Do your friends make you smarter?: An analysis of social strategies in online information seeking
Section snippets
Introduction and related work
As search engines and search algorithms have grown more sophisticated in recent years, people have become increasingly reliant on these technologies for seeking information. At the same time, the library science (Ehrlich and Cash, 1994, Fox et al., 1993, Shepherd, 1983, Taylor, 1968, Twidale et al., 1997), educational (Rogoff, 1990, Pea, 1993, Hatch and Gardner, 1997, Edelson et al., 1996, Karasavvidis, 2002), and organizational learning literatures (Granovetter, 1973, Allen, 1997, Burt, 1992,
Method
We used a talk-aloud protocol and video capture techniques to explore how eight users performed two search tasks related to US energy policy. Below we describe our study design and data analysis procedures.
Results
Our results focus on the process of social exploration and social reasoning that we observed. Since social search is still poorly supported by web technologies, we do not intend to do a full comparison of performance between the Social and NS Conditions. Instead, we focus on the outcomes of various social strategies in the Social Condition.
Discussion
In our study we observed several interesting patterns and noted that different types of social engagements (e.g., public versus private) may provide complementary cognitive benefits. While further study is needed to isolate the exact reasons why these benefits occur, we can discuss a few of the possibilities for our findings.
Conclusion
Our study provides some early insights to the behaviors and practices surrounding question–answering in social environments. Let us briefly summarize:
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We identified three social tactics for information gathering (Targeted Asking, Network Asking, and Searching).
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These tactics used in combination led to better search outcomes (based on Learning Scores).
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Query composition on social networking sites resulted in reformulation and framing of the task problem.
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Processing (targeted) friends’ answers led to
Acknowledgments
We extend a great thanks our willing participants and our collaborators in the Augmented Social Cognition group at PARC. We thank the reviewers of our manuscript for their critical comments. And we are grateful for the guidance from our energy policy experts: Gabriele Cente, Johannes Lehmann, and Lew Fulton. This work was supported in part by Office of Naval Research Contract No. N00014-08-C-0029 to Peter Pirolli.
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