Interesting post by Michael Feldstein on a graduate thesis by Fernanda Bertini Viegas titled Revealing individual and collective pasts: Visualization of online social archives. I haven’t read the thesis yet, but Michael uses some of the higher-level points and applies them to online teaching. This one particularly caught my eye:

A picture is worth a thousand words today, but don’t forget the effects of inflation: Pictures tend to “enhance relational outcomes” (i.e., make people feel closer to each other) when people are just getting to know each other in a textual environment. However, they tend to make people feel less intimate in situations where they already know each other well. So using images to help compensate for that loss of information density in the beginning of the class is a good idea, but keep in mind that it can have an effect on your cohort in the long term. The greatest affinity between users apparently occurs in long-term online communities without pictures.

This was a surprise to me and I really need to read the thesis deeper to find out exactly what images he (or Fernanda) means here. Images of each other? Images of ideas? Our experience at Omnium has definitely been the opposite. Not only have the images of the participants really helped the social aspect of the courses and projects, but also we are working on visual material, so images are essential. It gets pretty tedious to teach graphic design principles in text only. On the other hand, the Steven Heller thread in the Creative Waves 2005 project came to over 32,000 words. The discussion was, in the end, more in-depth than the graphic work.

There is something intriguing in this idea that the greatest affinity in long-term communities comes from being text-based. Does this come from that other old design adage “less is more”?