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

References
 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 and holds a PhD in Interaction Design.
• Shelly D. Farnham is currently a researcher at Microsoft Research and holds a PhD from the University of Washington

Summary

• Hypothesis
• People organize their social worlds based on life 'modes' and social sites have not sufficiently addressed how to help users improve their experiences in this area.
• 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
• The majority of participants drew their life maps as social meme maps, while  a few others focused more on a timeline style.  The researchers found that participants chose communication channels based on closeness and different areas of their lives.  Specifically, the closer they were to someone, the more they used a mix of multiple communication channels.  Additionally, the amount of segmentation that participants wished to maintain between certain facets of their lives varied greatly with age, personality, and cultural differences.
• 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 found this paper fascinating and highly relevant.  I feel the authors were convincing with their research findings, but I would have also liked to see the results presented in a more measurable way.  Perhaps the ambiguity was simply a necessary part of the research, particularly given the topic of study and the sheer variability between participants and social norms.