Mitigating Barriers to Public Social Interaction with Meronymous Communication
Name
3613904.3642241.pdf
Size
2.2 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
a37eb747f3932d7cc409537359a6315d
Author(s)
Soliman, Nouran
Kang, Hyeonsu B
Latzke, Matthew
Bragg, Jonathan
Chang, Joseph Chee
Zhang, Amy Xian
Karger, David R
Date Issued
May 11, 2024
Publisher
ACM
Citation
Soliman, Nouran, Kang, Hyeonsu B, Latzke, Matthew, Bragg, Jonathan, Chang, Joseph Chee et al. 2024. "Mitigating Barriers to Public Social Interaction with Meronymous Communication."
Version
Final published version
Abstract
In communities with social hierarchies, fear of judgment can discourage communication. While anonymity may alleviate some social pressure, fully anonymous spaces enable toxic behavior and hide the social context that motivates people to participate and helps them tailor their communication. We explore a design space of meronymous communication, where people can reveal carefully chosen aspects of their identity and also leverage trusted endorsers to gain credibility. We implemented these ideas in a system for scholars to meronymously seek and receive paper recommendations on Twitter and Mastodon. A formative study with 20 scholars confirmed that scholars see benefits to participating but are deterred due to social anxiety. From a month-long public deployment, we found that with meronymity, junior scholars could comfortably ask “newbie” questions and get responses from senior scholars who they normally found intimidating. Responses were also tailored to the aspects about themselves that junior scholars chose to reveal.
Description
CHI '24: Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems May 11–16, 2024, Honolulu, HI, USA
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642241
