Paper Reading #30: Life "modes" in social media

Reference Information
 Life "modes" in social media by Fatih Kursat Ozenc and Shelly D. Farnham.   Presented at CHI '11 Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on Human factors in computing systems.


Author Bios 

• Fatih Kursat Ozenc is at Carnegie Mellon University/
• Shelly D. Farnham is currently a researcher at Microsoft Research and holds a PhD from the University of Washington

Summary

Hypothesis
The researcher's believe that people organize their social worlds based on life modes and also believe that the ways to express such modes can be further improved when it comes to organizing such things.
Methods
The researchers recruited 16 potential participants after an extensive screening process and asked them to model their lives.  Specifically, their lives at present and with a focus on how they spend time and who they spend it with.  The participants then went through their maps with different colored markers, noting how they communicate between each node.
Results

Most of the participants drew one of two types of maps, namely, a social meme or timeline map, for modeling their lives. The remaining used list view, and a pi-chart. The ratio for extremely segmented to extremely integrated life facets was one to one. Email was the area where segmentation was universal. Participants’ transitions from one area of life to another were most often concurrent with external transitions such as moving through time or moving from one place to another. Focused sharing and consuming was preferred than organizing and transitioning. Reactions to the concept scenarios and rankings of visual metaphors pointed to a need for organization tools that prioritize different areas of lives in simple, dynamic, yet holistic ways.

Contents
This paper seeks to explore how we manage and compartmentalize the different social circles in our lives.  By looking at how people classify different levels of interaction and comparing it to the various social channels used to maintain communication, the researchers hoped to gain a better view of how social networking in general can be adapted and improved to better cater to the structure of our social lives.
Discussion
I though this was a cool way to look at social media and how it shapes the world around us.