Alex de Carvalho

The use of social objects as artefacts for identity management

by Alex de Carvalho. Average Reading Time: almost 8 minutes.

Table of con­tents for object-centered social­ity series

  1. The use of social objects as arte­facts for iden­tity management
  2. Social objects and the observer’s paradox
  3. Social object and the object-centered environment

First, a bit of history

Before talk­ing about social objects as acces­sories for online impres­sion man­age­ment, I wanted to sur­face a bit of his­tory about the term, “Social Object”.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about object-centered social­ity, which can be thought of as “the rea­son peo­ple con­nect and social­ize with each other”, to para­phrase Jyri Enge­strom. In addi­tion to Jyri, Hugh MacLeod of Gapingvoid’s been post­ing lots of ideas about “Social Object”, par­tic­u­larly here and here:

“The Social Object, in a nut­shell, is the rea­son two peo­ple are talk­ing to each other, as opposed to talk­ing to some­body else. Human beings are social ani­mals. We like to social­ize. But if think about it, there needs to be a rea­son for it to hap­pen in the first place. That rea­son, that “node” in the social net­work, is what we call the Social Object.” –Gapingvoid

Hugh asked me whether there’s a link point­ing to Jyri and I con­vers­ing about social objects, as we did in Reboot7 and LesWebs3 in 2005:

Twitter / Hugh MacLeod: @alexdc Is there a link tha...
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Alas, no, there is no link: Jyri Enge­strom first blogged about object-centered social­ity before the Reboot7 con­fer­ence in Copen­hagen in mid-2005 in a blog post that referred to the ground-breaking work of soci­ol­o­gist Karin Knorr-Cetina, and that changed my under­stand­ing of online social net­work­ing. I then con­tacted Jyri, Anne Gal­loway and a few oth­ers for guid­ance on where to learn more about object-centered social­ity; I spent the next cou­ple of months devour­ing every paper I could get my hands on. I relied on friends who are pro­fes­sors in procur­ing me hard to obtain research papers. That same year, I spoke with Jyri in per­son on two occa­sions, once at Reboot 7, where he gave a great pre­sen­ta­tion on the sub­ject, and later that year at Loic’s LesWebs3 con­fer­ence in Paris. On both occa­sions, we spoke about using the term “social object” to refer to object-centered social­ity. A Google search at the time pro­duced no results; but if I am not mis­taken, the term had already been used a cou­ple of time before by soci­ol­o­gists in research papers. How did Hugh link Jyri and I? He was at both con­fer­ences as well. By way of full dis­clo­sure, I reg­is­tered the socialobject.com domain in mid-2005.

Do I believe social object is the “Future of Mar­ket­ing”, as Hugh does? Yes, I def­i­nitely believe social object design and related con­cepts have the poten­tial to fos­ter greater cus­tomer engage­ment and word-of-mouth.

Do I think I should get credit for co-coining the term? No: the term has quite prob­a­bly been in exis­tence, even if obscurely. I am glad the con­cept is finally get­ting wider play.

Social objects as arte­facts for iden­tity management

I had a con­ver­sa­tion on Twit­ter yes­ter­day about Sin­gel­rin­gen as a social object; it’s a catchy blue ring worn by peo­ple who are, you guessed it, single:

From the site: “By wear­ing your Sin­gel­rin­gen, you declare that it is OK to be sin­gle. You may wish to find “the one”, or you are quite sat­is­fied with life as it is. Regard­less, you will show to every­one that you accept and stand for what you are, an attrac­tive single.”

  • alexdc: so the sin­gel­rin­gen becomes the social object for con­nect­ing? sure, it’s a con­ver­sa­tion starter but something’s miss­ing, methinks
  • alexdc: @leahjones ok; to grow as social object, should have tra­di­tions rit­u­als activites or other socially con­structed fic­tions for greater meaning
  • alexdc: @kr8tr right, the mes­sage should not be “I am avail­able”; it should be let’s respect, cher­ish and cel­e­brate being single
  • alexdc: @apenny i believe the ring is no more a social object than a wed­ding ring: the con­ver­sa­tions are around the tra­di­tions of mar­riage, not ring
  • alexdc: when you meet a mar­ried per­son, you might ask how they met, where they got mar­ried, do they have chil­dren, etc … the ring is just a signal
  • alexdc: with a sin­gel­rin­gen per­son, what are con­ver­sa­tion points? there are no social norms or sin­gle insti­tu­tions around which to converse
  • alexdc: @apenny i believe social objects are enriched through socially con­structed fic­tions, sto­ries, his­tory, rit­ual, behav­ior: ring is a “signal”
  • alexdc: @lindasherman i’m not dis­put­ing sin­gel­rin­gen is a social object: it cer­tainly breaks the ice; it may grow into more sig­nif­i­cant S.O. w/ time
  • alexdc: @lindasherman if sin­gel­rin­gen is a “real-life” (as opposed to online) sub­sti­tute for Match.com, it will remain only as an ice breaker
  • alexdc:  @lindasherman if sin­gel­rin­gen wear­ers take pride in being sin­gle as a lifestyle, even tem­porar­ily, then that’s really dif­fer­ent and worthy

So Sin­gel­rin­gen serves as an acces­sory for oth­ers to rec­og­nize, like a wed­ding ring. Mal­colm Glad­well wrote about rapid cog­ni­tion in his best-selling book Blink; peo­ple make imme­di­ate judge­ments about oth­ers, about their envi­ron­ment and about sit­u­a­tions through a process called thin-slicing:

When you meet some­one for the first time, or walk into a house you are think­ing of buy­ing, or read the first few sen­tences of a book, your mind takes about two sec­onds to jump to a series of conclusions.

In this sense, Sin­gel­rin­gen is an imme­di­ately notice­able, inter­est­ing and unusual ice breaker, like Armstrong’s yel­low Live­strong bracelet. Start­ing to talk with some­one about the ring can lead to pro­longed con­ver­sa­tions about what it means to be sin­gle. And as peo­ple talk to each other about the Sin­gel­rin­gen, they con­struct their par­tic­u­lar fic­tion or story about it, which is what social objects gen­er­ally lead peo­ple to do. When you see some­one with such a ring, you will prob­a­bly thin-slice and already start to make some judgements.

Sim­i­larly, today’s New York Times has an arti­cle, “Putting Your Best Cyber­face For­wards”, about online impres­sion man­age­ment:

Keith N. Hamp­ton, an assis­tant pro­fes­sor at the Annen­berg School for Com­mu­ni­ca­tion at the Uni­ver­sity of Penn­syl­va­nia, said the notion of impress­ing “every­one out there” is the fun­da­men­tal prob­lem of net­work­ing sites. They are designed so that mil­lions see the same image of a member.

For online impres­sion man­age­ment to be effec­tive, Mr. Hamp­ton said, the sites should be redesigned to allow peo­ple to reveal dif­fer­ent aspects of their iden­tity to dif­fer­ent users. You should be able to present one face to your boss, and another to your poker bud­dies. “We have very real rea­sons for want­ing to seg­ment our social net­work,” he said.

This makes a lot of sense. You prob­a­bly dress and behave dif­fer­ently at work than you would with your bud­dies or your fam­ily. The way oth­ers thin-slice you is depen­dent on the cloth­ing and acces­sories (arte­facts) you’re wear­ing and on your behav­ior. Just as you present dif­fer­ent sides of your­self in dif­fer­ent sit­u­a­tions in real life, so should you be able to man­age your online per­sonas. Most social net­works don’t allow you to seg­ment your con­tacts so they see dif­fer­ent aspects of you. How­ever, you con­trol the infor­ma­tion you pub­lish and by doing so man­age your iden­tity to make an impres­sion on oth­ers. The fol­low­ing blog post illus­trates this; Red Coat, Black Coat on PSFK:

Unlike para­noid Steve [who wears a black coat to pro­tect his pri­vacy], Jill is con­sid­ered as the socially evolved. It’s not only her red coat that presents an image to the world of how she wants to be seen – Jill under­stands and manip­u­lates how the world sees her, how com­pa­nies see her, how her friends see her. Using tech­nol­ogy that was devel­oped maybe twenty years ago, Jill knows nearly every­thing every­body else knows about her. And in the same way she uses his bright red coat to make a state­ment about her­self, she man­ages the data about her­self to present the image she wants.

Infor­ma­tion is like fash­ion – to be used, shown off and even bartered with.

By using online arte­facts and acces­sories, Jill is manip­u­lat­ing social objects and sig­nal­ing to oth­ers how to con­nect with her. When you wear a Sin­gel­rin­gen or a Rolex watch in real life, you are send­ing sig­nals for oth­ers to pick up. Online, you use infor­ma­tion about your­self and per­haps pic­tures, videos, slideshows, Face­book appli­ca­tions or other object-artefacts to send sig­nals on how oth­ers should social­ize with you.

—

If you’d like to know more about social object in con­cept and prac­tice, I posted a num­ber of links on Twit­ter yes­ter­day that may be helpful:

Next in series
  • http://mozdawg.blogspot.com Ben Trem­blay

    I have to say that all this res­onates with some­thing I’ve been work­ing on years. As in “year; plural”. So I won’t now pre­tend to respond to your post … I look for­ward to giv­ing it a good read.

    But as for “social object” I’ve been snip­ing (as in with a gun, not as in with scis­sors … though I have been snip­ping, too, see my most recent Tweet: ” RadioHead’s Yorke has it right: “object” as low-grade arte­fact, ergo for me “social object” den­i­grates > http://snipurl.com/1whwy <”)

    My point is that “social object” is, to be polem­i­cal, reduc­tion­ist and tech­no­cratic … it dehu­man­izes the phe­nom­e­non and thereby the trans­ac­tions. To be roman­tic, it demys­ti­fies the whole and drains it of the vital­ity that makes it (at least poten­tially) vig­or­ous and vivid.

    BTW, periph­er­ally, I have been tweet­ing with @dpn about the pos­si­bil­ity of doing some sort of mul­ti­vari­ate analy­sis on #the­me­words … where’s the “object” in a col­lec­tion of “the­me­words for 2008″?

    –ben­trem

    p.s. I use “Gnodal” as a work­ing name for my “par­tic­i­pa­tory delib­er­a­tion” project; I know all about hav­ing the life-blood drained … ;-)

    p.s.2 I don’t think your Pre­view func­tions works right on FF2.0 … I’m see­ing a very odd page. light gray text on a BG com­prised of light gray walkie-talkies and light grey text blobs.

  • http://wilywordsmith.blogspot.com vice­queen­maria

    Thank you Alex for this post. Very thought-provoking (in a good way!) :-)

  • http://bizcast.typepad.com Alan Wilen­sky

    I hate to break the news to you. And I am not try­ing to be neg­a­tive, however:

    The Sin­gleri­gen is a sad phe­nom­e­non of the day that is often adopted by by trag­i­cally sin­gle folk who are (right­fully) pin­ing for com­pan­ion­ship. It’s a vol­un­tary scar­let letter.

    I do not believe that there is any­thing wrong with sin­gle­hood (I’m divorced twice, I must like it), but the sin­gle ring and its poten­tial for mis­use, abuse, and as a scent marker for preda­tory behav­ior is problematic.

    I know of one case his­tory that I wish I could relate here, but dur to pri­vacy con­cerns, I can’t. Let me, how­ever, state that the per­son who advo­cates for this flawed marker needs to get hitched and fast. To the appro­pri­ate per­son, of course.

  • http://couragegroup.com Linda Sher­man

    I wanted to add my tweet back to Alex:
    Lin­daSh­er­man: @alexdc Sin­gel­rin­gen is not a sub­sti­tute for match.com. I think as you do that the pride thing is key. That sin­gles are already com­plete. about 4 hours ago

    Alex is absolutely right that the con­ver­sa­tion around Sin­gel­rin­gen is what peo­ple attribute to it and that pride in being sin­gle is a sig­nif­i­cant fac­tor. Both sin­gle men and women are tired of being bugged by their friends and fam­ily to get mar­ried as though being sin­gle is less than that. Sin­gel­rin­gen is a dec­la­ra­tion that as a sin­gle per­son you are already com­plete. You are not bro­ken, you are not des­per­ate, you are OK.
    Some feed­back from Sin­gel­rin­gen wear­ers:
    “A guy can add to my life but he doesn’t define it” “I don’t need a mar­riage license to val­i­date my existence.”

    The ice-breaker effect: “I wear three rings and the only one that any­one really ever asks ques­tions about is the sin­gel­rin­gen. You guys did a really good job of mak­ing the ring look sym­bolic and mak­ing it stand out against other nor­mal, dec­o­ra­tive rings. I always enjoy explain­ing the mean­ing of it!”
    And as Alex pointed out, once you are talk­ing you put your own story to it. One guy wrote us, “I decided to buy a ring to com­mem­o­rate the 10th year of my divorce”

    Some peo­ple appre­ci­ate the “sig­nal” aspect of Sin­gel­rin­gen, that as a sta­tus ring, it indi­cates the per­son is unat­tached. Some say no, they pre­fer no ring so that they can lie about their sta­tus when con­ve­nient. Par­tic­u­larly, in Canada I hear about women wear­ing wed­ding rings to keep men away. In this sense, I believe that wear­ing Sin­gel­rin­gen also indi­cates con­fi­dence and a will­ing­ness to be hon­est to those who might approach you.

    And here’s a weird thing. We know that need­i­ness dri­ves peo­ple away and gen­uine self-assurance is attrac­tive. It could be a placebo effect but many wear­ers report they are pleased with who they meet after they start wear­ing Singelringen.

  • Ed T.

    I’m putting together Alex’s Tweet on ego-centric vs. object-centric net­works (http://chimprawk.blogspot.com/2007/11/social-network-transitions.html) with my mem­ory of fash­ion acces­sories as sym­bols (http://www.snopes.com/risqué/school/bracelet.asp) to con­clude the following.

    With all this talk about social net­works and social objects, no one seems to talk about the why. What moti­vates some­one to wear a col­or­ful fash­ion acces­sory or cre­ate a col­or­ful ego-centric pro­file page?

    The answer is atten­tion. We all want someone’s atten­tion, espe­cially if it’s positive.

    Iden­ti­fy­ing myself by dec­o­rat­ing myself or my ego-page is a good way to “break the ice” and get some atten­tion. But atten­tion is an addic­tive drug. Once I have a lit­tle, I want more. How do I get more?

    To keep feed­ing the mon­ster some peo­ple just keep social­iz­ing. If someone’s lis­ten­ing to me, then they must be pay­ing me attention.

    But you let any­one talk for an extended period of time and even­tu­ally you’ll find some rea­son to dis­like them. Yes, you’re sin­gle and hip, but you’re also a jerk. Yes, you’re ego-page is eye-catching, but you’re also egotistical.

    The ego-centric social object cuts both ways. You inter­act with enough jerks wear­ing Sin­glerin­gens and soon blue rings worn on the right hand become asso­ci­ated with desperately-single, socially-inept dweebs who need some cheap gim­mick to ini­ti­ate a con­ver­sa­tion with the oppo­site sex. (This is right around the time our par­ents (aka the trag­i­cally unhip) first start to fig­ure out the “new thing all the kids are doing these days”).

    The prob­lem is that there’s no log­i­cal link between wear­ing a sin­glerin­gen and being sin­gle. It’s all hype from the Sin­glerin­gen com­pany — hype which can be turned on its head at any time. In the end, most peo­ple are turned off and return to the tried-and-true ways of sig­nal­ing sin­gle­ness. And a few peo­ple, frus­trated by the dis­con­nect between social object and iden­tity, take it too far by, for exam­ple, wear­ing shirts that say “I’m sin­gle” in big bold let­ters across the front.

    Sin­glerin­gens and MySpace pages are not good social objects.

    A good social object allows some­one to nat­u­rally and log­i­cally con­clude what they should do to get more atten­tion. If my videos receive a lot of views, then I should make more videos. If my pho­tos receive a lot of pos­i­tive com­ments, then I should take more pho­tos. If my blog gets a lot of link love, then I should write more blog posts.

    If my sin­glerin­gen or MySpace page gets a lot of atten­tion, then I should quickly take advan­tage and change top­ics to a dif­fer­ent, bet­ter social object before my ego-centric acces­sory goes out of style.

  • Tim

    Human behav­ior gets really inter­est­ing when we lose our bal­ance between indi­vid­ual iden­tity and group iden­tity. It seems to me that as these social object phe­nom­ena infect larger chunks of soci­ety, their early vic­tims are “cured” of their attach­ment to the object.

    For exam­ple, I was intro­duced to lol­cats about a year ago. Each lol­cat I encoun­tered was side-splittingly hilar­i­ous. The phe­nom­e­non broke ranks with the under­ground when it was picked up by major media. With that level of expo­sure came a tremen­dous increase in user-contributed lol­cats and, pre­dictably, a decrease in qual­ity. My last visit to icanhascheezburger.com left me unful­filled. The lol­cat has run out of lol. I’m sure alexa will concur.

    The same will likely hap­pen with sin­glerin­gen. What started as a cute way of con­nect­ing indi­vid­u­als is becom­ing cliched. As knowl­edge of its sig­nif­i­cance infects the gen­eral pop­u­la­tion, it loses its unique­ness and, in turn, its pur­pose. Another social object dies from overindulgence.

  • http://eduspaces.net/vinall/weblog/ Joan Vinall-Cox

    I think the mot inter­est­ing (to me) state­ment is: “Infor­ma­tion is like fash­ion – to be used, shown off and even bartered with.” At par­ties, men­tion­ing Face­book is like an acces­sory — it allows a con­ver­sa­tion to begin. I think, how­ever, that an acces­sory is not a social object; it’s an indi­ca­tor. When my party friend and I “friend” each other on Face­book, that’s not a social object yet (as I under­stand it so far). It’s a polite response that we are will­ing to acknowl­edge each other’s exis­tence in this envi­ron­ment. When we begin to play, what we play with is the social object, the ball, so to speak, that allows us to play the social game.

  • http://www.washingtonvc.com Rana Sob­hany

    I don’t know if i nec­es­sary believe that wear­ing Sin­gel­rin­gen is ego-centric or attention-seeking as has been argued. Per­son­ally, I feel that the true and inher­ent value of being a Sin­gel­rin­gen wearer is in the fact that oth­ers will NOT view the ring as an invi­ta­tion to insti­gate a dia­logue about being sin­gle (à la offine Match.com). As a con­tent sin­gle woman work­ing in a pre­dom­i­nantly male indus­try, I don’t want to feel pres­sure to con­stant explain to oth­ers as to why I am unat­tached. Just a glance at the Sin­gel­rin­gen is a sub­tle reminder that I am per­fectly happy with my life and the I am solely respon­si­ble for my per­sonal happiness.

  • http://www.washingtonvc.com Rana Sob­hany

    I don’t know if i nec­es­sar­ily believe that wear­ing Sin­gel­rin­gen is ego-centric or attention-seeking as has been argued. Per­son­ally, I feel that the true and inher­ent value of being a Sin­gel­rin­gen wearer is in the fact that oth­ers will NOT view the ring as an invi­ta­tion to insti­gate a dia­logue about being sin­gle (à la offine Match.com). As a con­tent sin­gle woman work­ing in a pre­dom­i­nantly male indus­try, I don’t want to feel pres­sure to con­stant explain to oth­ers as to why I am unat­tached. Just a glance at the Sin­gel­rin­gen is a sub­tle reminder that I am per­fectly happy with my life and the I am solely respon­si­ble for my per­sonal happiness.

  • http://wilywordsmith.blogspot.com vice­queen­maria

    Alex, the idea of the sin­gle ring is both fas­ci­nat­ing and oddly unat­trac­tive at once. It’s some­thing I’ve been think­ing a lot about lately. The sin­gel­rin­gen as a social object cre­ated by a com­pany doesn’t feel ‘organic’ to me, and I think that part of what gives a social object some integrity is how it incor­po­rates nat­u­rally into every­day life. IE, Hugh talks about wine, we drink wine, we share, but it doesn’t mean ‘any­thing’, it’s just some­thing we all enjoy and share. It’s the shar­ing part that makes it social and won­der­ful, not the fact that the object is a per­sonal “mark” for one person.

    I sup­pose the sin­gle ring is some­how like get­ting a tat­too or some kind of body mark (jew­elry, etc;) to define your­self, if that’s impor­tant to you at the moment. Some peo­ple are into that and that’s all good and well; I respect that it may be impor­tant to some and of course, I’m always up for a good joke.

    But on the other hand, an engage­ment ring/marriage band is spe­cial *pre­cisely* because it is what it is. When one takes a vow to be respon­si­ble and account­able to another human being, it *is* VERY impor­tant. And per­haps peo­ple have come to take that for granted. How can any sin­gle per­son deny the sanc­tity of this vow? That’s the whole point of the ring! How can any sin­gle per­son be so naïve?

    Per­son­ally, as a sin­gle woman, I would not buy a sin­glerin­gen ever. It wd not be a ‘social’ object at all for me, but one that makes a mock­ery of some­thing that I believe should be taken seri­ously, even if I hap­pen to not be in the estate of mar­riage at the moment.

    I once gave five dol­lars to a woman at the super­mar­ket who couldn’t pay for all her gro­ceries. I was also quite broke at the time. My life coach told me — it could’ve been five *mil­lion* dol­lars, or five cents, it didn’t mat­ter. it was the act of exchange and the act of love that mat­tered, not the green bill sig­ni­fy­ing “five dol­lars.” So maybe we should be talk­ing about the cur­rency and action behind the object. I think the object is a metaphor for the energy that is shared.

  • http://leahj.blog-city.com Leah

    Guess I’ll pipe in since I have and wear a Sin­gel­rin­gen. It first came to my atten­tion about a year ago, after a break-up when I was par­tic­u­larly frag­ile. “Huh, that’s cool, if I can bud­get the money, I’ll buy one.”

    I am a ter­ri­bly iner­tia dri­ven shop­per though and never got around to it, then Linda gave one to me.

    Since I started wear­ing it, I’ve only been to the office, so I can’t say what it’s like to wear it out to a bar or a café. What I can tell you is that I wasn’t inter­ested in it BECAUSE it was a social object, that occured to me after I put it on.

    For me it is not a mock­ery of mar­raige or an ego dri­ven splashy scar­let let­ter mak­ing me a des­per­ate poten­tial vic­tim to scam artists. It is quite sim­ply a small reminder to myself that I’m okay as a sin­gle woman.

    It is not a vow to always be sin­gle. It doesn’t declare my hatred of men or a dis­taste of rela­tion­ships. It is a phys­i­cal man­i­fes­tion of some heal­ing I’m try­ing to do after hav­ing my heart bro­ken twice in 2007.

    And if peo­ple talk about it, then it might become a social object. It is dif­fer­ent than the Blue Mon­ster, wine or the iPhone? Yes. Of course it is. Is it about money, ulti­mately? Yes, of course it is.

    Sin­gel­rin­gen is a jew­elry com­pany serv­ing a niche mar­ket. They found a cool angle, a good designer and some nice peo­ple to sell it.

    That’s called busi­ness, I think.

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  • http://googlesnipersystempro.com Google Sniper System

    well, we focus on the role of IT arte­facts as bound­ary objects in this … con­clude that the cre­ation and man­age­ment of bound­ary objects!

  • http://IamJaramy.blogspot.COM Jara­ma­cyC

    Human beings are social ani­mals. I relied on friends who are pro­fes­sors in procur­ing me hard to obtain research papers. I am glad the con­cept is finally get­ting wider play. Start­ing to talk with some­one about the ring can lead to pro­longed con­ver­sa­tions about what it means to be sin­gle. They are designed so that mil­lions see the same image of a mem­ber. You prob­a­bly dress and behave dif­fer­ently at work than you would with your bud­dies or your fam­ily. I think as you do that the pride thing is key. That sin­gles are already com­plete. Both sin­gle men and women are tired of being bugged by their friends and fam­ily to get mar­ried as though being sin­gle is less than that. Sin­gel­rin­gen is a dec­la­ra­tion that as a sin­gle per­son you are already com­plete. It could be a placebo effect but many wear­ers report they are pleased with who they meet after they start wear­ing Sin­gel­rin­gen. But atten­tion is an addic­tive drug. The phe­nom­e­non broke ranks with the under­ground when it was picked up by major media. My last visit to ican­hascheezburger. What started as a cute way of con­nect­ing indi­vid­u­als is becom­ing cliched. Another social object dies from overindul­gence. Just a glance at the Sin­gel­rin­gen is a sub­tle reminder that I am per­fectly happy with my life and the I am solely respon­si­ble for my per­sonal hap­pi­ness. And per­haps peo­ple have come to take that for granted. I was also quite broke at the time. I think the object is a metaphor for the energy that is shared.Hey i do like the post it is very nice . I do read this and enjoyed it let me know if you post any new.