Interaction Design, 6th Edition

Chapter 5SOCIAL INTERACTION

• 5.1 Introduction
• 5.2 Being Social
• 5.3 Face-to-Face Conversations
• 5.4 Remote Collaboration and Communication
• 5.5 Co-Presence
• 5.6 Social Games

 

Objectives

The main goals of the chapter are to accomplish the following:

• Explain what is meant by social interaction.
• Describe the social mechanisms that people use to communicate and collaborate.
• Illustrate how videoconferencing and other social media platforms evolved especially during COVID-19.
• Explain what social presence means.
• Give an overview of new technologies intended to facilitate collaboration and group participation.
• Discuss how technology can augment collaboration among people who are co-present.
• Outline aspects of online social games.

5.1 Introduction

People are inherently social: We live together, work together, learn together, play together, interact and talk with each other, and socialize. A diversity of technologies has been developed specifically to enable us to persist in being social when physically apart from one another, many of which have now become part of the fabric of society. These include the widespread use of smartphones, videoconferencing, social media, gaming, messaging, and telepresence. Each of these affords different ways of supporting how people connect.

There are many ways to study what it means to be social. In this chapter, we focus on how people communicate and collaborate face-to-face and remotely in their social, work, and everyday lives—with ...