The UX of Social Media

The monetization of suffering

The ship of fools is an allegory satirizing the human comedy as a voyage of frivolous or oblivious people without a leader or pilot, each one seemingly of the belief they are the savior. The concept is framed in the 1484 novel Ship of Fools by Sebastian Brant, and later by other writers including novelist Katherine Anne Porter (1962).

In Porter’s novel, each character is an archetype representing human vanities. She makes use of the Jungian archetypes such as the Hero, Scapegoat, Outcast, Devil, Earthmother, Platonic Ideal, Temptress, Unfaithful Wife, Star-Crossed Lovers, etc., and situations including the Quest, Fall, Task, Initiation, Journey, and so on. The way so-called Reality TV serves up these heavily-edited and therefore unrealistic segments varies only slightly between shows. There is always the one I like to call Grim Executioner. This is ostensibly the show’s moderator (speaking dialog spoon-fed from behind the curtain) whose job it is to deliver the bad news with a hatchet face.

The Grim Executioner is in love with Schadenfreude, or ‘enjoying the suffering of others.’ This the Grim Executioner’s daily diet, and the producers make sure there is enough drama and suffering to go around.

The suffering of others is also the staple of millions of viewers who tune in from squalid rooms and palaces alike to watch someone besides themselves become the latest humiliated outcast.

Larry Wilmore, who created Reality Junkie for Fox, said, “It’s like watching a car wreck… the drama of it… because there’s so much cruelty and tearing people apart. I feel like I need to take a shower when I watch that.”

As the producers of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? quickly discovered, reality TV is incredibly cheap to produce, and collects better market share than scripted dramas, soaps or sitcoms. That is putting pressure on scripted shows to reduce budget, which is not going to add literary value to our life and times.

Because the brain is malleable to the way it is used, and because sensory tolerances develop, it is inevitable that audiences will become jaded on current fare, and require more extreme and exotic reality entertainment. Just consider that about 1/4 of Web servers worldwide are devoted to porn, and you’ll get a sense of where the ship of reality TV fools can really take us.

One possible destination was illuminated at least as far back as 1958, in the short story Mr. and Mrs. Saturday Night by Robert F. Young (1915 – 1986). The story depicts a lottery in which a lucky couple is chosen to be on television from their own home, for the entertainment of millions. Crews come in and wire the whole place for video and sound. The couple’s elation turns to dread when they realize they are supposed to spend the entire evening in their bedroom. But the year 1958 provided a very moral setting: they were, after all, married to each other.

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Chapter 2.5 of:

Abuse, Sex and Addiction in Online Communities
Copyright Lee Baldwin 2009
@ArtOfSilence

The reason to be for Second Life, IMVU, Maple Story, Bratz, Habbo Hotel and most of the others is to make money. Which is a good thing. But through that lens, a particular new Internet trend (or phenomenon) appears: the sale of virtual goods.

What are virtual goods? One category is any asset or perk a chat player can buy for use with their online avatar: clothing, hairstyles, rooms, furniture, poses, music and so on. The goods are virtual because they are available only within the context in which they are used.

It makes sense that clothing such as a leather jacket for instance is available only in the 3D world where it is sold, but music is sold the same way. You might have a tune on your iPod, or on a CD, but if you want to hear it (and have others hear it) in your favorite chatroom you are going to have to buy it again. If you play in more than one chatroom, guess what – you will be forced to buy the same tune again.

VG sales are the latest major bubble in ‘monetization’ of the online experience, and the US market for virtual goods is near $1 Billion, a near 100% growth from last year, with another 80% growth expected in 2010. Some 11 million Americans buy VG products each month, and most of the purchases are made by women.

That is real cash for… real pixels.

The Asian market is $7 Billion, and in China, VG revenues are greater than on-line ad revenues. Stay tuned…

Recently I was asked to prepare a written estimate to upgrade the usability of a software product. I had spoken to several of the company principals, who assured me that usability was the central problem they must overcome to be competitive and secure key customers.

So I spent half a day looking at their software, and wrote up my estimate.

Being a user experience designer, I naturally gravitated to such activities as talking to users and integrating their evaluations of the product before, during, and after the rebuild. The tasks included heuristic evaluation, initial usability testing, revised flow models, key flow prototypes, visual design, usability testing of builds, final usability and acceptance testing, and normalized scoring of the finished package to provide a baseline for future projects.

The response I got was classic:  “How much would that cost without the usability testing?”

This goes back to one of my earlier rants, the conflict of features and usability. Features always win, because you can see them. Usability is assumed, like breathing, and is just as hard to explain. But if anyone still wonders how Apple, for example, managed to secure such customer loyalty in the early years, it comes down to that single idea:  they thought about their users and created tools that were easily understood and easily used.

Investing in good usability makes sense only when the time horizon is far beyond the next quarterly report or the next board meeting. Usability is not a quick hit that will produce instant gains. Usability is part of corporate good will, the customer loyalty, and these are not things that an ad campaign can bring in six months. Usability thinking will be in the DNA of the next wave of companies that reach the heights of Amazon, Ebay, Google, Yahoo, and Netflix. Those companies made a science of customer relationships and did not let up when they were successful. Customer experience growing from positive user experience is one solid reason those companies are at the top today. Please see ibmdesign’s post on the ROI of usability.

And yes usability work does cost, and it does take time. But if you don’t have time now to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?

Start with a pet peeve… you see an interesting job posting at XYZ Inc. and wish to explore it. You find yourself once again entering the same personal data into a format that some middle manager thought was so precious. How many times have you found yourself doing that? Can’t tell you how often I’ve bailed because it was too darn much like crawling over broken glass. Who the heck is XYZ, anyway?

What this amounts to is joining endless social networks that want basically the same info on you. You are required to create yet another data mirror by hand.

It is analagous to a merchant asking, “Do you have our rewards card?” Great. Yet another piece of plastic for my wallet that accomplishes an identical function to the ones I already own. Only diff is – it’s for someone else.

The Semantic Web is about data, and we won’t have the semantic web as long as applications are data hoarders. But there are a number of popular SNs that do have most of the data you would like to include in your job app, so why can’t they be available as sources?

A single social graph is a bit much to swallow all at once, but it would be really helpful if at least the major social nets were recognized as templates by all the companies that would just love to have you in their database. Then you pick one on the way in (you are professional and pick LinkedIn or Dice over MySpace for example), hand over your password, and most of your data shows up in XYZ’s template. You modify the info as necessary, you are done. Every so often, or on some trigger, your data could be updated the same way.

The APIs do exist. HR departments, wake up. It ain’t that hard.

Oh… plastic rewards cards. Merchants, forget your precious logo on plastic and let your customers give you a credit card number. Whenever the card is presented the rewards account provides its data without bother. No questions asked.

The conjunction of the semantic web and social networks may include the (artificially) intelligent growth of a member’s network along lines dictated by interpretation of their profile and in-network behavior, by profiles of those already in their network, and by network behavior and profiles of those not already in their network.

This action posits two distinct growth edges for a given player’s network. One is the growth edge of a particular player, the intention as it were, of that player’s network and profile. The other is the proximity or suitability of a player to the growth edge of all players in the network.

This effect is already shown to a degree on LinkedIn for example, where members recently joined from past employers are presented as possible linkages. Also in services like Amazon (people who bought this item also bought…). Music services approximate this behavior as well. With Pandora, the Music Genome dictates suggestions based on genome attributes preferred by the user.

This fits the Semantic Web concept, wherein the Web itself is understanding and satisfying unstated requests of members with regard to Web content and connections. In this model the semantic web is informing the creation of collaborative groups, fueled by enabling technologies that now exist.