Paper Reading #30: Life "modes" in social media

Authors:
Faith Kursat Ozenc
Shelly Farnham

Occupation:

Faith Kursat Ozenc is at Carnegie Mellon University
Shelly Farnham is a researcher for Microsoft Research

Location:

CHI '11 Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on Human factors in computing systems in NYC

Summary
Hypothesis:
The researcher's believe that people organize their social worlds based on life modes and also believe that the ways to express such modes can be further improved when it comes to organizing such things.

Methods
sixteen people were chosen as users to take part in this experiment. Each of these people were told to model their lives in the experiment. During the screening there was special focused placed on observing how they spend his/her time and with who he/she spends time with. The participants mapped out his/her mode of life by using a graph with various colored markers and described how he/she would interact with each of the node in his/her everyday life.

Results
Based on the results of the users. It was seen that most people made maps that were social meme maps. The communication chosen by the users were mostly based on two different things: closeness to the user and the specific area of his/her life that effected the user. Based on the observation the methods of communication increased some what proportionally based on how close the user was to a specific person. The various factors that determined this sense of closeness with others were strongly effected by age, personality, and culture of the people the users dealt with.

Content
The paper focused on how people use their times with his/her social groups and various other people in one's everyday life. The researchers observed the ways that the users organized his/her model of life as the various level of interactions were compared to see the various forms of communication. The overall point of this research was to see how social structuring/modeling/networking organizations can be improved to make it easier for one's everyday lives.

Discussion
I personally found this paper to be some what uninteresting mostly because there was no new idea they were testing or new product they were testing. Although i believe that it is a good idea in general to improving the currently existing way to model our social lives i do not think that this research will have any significant impact anytime soon. I believe however that this research will be a something good to build on if someone wanted to make a new better organized facebook.