The Social (Design) Dilemma
Reflections on the Netflix documentary
If you haven’t, I recommend you watch The Social Dilemma before you read this piece. Here’s the trailer.
Exaggerated, but necessary
I join those saying this documentary is much-needed, and a must-watch. Most of what the film talks about was not new to me, besides the insanely worrying data on the mental health of youth correlated with their use of social media. This is appalling.
What’s new in the film is the dramatisation in the telling of the story. And that’s among the main reasons why this is an important work: it is an educational and awareness-raising public service. This educational mission justifies those fictionalised narrative sections - which the film does to a degree that some would call sensationalism, fear mongering, or outright horror.
Point taken, but what next?
But from a solution perspective, a design perspective or a policy making perspective, The Social Dilemma doesn’t go very far. Two interrelated reasons why: it simply isn’t in the film’s scope, and this isn’t a design film. I believe it is in the (user interface, interaction and experience) design domain, if anywhere, that solutions can be found out of this mess.
Before I go into that, here are some of the main solutions argued for by The Social Dilemma (TSD) - and my take on why they wont work.
TSD Argument: Social media (and by extension digital tools) always ‘want’ something; they should be less ‘demanding’ and be more ‘passive’ like pre-digital tools: Not going to happen. Digital tools are by their very nature interactive. That’s their key benefit - that they can be interventionist, responding to and in turn driving user behavior for good. It comes down to designing that interactivity right, not rendering it inert. You could argue that a ticket machine should just sit there and vend tickets, but isn’t it great when the machine alerts someone of their train’s track change and saves them their job?
TSD Argument: Delete your social media, and if you don’t, stop using notifications: Not going to happen. A notification can be depressing-inducing for one user, but life saving for another. We need to redesign the notification, not get rid of it.
TSD Argument: Don’t tap on recommended content (on YouTube for example): Won’t happen. It is the recommended video feed that makes YouTube one of the, if not the, most valuable learning resources around (although the recommendations can be terrible too).
TSD Argument: Don’t give social media to kids: This has a lot of merit. Limit screen time, absolutely. Non-smartphone hours, totally. Not just kids, everyone could benefit from non-smartphone weekends. But taking away the phone entirely is a desperate move driven by lack of better choices. That’s exactly what we need to build - better choices. There is opportunity for enormous innovation here.
Algorithms might exploit the vulnerable …
The film shows how social media algorithms compete to keep the user hooked. One of the tricks they are shown using is providing tiny micro-feedback signifiers like: the user is ‘typing now’. The film shows how this makes a teenage user anxious with anticipation. It shows that over time such experiences scar some youngsters’ sense of self-worth.
The risk of this happening to vulnerable users, such a teens seeking an identity, is unfortunately very real.
… but let’s switch user and context, and look at it again.
For example, I’ve used a bunch of chats apps last week to coordinate a remote team on a complex proposal. To me, those little micro-signifiers within chat apps have been a godsend! It helps me a ton to know at a glance if someone has seen my message, is yet to see it, is awake and typing a response, etc. And they don’t need to communicate all that to me. This equals time and cognitive bandwidth saved on both our ends.
Highlight: ‘Typing now’ signifier
Highlight: ‘Seen’ signifier
The social (design) dilemma is more complex than we’d like to admit
The real social dilemma lies in the domain of design. Interactive innovations - outcomes of great user-centred design born of practices designers evangelise everyday - are ripe for algorithmic manipulation.
How do we separate great social design made to connect and empower people - from its unintended consequences - and both of those from its intentional exploitation and weaponisation? How will we distinguish between interaction that responds beautifully to context and need - and one that sucks the user into a spiral of toxic engagement just to boost business numbers?
The prediction problem
Interactive media need to predict something accurately to be useful. Prediction is inseparable from interactivity. But accurate prediction involves deepening knowledge of the user and their context. And so prediction comes with intimacy.
The question then becomes: how might we design technologies that are increasingly intimate, and simultaneously more trustworthy?
Designing Liminal Experiences
IM apps used to be about asynchronous messaging. Not anymore. They increasingly exist in a space of liminal user experience - between asynchronous and synchronous messaging. IM today is more effective than email for some users precisely because of their liminality (look at how chat apps are replacing email for a lot of Chinese users). Those little signifiers like ‘typing now’ allow a continuum of shared experience.
In a miraculous melding of human behavior and digital technology, me and another user are participating together in live, shared meaning-making via a digital chat interface. That little ‘seen’ signifier acts as a visual bridge to help us make meaning that is entirely emergent - and very different from the meaning two teenagers might make with the help of the same signifier when chatting about a party.
Liminal is a complex concept. It spans a vast psychological and physical terrain of behaviors and experiences. The book Liminal Thinking deals with liminality as a means of changing one’s thinking and beliefs for self-transformation.
However, to design for the digital liminal, we’d need to turn to the roots of the concept from social anthropology. Liminality was first developed in the context of understanding ritual. The beginning of this video has a good explanation.
And at the start of the video below you get a sense of being in a liminal space as experienced by Persephone, a Greek mythological being.
Resilience - Navigating the liminal
Some dominant characteristics of a liminal spaces then are: unfamiliarity, the uncomfortable, and the unknown. It a space of transition from a known reality of comfort to a new emergent reality filled with peril but also promise.
These are the very qualities that characterise the interstitial spaces within our social media. They help us make progress into new levels and kinds of relationships, in coordination with others. But that journey often entails leaving the comfortable and entering the realm of the uncomfortable.
So how can we design to address vulnerability and discomfort in such liminal spaces? How can we help users navigate into the liminal with assurance, safety, confidence?
Resilience is usually seen as being able to face discomfort and adapt to it. But the human is passive in this scenario. The world here acts upon the human, not the other way around. What about enactive behaviors? What about when we venture out ourselves to confront and conquer the unknown?
Resilience is the ability to enter and progress in liminal spaces with confidence
Within today’s social media, vulnerable users are mostly alone in there, like Persephone. Behavior designers can create interventions - signposts, signals and paths - to assure and lead users in that liminal landscape.
In our work at Fabric we have been investigating the design of such interventions. I hope to explore these ahead in this newsletter. Meanwhile, if you’d like to know more, email me on ashwin@fabricbd.com.
(And, here’s a great link: The Social Dilemma shows how a young person gets activated into an alt-rightish extreme movement. If that struck you, a more interesting - and true, not fictionalised - work of journalism are episodes 1-3 of this awesome podcast. (And while we are here, a shoutout to ContraPoints! - you’ll find out why in the podcast.)
