Nina Mehta

Sharing a news story usually seems like simply flicking a click of a button, scribbling out a quick thought and going about your merry way.

But news consumers, who once, were only news consumers are now also producers. Beyond the blogger, only recently has design and technology facilitated the tools to empower the lay consumer to interact with content in a creative way. They are now work as editors, writers and broadcasters, in their own social right.

John McCarthy and Peter Wright compose a fantastic book on experience design, Technology as Experience. “Experience is ever present,” they say. “We are always engaged in experience even when we are trying to stand back from it to describe it.” McCarthy and Wright reaffirm how it important it is to think about and the holistic experience of anything when designing, and in this case, sharing a news story.

Browsing through news stories is absolute active participation. Unlike watching news TV or even reading a print publication, the reader has choice more choice between on and off or skim or not skim. In the current content consuming paradigm, beyond a news summary, the reader must actively decide to click, and almost navigate to a new page to get immersed into a story. It takes a significantly greater commitment. The reader then must actively make a judgement, “do I want to consider reading this article?” If yes, they click, if no, they keep skimming headlines and photos.

This is the first step of what I’m referring to as an editing process, where the reader is flexing their judgement skills. Moving forward, they continue to do this when they’ve consumed enough of the article or graphic and decides to share it. Only now, after all of these hurdles, have they come to the act of sharing something. That standing on the assumption that the sharing interface (and logging in process for that matter) is seamlessly easy to understand.

If the article inspires and resonates with the reader, it’s likely it has a high share-ability. That or it speaks to the readers’ audience, the audience that is comprised of their network. Of course, considering, most people don’t think about the Facebook News Feed is developed in such a way that it’s difficult to overshare to your network, according to Aditya Agarwal, Facebook’s Director of Engineering. Though, they are hoping people will learn and stop worrying about overshare.

In Erik Stolterman’s book, Imagination and Communication, he talks about imagination and communication. The reader takes ideas from their minds eye and must make it communicable, he says, which is part of the creative process.

Once the reader has read the article and formed some kind of thought and new meaning, it still exists in their mind, in their imagination. Once they have taken that vision, explored and then written their thoughts, they have led to “new truths” cited to Erik Stolterman. Their new truths, that are “possible to share with other people.”

And beyond all of this, conscious or not, these readers are engaging in civic and cultural participation, which Jean Burgess, author of Vernacular Creativity cites.

Culture is the means by which we, as individual citizens and communities, experience what the world is like, how we fit in it, and importantly, how we relate to others who are different from us at the same time as we seek out opportunities for belonging.

Where participatory media opens up space for us, as ordinary citizens, to speak and represent ourselves and our ways of being in the world, and to encounter difference, then it’s also a space for the everyday practice of cultural citizenship  in that context, everyday creativity is civic engagement, in a sense.

It is not even the writing process itself here that is creative and expressive. It is the development of new truths, personal meaning and broadcasting in a cultural context to an audience, especially at such a mass scale, that has never been done before. Participating in every day media, like Burgess says, helps us develop our own identities, how we see ourselves and how we fit into our worlds. All the while we are making judgements about the what the people in our networks share, say do, and don’t do and how they fit into the world. That has always been a part of civic engagement.

When designing a share UI, designers must consider:

• The overall experience from arriving to the article in the first place. How did the reader get here? RSS, Website, another shared link? Think about where they are coming and possibly where they are going afterwards.
• Consider when they are likely going to want to share.
• Design the UI with enough space that supports an emergent writing and editing process, like a resizable window.
• Think of the reader as a media producer. Is your share UI a pop up or modal dialoge? Will they lose everything they wrote if they go to reread a section of text, navigate to a new site to get some information or another link or copy and paste something?
• Reduce the amount of choices they must make. The New York Times does a nice job giving commentary a high position in the visual hierarchy, while still giving their consumer/producers the autonomy to hit recommend without saying a word, which still says something.

Sharing a post seems simple enough. Copy and paste a link, click the like button or recommend a story. Seems simple enough–not too complicated. There is a lot more happening behind these 1 and 2 step flows. When we share we are defining our identify, building our social capital and simply speaking, expressing ourselves.

Takin the action to share, or not share, by whatever process is an editorial process. Creative tools like Facebook give people who were once only consumers a more liberal opportunity to also be producers.They are using their personal judgement to select or ignore what they choose to broadcast to their networks. Each post is a reflection of  their values by showing what they consume and promote and thereby constructing their identity.

Schniederman and Hochheiser discuss the transformation from readers to leaders in social media. Social media users are constantly shifting from roles as passive readers to very active leaders: those who move conversations in the community forward. In between they act as contributors and collaborators and are constantly negotiating their role and identity as it shifts even from post to post within their greater social communities online.

Sharing to a community also builds on social capital. Journalism history researcher discusses the orientation of text in his book Communities of Journalism.

“When a reader writes a letter to the editor, they are speaking to the public, speaking to the editor and to the self,” he says.

Nord’s statement here supports identity building while interacting with news. What also happens here is engagement with the community. Posting and sharing certainly speaks to a public, especially as the web is becoming more open. Friends in the network work as editors, they critique, comment and build on what has been stated. As a person shares to their network, the public and editor are one in the same as they are building their social capital.

In a recent study done at Michigan State University, Ellison, Stenfield and Lampe found significant social capital benefits from college students on Facebook. They found students used facebook “primarily to maintain existing offline relationships or to solidify what would otherwise be ephemeral, temporary acquaintanceships.” In doing this, they found “indices of psychological well-being, such as self esteem and satisfaction with life.” Sharing and engaging in these communities not only pass time and serve as passive news to read about friends, but also builds socially beneficial experiences.

Malcom Barnard quotes Roger Fry in his book Approaches to Visual Culture. Barnard writes:

Fry believed that message of the work is described as’a whole mass experience hidden in the artist’s subconscious’ Conscious or unconscious, the matter is still that of expression.

When someone share to their network, whether or not they are conscious and aware of their expressions does not take away from them expressing themselves at are. When they post, and especially with commentary,  they are engaging in editorial, creative work and the process of communication.

In doing this, their expressive nature directly relates to their identity that is always in progress of being crafted and the social capital in which they are building. The individual does this across their networks, their community while every other friend in their network is simultaneously making the same conscious and unconscious negotiations.

Call it expanding and contracting, cycling and then recycling or moving forwards and backwards. That’s the way research goes. I am midstream a thick media reporting project. As I sort through my quasi-professional-identity crisis as a designer, journalist and researcher I have full warrant to borrow tools and techniques from all disciplines.

I borrowed elements of affinity diagraming to draw new conclusions about so much of what I have learned this semester.

1. I wrote short summaries of my research findings on individual Post It notes.

2. I stuck the post it notes on a big blank wall. I organized and reorganized them until they made some kind of subjective, judged sense.

3. Then, I gave each stack a topic. I now have organized clusters of thoughts and seeds of ideas about how to move forward.

Questions

1. What kinds of people should I talk to next?
2. How does language connect communities and culture?
3. What are the analog things in our life that mimic the social layer?
4. What gap is social media sharing expression filling?
5. What filled the expression gap before?
6. Will we get social media fatigue (too many chicken nuggets)?
7. Social media satisfies impulsive behavior and thoughts. What other part of our life does this affect?
8. Why do we gather where we do online?
9. What gets left out when shared (broadcasted) content is personalized for us?
10. How are people who share to social media like and unlike journalists?