THIS IS A SECTION OF Chapter 4: Social Objects.  PLEASE FEEL FREE TO EDIT THIS PAGE WITH YOUR COMMENTS AND QUESTIONS.

So far, we've focused on social experiences in museums, both in terms of institutions connecting with individuals on a personal level and networking those connections to facilitate community engagement.  In many cases, this means creating new platforms for visitor engagement in institutions and offering experiences that are unlike those museums have traditionally provided.  This leads to an obvious and uneasy question: what about the artifacts?  If museums evolve to support visitors creating, sharing, and learning from each other, where do exhibits fit in?  Where is the object in the new museum conversation?

This is a more pressing question for some types of museums than others.  If you work in a children's or science museum, you're probably already comfortable with the idea that exhibits are designed experiences, a set of props and moving parts that help visitors connect with concepts.  But for history and art museums, where authentic objects are the heart of the visitor experience and business model, the question of what to do with real artifacts--not abstract, malleable exhibits but tangible objects in drawers--is a concern. 

You don't need to toss your collection to the wayside to engage visitors in social participation; in fact, the opposite is true.  In the best cases, objects are the engine of socially networked experiences, the content around which the conversation happens.  Every social network is fueled by content.  Without something to talk about and share affinity, there's little reason to connect.  Some social networks are about celebrity gossip. Others focus on custom guitars.  Others focus on religion.  We connect with people through our interests and shared experience of the world around us.

But "content" is a pretty general term.  In 2005, an engineer and sociologist named Jyri Engstrom coined the term "social objects" and the related phrase "object-centered sociality."  In an influential blog post, Jyri argued that discrete objects, not general content or interpersonal relationships, form the basis for the most successful online social networks.  The objects don't have to be physical, but they do have to be distinct entities.  For example, on Flickr, you don't socialize generally about photography or pictures, as you might on a photography-focused listserv.  Instead, you socialize around specific images.  You can share photos and comment on them.  You can invite users to submit their photos to various groups and galleries.  Each photo is a node in the social network that triangulates the users who create, critique, and consume it.  Just as on LibraryThing people are connected via books instead of reading, on Flickr people are connected via photos instead of art-making.

Flickr has photos. YouTube has videos. Upcoming.com has events. Jyri suggests that more generalized social networks, like LinkedIn or Facebook, can only succeed if and when objects are at the foundation of the experience. Facebook has a diversified object model--for some people, status updates are the essential object, for others, it's virtual gifts or games.  In the mid-2000s, LinkedIn changed its design to focus its network more strongly around jobs instead of professional connections, which Jyri sees as a move to object-centered design:

Think about the object as the reason why people affiliate with each specific other and not just anyone. For instance, if the object is a job, it will connect me to one set of people whereas a date will link me to a radically different group. This is common sense but unfortunately it's not included in the image of the network diagram that most people imagine when they hear the term 'social network.' The fallacy is to think that social networks are just made up of people. They're not; social networks consist of people who are connected by a shared object.[ISN'T THIS A SHARED "OBJECTIVE" RATHER THAN A SHARED "OBJECT?" MAYBE I'M BEING OBTUSE...CC]

This is great news for museums.  Jyri comments that creating online social networks around objects requires the ability to "create digital instances of the object."  But physical social networks have no such need for digitization--just access to the physical objects themselves.  While web developers scramble for object catalogues upon which to base their new ventures, museums can tap into pre-existing stories and connections between visitors and collections.  The challenge is to find ways to use those connections to turn the objects into triangulation points for social behavior. Rather than convincing visitors that they want to be part of "the museum club," if we can find ways to make our objects function socially, they can form the nodes of useful and appealing social networks.

Social objects are a cornerstone of the me-to-we engagement pattern.  Objects serve as focal points for discussion, whether immediately and physically, as in the example of the pointing visitors in the Race: Are We So Different? exhibition, or virtually, as on LibraryThing.  Objects mediate the uncomfortable experience of talking directly to strangers, and thus can serve as a bridge among people that facilitate comfortable discourse.  My favorite social object of this kind is my dog.  When I walk around town with my dog, lots of people talk to me, or, more precisely, talk through the dog to me.  The dog allows for transference of attention from person-to-person to person-to-thing-to-person. It’s much less threatening to approach someone by approaching and interacting with his/her dog, which will inevitably lead to interaction with its owner. Unsurprisingly, enterprising dog owners looking for dates often use their dogs as social instigators, steering their pups towards people they’d like to meet.

Dogs generally are positive social objects.  With the exception of the rare people who move away from me because they are fearful of dogs, most strangers are effusive conversationalists about the dog.  There are other social objects with mixed impact.  Pregnant women, people in wheelchairs, and heavily tattooed individuals have all experienced both positive and negative reactions due to the ways that strangers interact with the social objects to which they are bound.  The ideal social object is both reflective of personal aspirations and flexible.  By displaying your relationship with it, you feel like you are expressing your best self.  But you can also dispose of that relationship or put it aside when it is not useful to you.

How can we activate museum objects, both pre-existing artifacts and designed exhibits, as social objects?  How are social objects useful in a museum context, and how can they help you achieve specific participatory goals in your institution?  

To answer these questions, we have to dig deeper into the characteristics of social objects, the ways they are used, and the impact they make. 

What makes an object social?

Not all objects are social objects.  Loosely speaking, a social object is one that mediates interpersonal interactions among those who create, own, use, critique, and consume the object.  Social objects aren't just for looking at or producing; they are transactional, facilitating exchanges among those who encounter them.  A chair is not a social object because one person designed it and another one sat in it; there is no social interaction between these two individuals.  But a chair may be a social object when two people argue over who gets to sit in it.  A chair is a social object when it is acknowledged as "Eric's chair" and becomes the topic of conversation among Eric's colleagues as an example of his possessiveness.  A chair is a social object when one person gives it as a gift to another.  A chair is a social object when one person shares a photo of it and another asks where it was purchased.  In other words, any object can be a social object in certain conditions, at certain times.

There are few objects that are persistently social, that motivate interpersonal engagement among a diversity of strangers at different times.  Even within networks designed to optimize the sociality of objects, some objects are more social than others.  There are some Facebook status updates and Flickr photos that generate lots of discussion, whereas others fall on seemingly deaf ears.  Whether in the real world or the virtual, there are at least five conditions that help render an object social:

Social objects are often personal.  Many of the most effective social objects are highly correlated with their owners or users as individuals and are not social objects when taken out of that personal context.  For example, both tattoos and pets are objects that become social when they are with their owner.  The owner has a set of stories that go with the object, and strangers have a set of socially-permissible questions to ask about the object.  If I approach you in a museum and ask what captivates you about the sculpture in front of us, you might look at me strangely and tell me you were just spacing out. But if I ask what type of dog you have or why he does that funny thing, you will chatter on for minutes. Yes, this can happen in museums, but it is most typical when you interact with museum staff, who have vested interests, relationships, and ideas about the objects on display. Museum visitors are rarely as “close” to exhibits as they are to their pets.

Some social objects are active.  Objects that are able to directly and physically interject into the space between strangers can motivate discussion.  For example, if an ambulance passes by or a fountain splashes you in the breeze, your attention is drawn to it, and you feel complicit with the other people who are similarly imposed upon by the object.  Again, dogs can be powerful social objects in this way - one may take it upon himself to walk up and sniff a stranger, forcing an interaction between the people who have been brought together by his action.

Relatedly, social objects are often provocative.  An object need not physically insert itself into a social environment to become a topic of discussion if it is a spectacle on its own.  Many of the objects in the Race exhibition fall into this category.  One of the most discussed exhibits is a vitrine featuring stacks of money representing the average earnings of Americans of different races. Money is somewhat exciting on its own, but the real power in the exhibit comes in the shocking disparity among the piles. People are compelled to point out of surprise. The powerful physical metaphor of the stacks makes the information presented feel more spectacular without dumbing it down or over-dressing it.

Some social objects are transitive (NEED BETTER WORD)[THEY OPERATE LIKE A TELEPHONE LINE  MAYBE SOMETHING LIKE transmissive or conductive? CC] .  While people don't consciously use or discuss them together, they have a social experience that passes through the object.  For example, a comment board or online discussion forum collects comments from individuals who are not colocated in place or time.  Those comments are social objects in a growing dialogue that happens among individuals who may never meet. 

The most consistently effective social objects are explicitly relational.   They require several people to use them to work, and their design often implies an invitation for strangers to get involved.  Pieces of content that are posed as questions are relational as long as they beg an answer.  Pool tables and chess boards fall into this category, as do many interactive museum exhibits and participatory sculptures that invite many people to work together to solve a problem or generate an effect. 

Most social object experiences are fleeting and inconsistent.  For social object experiences to work repeatedly for a wide diversity of users or visitors, day after day, you need more than just objects that exhibit one or more of the above conditions.  Museums are particularly challenging social object platforms, especially those (like art museums) in which visitors often already feel a little uncomfortable or uncertain of how to behave.  If you don't feel comfortable and in control of your environment, you are unlikely to talk with a stranger under any circumstances.  In 2009, I did social object experiments in several museums and informal learning environments in which I challenged colleagues and students to create objects that get strangers talking with each other without staff intervention.  At the Woodlawn Park Zoo in Seattle, a highly social place, it was fairly easy for graduate students to design objects, especially game-like objects, that visitors comfortably gravitated towards and used in connection with others.  But at the Denver Art Museum, it was almost impossible for staff to design successful social objects.  These were creative, energized professionals experimenting in an institution that has been lauded for its welcoming, friendly feel.  But visitors expect art to be strange and potentially uncomfortable, and so everything that the staff created--signs that altered the meaning of elevator buttons, invitations into stories and games, even a box of chocolates--was viewed silently with suspicion and confusion by visitors. [WHAT ABOUT HISTORIC SITES OR HISTORY MUSEUMS? VISITORS SEEM TO BE MORE LIKELY TO SHARE THEIR EXPERIENCES WITH OBJECTS THEY MAY HAVE ENCOUNTERED IN THEIR OWN LIVES APART FROM THE MUSEUM. CC]

It takes more than just an intriguing object to get visitors talking.  To accentuate the socialness of an object, you need to design a platform for it that enhances its ability to be shared.  Jyri Engestrom talks about the fact that there should be active verbs that define the things users can "do" relative to social objects--consume them, comment on them, add to them, etc.--and that all social objects need to situated in systems that allow you to share them.  If I can't share my object experience with you, how can we discuss it?  In museum situations when visitors are co-located, experiences are often shared naturally among proximate individuals.  But there are many museum experiences that are not shareable, either because of prohibitions on actions like photographing artifacts, or because exhibits are designed for individual consumption.  To make social objects shine, we need to design platforms that promote them explicitly as shareable, relational objects.

Activity: Social Object Hunt

Personal, active, provocative, relational.  Can you find the objects in your institution that already function well as social objects?  What traits do they exhibit?  How could these traits be amplified (or other traits added) to improve their sociability?

IS THIS SECTION TOO BRIEF?  SHOULD THERE BE MORE ON IDENTIFYING PRE-EXISTING SOCIAL OBJECTS? [I'd welcome more examples from museums to elaborate the different concepts. This section is really interesting but I'm not entirely sure I grasp exactly what you are saying and how the concepts substantially differ from one another. CC]