Proceedings of the 32nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 1999
Proceedings of the 32nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 1999
I Get By With a Little Help From My Cyber-Friends:
Sharing Stories of Good and Bad Times on the Web
Mary Beth Rosson
Department of Computer Science and
Center for Human-Computer Interaction
Virginia Tech
Blacksburg, VA 24061-0106
Tel: 1-540-231-6470
E-mail: [email protected]
Abstract
Although the use of the World Wide Web has expanded
tremendously in the past few years, we still know very
little about how users are working with this new medium,
what they attempt to accomplish, what works, what
doesn’t. One way to answer such questions is to simply
ask users for descriptions of their own activities. This
paper presents an analysis of 133 stories of Web use
contributed by users over a period of 40 months, since the
Web Storybase began operation in December 1994.
Usage of the Storybase is examined in general, and the
stories are analyzed along several dimensions. The stories
convey usage experiences that not only involve global
information retrieval and person-to-person contact, but
also the development of both good and bad interpersonal
relationships, as well as extensive reflection on how the
Web is changing our lives.
1. Introduction
Over the past few years, the Internet has become the
place to be. Work groups routinely use it as a “place” to
archive and share group activities [7, 9]. Educators
increasingly rely on Web-based research as an
enhancement to normal classroom activities [2, 10, 13].
Individuals faced with a wide range of tasks, from adoption
of a puppy to filling out a college application form, now
often begin their tasks by searching the Web for relevant
background information. Businesses have spent massive
amounts of money building company pages and services
[19]. But perhaps what is most striking about all of this
frantic activity is the rapidity with which Web use has
evolved.
Three years ago, the Web was still largely the
dominion of the technological elite, the researchers and
scientists who had been using networks for some time,
and had followed the development of HTML and associated
browsers. But once several robust (and free!) HTML
browsers became commonly available, the user population
expanded tremendously, making the last three years a
fascinating case of technology adoption. In this paper we
consider this adoption process from the perspective of the
users who were part of it—we analyze a corpus of stories
and annotations contributed to a Web Storybase over a
period of 40 months. These stories suggest that the Web
has been successful in its most salient role, helping users
find and contact information and other people. However,
the stories also reveal a certain amount of turmoil in
users’ more personal experiences—activities involving
relationships with others, and reactions to how the Web is
intruding upon and changing our lives.
2. A Web Storybase
In the Fall of 1994, the World Wide Web was still a
novel domain for research in human-computer interaction
(HCI). The ready availability of free HTML browsers was
beginning to attract a wide variety of new users, and
businesses were working frantically to build Web
presences that could exploit the widespread interest. Most
Web interactions still involved only information retrieval.
Interactive forms had just been added to the HTML
markup language, and many users didn’t even know that
an opportunity for greater interactivity existed. There was
much excitement, confusion, and hope about how Web
technology might affect our lives.
We created the Storybase at this time with several
goals in mind. First and foremost, we simply wanted to
learn something about how the Web was being used.
Other HCI researchers were beginning to carry out
demographic surveys [14], and a few more detailed lab
studies of Web navigation techniques were beginning to
appear [3]. However virtually nothing was known about
the tasks people were actually carrying out on the Web,
what was being tried, what worked, and what didn’t. Our
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Proceedings of the 32nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 1999
Proceedings of the 32nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 1999
Figure 1. Partial listing of stories as indexed on the Storybase home page.
prior work on scenario-based design [4, 5] suggested that
the collection of user “war stories” (see also [12]) would
be a useful source of data for characterizing use.
A secondary goal was to investigate interactive Web
applications—to experiment with the emerging interactive
forms technology, and to investigate its potential for
building collaborative authoring systems. We could have
created a newsgroup to collect Web use experiences, but
HTML and the freely available Web browsers allowed us
to provide a more attractive and functional user interface
(e.g., HTML-based graphics and text formatting,
hyperlinks, automatic notification of story annotations).
By making the story capture mechanism an instance of
Web use itself, we hoped to gather stories that were more
directly situated in contributor’s real world usage context.
The Web Storybase was designed for general Web
users, so we kept its functionality to a minimum.
Visitors to the site (see http://miso.cs.vt.edu/story) are
welcomed with an introduction inviting them to share a
notable experience concerning their use of the Web:
We feel confident that Y O U too have a
story to tell. Maybe it's one you've
already shared with friends or colleagues;
maybe it's something that just happened
and is fresh in your mind. Or, maybe
something in the stories below will cause
a reaction, or make you remember a related
experience. Browse or search the stories
we have now; when you're ready to
contribute your own story, follow the link
below.
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Proceedings of the 32nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 1999
Figure 2. Icons/links leading to story lists filtered by story theme.
On this same page is a complete index of the stories
that have been submitted, sorted in reverse chronological
order (where order is defined by the date of submission or
of last annotation if any). Figure 1 provides a partial
view of this index; the stories themselves are accessed
through their title links. If the author provides contact
information, a name, and/or email address, this is listed; if
provided an email link is created to aid in contacting the
author. Other summary information is also provided—the
story’s date of submission, any keywords selected by the
author, and its thematic category (this is provided after
submission by the moderator after reviewing the
submission and will be discussed later in the paper).
Finally there is a summary of annotation activity, the
number of annotations added thus far and the date of the
most recent.
Visitors wishing to add a new story follow the
“compose” link. This takes them to a page with several
input forms, one corresponding to each of the pieces of
story meta-data (e.g. the title, author, etc.), and one for the
text of the story itself. Tips are available for how to use
the forms, including a recommendation to write the text of
the story in another text editor and then paste it in.
Authors are told that they can use HTML tags to format
the text or provide links to other URLs, but that
conventional formatting (e.g., carriage returns, tabs, extra
spaces) will be ignored. After submitting the story, an
author is shown the new story page. The browser’s
“Back” button can be used to return to the original forms,
which can be edited and resubmitted if desired. When a
story is submitted an acknowledgement is sent by email if
an address is provided; the Storybase administrator is also
notified.
At the bottom of each story page (i.e., following all
annotations), browsers are invited to “Add an Annotation”,
a link that brings them to a page with forms for entering
an annotation. The originating story is displayed at the
top, followed by a set of forms similar to those used for
submitting stories;
however less summary data is
collected (just author contact information).
After
submission, the annotations appear in chronological order
directly following the story; there is no further nesting of
discussion threads. Each time an annotation is submitted,
an email notification is sent to the originating author (if
an email address has been provided) and to the Storybase
administrator.
In keeping with our goals of simplicity, the initial
Storybase design provided just one mechanism for
browsing the stories—the story index on the welcome
page (although we did sometimes receive visitors who
arrived at a specific page due to its inclusion as a search
result set). However approximately two years into the
project, we decided that the list was too long to be
conveniently browsed (we had over 100 stories at that
point). Thus we added two new mechanisms, a withinsite search and six thematic filters. The search engine
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Proceedings of the 32nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 1999
Accesses
3000
80
Posts
70
2500
50
1500
40
Posts
Accesses
60
2000
30
1000
20
500
10
Apr-98
Feb-98
Dec-97
Oct-97
Aug-97
Jun-97
Apr-97
Feb-97
Dec-96
Oct-96
Aug-96
May-96
Mar-96
Jan-96
Nov-95
Sep-95
Jul-95
May-95
0
Mar-95
0
Figure 3. Frequency of accesses and posts to Web Storybase over 38 months during which use was monitored.
matches a user-provided string against all story texts and
meta-data. The filters are based on a high-level content
analysis of the stories: we identified six themes (Browsers
and tools, Cyber-relationships, Finding it all, Getting
started, Making connections, Web culture) that were
sufficient to categorize the entire set, and added a category
attribute to each story’s meta-data. If users select one of
these themes (see Figure 2) they are taken to a story index
page where the listing has been filtered to include only
stories with that theme.
3. Storybase Use
The Storybase application was launched on December
14, 1994. Initially it was publicized only internally (i.e.,
within the Computer Science Department at Virginia
Tech). In March 1995, after several months of troublefree operation, we announced the system on two major
Web launching pads (Yahoo, Mosaic What’s New). This
produced a flurry of site accesses (see Figure 3; note that
we began collecting logging data in March 1995), and the
application was quickly picked up by other
recommendation pages (e.g., Delphi Innovative Web
Sites, the Collaboration sites of the World Wide Web
Consortium, GEnie Hotspots). However, although the
site was getting quite a few visitors by this point, not
many were posting material, perhaps due to a lack of
critical mass in the archive [18]. Thus we made an effort
to recruit users more directly, using both personal contacts
and postings on various newsgroups. By the summer of
1995, we had about 25 stories and the application was
well underway.
The graph in Figure 3 summarizes the site's activity
over the 38 months for which we archived server logging
data. Posts (combining stories and annotations) are
graphed as a line on top of histograms depicting monthly
page requests (for any page within the site, including the
compose and annotate forms). The initial blip in accesses
is presumably due to its announcement on two wellknown Web launching pads; accesses then died down
somewhat but began to climb again in a few months,
presumably due to individuals and organizations adding
links from elsewhere on the Web.
It is interesting to note the somewhat cyclical nature of
site accesses—it appears that site accesses rise, fall, then
rise and fall again, and so on. We can only speculate as to
possible causes for such a phenomenon, as we have no
systematic data about the users who visit the site. Our
main source of insight comes from informal browsing of
the usage logs, and from looking for patterns in the
population of users contributing stories. These informal
reviews suggest that the site may be at times “shared”
within a community, who visit, use it, but then perhaps
move on. In a few cases, such a pattern seems quite clear,
because there were many requests from workstations at a
single location. One interesting line of research might be
to develop log analysis techniques that could identify such
“pockets” of users, and develop a model for sharing news
of Web applications within work-related or social
networks.
As is typical of online forums, users who are interested
only in browsing far out-number those who are willing to
contribute. Over the 38 months of logging, the Storybase
pages were accessed 65,623 times, and contributions were
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Proceedings of the 32nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 1999
posted 789 times, yielding an access-to-post ratio of
approximately 84:1. Note that posts also show local
peaks and valleys. In this case it is more clear that this is
due to temporary adoption of the site by a group of active
users. Although we have not carried out a formal analysis
of individual use (this is actually quite difficult to do, as
users are not required to identify themselves, and even
those that do may use different identities at different
times), we can point to many examples of a single
individual making numerous contributions over several
days or weeks; some contributions also make specific
reference to an earlier visit or visits.
As one would expect, the frequency of posts is related
to the frequency of accesses (r = 0.59, df = 36, p < .001).
This general result has a simple explanation: assuming
that likely contributors are evenly distributed throughout
the general Web population, then the larger the number of
Web users who visit, the larger the number there are who
will choose to contribute something. However, the last
ten months or so of activity appear to tell a different
story. While the frequency of accesses has remained
relatively high—at the same general magnitude as the
previous ten months—the frequency of posts has fallen
dramatically, back to the level observed in the first few
months of use. The ratio of accesses to posts is 70:1
during the period of Mar95-May98, but rises to 160:1
during Jun97-Apr98. For the first 28 months the accessto-post correlation is strong (r = 0.77, df = 27, p < .001),
but in the last 11 months this relationship disappears (r =
-0.27, df = 9, ns).
It may be premature to conclude that this is a real
difference, but as of now there appears to be no evidence
of a “corrective” shift in the frequency of posts. Perhaps
the Storybase has become too large; visitors coming for
the first time now may feel that they have nothing new to
add, or may be unwilling to spend enough time browsing
to find something that inspires annotation. Alternatively,
Web users may be starting to “outgrow” the need for such
a site—perhaps most have worked through their early
experiences and are no longer interested in reflecting on
and sharing the things that have happened along the way.
or off-color remarks. A smaller number of stories (22)
were removed because they duplicated other stories—users
sometimes became confused about the status of their
contribution and submitted it several times before
realizing they needed to refresh the index screen. Finally,
seven contributions were simply tests of the site's posting
mechanism by users who were presumably curious to see
how the interactive forms worked.
Two stories were submitted and appeared in the listing
for a while but were eventually withdrawn by request of
the authors. Both of these were stories describing
relationship issues associated with the Web. In one case,
the author began to feel awkward about the number of
“doubting Thomas” remarks she was receiving in response
to her upbeat—but perhaps somewhat naive—story about
a cyber-relationship that was just about to culminate in an
in-person meeting, soon to be followed by marriage. In
the second case, a wife shared a rather bitter story of how
her marriage broke up as the result of extra-marital cyberaffairs, but then became concerned that the friends of the
husband so accused were using her posting of this story to
incite even greater friction.
The stories vary considerably in length, ranging from
several lines to over a page of single spaced text. In
contrast, most of the story annotations are quite short,
often a single line comment that essentially conveys a
reaction such as “Me too!” or “Good for you!”. The style
of most of the stories is quite informal; many contain
misspellings and/or grammatical errors. Indeed one rather
heated discussion thread distributed throughout the archive
concerned the presence of small errors such as these, and
whether the authors ought to be criticized for submitting
such pieces. A few stories had clearly been written as
examples of creative writing, and one interesting outcome
of several such stories and their annotations was the
reported creation of an email-based “writing club”.
80
60
40
4. The Story Corpus
In the 40 months of its operation, users have posted
281 stories to the archive. However, only 133 of these
stories remain in the listing. Every time a story is
posted, the Storybase moderator (Rosson) is notified so
that the story content can be vetted for conformance with
the archive’s goals; this process led to the removal of 146
contributions. The majority of these (100, or 68.5%)
were rejected because they were off-topic; users attempted
to use this forum to “publish” material on a variety of
topics unrelated to Web use (e.g., rock band preferences,
short fiction, poetry); 34 of the discards included obscene
20
0
Generic
Personal
Intimate
Figure 4. Stories grouped by level of intimacy.
The majority of the stories related something of a
personal nature about the author. Sometimes this was
simply a detail about his or her life activities or interests
(e.g., that she likes to ride horses, that he recently took a
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Proceedings of the 32nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 1999
trip to North Carolina, that she hopes to be a writer).
Other times the stories included rather intimate details
about the authors’ (or in a few cases a friend’s) love life or
inner turmoil about some issue. Overall, 81 of the stories
(about 60%) contained personal information of this sort
(see Figure 4). The remaining stories were classified as
generic, because they described a usage experience or
concern without mentioning personal information about
the author. These general findings are quite consistent
with a prior analysis of the first 27 stories, where we also
found that about 60% of the stories contained personal
information [15].
Our conclusion now as then is simply that users seem
to be quite comfortable revealing personal—even quite
intimate—details about their lives in this very public
forum. We suspect that users’ apparent comfort in
sharing their personal life is related in part to the social
distancing created by a Web forum.
Even though
publishing details about yourself on the Web means that a
huge number of people can now know something about
your life, you still remain relatively anonymous, because
of the size of the audience and the absence of real world
proximity. Greater social distance has been found to
decrease the social inhibition of communicators [16].
Thus some of our story authors may have felt comfortable
using this forum to share an experience or work through
an issue that they otherwise might have been too shy or
inhibited to broach [17].
Both positive and negative experiences were shared (81
vs. 52 stories respectively, 61.7% vs. 38.3%). Positive
stories often described a successful venture relating to the
Web, a pleasant experience, or an optimistic view of what
the Web has to offer. Negative stories often complained
about Web-related events, services or tools, or worried
about potential or current problems with how the Web is
being used. The presence of both positive and negative
stories indicates that users are as willing to recount good
things about this new technology domain as to complain
about it; indeed the preference for positive contributions
suggests that users are still generally positive about this
new communication medium [15].
A majority of the stories received at least one
annotation; only 27 (20.3%) evoked no response at all. A
total of 571 annotations were submitted, for an average of
4.29 annotations per story. However the variance in
annotations was large, ranging from 1 to 25.
Interestingly, although annotations were also reviewed by
the archive moderator, only two were removed due to
obscene language. It may be that the considerably lower
occurrence of rude or obscene remarks as annotations
versus stories is also related to perceived social distance.
An off-color comment added to someone else’s story
implicitly directs the obscenity to the originating author,
whereas contributing a story containing profane language
directs it to the world in general. Having a more specific
target may decrease perceived social distance and thus the
likelihood of socially inappropriate remarks [16].
5. Story Themes
In order to characterize the kinds of experiences that
users were reporting, we developed a content analysis that
categorized each story by the main theme. Because our
goal was also to use these themes for organizing access to
the growing list of stories, we attempted to keep the
number of categories small. Ultimately we settled on six
general themes:
•
•
•
•
•
•
Browsers and tools—stories conveying success or
problems with physical interactions with the Web,
(e.g., browser features, network service problems,
platform differencess, HTML authoring)
Cyber-relationships—stories
describing
virtual
relationships of all sorts, often including some
discussion of real-life components
Finding it all—experiences in which the Web served
as an excellent information source, sharing a specially
useful or inspiring bit of information found,
describing situations in which in material was
retrieved just at the moment it was needed
Getting started—similar to Browsers and tools, but
for the special category of users encountering the Web
for the first time, or still identifying themselves as
“newbies”
Making connections—similar to Finding it all, but
focussing on using the Web to find or contact people,
including friends, family members, professional
contacts, etc.
Web culture—reflections on what it is like to use the
Web, what new experiences it enables (e.g.,
publishing by hopeful authors), how it is changing
people’s lives
Table 1 provides information about each category, the
total number of stories it accounts for and some
illustrative titles. As the table indicates, the themes of
Cyber-relationships and Web culture are by far the most
common, accounting for over half of the 133 stories
currently in the archive (27.1% and 26.3% respectively).
The themes Browsers and tools, Finding it all, and
Getting started, were relatively uncommon (10.5%,
10.5%, and 9.8% respectively), while Making connections
was intermediate (15.8%). This general pattern suggests
that what our story authors found most interesting—or at
least most worthy of sharing—was experiences that
conveyed their personal interactions and their views of the
Web as a new “place to hang out”. Descriptions of how
particular Web technology, services or information were
contributing to or interfering with these activities seemed
to be less worthy of sharing.
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Proceedings of the 32nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 1999
Table 1: Story Themes with Examples
Theme
Example Titles
Frequency
Browsers and tools
Shouldn’t Have Bought a Mac; Hot List Hemorrhage; Color!;
Trying to Negotiate the Web with One Hand Tied
14
Cyber-relationships
Why Must it End?; A Broken Relationship; Internet Love; I
Get By With a Little Help From My Cyber-Friends
36
Finding it all
Web Homework; Yahoo! The Hotspot is a Cool Monastery;
Dorm Sweet Dorm; Vacation Planning
14
Getting started
I Can’t Get Anywhere; Virgin; Helpless on the Internet; Where
I am Now!
13
Making connections
Finding Long Lost Friends; Looking for Lisa; Pour Ceux Qui
Parle Francais; Grandma at the Keyboard
21
Web culture
Boneheads on the Web; What Happened to the Soul?;
Confessions of an E-Bully; Overcoming Openness
35
Although stories with a positive message were more
frequent overall, the relative frequency of positive to
negative varied across the six categories ( 2(5) = 17.71, p
< .005). Recall that the ratio of positive to negative
stories was approximately 3:2. As depicted graphically in
Figure 5, only the Web culture stories approximate this
ratio, although Getting started and Cyber-relationships are
close. However, Finding it all and Making connections
contain much higher proportions of positive stories
(85.7% and 81.0% respectively), while Browsers and tools
differs in the opposite direction (27.3%).
Web culture
Making connections
Getting started
Negative
Positive
Finding it all
Cyber-relationships
Browsers and tools
0
5
10
15
20
25
Figure 5. Number of stories with positive or negative tone within each general theme.
It is interesting that the proportion of positive
experiences related to Web technology is so small relative
to the overall proportion; ironically this conflicts with
one of our starting goals, to understand what was both
good and bad about the technology. However, it may be
that users are likely to reflect on the tools they are using
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Proceedings of the 32nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 1999
Web culture
Making connections
Getting started
27-40
14-26
1-13
Finding it all
Cyber-relationships
Browsers and tools
0.00
5.00
10.00
15.00
20.00
25.00
30.00
35.00
40.00
Figure 6. Percent of stories in each category broken down into thirds (i.e., the first
13 months, the middle 13 months, and the final 14 months)
only when the tools become “present-to-hand” through
“breakdowns” [18]. The relatively high proportion of
positive experiences falling in the Finding it all and
Making connections categories may simply indicate that
these are the services that the Web has been most
successful in providing—locating information, including
information about other persons you have an interest in
contacting. The more intermediate ratios in Web culture
and Cyber-relationships are perhaps a sign that virtual
relationships and efforts at understanding this new culture
are still quite a mixed bag; although many are excited and
convinced all will be wonderful, many others are
experiencing various forms of distress, or worrying that
the technology is pushing us in the wrong direction.
6. Evolution of the Storybase
The Storybase has been in continuous operation for
three and a half years, since mid-December 1994.
Coincidentally this time period corresponds closely to the
emergence of the Internet as an accepted element of
popular culture. For example, one of our first stories
(from December 1994) remarks on the unusual experience
of seeing a URL in USA Today. In June 1998, it is
difficult to find a mass media offering (including
television and radio) that does not include at least some
mention of Web-based material.
The longevity of the story archive enables an
interesting evolutionary view of Web use. Storybase is an
open system, so we cannot control who visits or who
decides to contribute a story. However we are able to
answer questions about the kinds of stories that have been
contributed and whether this content seems to have
changed in character over the three years.
Figure 6 illustrates the evolution in the number of
stories contributed across the six themes. Within each
theme the stories have been grouped according to when
they were contributed: in the first 13 months of operation
(38 stories, dark bars), the middle 13 months (63 stories,
medium bars), or the final 14 months (32 stories, light
bars. As the figure suggests, there was tremendous
variation in thematic content over these three time periods
( 2(10) = 34.03, p < .001). For example, the category of
Cyber-relationships contained 0% of the stories in the first
period, 38.1% in the second, and 37.5% in the third; Web
culture went from 18.4%, to 27%, to 34.4%. In contrast,
the relative number of stories in the other four categories
diminished over the 40 months, with Finding it all
showing the largest drop, from 21%, to 9.5%, to 0%.
This pronounced shift in the content of the stories
contributed has at least two plausible interpretations.
Storybase is an open system and thus anyone on the Web
can visit and contribute material. The evolution we
observed may reflect a change in the user population
visiting and contributing material, for example toward an
increasing percentage of users who happen to be interested
in virtual relationships and Web culture. We have no way
of evaluating this interpretation, though it seems that at
the least such a change would have to have been a
complex one—while the Cyber-relationships stories seem
to be authored primarily by Chat room afficiandos, the
authors of the Web culture stories appear to be much more
diverse, with the stories covering everything from
personal interests in Web authoring, to the immensity and
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Proceedings of the 32nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 1999
often impersonality of the Internet, to characterizations of
different kinds of Web users.
Another interpretation would see this evolution as a
more straightforward reflection of how users’ experiences
with–and concerns about–the Internet are changing. This
interpretation has good face validity: it seems quite
logical that there would be a relative decrease in stories
about use of Web tools, or of getting started in general,
over a time period in which the Internet was transformed
from a specialized network for researchers, to a relatively
commonplace communication tool for the general
populace. This view would argue that many users have
moved beyond the initial excitement of finding some
particular piece of information or locating an old college
friend (see e.g., our analysis [15] of the first nine months
of use), and are wondering what more there is. Some are
exploring the kinds of interpersonal relationships that can
be created and sustained, but are curious or concerned
about how these will work, and how they compare to real
life relationships. Others are taking the time to sit back
and reflect on how this immense global network is
changing the way we live and carry out activities.
30
1 - 13
25
14 - 26
27 - 40
20
15
10
5
0
Generic
Personal
Intimate
Figure 7. Number of stories broken down by level of
intimacy across three different time periods.
A related analysis shows that the relative number of
stories of a personal nature also increased over the 40
months of operation (see Figure 7; χ 2(4) = 10.05, p <
.05). During the first 13 months of operation, none of
the stories contained any intimate content, although about
half contained some personal information about the
author’s life. During the next 13 months, however,
stories revealing intimate information began to appear,
and continued to be contributed during the final 14
months.
This finding is clearly related to the evolution of story
themes: 18 of the 20 stories classified as intimate are in
the Cyber-relationships category; the first of these did not
appear until March 1996, the 16th month of Storybase
operation. Like the changes in story themes, the changes
in intimacy could be due to changes in user population,
such that the more recent contributors represent a less
socially inhibited sample of users. Alternatively, the
effect may be due to some sort of critical mass
phenomenon: after a few “free spirit” authors led the way
with very personal stories, others may have felt
comfortable disclosing details of their own private lives
[18]. At the same time, authors wanting to share personal
information may have felt more protected from possible
ridicule or censure, as the database of stories grew in size.
7. Story Annotations
Many contributions to Storybase are in the form of
annotations to existing stories rather than (or in addition
to) first-order stories; the archive contains more than four
times as many annotations as stories. Of course, these
annotations are sometimes stories themselves, but more
often they convey a reaction to the content of the story,
expressing approval, disapproval, encouragement, and so
on. Given the wide variability in number of annotations
per story (values ranged from 0 to 25, with standard
deviation of 5.38), we wondered whether annotation
frequency might be related to some of the variables used to
characterize the stories.
Several factors might have differentially encouraged
annotations. If Cyber-relationships and Web culture are
especially “hot” topics (as evidenced by the relative
number of stories contributed) then they may also provoke
longer “conversations” in response to the experiences and
concerns aired. Figure 8 shows the number of annotations
contributed in each category, graphed on top of the
number of annotations; the scale on the left is for story
frequency, the one on the left is for annotations. As the
figure suggests, there is some tendency for stories in
Cyber-relationships, Getting started, Making connections,
and Web culture to receive a higher proportion of
annotations (averaging 4.89, 4.92, 5.00, and 4.54
respectively) than those in Browsers and tools, or Finding
it all (3.21 and 1.57). However, this variation is only
modestly significant ( 2(5) = 11.50, p < .05), and appears
to be due largely to the small number of annotations on
stories in the Finding it all category. This particular
effect is not surprising: these stories are reports of “good
finds” on the Web; the authors are either sharing their
satisfaction or suggesting that others might also find their
bit of information useful. Aside from evoking a brief
word of thanks or a “me too” comment, such postings
seem unlikely to be read as an invitation for discussion.
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Proceedings of the 32nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 1999
40
180
Stories
160
Annotations
35
Stories
120
25
100
20
80
15
60
10
Annotations
140
30
40
Web culture
Making
connections
Getting
started
0
Finding it all
0
Cyberrelationship
s
20
Browsers
and tools
5
Figure 8. Relative frequency of stories and annotations posted within the of the six general content themes.
A story’s level of intimacy might also be expected to
affect response rate. Studies of social psychology have
documented a “self-disclosure” effect: when an individual
reveals personal information about herself, the recipient of
the information often responds in kind with similar
personal information [1]. In our earlier report on the first
nine months of Storybase operation, we were surprised
that the more personal stories tended not to be annotated
[15]. At that time we speculated that this could be due to
the remoteness and relative anonymity of the disclosure,
i.e. perhaps it didn’t really “feel” personal. Now, looking
back at these early stories (the first 27 contributions) we
can also see that what we classified at the time as
“personal” was not high in terms of self-disclosure. Such
stories told of a specific personal experience, for example,
an individual recounting how a friend sent him a URL
related to his longterm fascination with airplanes.
Though such stories reveal details of an individual’s life,
they are certainly not intimate. In contrast, most of the
stories in the Cyber-relationships category reveal intimate
details about romantic or even sexual relationships. Thus
the current set of stories represents a much broader range
of this personal disclosure variable.
Figure 9 graphs the total number of annotations made
for stories classified as generic, personal and intimate.
Despite the wider range of the intimacy factor, this
analysis leads to a conclusion similar to that of the earlier
report: readers are just as likely to respond to a generic
story as to one of a personal or intimate nature. The ratio
of annotations to stories is approximately equal across the
three levels of intimacy ( 2(2) = 2.14, p > .30). Again,
this is unexpected, given the history of work on intimacy
and self-disclosure.
It appears that simply sharing
personal information is not always enough to evoke
responses from others. As we suggested in the earlier
analysis, it may be that the remoteness and anonymity of
a public Web application works against the feeling of
intimacy provoked through self-disclosure. In a public
forum such as this, there must be other more salient story
characteristics that evoke responsiveness, perhaps having
to do with the communication goals that are implicit in a
narrative.
A story’s tone—i.e., whether it reports a positive or a
negative experience—may provide one indication of the
author’s goals in sharing his or her story. As mentioned
earlier, negative stories typically relate some complaint
about a Web tool or service, or about an inability to find
satisfaction in some endeavor conducted over the Web. As
a consequence, these stories may often contain an implicit
request for discussion, possibly searching for an answer to
a specific question, sending out a plea for help, or trying
to understand why some problematic situation occurred.
The data summarized Figure 10 are consistent with this
reasoning: readers are indeed more likely to respond to
negative than to positive stories. Even though positive
stories are more common than negative stories, the ratio
of average annotations per story is much greater for those
of negative tone (5.8 vs. 3.3, 2(1) = 28.23, p < .0001).
Although a detailed analysis of the conversational
structure for each of the 133 stories is beyond the scope of
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Proceedings of the 32nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 1999
Stories
70
Annotations
300
60
Stories
50
200
40
150
30
100
20
Annotations
250
50
10
Intimate
Personal
0
Generic
0
Figure 9. Relative frequency of annotations to stories,
broken down by the stories’ level of intimacy.
this paper, a high-level examination of the “top ten” offers
further insight into the effects of an author’s
communication goals. The first three colums of Table 2
list the title, month of submission, and number of
annotations for these ten stories. The fourth column
conveys an initial attempt at categorizing the
communicative “goal” of the story; these goals were
identified simply by studying the story and trying to infer
what the author might have been trying to accomplish in
sharing it.
Stories
Annotations
90
310
80
300
70
60
290
50
280
40
30
270
20
260
10
0
250
Positive
Negative
Figure 10. Relative frequency of annotations to stories
grouped by positive or negative tone.
In three of these ten cases (stories 7, 8, and 9), the
author’s request for a continuing interaction was quite
explicit: story 7 concludes with an invitation for others
to begin a friendship (7); story 8 asks for help in locating
a long lost friend (8); and story 9 opens a discussion on
how the Internet is distancing people from one another
(9). However, the annotators do not always respond in the
ways requested. For example, in the annotations to story
8, no one was able to provide any information about
“Lisa”. Instead, many annotators initiated new dialogs of
their own, bootstrapping off the original author’s goal to
request information on their own long lost friends! In this
case the discussion was not a conversation at all, but
really a specific request followed by a series of “me too”
similar requests.
In other cases, the discussion following a story was
just what one would expect given the starting goal. In “I
can’t get anywhere” a newbie described with frustration her
initial experiences on the Web. Although she didn’t
specifically request help, her implicit plea for some
guidance on how to make this new medium work for her
evoked many sympathetic and constructive responses.
Similarly, the thoughtful piece “What happened to the
soul?” produced a number of genuine and reflective replies.
The stories complaining about Web content quality and
tools (stories 6 and 7) tended to evoke responses of the
sort “get a life, stop complaining”; a story boasting about
“virtual” tricks pulled on friends (story 10) produced a
number of remonstrative comments; and a story sharing
the hazards of virtual relationships (story 4) elicited
additional evidence for this implicit warning.
8. Discussion
The stories and annotations contributed to the Web
Storybase over the past few years reveal an interesting
mix of experiences, both good and bad, both very personal
and rather generic. If the trend in story content is
indicative of trends in Web use, we would conclude that
users have moved beyond a purely operational use of the
Web (e.g., for information retrieval) to a more complex
mix of work, play, and reflection about life in general. Of
course all of the findings reported here must be qualified
by the fact that these story data may have been influenced
by a self-selection bias: many people don’t have the time
to surf the Web in search of places to leave personal
remarks, of those with the time, many will be too shy or
will have no interest in sharing their experiences in
public. Thus the experiences described in Storybase may
or may not be representative of the Web use in general.
Another qualification concerns use of the term “Web”.
Although the Storybase invitation specifically requests
experiences relating to the World Wide Web, many stories
involved other Internet activities such as email and chat.
To some extent, this may simply reflect the integration of
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Table 2: Highly Annotated Stories
Title
Submitted
Annotations
Goal
1 Frustration, confusion, aggravation, exultation
Dec 1996
25
Seeking friends
2 Finding long lost friends
Dec 1997
21
Sharing success
3 I can’t get anywhere
Apr 1997
21
Asking for help
4 A broken relationship
Jul 1996
19
Warning
5 Boneheads on the Web
May 1995
19
Complaint
6 Shouldn’t have bought a Mac
Dec 1994
18
Complaint
7 A sad and happy time
Nov 1996
18
Seeking friends
8 Looking for Lisa
Oct 1995
17
Seeking friends
9 What happened to the soul?
Mar 1997
16
Open discussion
10 Confessions of an E-Bully
Feb 1996
15
Boasting
other network services into Web browsers. However, it
may also indicate a lack of separation between the
concepts of “the Web” and “the Internet”; it may be that
all activities involving remote communication and
information gathering are merged together in the minds of
many users. As a result, the experiences conveyed in the
stories analyzed here cover a broader range of network
technologies than we were originally attempting to assess.
These caveats aside, the prevalence of stories
concerning interpersonal relationships evokes a picture far
different from the “global information highway”. The
Storybase may have tapped into an unusual user
population, but even so, one must conclude that a major
contribution of pervasive network access has been to
encourage individuals to try new forms of relating with
others—as well as to explore the use of quite public
communication
channels
for
working
through
relationships that are problematic [17].
These new
ventures entail exploration of new techniques for virtual
introduction, such as the contributor who wanted to get in
touch with another author, but didn’t want to leave her
own email address. Instead, she annotated this woman’s
story, suggesting that she contact another author who had
left his email, and who in turn would know how to
contact her.
The relatively large number of stories and annotations
reflecting on the nature of Web culture was also
interesting. We began the project with the hope that users
would reflect on Web tools and their user interfaces; the
more philosophical perspective conveyed by these stories
suggests that it is the the Web “way of life” that is
capturing user’s imagination, not the tools or interaction
techniques that are so often the emphasis of work in HCI.
One direction for future research would be a
comprehensive, longitudinal study of a sample of Web
users, to better articulate the lifestyle changes and values
that accompany the shift to more Web-centric—and hence
remotely connected—goals and activities [6, 11].
The evolution of story themes is just what one would
expect to see as this new technology (and its user
population) matures and becomes more stable. While
“newbies” still drop by the Web Storybase on occasion,
they are becoming much more rare. Routine users of the
Web are starting to take for granted the ability to find just
the right piece of information (or person) at just the right
time. It would be interesting to look again at self-report
data such as this several years from now, to see if cyberrelationships also will become “old hat” or whether there
is something inherently unsettling in developing and
maintaining relationships without the benefit of physical
proximity.
Finally, the recent decline of posts relative to page
accesses has raised the possibility that the Storybase itself
might be undergoing a usage evolution, with visit rates
remaining high but fewer users choosing to contribute
something. We may have been truly fortunate to create
and publicize the Storybase just when the general user
population was in need of a comfortable forum for sharing
their experiences in these changing times. If many users
are now beginning to take the Web for granted, their need
to share may have died back. Indeed one of our most
prolific authors made just such an assertion in one of her
final annotations. On the other hand, perhaps the role of
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forums like this is to remain in the background of the
Web, just in case someone new comes along,
“Everything comes to an end eventually. I am
not saying that this page has run its course.
There will be new people who will stumble
upon it as accidentally as I did not so long ago.
They will deal with their issues in this rather
secure and friendly environment, then risk going
somewhere else. There are other places to write
and answer. They are building momentum.
Keep coming here. You’ll see.” (Storybase
annotation submitted April 1997)
Acknowledgements
The original Web Storybase application was built by
David Messner as an undergraduate research project; it
was subsequently enhanced by John Kelso, Rob
Loadwick, and Jonathan Hryn. Thanks also to John
Carroll who collaborated on the original design and on the
analysis of the first year of its use [15].
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