Designing Social Interfaces

Chapter 5. We Are Here! We Are Here! We Are Here!

It’s impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information.

—William Gibson

How do you know someone’s present? In class, they used to call roll and each person would respond with “here” or “yo” (it was the 1970s) or even “present.” Usually you can just look around. But how about when someone is standing behind you and he clears his throat, not because he’s feeling hoarse but as a way of letting you know he’s standing there so he won’t startle you. In the real world we are tuned to all sort of indications of who is present (either in the immediate moment or the recent stretch of time) and who is absent. If you see an unmown lawn, it may mean no one’s been home for a while, or it may mean that the homeowner is an iconoclast at war with the neighborhood association, but if you notice a pile of uncollected newspapers on the stoop, that’s a pretty good sign of absence. Likewise, if the curtains are open and they were closed earlier or a light is on that was dark before, that’s another sign that someone’s there.

Graffiti showing a nose peeking above a wall with the legend “Kilroy was here” may also tell you that someone has been by, perhaps recently.

In his fantastic anthropology weblog, This Blog Sits At (http://www.cultureby.com/trilogy/2007/12/status-casting.html), Grant McCracken has written about statuscasting (broadcasting your status; we’ll get to that ...