Evan Gillingham

10/4/19

NMD 200

 Technological Dissociation & Face2Face

Problem: In a world where half of our interactions with others are digital, we face many new problems in the wake of our rapid technological progress. We read text that angers us and respond by writing angry text back, and give that text a platform to let that cycle continue. We begin to lose what we consider to be the truth, as words contradict and opinions blur reality. We begin to lose touch with the humans behind the screen and get more connected with the words we are presented. So much information is either lost or misinterpreted when we can only speak in text, changing our own interpretations of the individuals on the other side. 

Technological dissociation, or the mental separation of the individual from the text on the screen has fundamentally changed the way we interact with each other, not only online, but offline as well. The idea of the platform I am proposing to is to try to create an engaging environment with it’s users while also trying to limit dissociation. 

Context: One of the subjects I kept returning back to while doing class research was political polarization and how we keep becoming a more partisan and divided nation. While this topic is very diverse and complicated, the anger that comes with differing opinions of others, and more importantly, the constant escalation associated with this anger is something we are all familiar with. I have found, and as we have discussed in class, that the way we communicate and express ideas in person is much different than how we interact in a one on one (or group) conversation. 

We’ve seen it happen ourselves, a particularly controversial post presented in a certain way will become part of the “outrage machine”, often without all of the information available. This will then lead to a mass amount of people accusing an individual or group while being misinformed, with no repercussions for their own words, as all that they have to represent themselves is their message and screen name. While content moderation is important, this is more of a band-aid and doesn’t really solve the problem as a whole, in addition to the ethical questions involved in content moderation. So, how can we try to enable more meaningful face to face interactions through an online presence, while minimizing the impact of overwhelming feedback?

Concept: Face2Face, or F2F, is a video journal discussion platform. The primary idea of F2F is to have a discussion base for any topic somebody might be interested in, whether that be political commentary, fantasy football, bird watching, or your favorite TV show. The biggest  difference between this platform and other discussion platforms is that F2F is designed to engage you with other users of F2F, not engagement with the platform itself. While a platform like Facebook is built to keep you logged onto (and engaged with) the site for as long as possible, F2F’s sole objective is to allow you to share your ideas as directly and meaningfully as possible to the most interested parties, whether that be on or off the platform. 

The primary function of the platform is very simple. Different communities, defined through different user generated tags, post video diaries talking about or even showing content directly related to said tag. A group of volunteer moderators, selected by the user who originally created the tag, set guidelines establishing what kinds of content is allowed in this community and monitor the activity of the community ensuring those rules are met. This, at its core, would be a redesign of Reddit. But, while Reddit is mostly a text based platform, F2F would be predominantly video posts with titles, supplemented by outside links and other forms of media. 

One of the bigger differences between F2F and Reddit would be the geographic feature. When a tag hits a certain threshold of followers, particularly populated areas of the world can have location specific tags/communities for respective interest. For example, if I’m looking for people interested in chess and I’m in Seattle, I can go to the Seattle geo-tag, search to find the chess tag, and find people within my region that share interests with me in my area. The moderation rules established by the original tag still would still apply to this new tag, except this time moderated by moderators within your region. The main purpose of this feature would be to incentivise these communities to organize local events and meet and greets of like minded individuals, taking the idea of “Face to Face” a step further. 

The last feature of Face to Face would be the video chat rooms. While within your desired tag, rather than making a post, you could join a chat room of live users, limited to at most 5 or 6 people, determined by a random algorithm. This chat room could either be a discussion platform for whatever interest your tag may be representing or a way for a group of people to watch something, like the football tag watching the Super Bowl or a classic movie tag streaming Rosemary’s Baby.  While online video chat rooms have proven to be a problem in the past, other people within the chat room would have the opportunity to flag users for inappropriate behavior, which would be reviewed by F2F staff. I’m not entirely sure how smooth this feature would work but it would definitely be tested in an earlier version of the site. 

Mockup of F2F Interface

Values and Redesign: The primary human value, or harm, that this reinvention of the classic web forum is supposed to tackle is the feeling of loneliness or isolation within social media users. According to a 2017 report from the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, young adults in the U.S. who use social media more frequently than their peers report higher levels of perceived social isolation. Even though we are more connected as a culture than we ever have been before, we feel more alone than ever. 

F2F tries to combat not just this sense of isolation, but also by trying to be a platform that isn’t a substitution for social interaction, but instead a tool that enables it. Human Tech describes this problem best in their Ledger of Harms when they say “Since tech companies get better engagement metrics for online conversations than offline conversations, they are incentivized to pull people towards digital conversation — and what if that replaces in-person connections?”. F2F tries to combat this not by putting a face behind the text, but by replacing the text with a face all together.  The entirety of the communication on the platform would either be directly talking to a video of someone else, or RSVPing to real life events. Also, F2F’s success would be measured not by its engagement metrics at all, but would entirely care about the number of active users, evaluating how our users are using the platform, and comparing this to the design guide created by Humane Tech. 

Conclusion: F2F’s first priority is to connect individuals as organically/naturally as possible, even though the platform is online. While a video call, or a video journal thread, is definitely not the same as a face to face conversation, F2F is more or less an experiment to see exactly how close we can get to that while still using a screen. When I proposed F2F to others, I often kept hearing that a video only platform was unnecessary; I was restricting myself, people couldn’t use it as efficiently and that talking into a camera makes people, generally speaking, uncomfortable. Honestly, they aren’t wrong. But I think the biggest thing I’ve learned since I started this class is: Absolute connection isn’t necessary. Sure, we can’t see 12 different responses at the same time, but do we really need to? There’s definitely value to sitting down and listening to someone talk to you without distractions, can that same value be brought to us online? I think there’s a lot of room to explore and adapt with this platform, and I’m curious to see if we’ll see anything similar to this in the future.