Form-From: A Design Space of Social Media Systems

DOI

Social media systems are a pervasive part of modern society. They have been almost universally adopted for a broad range of purposes including work, entertainment, activism, and decision making. They have also diversified, with many distinct designs varying in content type, organization, delivery mechanism, access control, and many other dimensions. In this work, we describe a design space of social media systems that aims to help understand similarities and differences, recognize potential consequences of design choice, and identify spaces for innovation. The Form-From model characterizes social media based on (1) the form of the content, either threaded or flat, and (2) from where or whom one might receive content, ranging from spaces to networks to commons. We derive Form-From inductively from a larger set of 62 dimensions organized into 10 categories. To demonstrate the utility of our model, we trace social media as they traverse the Form-From space over time and identify common design patterns within cells of the model.