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What is social?

This question has been in the back of my mind for some time: What does being social mean, and what does it mean to be not social? Is there such a thing as a little bit of social?

Earlier this summer, I posed this question on Twitter & Friendfeed, specifically trying to come up with examples of online activities that are not social. (It was more to brainstorm than to come to a consensus.)

Now that I’m designing a new social search study, it’s again important to define the boundaries of social. For example, will people perceive Wikipedia to be a collaboratively-edited continually-changing document or a static source of knowledge like an encyclopedia. To get a quick, general sense of whether certain websites were considered to be social or not, we created a short survey for Mechanical Turk. We were curious about:

• Wikipedia
• Bookmarking sites (e.g., delicious, Digg, Reddit, etc.)
• Networking sites (e.g., Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, etc)
• Question-Answer sites (e.g., Yahoo! Answers, WikiAnswers, Live QnA, Fluther, etc.)
• Newspapers online (e.g., nytimes.com, washingtonpost.com, wallstreetjournal.com, etc.)
• Search engines (e.g., Google, Yahoo!, AOL, etc.)
• Blogs

Very simply, the survey asked: “Do you consider the following internet sites to be social?” People replied Yes, No, Not Sure, or I don’t know what this is [when they didn't know what category/site we were talking about]. We also asked people to briefly justify their response, and expecting that no one would, we were quite pleased that +95% of people actually did!

We received 100 complete responses and got some surprising results!

First, I’ll report on the expected results (sites we threw in essentially as ‘controls’). Just about no one thought Search engines or Newspapers online are social. But everyone thought Networking sites are. Now, I have spoken to people who think Google search is social, which personally does not feel social to me, or at least I think it would be an edge case. In the least, these people were not part of my Mechanical Turk demographic here.

Surprisingly, people were basically split on whether Question-Answer sites were social: half said yes, half no. They deemed blogs to be social, but Wikipedia to be not social. There was a three-way tie for Bookmarking sites, split between: social, not sure, and I don’t know what the heck this is. Perhaps these results don’t seem too unexpected—I personally was surprised to see that so many thought question-answering was not a social activity but that blogging was. At least on my blog, I write out various musings and almost never get any responses back. It certainly doesn’t feel social to me! As for Wikipedia, we really weren’t sure whether people would perceive it as social or not.

Luckily, we captured justifications for people’s responses, and as a result, were able to pull out their definition of social.

Question-Answer sites were perceived to be a blend between the informational and the social because either:

• they involved interactions with people, specifically communicating or sharing information directly, or by encouraging debates
• or they were focused on presenting “purposeful” information, devoid of interaction; or at least, interactions were not encouraged or involved no meaningful, personal “contact”

Bookmarking sites were also perceived to be a blend:

• some said that the content is “user-driven,” so people can share opinions and comments, sometimes leading to discussions
• others observed that the focus is on websites, not on users; where information is shared, there is no actual interaction or it is not encouraged
• finally, some saw bookmarking as a game: something to be manipulated or something to be “won” (e.g., a “popularity contest”)

Blogs were social because:

• you can learn about the opinion of others
• they encourage the sharing of information, comments, feedback among authors and readers; this encourages conversations
• plus, blogs can reveal personal facts about people

Wikipedia was not social because:

• it is an encyclopedia/database, focused on presenting information to people
• it does not encourage interactions, “friend-making,” or social networking; one person said that it contained “social aspects” but not in how people use it
• on the other hand, a few did note that because it is a collaborative community effort, users can contribute and share information making it somewhat social

These self-reports contain interesting clues for developing general definition of what people consider to be “social.” Social seems to imply a direct interaction—communicating and sharing information (comments, feedback, or opinions) for primarily personal reasons. Activities that are considered not social are those which are predominantly informational. It shouldn’t have to be the case that social and informational stand in opposition, but many of our respondents indicated that they perceived a dichotomy—possibly coinciding with traditional classifications of news sources (New York Times) as informational and networking activities (Facebook) as social.

Though there was a general agreement about this split between social and informational sites, respondents had mixed views on whether this distinction occurred as a result of the purpose of the site as dictated by its creators or the end usage of the site as dictated by its users. For example, one respondent commented that Wikipedia is not social because it is “not intended for friend-making,” whereas another indicated that it was not social because it was “used for informative purposes.”

This distinction between purpose and use is interesting on the web, where sites can be hijacked for uses beyond the intentions of their creators. Sites intended as social networks or social utilities can become important portals of information (news now breaks faster on Twitter than on news sites), whereas sites intended for informational use can now become rich discussion forums (newspapers are increasingly disseminating news through blogs where users can comment and interact). As we move forward, the way in which knowledge is collected and distributed on the web is becoming increasingly complex; the line between the social and the informational is, too, quickly becoming blurred.

…

If anyone reading this feels like being “social” today, I would love your thoughts and feedback on this post! Do these definitions of social match your inclinations? Are other (new) websites changing the face of social by making our interactions more implicit now? What are the consequences of this changing social landscape, for individual users and for website developers?

[Acknowledgments: Thanks very much to Sanjay Kairam for his help with this mini-study!]

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