Reflection on “Social translucence: An approach to designing systems that support social processes”

Erickson, T. and Kellogg, W.A., 2000. Social translucence: an approach to designing systems that support social processes. ACM transactions on computer-human interaction (TOCHI), 7(1), pp.59–83.Vancouver

Summary:

In this paper, the authors wanted to design digital systems that support communication and collaboration among large groups of people, like an office organization. To tackle this, they focused on “social translucence’’, a novel approach they presented to design digital systems by making social information visible to its users. Social translucence has three characteristics: visibility, awareness, and accountability. The system is advocated to be translucent because there is vital tension between privacy and visibility. They further applied the concept of social translucence to knowledge management and defined the outlines of knowledge communities. The authors discussed how digital systems can be implemented using a social translucent perspective and presented an implementation called “Babble”, a conversationally based system that supports the creation, management, and reuse of knowledge in a social context. In the end, the authors discussed potential future research areas/issues using the social translucence approach to designing digital systems.

Figure 1. A social proxy showing the global structure of a knowledge community: larger circles -> conversation topics (circles meaning new information); smaller dots -> participants

Reflection:

This was a super interesting paper. I am in awe that this was written in 2000. This paper seems to be instrumental in Social Computing to design our modern-day platforms like Discord and Slack. The perspective of comparing the digital world at that time with how people interacted in the physical world socially was fascinating to read. The examples are given throughout the paper (of real-world scenarios like book chapter writing in different rooms or of the Babble system design) and the conversational style of writing by using daily words like “sort of” helped me in understanding the approach better.

In my mind, the closest social computing systems at present used for knowledge management using social translucence are Google Docs and Slack. The edit history of the Google docs (to give incentive for the knowledgeable person to share knowledge and get credit), along with features to chat, add comments, and suggest corrections while collaboratively sharing knowledge on the document fits into a system designed with social translucence kept in mind. Similarly, Slack has all these features present and tackles conversation restructuring by the maintenance of hashtags for a certain topic. (e.g this slack #cscwclass2021fall ) and the ability to reply to a text which initiates a sub-thread on the topic. Google Docs have small user bubbles at the top of the document, which are active or passive based on user activity, which seems to be based on Babble’s minimalist graphical representation of social proxy. The concept of privacy vs visibility can be seen in Slack where during a group discussion on a channel, we can directly message a person in the group and no one else knows that we are simultaneously conversing in private chat.

In the implementation of digital systems using the social translucence section, the realistic, mimetic, and abstract approaches reminded me of the Snap Inc. virtual booth at the Grace Hopper conference 2021 I attended. They had used virtual reality to design rooms as they would be at a physical conference (mimetic). The “meeting rooms” had teleconferencing (a realistic approach) with a speaker and audience. And lastly, there was the abstract approach also presented using emojis like 👏🏽, 👍🏽 to convey the audience’s reaction to the topic or people could ask questions in the chatbox.

I think the presence of social translucence in modern-day social computing systems has become even more prevalent after the pandemic has hit. There was an urgency to redesign or use current social computing systems to perform office work or attend a class virtually. Hence the usage of social computing systems like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Discord increased substantially for organizations moving to remote work.

Overall, the significance of this paper is obvious when a student like me after 21 years of the paper being published is able to find examples of systems that I’ve used which implement social translucence. Lasting impact. Amazing read.

This reflection was written as part of CS5754: Social Computing class under Prof. Sang Won Lee in Fall 2021.