When we consider the adoption of new media an often-overlooked factors is the psychological affect that the use of a medium or method of use has on the comfort level of the user. I was reminded of this again recently when reading an article by Jeff Bardzell, Jay Bolter and Jonas Löwgren in a recent issue of Interactions Magazine/Journal. [1]
The following quote from the article reminded me of this:
“Many popular digital forms today are highly performative in this sense: The users project themselves or perform before an audience of friends, acquaintances, or indeed strangers in applications such as Facebook, Twitter, ’World of Warcraft,’ and so on. These applications are successful precisely because they make it easier for users to reinvent their identities in the act of performance.”
The use of different media in different contexts may be entirely different types of performances. So using email with three colleagues in an organization is a completely different type of performance for most people than using a company social network with 3,000 employees. If this is true, then it follows that expecting fluent users of email to easily adopt a corporate microblogging like Yammer or a company collaboration platform like SharePoint is as silly as expecting closed-set movie actors to instantly feel at home performing at an improv club. There are some things that translate, but there are others that most certainly do not.
From this perspective, when slow social media adoption occurs, we need to look beyond mere resistance to change or a lack of basic knowledge of how to use new tools (what we are now calling literacy), and include an exploration of people’s comfort levels (related to what we are now calling fluency) with performing in an environment where so many things about the dynamic between user and user or actor and audience are so different.
[1] Interaction Criticism : Three Readings of an Interaction Design , and What They Get Us. Jeffrey Bardzell, Jay Bolter, Jonas Löwgren (2010) Readings 17 (2) p. 32-37
Pingback: SociaLens – Perfectionism vs. Innovation Fluency