Folk Computing: Revisiting Oral Tradition as a Scaffold for Face-to-Face Communities
Abstract
The concept of Folk Computing appropriates the patterns and processes of oral tradition as a starting point for designing technology to support face-to-face communication and community building. While technology has already played an important role in supporting communication and community at a distance (e.g. email, online discussion groups, chat rooms, instant messaging), much less research has been done on the role it can play in supporting face-to-face gatherings. Such gatherings have very different requirements than their “remote” counterparts: while technology that supports distance communication must mediate the entire contents of the conversation, technology that augments face-to-face communication can leverage the existing conversational bandwidth that such interaction already affords. This frees the technology to address other “meta-conversational” challenges faced by members of face-to-face communities, such as: “How do I meet people outside my core group?”, “What do I have in common with this person?” and “What defines this group as a community?”
There is no need to start from scratch in conceiving of a communication system that works on a meta-conversational level to support face-to-face community. There is a large research literature that highlights the role of folklore – games, jokes, and legends that circulate among communities via word of mouth – in building community, including its role in providing common ground to strangers and in helping communities develop a sense of themselves. Folk Computing attempts to preserve the key dimensions of the folklore process – such as its traditional, informal, and bottom-up nature – while also taking advantage of the unique affordances of technology to enhance folklore’s community-building efficacy.
This dissertation will synthesize a design framework for Folk Computing, and it will argue for the value of this approach. To do this, I will draw on relevant folklore theory, on my experiences with three Folk Computing devices we have built over the last six years, and on analysis of data collected during activities where hundreds of people used each of those technologies. The technologies I will focus on are:
- Thinking Tags: Computationally augmented nametags that give two speakers a simple measure of how much they have in common.
- Meme Tags and Community Mirrors: A next-generation nametag that tracks interactions, allowing a community to visualize some of its own dynamics in real time.
- I-balls: Key-chain-sized devices that allow kids to create, trade and track simple computer programs that take the form of children’s folk games and folklore.
Introduction
Establishing Folk Groups
Most people have some experience with the concept of folklore: “tradition-based communicative units informally exchanged in dynamic variation through space and time.” (Toelken 1979) This may come from hearing the latest “urban legend” about the person who bought a Porsche for a dollar from the philandering owner’s angry spouse (Brunvand 1981); or remembering the games they used to play as children – such as “Four Square,” “Marco Polo,” “Sardines,” “One Potato, Two Potato,” and the many variants of “Tag” and “Marbles” – that they learned from older peers and passed on to younger ones (Opie and Opie 1959). These experiences may leave one with the sense that folklore is something fun, but frivolous. Therefore, it is surprising for some to learn about the important role scholars believe folklore plays in helping to create and maintain the community it circulates within, called the “folk group.”
The folklore researcher Jay Mechling defines “folk groups” as “face-to-face human groups wherein people use stylized communication to create the sense of a shared, meaningful world” (Mechling 1986). The “stylized communication” he refers to is folklore. Note that Mechling considers that the folklore is what gives rise to the sense of a “shared, meaningful world,” not the other way around. Other researchers also emphasize the reciprocally reinforcing nature of folklore and the folk group.
One of the key features of a folk group will always be the extent to which its own dynamics continue to inform and educate its members and stabilize the group. Because the members share so much information and attitude, folk groups are what Edward T. Hall would call High Context Groups… whose members all see themselves as parts of a single community that ‘knows’. (Toelken 1979)
The goal of Folk Computing technology is to help a group of folks become a folk group – “a single community that ‘knows’” – by giving them a medium to easily create, circulate and reflect on their own computationally-enhanced folklore. Our research has focused on two very different contexts where community building is important: conference-type gatherings and primary school settings. Folk Computing focuses on several ways in which folklore helps establish and support folk groups, according to the research literature:
- Supporting the construction of community identity. The folklorist Alan Dundes says, “it is important to recognize that folklore is not simply a way of obtaining available data about identity for social scientists. It is actually one of the principal means by which an individual and a group discovers or establishes his or its identity.” (Dundes 1989)
- Facilitating community integration. Folklore can serve an “ice-breaking” function between relative strangers (George 1973).
- Understanding community dynamics. Toelken says “One of the key features of a folk group will always be the extent to which its own dynamics continue to inform and educate its members and stabilize the group.” (Toelken 1979)
- Establishing common ground. Mechling defines Folklore as “Expressive, stylized communication performed within and for a community of humans … which form the basis for the creation of meaning” (Mechling 1986). This makes folklore an important part of what linguists call “mutual knowledge” – an underlying set of knowledge that is shared and known to be shared on which communication rests.
- Educating community members. Toelken states “folklore functions in part as an informal system for learning the daily logic and worldview of the people around us” (Toelken 1979).
Technology and Face-to-Face Communication
I have drawn on folklore for its community-building efficacy in face-to-face environments such as conferences. There is some debate in the literature as to whether communication must be face-to-face in order for it to be considered folklore. Some (see Mechling’s above definition of a folk group) still hold to a true oral or “word of mouth” definition. Others require only that the communication be “informal” (see Toelken, above) and “personal” (Oring 1986), meaning that it happens outside on any mass medium or organized system of knowledge dissemination (e.g. books, television). Without resolving this debate, however, it is clear that the informal and personal aspects of folklore make it especially appropriate for the unstructured mingling that goes on at a conference.
If folklore is a useful tool for thinking about community building in a variety of contexts, why then focus only on technology that only supports community building in face-to-face settings? The simple answer is that technology to support face-to-face community building is vastly underrepresented in technology research. Ask a group of people about new technologies they use to support communication, and the cumulative list might include internet tools such as e-mail, video conferencing, instant messaging, chat rooms, and discussion groups, and telephony-related technologies such as voice mail, pagers, and cell phones – all technologies designed to support communication at a distance. Ask that same group of people to name their five most memorable “communicative moments,” however, and most of them will involve face-to-face interaction. Why isn’t there more technology to support this mode of communication?
One reason may be that face-to-face communication is often considered the gold standard against which computer-mediated communication is measured (Hollan and Stornetta 1992). Since this type of research is focused on using technology to reproduce the physical world’s rich set of social cues in the online world, it has little to say about what technology can do when those cues already exist. The implication is that there is nothing to improve. Of course, this is not the case. For example, while the medium of face-to-face supports “high bandwidth” conversation, it does not make it easy to see the patterns of interaction between large numbers of people that make up a community.
Another reason there have been few technological inroads into face-to-face communication may be more insidious. In the public’s mind, there lies a deep-seated belief that technology is antithetical to intimacy. Consider the current debate about people’s use of cell phones in public places. An article called “Cell Hell” in the online Salon Magazine bemoans a proposed use of cell phones on airplanes, “eliminating one of the last oases of unconnected time.” The cell phone is just the latest example of a technology that is derided for encroaching on our humanity. However, it may appear especially threatening because, where technologies like television and the Web had to lure us to them, the cell phone was one of the first that was able to follow us into the restaurant, the park, the car – into our daily, personal world.
Although technology has its limits, we should not accept that it has no role to play in building face-to-face community. While we must respect people’s protectiveness of their “face time”, we must also help to fashion a new image of technology that is not inhumane, restrictive, or isolating – in other words, that is not a threat to this kind of interaction. This thesis aims to extend the realm of technological possibility to include face-to-face community building.
Problems in Face-to-face Community Building
This thesis will address three major problems in community building: Insularity, the “Common Ground Problem,” and “Ego-centeredness”. I will call the sum of these problems ICE, and call the technology that works to address them “ICE breakers”.
Insularity
Insularity is one of the major enemies of successful community building. Many companies I have worked with have complained that their efforts to gather people from across many different groups have been thwarted by the participants’ strong tendency to interact within their previously established groupings, or cliques. Even people who express an interest in breaking these boundaries have a hard time doing it. The consequence is slow community stagnation due to lack of communication between various sub-groups.
The Common Ground Problem
While the medium of face-to-face supports “high bandwidth” conversation, it does not make it easy for two strangers to figure out something meaningful to talk about. In fact, since all conversations are built on “common ground” or “mutual knowledge”, it can be quite awkward to use conversation to acquire enough mutual knowledge to have a conversation. Linguists call this chicken-and-egg paradox the “Mutual Knowledge Problem” (Krauss and Fussell 1990), or what I call the “Common Ground Problem”. We all experience its awkwardness at the beginning of conversations with people we do not know. While it can be partially overcome by a solid introduction from a trusted third party, the combinatorics of a large gathering make this impossible for most interactions. The problem of uncovering common ground becomes increasingly difficult in an age where gatherings include people from many cultural backgrounds.
Ego-centeredness
There is considerable evidence that people have a poor conception of the social network that lies beyond their immediate circle of friends, also called their “ego-centered network” in social network theory (Wasserman and Faust 1994). This was famously illustrated in Stanley Milgram’s research in which subjects were asked to guess the number of people it would take to connect two random people in the U.S. via a trail of acquaintances (people guessed 100 on average, while the actual number was closer to six) (Milgram 1967). If people had better-developed understandings of these social network phenomena, they might work to become more effective community participants.
Why the Media Lab is a Good Place to Explore Technology for Face-to-face Community Building
The Media Lab is known for creating two things: new technologies, like wearable computing, and new communities, like News in the Future. Some of the research that forms the basis for this proposed dissertation used experiments at semi-annual gatherings of Media Lab sponsors, where we tried our technologies with hundreds of users. These users have a genuine need to overcome their insular tendencies (e.g. to sit with others they already know at lunch); to find common ground on which to build enduring relationships; and to better understand the evolving structure of the communities they are forming. The fact that Media Lab sponsors come from all over the world, from all different industries, and with all different prior knowledge about the Lab make them a challenging test-bed for face-to-face community building technology.
Proposed Approach to the Problem
This thesis draws on folklore as a model for how to break the ICE in a gathering of individuals, transforming it into a folk group that demonstrates diverse member interaction, a sense of shared meaning, and an understanding of its own dynamics. The key is to simultaneously preserve many of the existing qualities of folklore while adding other novel properties enabled by the introduction of computation. This mix of preservation and innovation is guided by the desire to leverage and enhance folklore’s role in creating and maintaining a folk group.
The following section examines the three main Folk Computing technologies we have developed in terms of what traditional features of folklore they preserve, what new features they add, and how this can enhance folklore’s community-building role. These technologies and the experiments that support them will be re-analyzed and discussed in the proposed thesis, and their value in supporting the Folk Computing framework will be assessed. Note: although many of the qualities of folklore and Folk Computing are relevant to several devices, for the sake of brevity, I only discuss them in the context of the technology where they first appeared.
The Thinking Tags
Event / Technology: In 1995, at the 10th anniversary of the Media Lab and the launch of the “Things That Think” research consortium, we created 200 computationally augmented nametags for the sponsor meetings (Borovoy, McDonald et al. 1996)(Borovoy, Martin et al. 1998). After programming these badges with their multiple-choice answers to five opinion questions, sponsors could see a simple measure of how much they had in common by noting the number of flashing lights on their badges as they conversed. Each green light corresponded to a question they answered the same way. Each red light signified a question they answered differently.
Folklore Quality Preserved: Although this early work was missing many dimensions of folklore, it preserved one of its key properties: its fondness for “wild” habitats. Folklore thrives in unstructured, informal social environments. We struggled to design an augmented nametag that would not impose too much of its own structure. For example, we wanted to avoid sponsors having to use PC kiosks in order to program their nametags, since this would have been very disruptive to the social setting. Instead, we came up with a way to integrate tag programming into the social space by designing special “bucket kiosks”. The picture to the right shows one of the five kiosks where guests could program their answer to a multiple-choice question by dunking their tag into the bucket that corresponded to their answer. This provided a much more social approach to the programming task.
In the end, the Thinking Tags blended quite well into the sponsor gathering. Participants kept using them for longer than we imagined (causing a small battery crisis), and the tags were seen supporting conversations in elevators, in the bathroom, and over dinner at a museum.
Novel Folklore Qualities Introduced: The Thinking Tags provided an early example of the power of social devices that exhibit a small amount of computational agency. All two participants had to do was turn toward each other, and their Thinking Tags automatically engaged in a conversation on their behalf, resulting in a simple kind of introduction (e.g. “You two have a lot in common”). Also, the tags were our first experiment with a technology that could reveal common ground between two people (Borovoy, Martin et al. 1999). While folklore has always helped to contribute to common ground, the onus has been on people to go through the often-cumbersome process of discovering what they have in common.
Enhanced Folk Group Support: Many users commented on how the Thinking Tags made them feel comfortable interacting with a wider circle than they ordinarily might. As mentioned previously, folklore is often cited as playing this “integrative” role in communities (for an example, see the Background section on integration). However, I believe that the augmented properties of the nametags made them especially good icebreakers. The agency exhibited by Folk Computing devices expands their integrative capability by giving people a visible alibi for their extroversion – “my tag made me do it”.
Meme Tags and Community Mirrors
Event / Technology: In 1997, we built 400 nametags for another set of fall sponsor meetings (Borovoy, Martin et al. 1998). Participants could program these tags with short 64 character ideas, or “memes”, that they believed in. When two people met, each person’s tag displayed a meme that he or she subscribed to and that the other person had not yet seen. If people liked the meme they saw on their conversation partner’s tag, they could click a button and a copy of it would “jump” to their tag. We also created large screen “community mirrors” that showed visualizations of how memes were moving through the community in real time.