Not Community; Identity

It crossed my mind that what I'm looking for in a mediated experience isn't exactly a sense of community; instead it's a sense of shared identity: that the people in the mediated experience are, in some sense, part of me; that we share a common identity.

The word community, on the other hand, has specific meanings in the physical world, but is a very vague term when applied to online experiences. Naively, I think of shared identity as one element of a community, and that a community implies support, intimacy, trust, recognizable individuals, continuity of relationships, etc. In contrast, I think (again Naively) of shared identity as simply defining an "us" vs. the world of "them".

This is a useful distinction, because I believe a sense of group identity can be established and communicated far more easily than a sense of community can.

The Loneliness of Shadows

An accidental experiment has given me the impression that seeing shadows - at least anonymous shadows - may not be a very reassuring an experience.

We were at the JFK airport the other day, and in the course of navigating the rabbit warren of security tunnels, we wound up in a waiting area where we could see the shadows of people passing by outside.

Far from being the reassuring experience I had expected, seeing the shadows enhanced the airport's feeling of isolation and loneliness.

Granted, this experience was within the context of the general jet lag, dehydration, and paranoia that typifies air travel, but I think the experience is still valid: the anonymous shadows (as you might see in the Flickering Lights idea in an earlier blog) didn't provide a warm, fuzzy feeling at all.

I feel a big part of the problem was that the shadows were anonymous - the people represented by the shadows were not recognizably part of my community. This leads to a design rule:

Design Rule: evidence of people in a mediated experience should be associatable with your community. This doesn't necessarily mean that the user should recognize who the people are, but it does mean that the user should recognize that the people are part of their community vs. the general population.

For example, if I were part of a baseball team and a few of the shadows passing by were wearing baseball caps and carrying our team duffle bags, the shadows might have been reassuring.

The limits of Shared Space, and what crossing them means

As I was re-reading the Casablanca Project paper it crossed my mind that there may be something limiting about describing coordinated experiences as 'Shared Space'.

The issue I see is that Shared Space implies

• a uniform physical architectural metaphor - that each participant's experience (or at least the mental model of it) is identical.
• a uniform order of events - that each participant's experience of events in the space is (ideally at least) identical.
• a coherent experience of time - that when an event occurs in the shared space, it occurs (again, ideally) at a single, Coordinated Universal Time (UTC or GMT) that can be identified by all participants.
  

Knowing these limits opens up new possibilities. Imagine a multi-user experience where:

• one user's concept of the space, not just the medium, may be very different from another's.
• the order of events may be relativistic.
• the relationship of time in the application may be non-linear, non-monotonic, and not connected to UTC.

The Loneliness of Synchrony

Ok, so there are a pile of distance awareness apps out there, from Scott Brave, et. al.'s In Touch to Jackie Lee and Hyemin Chung's Lovers' Cups.

The trouble I see is that the synchronous nature of this awareness means that most of the time the other person isn't there. Instead of being a means of feeling connected, it's a means of reinforcing disconnectedness. Imagine having a light that would go on whenever a friend thought of you - I imagine it would be on disappointingly little, and you would go crazy staring at the light, waiting to catch the moment that it blinked on and off.

In contrast, consider a greeting card (the physical, paper thing). The sender needs only think of the recipient only for a short time, and the recipient can bask in that thought for a long time. The recipient says 'what a lovely thought' rather than 'why aren't you thinking of me literally every moment?'

Shadows flickering by, via light bars

One idea: simulate the effect of seeing shadows flash past in a hallway, via a set of light-bars on a hallway wall. As people walk down the distant hallway, sensors in their light-bars detect their passing. Your local light bars flash off in sequence, to give the impression of a person passing by.

It's as if someone has joined the two hallways with a series of thin, vertical, translucent windows. Something like you might find at an airport.

The idea is that this is one way of creating a basic distant awareness: the feeling that there are people around you, yet very little more. It might be something like walking through an airport - would it be comforting to be aware of others, or disturbing to be aware of the proximity of strangers?

Beginning: what makes a non-verbal community?

So, here we are. What makes a group of people a community? ...even a community of strangers? It seems uniqueness and repeatability of identity has something to do with it. What are examples of communities that exist without any verbal or visual communication? There is the effect of 'familiar strangers' - the people you habitually see, such as the person with the umbrella at the bus stop.