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"G/localization: When Global Information and Local Interaction Collide"

Tags: communities, culture, sns, social-apps on 2007-08-09 and saved by28 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Glocalization is the ugliness that ensues when the global and local are shoved uncomfortably into the same concept.
Culture is the set of values, norms and artifacts that influence people's lives and worldview. Culture is embedded in material objects and in conceptual frameworks about how the world works
Although he founded this site and has hired many employees, he's still deeply invested in understanding what his users are doing. He reads email all day, responds directly to concerns. He watches what people do with the site and develops to make their lives easier. The site is infused with Craig's personality, passion and quirks.
When Flickr first started, Stewart and Caterina welcomed you personally. They introduced you to other users on the system and asked for your feedback. While this practice has stopped, they are still very present on the system. When there are problems, Stewart writes a message on the Flickr blog using a very personal apologetic tone. It sounds like he means it. Because he _does_. The content on Flickr has a goofy flair to it - it is not glossy and formulaic. Users love the tenor of this material, but it's not some marketing ploy. The folks at Flickr really love their users and want them to feel like they are part of a broad community. There are numerous employees dedicated to this.
MySpace users are initially given one friend - a guy named Tom. Tom isn't a bot or a helper avatar - he's one of MySpace's founders. Every day, Tom posts messages to the site, announcing cool new features and apologizing for technical hiccups. Like Craig, Tom is a glorified customer service person - he reads messages from users all day long, relying on users to inform him of problems on the system, features that they want, concerns that they have. The folks at MySpace design based on this ongoing flow of user feedback.
They each have public personalities that early adopters feel connected to. The early adopters really felt as though they were participating in and creating an intimate community, even as the community grew to millions. Users are passionate. Designers are passionate. They feel a responsibility to it and are deeply invested in making users happy. Character was not boiled out of the site; the text on the system is natural and goofy, reflecting the personality quirks of the developers rather than the formal speech of a corporation. Each site has a unique culture that was born early on and evolved through years of use and growth. The culture evolves with the designers and users working in tandem.
Customer service is not a segregated group who simply answers questions of a finalized product. They are completely integrated into the design system and the senior people are the most deeply embedded in user culture. There is a strong commitment to the needs and desires of the users.

While the creators have visions of what they think would be cool, they do not construct unmovable roadmaps well into the future. They are constantly reacting to what's going on, adding new features as needed. The code on these sites changes constantly, not just once a quarter. The designers try out features and watch how they get used. If no one is interested, that's fine - they'll just make something new. They are all deeply in touch with what people are actually doing, why and how it manifests itself on the site.
EMBEDDED OBSERVATION

The designers of these systems are engaged in embedded observation. They are living in the culture that they are helping to frame. They are aware of the others living in that culture and constantly engaging with them to really understand the emergent behaviors. They recognize their power as designers and try to use it to benefit the collective rather than their own personal goals. Their design process is stemming from this embedded observation, producing a state of "flow" to use Cziksentmihalyi's term. The designers love what they are doing and infuse their passion into the systems. This is a very powerful way of doing design.
Embedded observation takes into account the cultural forces that can not be systematically tested or modeled. As a result, the designers are aware of social problems when they materialize and can work immediately to try to influence change. Their efforts at understanding culture and evolving the design alongside it create a meaningful bond between the users and the designers
1) On Tuesday, Tim spoke about how passion is critical. That's an understatement. If you are building a community, if you are trying to support the evolution of culture, passion is everything.
Just because people _can_ connect globally does not mean they want to. People are more drawn to those who are like them, who share their same values and cultural norms. In this way, people don't have to explain the foundations of their thoughts. They feel more closely aligned and more willing to share with people who are more like them. Similarities breed less conflict. Furthermore, most people don't use digital communities to make new friends - most use it to connect to offline friends through technology.

Of course, there are important exceptions to this. Ostracized individuals frequently use social software to connect with strangers like them. Single (and for the matter married) people use dating sites to meet strangers, although they are mostly looking for strangers in geographic proximity. Strangers connect around topical interests. These are some of the reasons that we build global networks.
Digital community participants sometimes find that they "accidentally" meet someone. People collide on Flickr because they took similar photos; the find wonderful blogs through search. These ad-hoc interactions typically occur because people are producing material that can be stumbled across, either through search or browsing. They may not intend for the material to be consumed beyond the intended audience, but they also don't see a reason to prevent it. In essence, they are inviting moments of synchronicity. And synchronicity is energizing.
One challenge in designing sociable systems is to provide enough opportunity for strangers to collide without providing the structures for people to exercise power.
In the early 1970s, Stanley Milgram was intrigued by what he called "familiar strangers" - people who recognized each other in public life but never interacted. Through experiments, he found that people are most likely to interact with people when removed from the situation in which they are familiarly strangers. In other words, two people who take the same bus every day for years may never interact, but if they were to run into each other in a different environment across town, they would say hello and talk about the bus. If they run into each other in a foreign country, they will immediately be close friends.
The same is true online. Interests groups are particularly meaningful to people who don't have access to people who share that interest in their everyday lives. If you run across a blogger from the same rural town as you, you are far more likely to drop them a note on that basis alone than if you both grew up in Chicago. People feel as though something is an act of fate when it seems probabilistically so unlikely to occur.
Provide the cultural environment where people can accidentally connect with strangers over meaningful things without being forced to face everyone on the system. Let users privatize or wall off access to only certain people for their own needs. Let users see the valuees of being public. Of course, balancing privacy needs with public possibilities with the lack of interest in dealing with the *whole* public is quite tricky. Anyone who can solve this design challenge with a robust system will win the hearts of users and investors.
3) Empower individual users to be cultural spokespeople. Give them the ability to modify the system for their communities and cultural needs. Again, this means openness of software or providing richer platforms to develop on top of.

Organic community growth, embedded design, and the ability to connect culturally local communities through global network are the way to form large sustainable communities. My hope is that there are new fascinating communities emerging as we speak!