What Kinds of Communities Do We Want to Create?

[Julie Strothman]

In his opening keynote at the Information Architecture Summit 2009, cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch, of Kansas State University, asked the room of user experience designers: "How can we create an environment that creates the kind of community and the kind of people we want?" It’s arguably self-aggrandizing to think we are engineering types of people, however Wesch, and later Jesse James Garrett, reminded us of McLuhan’s observation: "We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us."

While the Facebook timesink is beloved for the community and connections it helps us maintain, the constant vacuous quizzes are a vexing reminder of its lack of avenues for creativity. Wesch noted that "We are most creative when we let go of identity." Demonstrating identity is one of the strongest intrinsic values of most social networking sites (SNSs). In creativity-focused sites (deviantArt, Flickr, MySpace) pseudonyms (an alternate persona or ‘alt’) are more common than on sites where real identity is the main focus (e.g. LinkedIn, Facebook). Social networking sites also must negotiate a balance between enforcing social norms and supporting individual freedom.

Looking at SNSs on a spectrum of creativity and identity crossed with a spectrum of individual freedom and social norms makes me optimistic that creativity-related features are possible in communities that have room for social norms. Facebook has many users who have work posted on deviantArt, Flickr, Slideshare, YouTube and other creativity-focused SNSs. Many of these users have joined the artistic communities for the feedback and inspiration they get there, not necessarily because of a desire for anonymity. Younger users tend to be less inhibited about sharing their creative work. We need (good) apps that make it possible to bring our content in from disparate sites. Gavin Bell, in Disintegration of Persistence of Identity at the online conference, said we need to create ways to see the "larger picture of identity, not just the last 15 things about a person." We need to create mechanisms for coherence rather than chaos and fragmentation.

Read the entire post: What Kind of Community... at strottrot.com