Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do.
Trying to model these trust relationships in the computer is fraught with hubris and failure, but what we can do is associate information with people, and display the information from people we know, with their pictures (and names) next to it. Then, our brains can apply the subtle modelling of trust relationships that they have evolved to do so well.
Making faces bigger onscreen lets us blend the two modes of computation smoothly, and filter and understand the world better through our nuanced understanding of trust.
8 comments:
um... so at what point in my 4-page diatribe about how Faces Are Important am i "missing the reason they are so powerful"?!?
sorry, i think we're in violent agreement here. my post was entirely about that exact point, from the headline to the end conclusion
(if your point is the context of the social graph relationship behind the faces = necessary trust, then i somewhat agree... altho our engagement with faces is not only based on our trust- & reputation experiences with the people behind them)
I don't suppose I articulated the reason or value in faces on the web, but I did call for bigger profile photos quite some time ago. FriendFeed is really the only service that, on the whole, seems to be using larger avatars these days.
Potential issue:
My social net is mostly composed of developers, and thus most faces look like (old) white guys. It's getting hard to distinguish between all of them. It'd be easier if the field had a bit more a diverse face spectrum. :)
@FactoryJoe -interesting you mention FriendFeed b/c they were quite late in adopting avatars...only the recent redesign pushed them to the fore.
Faces are important because they remind us of our humanity [yes, I just typed that]
It is too easy to think of the social web as social data only without recalling the people part - trust and the human element is the secret sauce that glues these connections together.
OK - this comment is turning into a post..off to write it.
I love your website, seriously. I read it daily via my Greader
pearls
Yes you are absolutely right. People true those who is known to him. The parameter is face, does he knows by face. Many people we meet regularly, but don’t even know his/her name. but compared to a people how talk to you over phone. You trust the unmanned person so to speak. As there are call center services agents, do we trust them? How much we care their calls ? Answer yourself you will get the result.
Robert Kaiser
Post a Comment