progress towards an investigation of social aspects of music and interactive ....
Culture of Mobile Listening: From Walkman to iPod, Consuming Music Together,.
Social Aspects of Music and Interactive Technologies in Facilitating Face-to-Face Interactions in Third Places Mayur Karnik Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute Funchal, Portugal +351 962379111
[email protected] ABSTRACT Emerging communication technologies are fundamentally changing our social lives. The relationships between our new digital and traditional physical social activities are changing dynamically, continuously evolving, rapidly integrating with one another. This paper describes research motivation and work-inprogress towards an investigation of social aspects of music and interactive technologies within the context of ‘third’ places such as bars, cafes, clubs, etc. The goal of this research work is to create methods, tools and guidelines to inform the design of novel systems that help lower social barriers and facilitate natural (face to face) interactions between strangers in co-located scenarios.
Categories H.5m [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: Group and Organization Interfaces - Miscellaneous
General Terms Design
Keywords Design, Public Interaction, Third Places, Social Networks, Music.
1. INTRODUCTION Over the last few decades, many channels have become available for people to connect to one another using technological means. The Internet (emails, online forums, instant messengers, social networks) and mobile telephony have made profound changes to the ways in which people define and manage their identities and relationships. Communication and entertainment are two key areas where these changes are very evident. People increasingly use social network sites such as Facebook for socializing, entertainment, self-status seeking, and information [1]. Although much of the focus in research related to social network services, such as Facebook, has been on studying remote interactions between people, very little attention has been placed on studying such services in relation to natural interaction
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occurring between people in physical spaces. Third places [2] are spaces such as bars, cafes, clubs, etc. that are characterized by an openness to casual social interaction. One often encounters ‘familiar strangers’ [3] in such spaces allowing for relatively safer ways to extend one’s social network within the proximity of a place or neighborhood. With more and more convergence in technologies related to communication and entertainment, interesting possibilities are emerging to enhance natural or faceto-face interactions situated in these places. These possibilities, however, need to be understood in the context of increasing connectivity between people, places and technological artifacts in the backdrop of strong concerns about privacy. These social spaces are sites of constant negotiation between familiarity and anonymity, between solitude and socializing, leading to tensions in the way people manage their personal and collective identities [4]. It has also been argued that situations of brief encounters, as manifested in third places, allow for more open social interaction [5]. Hence, there is a need to explore themes that enhance social interaction by offering a way to maintain a balance in these conflicts. Music is a good theme to explore as a common good in such social spaces since it can potentially lower social barriers. Music plays a social role in our lives and acts as a resource through which people make sense of a place and its social reality [6]. Listening to music is inherently a social activity, especially outside homes. For instance, consumption of music through portable media players is often an act of maintaining ‘civil inattention’ using headphones as ‘do not disturb’ sign [7,8]. Moreover, the popularity of services such as Last.fm and Grooveshark point to socialization of music consumption. The intention of the research is to investigate how music and interactive technologies can help extend people’s digital identities into their everyday physical social lives.
2. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY The research adopts a ‘research through design’ methodology drawing from behavioral sciences, engineering and ethnography [9]. Building on Frayling’s work [10], Zimmerman et al. propose design artifacts as outcomes that could serve as exemplars for transferring research findings more effectively to HCI research and practice communities. In effect, employing qualitative means, the studies will explore the role of technology and inform the design of prototypes. In the following sections, we present two studies that have been initiated in the intended direction and conclude with some indication of future work. The first study describes an
investigation of user behavior using cultural probes that provided early information and impetus to the research. The second study builds on this foundation and explores a social network group and visualization based around the sharing of music videos.”
3. CULTURAL PROBES The work began with some exploratory research using Cultural Probes to understand users’ notions of identity, security and privacy with regards to their social ties and daily activities within the context of private and public spaces [11]. The designed kits included neighborhood maps for people to annotate, a GPS device, diary, an ‘evidence bag’ and instructions to photo document their everyday lives. 10 residents were recruited for participation in our studies with duration of 4 to 5 weeks. 8 out of the 10 residents responded with completed activities. Interviews were conducted to allow for respondents to describe contents of the returned kits or elaborate on any of their activities. This analysis of the results revealed some interesting insights into the role of music in establishing group identities and forming social networks. Music came across as an integral part of people’s daily routines and recreational weekend activities. The interpretations further revealed how personal music consumption formed a mnemonic association with spaces and triggered memories of people in their lives. Finally, the probes revealed how music sharing practices served as extensions of face-to-face conversations and vice versa. The insights through probes led to a number of design concepts revolving around music and social technologies.
4. SATURDAY MORNING CLASSICS Saturday Morning Classics [12] is an online experiment in social entertainment. It is a website that draws video content posted on a Facebook group and displays it in a full screen format like a television via a media player like interface. It is comprised and supported by a small group of people who posts and discusses social media related to music from the past decades. Currently, the Facebook group comprises of 170 members who have posted more than 400 videos relating to old / classic music from various genres, regions and cultures within a span of 6 months after its creation. We observed that the videos posted are ‘liked’ and replied to in the form of comments or / and subsequent posting of videos from similar artists, genre or other related attributes. These activities foster familiarity amongst the group members. The experiment is currently in the analysis and evaluation phase. So far, it has been observed that the website is not being used by the group members and a large part of the participation currently takes place on the Facebook group. A detailed analysis of users’ behaviors will be performed coupled with surveys / interviews of a sample of the total users. The subsequent steps will be to improve the system with those insights and organize place-based interaction opportunities through an event / art installation in a bar or a club drawing content and identities from the Facebook group.
5. CONCLUSION The work so far is aimed at gaining an understanding of the role music and social technologies in people’s everyday patterns in identities, relationships and experiences. Further work will use the insights from these studies and employ a multi-disciplinary approach to design and develop interactive systems that enhance social interaction in public places. Serving as technology probes /
prototypes, these systems will lead to methods, tools and guidelines as contributions to HCI.
6. FUTURE PLAN The future research work will entail evaluation of current prototypes (1-2 months) leading to the design of interactive systems that facilitate natural interaction in third places (5-6 months). These systems will act as proofs-of-concepts besides serving as technology probes for gaining a deeper understanding of the design space. This understanding will be articulated in the form of methods, tools and guidelines (5-6 months) that will help researchers and practitioners working in this particular domain.
7. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thanks to professors Dr. Ian Oakley, Dr. Valentina Nisi and Dr. Jos van Leeuwen for their guidance, my colleagues Ken Keane, Nuno David Santos and participants in my studies for their collaboration and time. I would also like to thank Madeira Tecnopolo, University of Madeira and Zon Maderia for supporting the work.
8. REFERENCES [1] Namsu Park, Kerk F. Kee and Sebastián Valenzuela. CyberPsychology & Behavior. December 2009, 12(6): 729733. doi:10.1089/cpb.2009.0003. [2] Oldenburg, Ray. The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community. Paragon Books (1989) [3] Milgram, Stanley. The Familiar Stranger: An Aspect of Urban Anonymity. In S. Milgram, The Individual in a Social World, pp. 51-53. Addison-Wesley, 1977 [4] Goffman, E., Behaviour in Public Space; notes on the social organisation of gatherings. FP of Glencoe, New York, 1966. [5] Oskar Juhlin and Mattias Ostergren. 2006. Time to meet face-to-face and device-to-device. In Proceedings of MobileHCI '06. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 77-80. [6] DeNora, T., Music and emotion in real time, Consuming Music Together, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 2006, Volume 35, Part 1, 19-33. [7] Goffman, E., The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Penguin Books, London, 1959. [8] Bull, M., Investigating the Culture of Mobile Listening: From Walkman to iPod, Consuming Music Together, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 2006, 35(1). [9] Zimmerman J., J. Forlizzi, and S. Evenson (2007) “Research through design as a method for interaction design research in HCI,” Proceedings of CHI 2007, p. 493-502. [10] Frayling, C. Research in Art and Design. Royal College of
Art Research Papers 1, 1 (1993),1-5. [11] van Leeuwen, J.P., Karnik, M. and Keane, K. 2011. "Discovering Madeira: A Case Study of Cultural Probes." To be published at DESIRE '11. [12] URLs for Saturday Morning Classics: http://www.facebook.com/groups/saturdaymorningclassics and http://classicstv.m-iti.org
