What are social images in Besѣda®?

one man in his time plays many parts

by William Shakespeare

Content

Design goal
- Requirements
Research
- Academic
- Video game industry
Discussion
- Synthesis of academic research
Design
- Role
Examples
User manual
- Front stage
Limitations
Roadmap
Version history

Design goal

Provide a way to coordinate social roles into existance.

Requirements

Increase clarity about the reponsibilities and accountabilities.

Maintain the flexibility - the mechanisms for the social images provided in Besѣda® are such that they can be used for in-situ/emergent/ad-hoc conversations.

Research

There is a large and diverse body of work which the author has correlated. Because examining the body in sufficient depth in this blog post would turn the post into a massive essay, instead the reader is encouraged to check the hyper links. More importantly - you can check the examples.

Academic

Microsociology

The concept of “face” was the initial line of research of one of the pioneers of microsociology - Erving Goffman. It is worth mentioning that Goffman borrowed the concept from the Chinese culture, from the term “mianzi” which has more nuance and depth.

His inspiring legacy is the breakdown of the Speaker role into many layers. He did draw on dramaturgy therefore it is fitting to illustrate his concepts with puppet theater:

Speaker Layer	Theatre	Individual Person
principal	theatrical group	consciousness
author	the playwriter	mind
animator	the actor	heart
figure	the puppet	body

The concept of face was further developed with the concept of deontic stance/the stance triangle and (social image) impression management.

Additionally, while people are engaged in conversation they need to externalise some internal processes: announcing/informing or noticing or registering or referring. Sometimes the interactant lacks some awareness which the interlocutor knows about and the mechanism to obtain that information is called fishing.

Sooner or later the participant needs to make an assessment and take an evaluative/epistemic stance. This is often accomplished by the use of membership categorisation devices which another pioneer of conversation analysis - Harvey Sacks, did important research on.

How does a child learn to participate in social life? The considerations that follow are from personal observations and backed by literature which however is not specifically referenced in this blog post.

At the first months the baby is more or less an extension of the mother as it continues to rely on her for its survival. The baby is hardly more than a living object - the consciousness is extremely aware but at the same time the author/animator/figure are extremely incapable.

Even though it is not a compentent participant in social interactions, the baby needs (positive) interactions to grow. In fact, the figure/baby physically stops growing when there is no interaction from the caretakers. Furthermore, there is research which has proven that the father(ly) presence is irreplacable for the social development of the child and that the lack of it increases the likelihood that the child engages in anti-social/criminal activity. The author believes that the reason for this cause-effect is because the father is the first somewhat detached presense in the life of the child. The first social mirror which reflects back and triggers relflexivity.

Around 2-3 years of age the animator/child notices that the father/other animators may take a negative evaluative stance towards it, not only positive. This frightens the animator/child because the figure/child is still dependent for its survival on the father/parents. Therefore the animator/child begins to develop a sensitivity towards shame which pushes the author/child to comply with the order desginated by the parents. The consciousness with the child is thus given a face - an object of interaction which is different from the figure.

At around 3-5 years of age the author/child begins to form its own understanding of itself as a social being - a self-esteem, a private face. This enables the author to compare its private face with the face given to it by others. In turn enables to pinpoint precisely which actions cause problems with other people. Gradually the fear of dangerous consequences of troublesome actions becomes transformed by the animator/child into the feeling of guilt.

The precision that results from comparing the private face with the given face enables the author/child to fix/amend/repair troublesome actions/behaviour. Therefore the interactions when the animator/child becomes worried about its membership and the figure becomes afraid about its survival happen less and less often. There is a newly established certainty in the interactions. This certainty leads to tranquility which enables the author/child to take risks, the consciousness with the child to develop and grow.

It is at around 7 years of age that the author/child becomes self aware to the extent that it can determine what the figure/child is feeling and the cause of that feeling. Or in other words - the author becomes aware of the autonomous/spontaneous functioning of the figure.

Psychology

The consciousness has an ideal which it strives towards during the entirety of the mortal life of the personal/physical body. The behaviour of the person within the less than ideal reality can be either congruent or incongruent with that ideal. That congruency is the basis for the private “life”/self-esteem/self-image.

Structuration

For a long time people have been disputing about the friction between agency and structure until the friction was elegantly explained by Anthony Giddens with the concept - duality of structure: agents reenact and use the resources from the latent social structure, during the same interaction the actors may corroborate, break down and/or transform the structure.

If the reader is familiar with the concept of a circular economy, they would understand this with ease - the consumption serves as input to the production.

Work management

TODO Jan Dietz - object world, intersubject world. Order (O) => Execution (E) => Result (R) (OER) phases

ActionWorkflow TODO domains of activities: business, information and material.

TODO Robinson defines a medical project for new medical problems.

Video game industry

Project Horseshoe

Discussion

The human child develops socially into maturity when:

innocence (lack of self awareness) transforms into accountability
naivety (lack of discrimination) transforms into responsibility

They are sacrificed and the child trades some of its freedom for security. From a social perspective, security means that a person can claim the right to do something (the freedom) but in a way (and the result of) which does not harm others (the duty).

Positioning

third order === status, latent structure first order, performative (“constraints on and openings for kinds of … acts available”) === this could relate either to the choice of genre or the posture itself second order, accountative === embed genre (“shift from its original object to the story itself”)

Synthesis of academic research

The hierarchical/latent structure has rules which hold people accountable. These are the cultural norms of solidary behaviour which bind members of a group together. Any violation of the norms needs to be handled carefully, otherwise it leads to relationship turbulence -> lack of trust -> (possibly) the silent/violent breakdown of the group/community.

The emergent structure (the conversational event) is exclusively directed by a single individual who is held responsible. Being responsible means that the individual could be rewarded or punished by the other interactant(s).

The difference between accountable and responsible is that if the person fails to be accountable the relationship is in danger, whereas if the person fails to be responsible it is foremost the behaviour which is punished.

Design

In Besѣda®, at the tactical level of the design is the concept of the social image - the combination of the personal figure with a single social role. This rule is compliant with the functioning of the mind which can concentrate on only one thing at a time.

In Besѣda®, a personality is the constellation of all the past and present social images of a conscioussness bound to a physical body. The personality is a mosiac of sorts, it is not a uniform “I” as the mind oversimplifies for efficiency.

Let it be clear that the participants in a conversation are consciousness. Not the personality, not (a) social image(s). A consciousness can imitate or quote another personality, a consciousness can distance itself from a past personality - it operates at a different level. It is during encounters that the consciousness creates social images and over time these images form the personality. The personality is like a moziac of all the images, it is not a single “I” as the mind conveniently simplifies.

In Besѣda®, the social face of the principal is an instance of the personality which is used within the ongoing interactional event. The social face is the public image, the front stage in dramaturgic terms, the façade in architectural terms - the means through which interaction is possible. The social face is dependent on many variables, it is dynamic.

There are two ways to approach the design of social roles:

deterministic - break down activities which need high skills to execute into smaller activities which require less skill; then turn those smaller activities into roles - make a precise definition of the intended behaviour, make an exhaustive list of the main responsibilities; the focus on specialisation means that variation must be continuously eliminated; the outcome is a hierarchical structure and the low-skill participants can be easily replaced. The highly skilled individuals who deal with the variation are at the top of the hierarchy and are more difficult to replace.
organic - the focus is on values; variation is tolerated; the outcome is a flat structure

Role

The author/designer/developer draws from his experience managing a computer security incident response team - work which included technical as well as social aspects.

Input

The first obstacle was to resolve the strange issue of role definition without pre determined rights and responsibilities. Anyways, the focus is on actions not descriptions of actions.

In principle, social roles are repeatable/operational/reproducible. Alternatively defined - they are functions. Functions have a core algorithm. The interactant needs to be able to supply the input to that algorithm which determines the output.

The solution is to provide an ontological spin interface which has four steps:

Awareness: corresponds to the epistemic functions but in a purely referential form. There are important additions to the epistemics:
- the participation framework - the summons-answer sequence is not a pre expansion to an adjacency pair but a ritual of engagement. To illustrate this difference, let’s remember an example of a pre expansion inside the ritual of engagement: the conversationalist would like to summon a person whose name they are not aware of. She can ask for the name of the summoned or provide her name with the expectation of reciprocation. Another example is asking if the responder has enough time to dedicate to the planned activity - in cases where the activity is beyond a single sequence this preparation would not be a pre expansion but part of the ritual of engagement.
- spatial-temporal reference - is the talk going to be about the present situation, an episodic memory from the past, a hypothetical situation or the future?
Orientation: corresponds to the epistemic functions in a marked/categorical/classifying form. Or in other words - epistemics and ethics.
Coordination: corresponds to the deontic functions. Because coordination is very important it specifically is further divided into three steps:
- Nomination - chosing between alternatives, can be skipped
- Planning - defining what task need to be carried out
- Division - distributing ownership over the task(s)
Enaction: the embodied action(s)

The four steps are micro activities - cognitive and behavioural, which a person goes through. That is why the interface is called “ontological”.

The author borrows a term from physics - particle “spin”, for the neologism “ontological spin” because:

these steps are circular/cyclical
there is a velocity to the steps - Awareness is the most passive, Performance is the most active and with the highest velocity
the interlocutor would need to synchronise with the step of the cycle in which the conversationalist is currently (similar to the quantum entanglement phenomena)

The natural progression is Awareness => Orientation => Coordination => Enaction. The author claims that going backwards is a sign that conditions for a previous step were not satisfied. Individuals are aware of this natural progression and they usually treat backwards movement as troubling (not necessarily problematic) and accountable.

In a spontaneous interaction the participants are executing a few of the steps of the ontological spin. See the example of telling a story to share.

This is in contrast to an interactional project which has an intended/measurable/expected outcome. The project necessarily consists of at least one complete spin with the performance step in the object world. And the project may contain multiple complete spins.

It is during the step Coordination that a role is defined. More specifically, during the coordination the responsibilities are selected/distributed.

An institution(al role) usually provides space for formal physical visitations/online consultations where the performance of a project is the whole of the conversation event.

A compilation of projects - campaign, is carried out accross multiple conversation events. It is the strategy. An example of a strategy is “get a job offer from company X” which includes going through the hiring interviews with that company.

Procedure

There are two additional roles based on the structure of the conversation: Initiator (of a genre sequence) and Responder.

Initiating does not automatically mean assuming the responsibility - the Initiator can ask for a favour or delegate a task in which case the responsibility is shifted/trasnferred.

Output

The output means the social consequences which arise from the functioning of the role. The output is the responsibilities and accountabilities.

Most if not all actions have a purpose, a goal. Modern research has broken down goals into three levels: process, performance and outcome.

	Responsible	Accountable
process	ethics	morals
performance	reputation	consciousness
outcome	cultural capital	moral capital

For the rapport sequence (when the participants have one face, they are acting as a single unit), the execution of the action in the object world is done at the last phase of the sequence - the post expansion.

Whereas in a dispute sequence (when each participant has their face) the execution can occur at the beginning of the sequence. For example a trainer gives an instruction, the trainee executes it and then in the second phase of the dispute the trainer evaluates the action.

Accountabilities

With the focus being on the local structure there are two obvious roles: Speaker and Listener. In Besѣda the Speaker is presented with guidance and the Listener is asked during step changes to confirm the objective of the previous step were satisfied.

One of the four cooperative principles expressed by the linguist Paul Grice is the maxim of relation. Grice did point out that there may be (un)intentional exceptions to the principles. If the principle is broken intentionally but with benevolance then the very act of breaking has some hidden, implied meaning - an implicature.

How is the burden of the accountabilities divided? According to some cultures it is the Speaker who is accountable, according to others - the Listner is accountable.

Adaptive listening maps to the steps of the ontological spin:

Awareness: the Listener immerses
Orientation: the Listener discerns
Coordination: the Listener ~~supports~~ (the author prefers the word aligns as it has a broader and more neutral meaning)
Enaction: the Listener advances

Because the Speaker is recreating the structure, it becomes clear that there are two sides of each step - one is ethical, one is moral. To illustrate this with an example

Responsibilities

Responsibility from a structural point of view is the pool of tasks which a role has. From an emergent point of view it is the ownership over tasks.

The responsibilities can be claimed in two ways - voluntarily/compliantly assumed or externally assigned. Once claimed, the responsibilities can be disclaimed [Evade()].

topic organisation small stories, participation framework

Examples

Awareness examples

1: Jeff made an asparagus pie [Awareness step; rapport sequence, pre expansion; Prioritise]
2: it was s::so:goo:d [Orientation step; first pair part; Sympathise]
3:             I love it. Yeah, I love that. [Orientation step; second pair part; Sympathise]

Coordination examples

Nomination example

If you're hungry
there is ham in the fridge [Designate]

“If” is a condition, a hypothetical situation. If it is relevant the

A police encounter - Extract 3 from “Categories in Social Interaction: Unlocking the Resources of Conversation Analysis and Membership Categorization for Psychological Science” by Stokoe, Elizabeth and Raymond, Geoffrey and Whitehead, Kevin A.

01 C1: >Hey. =Honestly sir.< (.) I have no issues=
02 PO1: =Let’s go out[side.
03 C2: [These guys are cool.
04 C1: This guy- I- hon[estly- honestly=
05 C3: [He’s cool. He’s,
06 C1: =I’m the- I’m [the one that’s keeping th[uh peace sir

In this case the conversationalist C1 is defending his autonomy. The etymology of the concept of auto-nomy is self naming in the sense of self determination. Appointing himself as a member of the category “peace keeper”. He is aligning with the police officers who are keeping the order and peace.

Planning example

van Dijk, Pragmatic connectives

(3e) Yes, I’ll buy you a mink coat. But, I must fust ask my boss for a promotion.

The agreement is about the division of tasks - the communicator makes a promise. The pragmatic connective ‘but’ in this case opposes the usual and expected direction of the ontological spin: the conversationalist does not proceed to the performance step but returns to the planning step. There is a condition to satisfy first on which the performance of the promise depends - to get a promotion.

Division example

Extract 3 from Manipulation in board game interactions by Emily Hofstetter

1 Dav: I would like to point out Robert¿=that to stop him from
2 doing that you can put the catastrophe card on one of the
3 tundra til:e+s that he’s o[n.
4 Cal: +hits desk
5 Rob: [#TUHhhhhhh [#hhh
6 Cal: [+WHY would you do that.=
6a cal: +gaze->Dav mouth open*-->
7 Rob: hehehe
8 Dav: =°Be°cause I’m ↑↑mea:n:.
9 Al: hehnuh hhhhhhh
10 Rob: ↑hahhah↑hahhah[↑ih:::: ↑ih↑heh
11 Dav: [↑↑WHAT.
12 (0.7)
13 Cal: [+↑Yeah. (0.2) That is13a cal: -->*+
14 Al: [°Hahhhh heheh°
15 Rob: °hehbhuhhhh°
16 Cal: mhhhhh ((C closes eyes, breathes out through nose))
17 (0.6)
18 Al: .hh[=hihhhh
19 Cal: [That is extraordinARily mea[n,
...
22 Cal: [It’s not like helping someone
23 Al: [°heh .hhhhhh heh hih°
24 Cal: to aid (.) their [getting of points,
25 Al: [°heh heh°
26 Cal: It’s spe[cifically to target=
27 Rob: [°heh huhh°
28 Cal: =someone you’re competing with.
29 Al: °heh[heh°heh ↑heh ↑heh heh hih
30 Dav: [Yes.
31 Cal: Yes. That’s
32 (0.5)
33 Rob: khh[hhhhhhhh
34 Cal: [Beyond a line.
35 Al: ↑↑.hh[heh ↑↑.hhhih
36 Dav: [Okay,

The player Dave (Dav) has an intended outcome (an interactional project) and initiates a rapport sequence. He addresses one of the other players thereby limiting the participation framework to the two of them.

By suggesting “to stop him from doing that you can …”, he is effectively in a single turn defining a task and distributing it. This happens within the Coordination:Division step.

Dave’s project amounts to a conspiracy. Dave and the co-conspirator - Robert are preparating to act against someone, they are in the backstage. That someone - Cal, however is physically present and overhearing the ongoing conspiracy. As the object of the conspiracy his fairness motivation is triggered.

Cal interferes into Dave’s sequence, he transforms from an object to a subject of the interaction. Cal embeds a dispute sequence to hold Dave accountable. By holding Dave accountable Cal is threatening his face and threating to reduce (sanction) the moral capital of trust.

At the Orientation step, Cal makes a contrast between acceptable and unacceptable: helping someone vs using someone against another. Cal condems Dave’s action as having crossed the line of acceptable. This corresponds to dispute stage 3 - conviction.

Because the situation is a low risk environment between friends, the unraveling is amazing - Dave makes counter arguments which Cal accepts. Thereby the conviction is changed and Dave rescues his face.

After the dispute, Robert has to make a choice whether to use the unfairly acquired knowledge that would put his social image (Robert+Player role) in an advantegous position.

The article is recommended as a somewhat rare example of participants commenting on their strategies and motives.

Enaction examples

Inspiring

Source

Mic: 1-> [M y |fa:ther- ]
Mic: 2-> =.hhh ^My |fa:ther we w’r in Manners Big Boy. da(Bob’s )
4-> Big Bo[y back E]a:st?
Sha: [Yea:h? ]
(0.3)
Mic: 3-> En eez drinkin a cuppa coffee iss a true story
...
drinkin this cup coffee’n there’s this fly un the bottim’ee goes .hhhhh
JEEZIZ CHRI[ST!
Sha: 5-> [heh-ha ha ha:[ h u h ]
Mic: [(y’know)]the whole place is (ghho(h)i[ng crhhhz) ·hh He stands up ·hhh (0.2) hOh my-
Vi?: [ihh heh-eh
Mic: WAITRISS WAITRISS (’is [waitriss )]comes over’ee zez=
Sha: [(hah ^hah)]
Mic: =’z a fly’n ah- ah’m NOT payin fer none a’diss uh’m not payin fer none a’this.Right? We dih °he din pay fer any
of it.°
Sha: Yeah?
(0.2)
Mic: °Yeah° ’ee[made a big[scene.
Nan: 5-> [°°Yeah°° [Yih see he did[it the right w a : y.]

[Wait] just a minute [embed genre dispute => hold accountable; Banish]
It is not up to you to feel what the design is [Pursue]
It is up to you to answer the question [stage III conviction; Instruct]

Single case example

In the motion picture film “8 Mile”, during the final conversation/“battle”, the consciousness with the protagonist does full disclosure: starting from biographical data (“white”, “lives in trailer”, “lives with mom”), deeply held fears (“did f*ck my girl”), goals (“F*ck the Free World!”) and the concept of self (“a pice of … trash”).

What is powerful is that the consciousness acknowledges the miserable existance and small part to play in society but it still has dignity. This is the attitude, the behaviour - for start by actually participating in the conversation/“batlle” from a disadvantegous position. Tactically by saying “And f*ck this battle, I don’t wanna win, I’m outtie”. The consciousness repeatedly dismisses everyting in the scene, including the figure it is bound with (“f*ck everybody”) - because there is the awareness that it is other than the mortal person.

The semi fictional, semi biographical scene is further interesting because of the dynamics between the two structures: latent and emergent. There is a transformation of the latent structure - the protagonist who is the “weaker” participant, becomes stronger than the interlocutor. A transfer of power occurs. Then the accountability is on the participant who was stronger to hand off the power for the greater good. In the film this is what the antagonist does - he abstains from taking his turn, he abdicates.

User Manual

When you use the web application Besѣda® there are a few levels of interacting:

principal = You, the person who is using the web application
author = the social image you chose. It can be one of your images or you can impersonate an image from another person.
animator = the body of the interactant which speaks, the person
figure = the graphical representation of the person (in the application it is a simple pawn)

Front stage

Because we are in the world, we are condemned to meaning, and we cannot do or say anything without its acquiring a name in history.

By Maurice Merley-Ponty

Speaking is done towards an audience - the interlocutor. That is the front stage.

A sequence is a social opportunity.

Initiate a rapport sequence === create opportunity, GIVE face (“positive”) Advance a rapport sequence (SPP only!) === return interlocutor’s face Make a first move after embedding a dispute posture within a rapport sequence (effectively blocks the progression of the sequence) === lose own face (only an opportunity is lost) Complete a rapport sequence (reach the final phase) === created cultural asset, each participant gains one rapport (maybe the initiator gains two? This would incentivise cooperative sequences)

Initiate a dispute sequence === claim opportunity, GAIN face (“negative”) Win a dispute sequence: === save own face, interlocutor loses face => claimed cultural asset/right * Awareness dispute - chose the topic?, intero - what I know, proprio - what I can find out, extero - what the interlocutor know * Orientation dispute - what attributes to assign to the topic. Intero - am I part of the group?, proprio - what is the group?, extero - is the interlocutor or the topic inside or outside that group? * Coordination dispute - extero - chose between alternatives, proprio - distribute the task ownership, intero - define the attributes of the task (for that to work the task creation must be limited to one for the current spin) * Enaction dispute - ? Lose a dispute sequence === lose own face, interlocutor gains face => claimed cultural asset/right

Limitations

The categorisation and labelling of the roles is left to the interactants. There is no global database which contains a taxonomy/“cultural inventory” of roles.

Accountability is strictly about the local role of the Listener to determine if the epistemic objectives relevant to the ontological step are satisfied. In real life accountability is much more complicated - it is the product of self-reflection.

Only one single social image can be used per genre sequence.

Roadmap

The implementation of these features makes the work on storytelling and planning as separate genres redundant. Storytelling usually happens either at the awareness (and possibly orientation) ontological step. While planning happens during the coordination ontological step.

Strategy; figure and face customisations

The next epics (collections of tasks) on the roadmap are …