dual value proposition – one creator facing and one consumer facing – to generate content consumers may want. Yet, because of the norms embedded in the Q&A frame proscribing self-promotion or overt display, the only legitimate, communicable value proposition is the consumer facing one. Confusing? Let me elaborate. Throughout, I'll use reader comments associated with Saneel Radia's critical post as discussion fodder.

Frames as Norm-embedding Structures

"I keep trying to find some utility but it seems like a place where people either just post questions that are utterly ridiculous or they post questions to demonstrate their “expertise” (i.e. they answer them)… It doesn’t seem to be supporting collaboration or interaction…"
Sara' 1/11/11 comment on Saneel's post

"You hit the nail on the head, Sara. Quora is for the creator, not the consumer."
Saneel's response to Sara's comment

Quora self-describes as "A continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it." Basically, it's billed as an evolving, ever improving Q&A platform in which the best and brightest – initially, but now including the worst and dullest, like me – can ask questions, follow questions, answer questions, and then endorse or promote the answers. Of course, there are also a bunch o' "community" features integrated (and integral) throughout, but that's it in a nutshell.

Sounds simple and it's actually pretty nicely designed, quickly getting you up to speed as regards "official" interactions, functions, and entities. Of course, part of what makes the site's structures, functions and interactions so easy to grasp is the familiarity of the product's framing concept, Questions and Answers. You say "it's a Q&A site, created edited and organized by users" and, as the primary frame is a very conventional interaction structure, we know more or less what to expect.

Framing, in this dumbed down sense of the big, abstract interaction type that structures the product, is an incredibly useful tool that can do a lot of work for you. If properly deployed frames can guide expectations and define roles entering into interactions; constrain or lead actions through processes and flows; and often determine the bounds of appropriate and inappropriate behavior. Relying on familiar, conventional, relatively unambiguous frames offloads a lot of the high level, strategic discovery and design work to the frame itself.

But relying on a frame can lead to problems if you don't understand how they do what they do. Often, frames embed norms, the informal, behavior-guiding rules and simple conventions that we rely on to coordinate and smooth our daily activities and interactions. Norms – mostly social norms but sometimes conventions as well – can be not only descriptive, indicate what most people happen to do, but also prescriptive, indicate what people should do. We humans slip easily, almost inevitably, from the descriptive to the prescriptive – from the fact-based to the evaluative – often feeling that how something happens to be done is how it should be done. Furthermore, norms aren't prescriptive at just the behavioral level, indicating what you should do. They're also often prescriptive at the procedural or motivational level. It's not just what you do that's prescribed and judged, it's also how or why you do it.

Display and the Problem of Motivation

Motivation is a hot topic in our circles, particularly now that everyone is high on that most pernicious and faddish of sub-fields "persuasive design". How do you get folks, for example, to invest time and effort asking and answering questions on your site? How do you softly enforce quality/behavior standards yet open the gates to the largest number of users? How do you trick somebody into signing up for your damn newsletter? Etc….

There are two much discussed types of motivation.

Internal Motivation
Motivation arising out of inherent or intrinsic desires, values, drives, etc.

External Motivation
Motivation arising out of extrinsic considerations or inducements.

Research on these issues is pretty muddled, but seems to indicate that the internal sort is best for, say, learning and maintaining desired behaviors and habits, while the external becomes self-defeating and can crowd out internal motivation in the long run. Other research, however, seems to suggest that, in the real world, the truth is actually a lot more complicated and a motivational cocktail of both types is actually the most effective.

Whatever the case regarding actual motivational efficacy, moralizing the distinction is almost inescapable. We're all pretty biased in our evaluations of perceived motivation, just assuming internal motivation to be somehow better or nobler than external motivation. Consider the case of social interaction. Folks apparently acting from internal dispositions are lauded as "genuine" or "authentic", while those clearly interested in appearances and the esteem of others are branded "fake" or "inauthentic". Maybe this is a normative corollary of social psychology's well documented Fundamental Attribution Bias, the finding that our perceptions of the causes of peoples behavior are significantly biased toward assuming internal as opposed to external (structural or situational) causes.

Anyway, we designers realize (or at least we should if we want to be successful) that a significant real world motivator and quality-driver is Display. We can acquire and accrue social goods – esteem, reputation, and status – from estimable acts (judged by some norm-determined standard) performed in a public context. Display considerations fundamentally impact the quantity and quality of our contributions to social products. And Display is far less about internal than external motivational factors, like how the content, quantity, and quality of your input changes depending on who's likely consuming it and the possible esteem or reputational benefit their consumption might provide. If you were purely internally motivated, it wouldn't matter who was watching, how you'd like them to react/judge you, or what standard they were applying. Your input would always be the same.

Because of our normative bias for the internal, on those rare occasions we do talk about Display it's in passing and with embarrassment. In my opinion, we should drop our proudly naive, exclusive public preference for internal, "authentic" motivations (which is probably an artifact of biases, heuristics, and norms rather than a reflection of true motivational schedules) and embrace the external as a vital tool in our designer's toolbox. But, I certainly don't think that Display is the only motivator here. Rather, as I've written before, there are at least three big, abstract reasons people use social functionality: Connection, Knowledge, and Display.

Explicit Position vs. Afforded Position vs. Enforced Position

"…as much as i dislike it, i can’t fault the strategy: let SV folks self-adulate through display of knowledge, whether real or fake…"
adam on 1/11/11

"The thing that turns me off about Quora is that there seems to be no personality allowed. I answered with a few tongue-in-cheek responses, and found a few of that ilk that I liked, and they were all voted down."
Tinu on 1/11/11

You can think of our three big reasons for engaging with social functionality – Connection, Knowledge, and Display – as the poles of a three-dimensional continuum. Then, if you're really geeky, you can plot (very unscientifically) where items of social functionality fall on the continuum – both functional elements and whole products. Considering the norms embedded in Quora's Q&A frame along with their more or less explicit positioning and teaser line, I'd plot them as below.


Basically, this is the mix of motivators and reasons for engaging with the platform that Quora "explicitly" or officially appeals to. The big circle around the plot indicates that the official message and frame-embedded norms determine more of a range than a coordinate; there's leeway, particularly since product-specific norms are just now arising. They're very skewed toward the Knowledge pole, but with a significant Connection (in this case the explicitly "community" elements) leaning. Their official position is very light on the Display component, although it's implicit in the social aspect. Still, a little bit of Display is allowable so long as the clear point of the activity is Knowledge.

But as some of the quoted comments suggest, perusing Quora you definitely get the sense that a lot of activity is driven either solely or largely by Display. Many people are using Quora as a means of advertising their expertise, interests, sense of humor, and abilities. That's no surprise. The platform clearly "affords" that, and a lot of activity probably depends on it. But, this afforded use case is proscribed by the "official" position and norms. It's clearly the case that a lot of people wouldn't answer at all, except that they can flash their smarts. However, when we think of a Q&A platform, we feel that it should be about Knowledge first and foremost. Display should fall naturally out of quality performance or at least not appear to drive the performance. In this strongly Knowledge-first context, performances perceived to be selfishly Display-focused can make us really uncomfortable or mad (a typical reaction to broken prescriptive norms), even if the content is high quality.

To counter this natural and predictable issue, Quora provides voting up and voting down functionality as well as monitors to actually remove "self-serving" content. This is a good way to guide content quality and pro-sociality, particularly if you're designing within a strong frame. But, it looks like the discomfort of the transgressed no-Display norm associated with the frame is generating a powerful backlash against those perceived to be too Display motivated. Several comments mentioned the strictness and harshness with which some humorous or snarky answers were squashed. The enforcement norms that seem to be emerging appear to be even more anti-Display than the official Quora positioning warrants. Plotting the "afforded" position and the "enforced" position on our continuum gives us something like this.


Clearly, there's a problem here. The product affords activities that the framing and position explicitly proscribe. This happens with every social product, but in this case, the frame is so normatively well defined and understood that transgressions against its accepted norms are glaring and galling. Also, the platform is relatively new and, though there are robust means of sanctioning (vote up and down) and clear identification of high performance, the content is just now reaching the volume where product-specific norms of appropriate presentation form and solidify. The users have yet to coordinate on acceptable means and practices of Display within the normative bounds of the platform. Until these norms become widespread and a "generation" of users have accumulated the norms as product-specific "Cultural Capital" there will still be a largish proportion of brazen self-promoters ticking everyone else off. But, as the norms solidify and spread, they will most likely learn them and cooperate.

Why Redesigns are So Damn Hard

Redesigning social functionality – that is, re-doing a social product already in use by some sort of entrenched audience – is sometimes tougher than designing from scratch. Very often you're fighting against organizational and institutional inertia; legacy issues that determine what's actually possible; entrenched user expectations; nervous stakeholders demanding guarantees; and a little understood, fickle market always on the verge of catastrophic "creative destruction".

But what interests me here, is that in my experience the difficulty of redesigning a product – both the subjective experience of effort and the objective expenditure of time and attention in completing a redesign, start to finish – seems to vary with the product's success, but not in a particularly straightforward manner. That is, how successful the product to be redesigned currently is affects the difficulty of the process in a complex, non-intuitive way. Why?

Well, first of all there are at least three big classes of factors impacting the difficulty of redesigning a site. Some of these are important in designing the site from scratch, too, but the way they interact with the current success of the product when embarking on a redesign is what interests me. The three factors are Market Information, User Entrenchment, and The Organization.

Market Information
When redesigning, we look to the market for clues, approach our users for tests, and effectively try to tease out guidance from the field. Ultimately, we're looking for the formula for design success. But this stuff is incredibly complicated, including such things as the design conventions determining current user expectations; the competitive landscape identifying areas of relevant differentiation; trend dynamics suggesting potential "innovations"; etc. But the most subtly difficult factors are the complex social dynamics of product acceptance. I've written about these before: the hard to discern workings of network effects, informational cascades, and the resultant path dependencies cause enormous confusion among stakeholders, greatly increasing the difficulty of redesigning social functionality. In our misguided search for a simple formula for redesign success, these factors, which decrease the role of product qualities (the stuff of design) in predicting product success, can really lead you astray.

In a nutshell, the externalities inherent in the social web (i.e. we initially evaluate a product based on others' actions and then get the most value from the products that everyone else uses) make predicting success from product qualities almost impossible. Success is usually a matter of context, timing and accidents of the product's acceptance history rather than objective design quality. So, beyond a set of user expectation-defining standards – the competitive baseline, which you should have already identified in the initial design round – market analysis and user research won't help you identify a redesign guaranteed to succeed.

Even worse, up to a certain point, the more relative success you have, the murkier the information derivable from testing users and combing the market becomes. Your variance from the competitive baseline tends to be smaller the more successful you are, and the true drivers of success are rarely clear cut product design issues beyond this competitive baseline. Very few stakeholders understand these subtle dynamics and insist that more market research, testing and "innovation" will crack the "guaranteed success" design code. As a result, redesigns of moderately successful products tend to bog down in obsessive, inconclusive research, the results of which are infinitely and inconsistently interpretable (especially if testing is public). Research is necessary, but will never provide a guarantee.

User Entrenchment
Perceived usability – as opposed to laboratory usability – is more about familiarity than objective human factors metrics. Users invest their time and attention in your product, amassing a sort of practical capital of product-specific know-how. When you start changing things, they view this as effectively theft of a precious resource: their investment in practical capital has been thrown out the window without their explicit blessing.

As anyone who has ever redesigned anything knows, users get angry when they feel they've wasted time and attention; they must reinvest to get back to the same level of practical capital. So, up to the point where nearly everybody's using your product and there's no real alternative (i.e. where the network effect is so strong and the average user's "sunk cost" so great they overcome practically all anger over perceived losses associated with change), redesigns get dicier the greater the success of the product. One consequence of this is that testing redesigns with current users will significantly skew your results toward the negative, regardless of "actual" quality. If these tests are public, you've just created a significant political battle and, thus, headaches.

The Organization
There are two related but distinct sources of organizational inertia. First, people within the organization simply get used to doing things one way and – being human – are reluctant to change. If the product's relatively successful, that felt reluctance can be rationalized by arguing that any redesign is a dangerous and unneeded rocking of the boat that endangers continuing success. Slowdowns, endless discussion, and frequent miscommunications are usually the result.

Next, as much as I hate calling simple regularities or covariances "laws" for comic effect (Moore's Law, Metcalfe's Law, etc.), Conway's Law, or something like it, seems to be pretty prevalent. In 1968, Melvin Conway observed that organizations produce products that mirror their structure or at least their internal communication patterns. He was referring specifically to the development of intercommunicating software systems produced by different design teams existing in some sort of institutional, social or communication structure. His claim is that this structure will manifest itself in the design of the interfaces between the systems.

Conway thought this was inevitable, which is way too strong by my lights. But stretching the idea a bit, some products, particularly websites, often mirror the structures of the organizations that created them. Furthermore, it seems to go the other way as well. Sometimes the organization and product have co-evolved in such a way that they're truly intermingled or even identified in many stakeholder's minds. Stakeholders view the product as a direct manifestation of the organization, and any change to the former necessarily impacts the latter.

Whatever the underlying mechanisms that generate this feeling, the upshot is that redesigning a product often has organizational implications, at least in terms of many stakeholders' perceptions of the project. Tampering with the product is often perceived as tampering with roles, responsibilities, and the delicately negotiated distribution of power within the organization. Understandably, this can lead to a significant amount of internal resistance, particularly when the product has been relatively successful and actual power and prestige have accumulated. The resulting inertia and sometimes downright sabotage can lead to massive struggles and delays.

These factors interact with the current success of the product (and with each other) to impact the difficulty of redesigning the product. Drawing from my highly subjective experience designing, redesigning, and "researching" social functionality, the situation seems to look something like this:


On the x axis is increasing success and on the y axis, increasing difficulty of redesigning the product. Some of the more interesting areas have been called out with letters. I'll discuss them briefly.

Why is a more difficult than b? After all, nobody's using the product, so redesign should be really easy. At this level of market failure, if you're asked to do a redesign, you should consider it carefully: this product should be completely abandoned and a different product built. But if you have to do a redesign, the whole organization probably understands and embraces the need to change and analyzing the market may help you identify appropriate conventions, standards and design directions. However, you are re-starting from a hole with little prospect of success (remember the importance of network externalities). Your potential users have already invested somewhere else (this a redesign… you had an initial chance and blew it. At this point your users have invested elsewhere and people burned earlier won't come back.). Finally, you have absolutely no user data on which to base your redesign recommendations and no prospect of launching then optimizing, bootstrapping your way to a successful design. After all, there's not enough activity to get a picture of where it's failing or succeeding; analyzing the market will suggest directions, but you can't really put it out there and optimize on the fly as no one's using your product.

As success modestly improves to b, the ease of redesign increases dramatically. At this point, your stakeholders are still ready for change. Analyzing the market could probably still help with design standards, conventions and trends. But now you have some data on what might work and what definitely won't. You have real users that you can gently test against, but not so many that changes will be met with a loud protest. You also have at least a foothold, which, with luck could be turned into something more by doing everything you can to generate an informational cascade through targeted design differentiation and smart positioning/marketing.

But things get progressively tougher from b to c. You're probably nearing the conventional designs as you're at least competitive at this level of success, so analyzing the market too much could lead to frustration and confusion among your stakeholders. Selling designs internally becomes more difficult as the product's modest success has been enough to spread a bit of influence and power throughout the organization. But, there are enough users to make switching costs to another product at least non-negligible to many users. However, the User Entrenchment process begins to become an issue at this point, as you've enough success for your users to have begun internalizing the system.

From c the difficulty quickly rises with success, slowing to a peak at d. This is the zone of incredible difficulty for a redesign; throughout this region all of the factors are potentially against you. Unless you're just adding hot new functionality pioneered by a competitor, culling the market for tips will be largely fruitless. You're most likely conventional – if not the leader – at this level of success, so most of the factors determining further success are those frustrating, inconsistently interpretable, and highly contingent social dynamics. Thus prolonged research and analysis in this situation actually pays little – and often costs much in terms of focus, morale and transactions. But most organizations in this range still get hung up searching the field and bugging their users in an obsessive search for a magic design formula when they should just be looking for suggestive trends to fuel experimentation. But you have to remember, users in this range become ever more entrenched, so the "right" changes are both difficult to identify and nearly impossible to justify through testing or interviews. Users want what they know now, not what they will want later, so at high levels of entrenchment asking them to evaluate a change (as opposed to just testing lab usability) often confuses the issue or leads to the agonizing death of bold new designs. Finally, organizationally, great success can make people scared to change for fear of losing it (people are, after all, far more risk averse than gain hungry). The organization has "rigidified." Success has pumped prestige and power into it's structure, creating significant vested interests in maintaining status quo. Projects in this range can quickly become nightmares.

At d, however, things turn around a little. Though it's never as easy as it is when you've poor to moderate success, the network effect is so strong, that the specter of losing position is largely mooted. That effectively removes the rationalization for status quo from within the organization and greatly mitigates the sting of negative test results from entrenched users. Also, at this point, you lead the market and most of the tips you're looking for are in terms of competitive and trend analysis, not the elusive success guaranteeing design formula. You largely co-determine the conventions defining the completive baseline along with other highly successful players. Thus, redesign at this point becomes slightly easier, but there's still there's a lot of reluctance from those who might fear loss of position and entrenched users will definitely make a lot of noise, which is never pleasant.

Redesigns are necessary to stay competitive. But along with the excitement and product / organizational rejuvenation they generate, they can also be headaches for the designers involved. Hopefully I've managed to shed some light on why and how. As I said, all of this stems form my subjective observation that redesign difficulty seems somehow oddly related to product success. Whether or not your experience of the relation between the two mirrors mine, I hope you'll at least agree that there's some relationship and that it's impacted by the factors I've suggested.

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.

Playing Nice For the Wrong Reasons

We were sold the story of being mainly self-interested, mainly rational actors interacting in market places. And the internet has shown that we have all these social, empathetic relationships with deep, authentic motivations that are nothing to do with selling and spending.

Clay Shirky

The Observer, Sunday 15 February 2009

One hears this sentiment a lot these days, particularly from American web pundits. It sounds like a lingering echo of the utopianist strains of early web propaganda; it's a rhetorical move positioning the web as a signal force in a new flourishing of hierarchy-smashing communitarianism against the old alienating and atomizing intellectual myths of “maximization” and “rationality.” The idea's intellectual sources include the recent widely touted corrections (e.g. behavioral economics) of some of the excesses of neo-classical economics and possibly the U.S. sociological tradition stemming from “functionalism.”

Anyway, I agree wholeheartedly that we often cooperate or collaborate on the web out of more or less benevolent – if not truly altruistic – impulses. But it’s also obvious that “deep, authentic motivations” aren’t the only incentives for acting in, or even just joining, groups. Significant “shallow” and “inauthentic” motivations impact social behavior as well. “Ignoble” motivations like esteem accumulation and status achievement – which are both distinct from reputation – significantly impact people’s behavior in social settings. Indeed, much of the functionality on the social web already has an esteem function baked into its primary or legitimate function. As a simple example, posting reviews is as much about displaying expertise or simple likes and dislikes as it is about helping others choose. As a rule, people genuinely like to play nice and help each other. But they’ll play nicer and help more if you also let them compete for group defined goods that are neither “authentic” nor “deep.”

Sticking with Clay Shirky, in his latest book he recognizes that there is a place for some sorts of less than noble rewards online. For example, he considers “vanity” and reputational benefit to be valid motivations for contribution. But the mention of reputation notwithstanding, he focuses on intrinsic, non-material motivations like self-esteem, the desire to produce something good and the need for communion. What he doesn’t talk about are the powerful extrinsic, non-material motivations involving the attention of and positive evaluation by others in your group. You contribute partly for the esteem your contribution can get you. And this holds true even if the esteeming group is minuscule. Indeed, it’s often the case that the smaller the esteeming group, the more valuable the esteem (“selling out” after all is the trading of esteem for popularity).

If we’re honest with ourselves, it seems pretty clear that some of our motivations for social interaction on the web (and elsewhere) are self-interested, operate by some sort of market principles and are neither authentic nor empathetic. We engage in behavior that is intended to "maximize" some in demand good – esteem – relative to the costs we're willing to bear. Other things equal, the greater the potential esteem the more cost we're willing to bear. Esteem seeking definitely isn't ideally authentic behavior: you can get it only to the extent that it’s not apparent – to yourself or others – that you’re actively seeking it. And although esteem seeking involves empathy – it assumes taking the point of view of others in order to determine the most estimable move – it’s not an “empathetic” motivation in the laudatory sense intended by Shirky. But, of course, this doesn’t mean that we don’t genuinely like helping and hanging out with others. It just means we have both sorts of motivations.

Shirky clearly recognizes this fact since he qualifies the whole thing with "mainly." Most likely, he just wants to make the point that we often act socially for the non-optimizing, genuinely pro-social reasons we say we act. Our actions are generally genuine and not cynical. But this is the tricky part: I don’t think that recognizing the importance of esteem to most contributors automatically commits us to cynicism. Furthermore I don't think that the distinction between Shirky's "good" motivations and my market-like esteem considerations is all that clear and easy to maintain in the first place. Esteem, like self-interest generally, is what Philip Pettit and Geoffrey Brennan call a standby or virtual cause of behavior. It’s not what’s directly sought from your actions, but if esteem wasn’t provided, you’d be less likely to behave that way. It’s a bias that steers us rather than an explicit principle that guides us. Esteem – the positive evaluations of others by the norm-based standards of whatever reference group you’re using – is the emotionally powerful implicit incentive within social groups that maintains conformity while allowing constant competitive evolution. Seeking it isn’t necessarily cynical, rather it's inextricably woven into group-focused behavior.

Why on earth are we so afraid of “rational motivations” that we have to banish them almost completely from talk of group action online? Beats me. Anyway, as someone who has to design interaction spaces online I think it’s dogmatic, maybe even superstitions, to think that esteem motivations are somehow less real or powerful because “inauthentic” and self-serving. After all, in public goods experiments, we are shown to be conditionally cooperative, meaning that we cooperate with a self-serving bias. If norms of cooperation or reciprocation aren’t sufficiently salient or aren’t otherwise maintained, we tend to stop playing nice and settle for getting all we can. The desire for esteem and status can actually get people to observe and stabilize cooperative norms for purely self-centered reasons; they’re self-serving incentives for pro-social behavior . We should design accordingly.

In the next couple of posts I’ll look more closely at esteem seeking, Shirky’s book and the popular bias against instrumental motivations online. I’ll use the example of the development of the Linux operating system to illustrate the distinction between two different versions of social capital as well as two different takes on the free rider problem. Of course, both of them will utilize the idea of esteem along with Bourdieu’s idea of the “economy of symbolic goods.”

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.

The Social, The Cultural and The Difference

In my line of work we use the word "social" a lot... social media, social networks, mobile social software, etc. And in analysis of these things, we generally use the word ambiguously to mean either the social or the cultural. What, even in caricature, is the difference? Here’s an intuitive first stab at the distinction.

The Social is about the connections and interactions between people, whereas The Cultural is about connections and interactions between people mediated by shared concepts, history, symbol systems, etc.

That is, most social interactions are mediated and structured by cultural mechanisms like norms and institutions.

Social functionality and social media obviously have some effects that are purely social in the sense above, i.e. that impact the number and quality of our interpersonal connections and the efficiency with which new connections may be made. But social media just as obviously operate on and respond to culture, i.e. the conventional meanings, preferences and distinctions that structure the interactions within our social network.

In this post, I’ll sketch a view of social norms and thus culture. Basically, I want to be able to use this formulation in future posts as a means of understanding how social media impact our preferences and expectations going into interactions. In other words, I ultimately want to look at how the specific properties of social media change culture, but first I'd like to clarify what culture is.

The Games People Play

Social norms are the informal rules of society that are maintained in several ways: by sanctions from others; by our expectations of others’ expectations; by our general desire to do as relevant others do or by some combination of all of the above. You can look at social norms in at least two ways.

1. Norms embed, encode and instantiate values.

2. Norms coordinate interactions.

To me, these are complementary ways of thinking about norms. The first is more of a lived, affective understanding. It’s about our motivating emotional states, presumed expectations and means of personal and interpersonal leverage. The second is a more cognitive understanding. It’s about the conventional structures of interaction and the delimited sets of feasible strategies that turn potentially destructive “state of nature” mixed-motive games into coordination games. The two ways of thinking of norms feed into each other: the affective reinforces and “operationalizes” the cognitive and the cognitive effect of coordination “justifies” the affective.

Culture is a system of norms that coordinates repeated interactions. Stanford political scientist David Laitin provides a tidy definition of culture in his book Nations, States, and Violence.

culture [is] an equilibrium in a well defined set of circumstances in which members of a group sharing in common descent, symbolic practices and/or high levels of interaction – and thereby becoming a cultural group – are able to condition their behavior on common knowledge beliefs about the behavior of all members of the group.

Basically, he’s using game theory jargon to say that culture is a set of complementary “plans” – or strategies – for interacting with other locals. The plans allow us to coordinate our actions efficiently and effectively. If we stick to our learned and conditioned plan we can greatly reduce the daunting task of keeping track of everybody’s probable motivations, expectations and preferences (i.e. what game they’re playing) in every interaction. Essentially, our plans tell us how we’re expected to proceed and what we should expect from others in most interactions. Once that’s out of the way, we can get down to the business of actually getting what we need out of the defined interaction. Others are using similar interaction-defining plans and expect the same from us. If we deviate, they may have incentive to try to get us back on plan. Thus feedback keeps the set of plans in a relatively stable equilibrium; deviation from conventionally understood plans often results in forces – from others and from within – that may pull us back on plan. So, in effect culture systematizes and stabilizes most of the repeated interactions we get into and defines the ones that might be unclear otherwise.

Why are cultures different in different places? Because there are a huge number of sets of plans that form equilibria for the repeated interactions we get into daily. Which equilibrium your group actually converges on is a path dependent accident of history. And of course, the “chosen” equilibrium could always fall apart and a new equilibrium could be converged upon.

So culture is just a locally stable, conditioned and self-reinforcing set of plans for coordinating the situations that continually arise in interactions with others. Specifically, they coordinate interactions by limiting the available plans for action given everybody else’s probable plans.

Seems pretty anemic, doesn’t it? Indeed, our daily experience is of the affective, values-embedding aspect of norms. It’s affective insofar as there’s a definite emotional and felt component to this conception of norms. We feel the draw of values and morals to comply or sanction non-compliance. We feel a certain dread (or delight) in transgressing them. Or when our fully internalized and purely habitual norm compliance is challenged we feel discomfort or confusion as to how to proceed.

It helps to think of these two aspects – the cognitive and the affective – as operating at different levels. If the equilibrium story describes culture from a broader perspective – of long term, pan-player negotiation that ultimately settles upon conventional ways of framing situations and thus structuring interactions with each other – then the affective aspect seems to be more about the short-run, lived experience of these coordinated interactions. That is, the equilibrium understanding is about the way we stabilize interactions through longer term development of coordinating conventions, while the affective understanding suggests something of the way we perpetuate, commit to, signal compliance with and internalize the equilibrium’s strategies in our daily lives.

My interest here is in motivation to comply and how that can stabilize and perpetuate norms. People like to belong. But more than that, they like to avoid sanction or be esteemed or attain high status or maintain a (good or bad) reputation. These are social needs that manifest themselves through the conventional “channels” and mechanisms of norms.

Some social norms, like fairness, have a clear benefit in coordination. Others, like wearing burkas, seem a little murky and arbitrary to cultural outsiders. We really can’t see any benefit in the custom and actually often perceive moral and political dangers to women. Still, the custom is valued by many and tolerated and perpetuated by many more for reasons of social pressure, perceptions of sanction and societal expectation. Still, those who don’t really feel that it’s god’s will that they wear a burka must act as if they are doing so out of devotion. It’s not enough that they do it, but rather they must do it as if they are true believers. If they didn’t they could face exclusion, disesteem or possible social and physical sanctions.

Following the work of Jon Elster and Learry Gagné, I claim the emotional aspect of norms – even though norms “really are” just arbitrary, conventional and clearly sub-optimal instances of behavioral coordination or sub-game equilibria of a higher level game equilibrium like religion – explains the perpetuation and spread of even the most detrimental customs and practices in a way that purely instrumental or utility maximizing accounts can’t. Emotions and values make these things sticky and resilient in the face of obvious sub-optimality and irrationality. Many of the people maintaining norms don’t even have to believe in the encoded values and may even suffer because of them. They simply have to believe that others believe and thus will sanction, not value or ostracize them if they don’t comply. Most importantly, they must desire the esteem, belonging and the self-respect that comes from acceptance by others. And, of course, they may fear both external sanctions and the emotional sanctions one gets from transgressing internalized norms. If there are vocal and salient norm believers, a significant number of compliers and a lot of folks interested in belonging and accumulating esteem, even lame, unpopular norms can be indefinitely perpetuated (if the incentive to change is outweighed by the incentive – rational and emotional – to maintain).

Properties of social media – in particular the ease with which feedback accumulates and speed with which items can be propagated – can impact dynamics of culture. I’ll explore this idea in the next post by looking at the new norm of “compulsive disclosure” online.

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.

The Display Aspect of Social Functionality

In an earlier post, I suggested that what I broadly call social functionality (i.e. the sociality-enhancing, socially focused, largely UGC functionality, sites and applications currently so popular) operate within a space defined by the following three dimensions.

Knowledge: We use this stuff to learn. Specifically, we use it to learn from each other. For example, user reviews or Wikipedia.

Connection: We use this stuff to communicate, bond, meet, define affiliations and dislikes or just hang out where the people are. For example, friending on social sites or Twitter.

Display: We use this stuff to communicate and manage presentations of ourselves, truthfully or not, to others. For example, user profiles or Flickr.

No piece of social functionality is all one and none of the others, but they tend to be weighted differently in each case. To me, Display is the most interesting one, yet it’s the least explored of all of them. Web theorists and proselytizers tend to focus on Connection and Knowledge, assuming them to be the main drivers of online sociability. Display is often thought of as an embarrassing, “inauthentic,” or cynical counterpoint to these otherwise ennobling drives. In this post, I look at the Display dimension and suggest that it's crucially important for motivating contribution and can actually stabilize and help self-regulate systems of social functionality.

Even though Display frequently only makes sense in terms of Connection and Knowledge, the latter two get a lot of their user-motivating power from Display. That is, functionality in the Connection and Knowledge dimensions often provide a means of – and excuse for – Display. But Display often motivates contributions (and impacts the type of contributions) made via Knowledge and Connection functionality. For example, mixing elements of Display into Connection focused functionality (e.g. publicly visible comments on Flickr) arguably motivates more – and more interesting – use than simple Connection (comments viewable to the image poster).

Break It Down

Users are generally looking for one or more of the following things when they approach social functionality through Display.

Status: This is rank or position, often bound up with some expectations and obligations. These tend to be systemic or group based, like editor status in Wikipedia. It's a mark of distinction that sets certain users off from the rest. Some social sites actually allow the earning of status and thus it becomes aspirational for a devoted few. Others just require that you stick around and contribute for a long time, sort of like the “old hats” in the usenets of yesteryear.

Reputation: A user evaluation (positive or negative) based on past interactions that sticks with the user through future interactions. eBay’s reputation mechanism is the most famous and easiest example. These are usually associated with mixed-motive situations in which some folks may have an incentive to screw over other users. Generalizing, we can say that if your past interactions or contributions affect your future interactions, then you have a reputation.

Esteem: We seek positive evaluation of our contributions based on more or less well defined normative standards. This one is the most vague but also the most prevalent social function in the Display dimension. Whenever we write a review or post a picture we want to give off the best impression we can, even if we're posting to a group of friends who know us really well. We still tailor our presentation of self to whatever normative standards we think we can get away with. We pitch our performance to the normative standards of the group we are trying to garner esteem from. The desire for esteem, the desire to look good, is part of most user's motivation when using (UGC) social functionality.

Though often used more or less interchangeably, these three are in fact distinct but closely related ideas. You can have a high status – be a Wikipedia editor, for example – yet still not be particularly esteemed. The same goes for reputation. You can have a good reputation, meaning you haven’t screwed over anyone, yet not be a star. Similarly, a hack with a bad rep can create a good post, garnering some esteem, but this doesn’t mean she thereby has a good reputation. Also, a reputation can be good or bad while esteem is always positive.

So, they’re distinct ideas, but they’re also intimately related. For example, a mechanism that cuts across all three is Amazon’s “Top 100 Reviewer” tag. Review voting is primarily an esteem focused gadget intended to incentivize quality. These aggregate via a modified reputation system which then results in a status change.

Like the larger space of social dimensions, the three Display dimensions – Status, Reputation and Esteem– form a continuum. It’s rare that a piece of social functionality falls under just one. It’s also rare that a piece of functionality is expressly intended to operate within a single dimension, e.g. be expressly designed to allow the user to garner esteem by posting content. Rather, the dimensions articulate the different social functions actually played by the largely neutral mechanisms deployed in different contexts. Obviously, some social functionality mechanisms are expressly intended to focus on a single element, like reputation mechanisms. Most, however, are comprised of relatively neutral functionality that’s contextually deployed in such a way that it assumes the social function. For example the commenting functionality associated with pictures in Flickr often assumes a significant Esteem accumulating function. This doesn’t mean that the generic class of commenting functionality was designed to fulfill the Esteem needs of the owner of the target content any more than it was designed to facilitate the Connection needs of the commenter. It’s just used that way in this case.

So What

Surprisingly, these “individualistic” Display functions can have significant effects on the larger “ecology” of dimensions. That is, the elements of Display, which are simply mechanisms individuals use for self-presentation and self-image management online, can have surprising higher-level effects.

Motivating: Regardless of what traditional decision theorists say, status and esteem are powerful incentives[pdf] that can generate their own systems of distribution and accumulation. The desire for esteem in particular can be particularly motivating. A significant portion of the “altruistic” behavior in user created knowledge sites like Wikipedia is attributable to the motivating power of esteem. It can get people contributing even if the group from which esteem is sought is tiny, provided contribution costs are relatively low.

Stabilizing: Esteem mechanisms like voting on reviews and reputation mechanisms like some badge systems actually help to establish norms, thus stabilizing the systems they’re part of. In effect, these mechanisms create a means of negotiating, ratifying and displaying norms by continually motivating input, allowing voting on contributions and filtering out the less popular within whatever groups arise. The result can be something like a self-fulfilling system of expectations (an equilibrium, maybe?). New users see what garners esteem or creates a good reputation, allowing them to accumulate cultural capital, which then, of course, determines the norms their contributions follow.

Regulating: Display functions often introduce the “spectre of the future” via reputation mechanisms. Basically this means that in mixed-motive situations, you’re likely to cooperate and play nice if you think that this interaction will have repercussions on future interactions. Also, producing visible normative prototypes via the mechanisms discussed in the last item actually leads to more and more people honoring local (in the sense of relevant to their group) norms. Norms that arise from groups through action and feedback tend to be largely self-regulating.

All of this suggests (to me at least) that the Display aspects of social functionality are pretty important and not simply the embarrassing or cynical flip-side of the nobler Connection and Knowledge dimensions.