On Communication and Engagement
A response to [Analytics on the Open Social Web](https://rochebit.net/posts/analytics).
What are analytics for? In Analytics on the Open Social Web RocheBit posits that “engagement” is an essential component of communication and that analytics is a method of metrically tracking that engagement. That is, counting the number of type of events related to a piece of communication.
Communication in this sense is denoted in both one-to-one direct exchanges, public small group interactions, and even one-to-many one-way broadcasts. The question of “who is engaged in this communication” is meant to show who is responding, who is reacting, or simply who is listening. The first two are easy to manage – after all of someone expresses a response to us, they must communicate that to us and then we can acknowledge and count that communication. We know we are being engaged with.
Sidebar; I actually don’t think that engagement is an integral component of communication. Think of the radio, the broadside or even the letter. In these media, one releases their communication into the world blind. Did anybody see that? Did anybody hear that? Did that letter arrive to be read, or burnt? These are not knowable questions. Engagement is naturally about a response not simply an acknowledgment of receipt. Listening-as-engagement is confined to smaller more personal settings, like the lecture hall or soapbox. These are different modes of communication, and it’s worth identifying how these different modes of communication work in online media.
Analytics, on the other, looks to answer the third question: are we being heard? How many people have read this information? Is anyone paying attention to me?
That, however, is just one of the things that analytics can do. It’s a single use-case of the broader function of analytics which is to study and interrogate the nature of our systems. Analytics is much more like a social science study than it is counting heads in a room.
Now, from the other direction.
If we suppose that “engagement” is integral, and understanding the scale of that “engagement” is important, we have to ask ourselves why? Why do we want to measure our “engagement”? Why are metrics important to us, and which?
I think it’s important to avoid conflating two distinct and very different questions, the collapse of which into a single concept of “engagement” is probably to blame for the LinkedInification of social networks.
The first question is “am I being heard?”. The second question is “is what I am doing working towards my goal?”. The first question is social. The second question is transactional. Both are fine, but when the social becomes by necessity of the media transactional we have poisoned our communities with the logic of capitalism.
RocheBit notes:
…there are some limited engagement signals that are available to the content creator; replies, follows, likes and quotes. And that is exactly where almost every platform in both ecosystems stops. We don’t stop here because that is all the metrics that are available, or useful to creators.
We are focused here on the explicitly transactional question of “is what I am doing working towards my goals”, which is fine! I think it’s important to have tools for understanding this question! I too have goals I am working towards through creating content on the web! But lets dispense with the conceit that we’re interested “engagement as integral component of communication”. We’re talking about marketing, and measuring the effect of that marketing.
RocheBit correctly identifies the issue with pursuing marketing analytics: “more engagement analytics … require a level of privacy and trust”. The next leap, however if conflation: “I’d strongly argue that we should just assume the desire for metrics by default.” The desire for metrics is a default for marketers looking to understand their transactional results. It is absolutely not the default for social communication. RocheBit here is simply reflecting the shift of social media culture to understand any interaction or communication as a transaction. This is an impulse to be resisted and deconstructed.
I think we can look towards ethnographic research practices to guide us in the development of privacy and trust. Ethnographic research has spend decades grappling with these questions. The concept of respecting your participants privacy, and earning their trust through transparency around use and benefit of their response, are integral concepts to ethnographic research. This idea is so core to the fundamental legitimacy of the field that the Independent Review Board exists to make sure you’re going to do it right before you do it. Market and product research bypasses this ethical component entirely, and thus forfeit any right to be trusted by their participants.
In terms of methodology, RocheBit is absolutely correct that the model the open web needs to operate on is avoidance of the platform, and locating metrical data within a personal data store. Thinking of our analytics data as research data makes this clear – one must properly own and secure your own research data in order to handle it ethically. Harmonizing and standardizing research data as it arrives in different shapes and forms is an interesting methodological question, and fun for the engineer to puzzle on. But it’s rather incidental to the core concepts of trust of privacy.