Our study has generated significant new insight into how individuals choose to augment them-selves with digital media in multi-party interaction. By curating representations themselves, and studying their use in multi-party situations, we have gone significantly beyond the current state of the art that has, so far, largely focused on automatic selection of media in strictly one-to-one interactions. In framing our discussion, we do so around our two research questions.
6.1 RQ1: how do individuals choose to represent themselves to strangers with digital selfs?
Participants strongly favoured images over text content to incorporate in their Digital Self. Only a minority of participants chose text only Digital Selfs. Additionally, the majority of images participants chose to include came from outwith existing social and digital media accounts, with over 70% being sourced from a Google image search. This is surprising given the emphasis of existing work (Chen and Abouzied,
2016; Jarusriboonchai et al.,
2015; Nguyen et al.,
2015) which both focuses on matching or using social media from existing accounts, and presenting those matches to users as text. Our results indicate that whilst these techniques identify common interests, they are unlikely to represent those aspects of self that individuals would wish to present publicly to strangers.
The use of such images was mostly due to participants wanting to express ambiguity in their Digital Self, and images were a good way to do this. Participants considered that the interpre-tation of the image provided only some insight into its meaning, and how it represented them. This meaning could be further disclosed through conversation, facilitating the use of the Digital Self in boundary regulation (Lampinen,
2014), and allowing an individual to dynamically man-age disclosure through conversation. From Part 2 of the study there is also evidence that such ambiguity in presentation through images stimulates and supports conversation more than provid-ing simple textual information. Such Digital Selfs were found to be useful through all stages of conversation. The lack of use of Digital Selfs by some participants was at least in part due to the information in Digital Selfs being textual and unambiguous (name, likes, personality, occupation, etc.). Participants found these to be unstimulating, and often didn’t use them or incorporate them into conversation. Whilst this is not the only reason participants chose not to use Digital Selfs, those that provide only basic facts or interests are unlikely to enhance interaction. Unlike prior work, such as Nguyen et al. (
2015), and because we had multiple parties and covered all stages of conversation, there was less explicit focus on use of the Digital Self as the ‘task’, and participants felt able to not use it when they felt it wouldn’t help them. Further study to show this is required, but participants should be encouraged to create richer and potentially more ambiguous Digital Selfs if they are to have greatest benefit. In avoiding automatic selection, identifying only those who are similar, self curation avoids isolation from others that are dissimilar and potentially contributing to a ‘filter bubble’ (Resnick et al.,
2013). As with online media, digital augmenta-tions with the same automatic recommendation algorithms may simply keep like-minded people together, whilst as noted by Mayer et al. (
2015), individuals may often be open to meeting others who are dissimilar. In many work situations it is often necessary to work with others who are dissimilar, and understanding those differences may be as important as identifying similarities.
Using these richer and more ambiguous representations may also reduce the barrier to interaction with others, providing not only a ticket to commence an initial interaction, but opportunities of setting talk that have greater potential to lead to richer interactions. Such media may pro-vide accelerated opportunities to establish better awareness of others and common ground with them. Within CSCW, this may be a practical approach where ad-hoc teams must form quickly and effectively in a short time period. For example, Wong and Neustaedter (
2017) have identified how cabin crew must quickly learn about and trust one another in a safety critical environment. Similarly Lykourentzou et al. (
2017) notes how having a deeper relationship with team members before those teams are formed enhances task performance. Although we have focused on more social scenarios, and the media chosen may well be different, the use of ambiguous media may provide an effective way to support this relationship forming between team mates faster.
6.2 RQ2: how are digital selfs used at each stage of interpersonal interaction between strangers in multi-party settings?
Existing work has largely focused on supporting individual stages of interaction, and evaluated work has focused only some of these (e.g. (Chen and Abouzied,
2016; Jarusriboonchai et al.,
2015; Nguyen et al.,
2015)). Existing solutions are unlikely to support all three stages. For example, whilst Jarusriboonchai et al. (
2015) badges present simple information to support ice-breaking, they are unlikely to be useful during conversation. Nguyen et al. (
2015) focused only on supporting conversation, and although their system provided new topics to discuss, it did not support evolving conversation beyond basic interaction. Our work found that Digital Selfs were employed, and were useful at, all stages of conversation. Most importantly, and unlike prior work, they are also useful after the initial ice-breaking phase and may support moving onto rich topics. Whilst Digital Selfs were still accessed when participants had established conversation, the frequency of accessing and switching reduced during the course of the study. This indicates that conversation had reached richer topics of which there was more to talk about. This is unlike Nguyen et al. (
2015), which shows more referrals and use of topic suggestions as their study progresses. We argue Digital Selfs supported richer conversation, which did not need augmentation to sustain, whilst towards the end of interaction Nguyen et al. (
2015) automatic topic selections were used to simply keep talking rather than those conversations being insightful. Again, this highlights how Digital Selfs might support individuals who must work together (e.g. (Wong and Neustaedter,
2017)) to form better relationships based on aspects of their interest, increasing common ground between them, and if not forming closer personal relationships, at least gaining a better understanding of others.
Whilst participants used Digital Selfs at all stages of interaction, not all participants used them at every stage. It was not the case that some participants did not use Digital Selfs at all. Participants used Digital Selfs when they felt it would be beneficial, and felt able to ignore it when they did not. There were multiple reasons why or why not this was done, but the Digital Self did not dominate the interaction, nor replace existing conversational practices. If participants were engaged in an interesting conversation, the Digital Self would sit ‘on the side’, with topics participants found and wished to introduce left until a suitable point emerged. Participants were comfortable using content as an ‘ice-breaker’. Either starting conversation directly with it, or introducing themselves before. Our event is an example of an ‘open-region’ (Goffman,
1963), where there is an assumption, due to the context, that interaction is permissible. This is true in all other formal studies of face-to-face augmentation (Nguyen et al.,
2015; Chen and Abouzied,
2016; Douglas,
1990; Maynard and Zimmerman,
1984). It is challenging to study such systems outside of an ‘open-region’ environment, where such assumptions cannot be made (e.g. at a coffee shop), but there would significant value in doing so and understanding how this might impact their use in ‘ice-breaking’. Digital Selfs also worked as ‘advertisements’ for participants, as they guided which conversation to join. Digital Selfs played a key role in establishing common ground when participants (newcomers) joined conversations. Newcomers accessed the Digital Selfs of the members of their ‘new’ conversation group before joining, and newcomers were integrated into conversations through Digital Selfs by incorporating a conversation topic from that newcomer’s Digital Self. Again, in relation to more general CSCW, there is potential to support on-boarding of new team members of colleagues faster into existing groups. A potential future avenue of investigation is to consider how Digital Selfs perform in creative environments, such as academic departments or maker spaces, where individuals are open to new collaborations with others. Existing work has investigated public displays (Bilandzic et al.,
2013) for this, but there is value in considering how co-located representations of self (such as current ideas or work) might support this, and leverage on the ‘advertisements’ identified by participants.
Whilst participants did browse others before starting interaction, and again before merging groups, we observed much less of this behaviour than we expected. We argue that in small multi-party gatherings there is less need to be selective on who to talk to. In the 3 person groups we observed fewer instances of browsing Digital Selfs before moving to ice-breaking, although Digital Selfs were used during ice-breaking for these groups. In the 4–5 person groups we saw more evidence of this ‘pre-browsing’, and we would expect more in even larger groups. All participants started interaction at the same time at the beginning of the study. This comes from existing study methods (Nguyen et al.,
2015; Douglas,
1990) that we used in our study, and a desire to ensure everyone started from the same position. However, it is somewhat unlike how individuals would enter such gatherings (such as parties), where individuals would arrive in a staggered order. Therefore there would not be the situation that all participants would arrive at the same time (although multiple people may still arrive at the same time). From participant comments, dealing with the Digital Self at the start of the event could also be demanding. Participants found it too much to both browse the Digital Selfs and decide who to talk to. We carried out our study in a controlled way to better consider how it related to existing one-to-one studies (such as (Nguyen et al.,
2015)), and to ensure we focused on interaction with strangers. However, there is value in study of applying Digital Selfs to pre-existing events (which may have a mix of friends and strangers) to better understand how they are used for initial browsing of others and choosing who to interact with.
To do this it is necessary to consider automation support to access and move between Digital Selfs. Such issues, due to the focus on one-to-one interaction where there are no alternative augmentations have not been uncovered in prior work. We allowed only manual selection of the Digital Self as we did not want to constrain how they were used by enforcing an automatic system to switch between them. In many cases manual selection was important. For example, the ability of participants to ‘sneak view’ the Digital Selfs of individuals outside their current group, or where an individual was an ‘unaddressed recipient’ (Gibson,
2003; Traum,
2004), and had time to look for interesting topics that they may wish to pivot to when a natural break in the conversation occurred. However, it was also clear that fully manual selection will not work in all places. In addition to the outlined issues on browsing at the start of interaction, manual selection often led to breakdowns during conversation. Digital Selfs acted as an invisible ‘layer’, providing resources to the conversation. Although participants were explicit when cueing information that came from the Digital Self (through explicit utterances or gesturing towards the HMD), participants were often not all viewing the same Digital Self. This led to a collapse of common ground, requiring management work to access the correct Digital Self to ‘repair’ (Clark and Brennan,
1991) and re-establish common ground. In such cases an automatic approach, or ability to quickly ‘sync’ a common Digital Self amongst group members, would be beneficial. Further work on mechanisms to do this is required, incorporating sensors to determine automatically who is in the participant’s group, and what the user’s current role is (e.g. is he or she currently talking) is one approach. Existing CSCW work (such as (McCarthy et al.,
2004; Chen and Abouzied,
2016)) has considered only one-on-one interaction, and has not yet considered how groups form, reform and interact. Our work here expands on this to identify how digital augmentation is used in these phases, and will help develop mechanisms that support automatic switching between augmentations. Such mechanisms are not trivial, but are essential to further study Digital Selfs in the larger group scenarios we previously discussed.
6.3 Future work
Our future work is largely focused around addressing the issues in the discussion. By developing better support to synchronise and move between Digital Selfs, we will be able to study their use in larger groups of individuals and augment existing events. By encouraging participants to generate richer and more ambiguous Digital Selfs, we will be able to improve our understanding of how they can be used in browsing for individuals at the start of interaction. However, such events are largely a mixture of strangers and individuals with a prior relationship (e.g. friends). Prior work, including our own, has largely focused on strangers, yet an interview study that formed our initial ideas and motivated this work identified that that there is a need to tailor contents for different audiences (McGookin and Kytö,
2016), as does existing work on social media management (Farnham and Churchill,
2011). Individuals may wish to create different Digital Selfs for different relationships, yet interaction may occur in a mixed-group. Further study is required in different situations and prior relationships between individuals to strengthen and deepen our understanding of digital augmentation of interaction. Whilst we argue there is value in general interaction, it is clear that Digital Selfs may be valuable in a number of more focused, work related environments. Although the content individuals choose would obviously differ from the more general social scenarios we used here, there is value in applying our approach to situations where personal relationships between team members are both important, but where the work situation constrains the time to develop them (e.g. (Wong and Neustaedter,
2017)).