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Presence in the age of social networks: augmenting mediated environments with feedback on group activity

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Abstract

The present study aimed at increasing behavioral engagement in groups of networked people by providing feedback on the group activity. Each participant logged into an on-line virtual environment for four subsequent treasure-hunting sessions along with other nine players. During the game, all players communicated dyadically through textual chats, and searched for the treasures in the virtual environment. In two conditions, the participants received a visual feedback depicting the communication activity with the group based on social network analysis indices (i.e. ‘centrality’ or ‘reciprocity’). Feedback was not provided in the third condition. The underlying assumption was that if the group activity becomes more visible to the individual user through the feedback, then the behavioral engagement with the group increases. The resulting behavioral engagement was measured with two techniques, one based on the amount of messages exchanged and one based on self-reported measures. The results show that feedback improved the exchange of messages with respect to the control condition and that this effect was only partially captured by self-reported measures.

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Notes

  1. In general terms, social networks can be defined as social aggregates composed by people carrying out activities within a certain social context (a context comprising other people); the relations established among actors (Wasserman and Faust 1994; Martino and Spoto 2006) define such networks. Authors further distinguish between kinds of social networks. For instance, Wellman (2001) differentiates “groups” from “community networks,” the former characterized by being tightly bounded, densely knit, and composed by a limited set of people, the latter scarcely knit, composed by a high number of people and without precise boundaries.

  2. The PASION project aims at adding cues to a communication environment in order to enhance the users’ social presence in the group (PASION, Psychologically Augmented Social Interaction Over Networks, reference number 27654 PASION, EU IST program, see Brugnoli et al. 2007).

  3. SNA based on this kind of data is often referred to as dynamic network analysis, see McCarley (2003), Kossinets and Watts (2006), and Bender-deMoll and McFarland (2006).

  4. This is a measure of reciprocity at the level of thread, not at the level of each single message; it measures the willingness to communicate with the other. Identifying that a certain message is responded would require a deeper qualitative analysis. This work could not be carried out in the short pause between game sessions when reciprocity index was calculated and the visual feedback was built.

  5. The indices can be represented in several ways. The most intuitive is probably through connecting dots and lines (see Heer and Boyd 2005) as in Morris’s Social Network display (2005) aimed at improving elderly people’s social activity. This should not be considered as the only option. The social dimensions that emerged from the data extracted (e.g. the “popularity display” of Technorati, http://www.technorati.com) can be represented in indefinite number of ways, with the information about group structure and individual properties always remaining incorporated in the value of the index and in the properties of the representation (see Freeman 2000).

  6. Post hoc analysis described in this section involves comparison of 95% confidence intervals for the estimated marginal mean score across conditions in each different session.

  7. ICC value was 0.49 for item 9. This value is sufficiently high to suggest the use of multilevel models.

  8. ICC value is 0.33 for item 8, sufficiently high to suggest the use of multilevel models.

  9. Item 13, centrality condition: M 3.33, DS 0.69, reciprocity condition: M 2.98, DS 1.05.

    Item 14, centrality condition: M 3.76, DS 0.67, reciprocity condition: M 2.96, DS 0.96.

    Item 15, centrality condition: M 3.8, DS 0.65, reciprocity condition: M 3.00, DS 0.91.

    Item 16, centrality condition: M 3.66, DS 1.00, reciprocity condition: M 2.82, DS 1.28.

  10. ICC values were, respectively, 0.29 for item 14, 0.56 for item 15, 0.64 for item 16. All these values were sufficiently high to suggest the use of multilevel models.

  11. Item 17: centrality condition: M 3.65, DS 0.95, reciprocity condition: M 3.33, DS 1.11.

  12. Item 19: centrality condition: M 3.15, DS 1.05, reciprocity condition: M 2.85, DS 1.27.

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Acknowledgments

The study reported here is partially funded by the PASION project (Psychologically Augmented Social Interaction over Networks, reference number 27654 PASION, EU IST program).

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  1. Human Technology Lab, Department of General Psychology, University of Padova, Padova, Italy

    Francesco Martino, Roberto Baù, Anna Spagnolli & Luciano Gamberini

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  1. Francesco Martino
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  2. Roberto Baù
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  3. Anna Spagnolli
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  4. Luciano Gamberini
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Correspondence to Luciano Gamberini.

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All authors contributed equally to this work.

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Martino, F., Baù, R., Spagnolli, A. et al. Presence in the age of social networks: augmenting mediated environments with feedback on group activity. Virtual Reality 13, 183–194 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10055-009-0125-2

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