Research Keywords: Privacy, social computing, computer-mediated communication, avatars, forgiveness, reputation systems, self-awareness, user experience, emotions.
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What is privacy?
There are many disagreements about what privacy is. Is privacy something we do or is it something we feel? What do we protect or are entitled to protect under the rubric of privacy? Often experimenters will ask participants to articulate concerns about their privacy. However, without a thorough understanding of the issues underlying privacy, it is possible that important discourse pertaining to privacy is not acknowledged. I have been using prototype theory to investigate a layperson's perspective of privacy. This approach gives some answers as to why privacy theorists have been unable to obtain a set of inclusive criteria to privacy. It also promises to provide linguistic markers that can help researchers distiguish instances of privacy.
Designing for self-awareness
A state of self-awareness is prerequisite for the experience of self-conscious emotions such as guilt, shame and embarrassment. I have been investigating how self-awareness theory can be used to design mechanisms that will increase self-awareness online. The aim of this work has been to observe whether the designed mechanisms can elicit self-conscious emotions and in turn motivate an online offender to repair his/her actions.
Reputation systems visualise the quantitative aspects of a member's offences (e.g. severity or frequency of previous actions) with the aim to increase or decrease one member's trust in another. When trust breaks down, reputation systems operating in isolation neglect to account for the qualitative aspects which can often lead to resolution (e.g. apology or the ability to reverse one's offensive action). In this work, I have been considering forgiveness as a mechanism that can be integrated into reputation systems to enable the repair of trust.
How do users negotiate their self-presentation through an avatar for social media? In having equal access to real life objects as well as options of fantasy, what strategies do users draw together to construct their online self? My interest has been to examine the relationship between self-presentation and subsequent changes in self perception. This work has also focused on extracting design recommendations for creating more engaging avatar customization tools.
