The Connection Framework: How designers and developers can impact social connection

This paper outlines the importance of social connection and its relationship with connective technologies, defined as computer applications with the goal of creating or sustaining a social experience or network, including digital social media. We investigate how the choices made in constructing the design and algorithms used in connective technologies create both positive and negative effects. Especially as an explosion of AI content creation and metaverse technologies are rapidly entering the market, this becomes a critical conversation to avoid a repetition of previously made damaging effects. We propose a framework which designers and developers can use to better facilitate social connection, applying lessons learned from the rise of social media to new forms of interactive and immersive media.


INTRODUCTION
Uplifting social connection and the sensation of belonging are fundamentally important part of the human experience. With significant verifiable physical, mental, and emotional benefits, social connection has been described as a basic human need, and its inverse, loneliness, as a detrimental health factor (Martino, Pegg & Frates 2015). However despite awareness of these benefits and increasingly more ways to connect with others in the form of social media and customisable, interactive experiences, there has been a documented increase in loneliness (Holt-Lunstad 2017, Cigna 2018. While causes are complex, some have pointed to connective technologies with unethical designs or with unintended consequences (Madray 2019).
We define connective technologies as computational technologies with the primary goal of creating and sustaining a social experience or network. This includes social media networks like Meta (formerly Facebook) and Instagram, as well as in-person experiences facilitated by technologies such as augmented or virtual reality (AR/VR).
Ongoing conversations around these technologies typically take a polarised viewpointeither that connective technologies have overwhelmingly positive or detrimentally negative effects. However, the effects of connective technologies range across the spectrum, sometimes even in the same application. This paradox confirms a nuanced point: these technologies are ultimately tools which are dependent on how society interacts with them. However, the way they are used is directly related to the design of their underlying interfaces and algorithms.
This paper explores what uplifting social connection is and discusses the main tenets causing those connections. We use the context of existing connective technologies to determine how design features support or hinder uplifting social connection. We apply these lessons to contemporary discussions of emerging technology and propose a framework for designers and developers to critically discuss the effect their work has on connection.
It is important to mention that the emotion and perception of being "connected" is not a quantitative measurement and can therefore only be discussed in relation to lexical tools such as observations and interviews as customary in sociology (Fiske, Seibt, and Schubert 2016). We discuss uplifting social connection and its relation to connective technology using four themes used in previous sociology research. These four themes form the basis of the proposed framework system (Winzer 2022).

FOUR TENETS OF SOCIAL CONNECTION
Social connection can broadly be defined as a person's sense of closeness and belonging to other people (Wiest 2018). Uplifting social connections confer several benefits to those experiencing it, including greater psychological and physical wellbeing, faster recovery from disease, and increased longevity (Seppälä 2014;Martino, Pegg & Frates, 2015). Conversely, feeling disconnected can cause anxiety, depression, and violence, which are all strongly correlated with loneliness (Seppälä 2014).
We specifically focus on uplifting social connection because the simple act of connecting is not enough to confer positive long-term benefits. For example, Umberson and Karas Montez (2010) mention that an act of caretaking which is seen as a burden on the carer does not transmit the benefits of social connection.
Uplifting social connection contains three phases: (i) being emotionally able to connect with others, (ii) establishing reciprocally beneficial relationships with others or with a community, and (iii) maintaining those relationships. The first two phases alone are enough to make a connection uplifting, but to make this connection long-term, all three are needed. While many factors make these stages possible, we focus on four connection themes.

Authenticity
Connection begins with the individual's ability to connect and the feeling of being able to be themselves around others. This includes feeling safe enough to express one's genuine self and not feeling pressured to change that self in order to fit in.

Empathy
Connection is tied to empathy, allowing individuals to understand one another and engage in mutual listening, genuine care, and vulnerability, as described by Weist (2018) and Pozniak (2019).

Focus
Creating and maintaining connection depends on the amount of time spent together, and also on the quality of that time, including active listening and deep conversations. It takes over 150 hours of focused time to become good friends. Conversely, unfocused, distracted or shallow conversations can even harm connection (Hall 2018). Connection is also enhanced by everyday interactions, like checking in and making inside jokes (Hall 2018).
Social Support Social Support is the reciprocally beneficial emotion in which an individual feels 'loved, cared for, and listened to' within the context of their social ties (Umberson and Karas Montez 2010). This includes feeling heard and understood, which is connected with empathy and focus, as well the critical feeling of belonging to a group (Civic Signals 2020). Note that belonging is an emotion based on perception; therefore it is wholly dependent on how much an individual feels they deserve to be in a group (individual capacity to connect), and how other members of that group make that person feel included (building and maintaining community), rather than the size of the network (Seppäla 2014).

DUALITY IN CONNECTIVE TECHNOLOGIES
Connective technologies are computer-based applications through which social connections and networks are formed. They use designed interfaces and algorithms which perpetuate both positive and negative connection themes, which contribute to or detract from one or several of the phases of uplifting social connection. Connective technologies typically focus on one or two of the three phases, so users move between apps which specialise in different lengths and intensities of social connection.

Individual willingness to connect
Chatrooms and applications which allow users to curate groups according to their interests, like Facebook and Discord, often encourage individual connection through authenticity and empathy. Anonymous communication, especially through online chat rooms, allows users to express thoughts to a large group of similarly anonymous people (Hosterman et al. 2018). These so-called weak-tie connections are especially important when individuals want to express concerns, questions, and struggles about topics they may not be able to talk about offline, such as mental health, gender identity, or experiences with sexual assault. This allows them to feel heard and understood and to express their authentic selves (Hillier andHarrison 2007, Hosterman et al. 2018). While anonymous ties are comparatively less effective at creating social experiences than in-person interactions, this authentic communication without the fear of retaliation is critical to creating connection (Umberson and Karas Montez 2010;Turkle 2012). Additionally, tools like "groups" on Discord and Facebook allow individuals to connect with people and topics that are relevant to them (Berkovsky and Freyne 2015). Groups are effective in creating connection for individuals as they lead to the feeling of meaningful belonging (Hall 2018, Civic Signals 2020.

Creating far-reaching communities
The most obvious example of positive contributions made by connective technology is access to a larger, more far-reaching community. Whether in one-to-one interactions, small groups, or large communities, these relationships become an online version of a system of social support and sharing, allowing people with similar interests, ideas, and experiences to come together. These interactions often result in spaces for community members to feel a sense of belonging, make inside jokes, and share experiences, online and offline. These social groups include, e.g., a community of music fans to bond over their common interests (Lacasa et al. 2016), and groups uniting people over a collective social issue. For example, the #MeToo movement, used to bring awareness to sexual assault and its survivors, first gained traction on the connective network Twitter (Hosterman et al. 2018).

Maintaining relationships
Once communities are created they must be actively maintained. On the individual level, people use social media or messaging apps such as WeChat or Whatsapp when maintaining connection to friends and family (Heimlich 2011). Sustaining connections, whether by videochatting with friends and family or talking to new friends strengthens interpersonal bonds and facilitates the contact time necessary for genuine connection (Hall 2018). In this way, connective technologies provide the necessary frameworks to communicate more frequently and/or over long distances, thereby strengthening connections. This also extends to larger groups like fandoms and support communities. Additionally, the ubiquity and omnipresence of these communities provides a sense of social presence, which gives individuals the feeling of being connected to a group. These online communities can also increase the empathetic connections necessary to build and maintain relationships (Pozniak 2019).

Discouraging individual connection
The same anonymity that can provide a platform for safe and authentic communication can also foster an environment for bullying or sexual harassment (Kircaburun et al. 2018). While harassment is by no means limited to connective technology, anonymous online platforms have a much wider reach and allow harassers to bully anonymous people anonymously using "screen names" (Kircaburun et al. 2018). In some cases, this also leads to a lack of empathy (Peebles 2014, Pozniak 2019. Social media can also discourage authentic communication through the use of online personas that individuals take on which are different from their actual lives. On Instagram, users are often encouraged to feature an overwhelmingly positive portrayal of their lives, bodies, food, travel, and relationships (Hern 2018). This is supported by builtin features such as filters and editing tools which make these images easy to create (Lukas 2015). Users often mimic this mode of interaction perpetuated by "influencers", those with many followers on the platform ( fig. 1). Even for viewers who are aware that an image is staged or manipulated, the visual photographic confirmation of this "perfect" lifestyle makes it psychologically difficult to remember that the images are fake (Pittman and Reich 2016). This hyper-positivity is also perpetuated by Instagram's "like" button, which allows users to engage with content. These heart-shaped buttons give the person who posted the image a dopamine high when they receive a new "like", similar to what one experiences when being affirmed by another person in real life (Haynes 2018, McNamera 2021, Hung et al. 2017). However, this phenomenon quickly creates an artificial measure of self-worth, i.e., the numbers of "likes" and "views" become a numerical score of how much someone is liked by others. Because users want to feel they belong, they post attention-grabbing images to get more "likes". Along with wanting to keep up with friends' "perfect" images (Weist 2018), this leads many users to change their behaviour and even lie to present the social image required for approval.
The same set of interactions can lead to users feeling inadequate because of the perceived perfection of someone else's experience (Hern 2018). This passive interaction with personas can result in individuals comparing themselves to unattainable standards resulting in a lack of selfworth, a phenomenon known as social comparison (Jiang and Ngien 2020). For some, this negative emotion, especially regarding body image and mental health, has been extensively linked to platforms like Instagram (Milmo and Paul 2021). Since connection is a subjective emotion which is linked with feeling that one deserves to feel connected (Seppälä 2014), a constant reinforced dialogue that 'makes you worry that everyone is perfectexcept you' (Hern 2018) negatively impacts an individual's ability to connect.
Lastly, the level of personalisation which exists in these connective technologies can impact the focus necessary for connection to happen. Users can often choose the content they would like to see and ignore. In fact, this level of personalization has resulted in a shift of expectations, where people 'expect a personal digital experience … having grown accustomed to personalized experiences from their news feed, social network, and shopping recommendations.' (Paveza 2021). This results in many people becoming impatient with the time required to forge lasting connections, making building and maintaining connection more difficult.

Steering harmful community creation
The creation of communities is undoubtedly positive. Online recommendation algorithms actively read a user's existing connections or preferences and recommend other users to follow (Zhang et al. 2015). While this can lead to positive communities, it can also lead to ideologically isolated communities. Examples are algorithms creating media bubbles, defined as a compilation of online input which surrounds users with a single point of view that confirms or perpetuates bias (Reviglio and Agosti 2020). Surrounding oneself with people and arguments one agrees with (homophily) is common (McPherson et al. 2001), but when pushed to the extreme by algorithms, can become dangerous. In fact, 'excessive homophily helps to spread misinformation, frequently resulting in homogeneous, polarised clusters reiterating emotionally charged and externally divisive content' (Reviglio and Agosti, 2020). Consequently, users become stuck in single-minded groups and echo chambers and lack the multi-faceted input necessary to empathetically relate to people outside their immediate circles, a key part of connection (Pozniak 2019).
While recommendation algorithms create communities and a sense of belonging, they are also programmed in ways that prioritise engagement rates over safety, often perpetuating aggressive, intolerant posts and fake news (Milmo 2021, Reviglio andAgosti 2020). Without proper monitoring, this can result in dividing or isolating society by actively promoting hate speech or even inciting violence. Examples include the "fake news" bubbles in the 2016 United States Presidential elections and Meta's (formerly Facebook's) improper monitoring of hate speech, which stoked ethnically charged violence in Myanmar (Milmo 2021, Oliver 2018.

Distracted maintenance of relationships
While connective technologies allow people to maintain connections and communities, they also create a paradox of over-connection, in which the pressure to be constantly available can cause negative effects like anxiety, sleep deprivation, and distraction (Waizenegger et al. 2016). Equally, the pressure to constantly be online leads to effects like Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO), which, similar to the "likes" on Instagram, causes stress by reinforcing a feeling of anxiety that one either does not belong, or that others are having a better time than oneself (Barker 2016). While this is still technically social connection, the benefits of connection are not transmitted if the act of being connected is stressful (Umberson and Karas Montez 2010).

FACILITATING VS REPLACING CONNECTION
Connective technology has a complex relationship with society. The very same tools that allow families to connect over long distances and communities to come together over a social issue or love of music can equally cause problems with self-esteem, attention and even charge violence. But if technology is simply a tool, what is the difference between it causing positive and negative effects, and what can be done better in its design?
One approach to this better future is to design technological interactions with a conscious regard for the complexities of social connection. We argue this can be achieved by facilitating, not replacing, social connection.
In each of the negative examples discussed above, connective technologies interfere with uplifting social connections: Instagram replaces authentic connection with a hyper-positivity; addictive "likes" replace the goal of connecting with others with the need for digital validation; and recommendation algorithms actively steer and narrow the groups that participants would have been exposed to without them. In contrast, the positive examples given above have one fundamental feature in common: they act as neutral facilitators, providing the framework for authentic, vulnerable, focused and empathetic connection. This includes technologies that facilitate communication with friends or loved ones, create fan communities, allow individuals to express authentic identities, and do not pressure participants to be constantly available.
Note that studies have consistently found that the effects of connective technologies affect different users differently, and that these effects are directly linked to how and how much individuals engage with those technologies (Bekalu 2020). However, both how and how much these effects occur are linked to specific design choices (i.e. features which encourage behaviours like posting hyper-positive imagery, recommendations which prioritise engagement over safety, or a model which encourages constant availability). The influence of design choices also reflects biasthat is, if the designers and engineers behind those features, algorithms, or apps had any unintentional biases or ulterior motives, they would be embedded in the technology itself (Reviglio andAgosti 2020, Tugend 2019). In Instagram's case, keeping users addicted to social media platforms allows companies to continue selling data to advertisers who target those users online, hence increasing revenue (Reviglio and Agosti 2020).
Ultimately, how connective technologies are designed matters. However, understanding this also presents a hopeful alternative: if negative effects can be designed with technology, so can positive ones. Hence, technology with an active goal to encourage individuals to connect, create connections, and maintain communities through authenticity, empathy, focus, and social support, can better facilitate uplifting social connection.

HOW DESIGNERS CAN STEER CONNECTION
As more online interactions begin to involve new technologies, a conversation about responsibly facilitating connection becomes increasingly important. One such example is Artificial Intelligence (AI) based image generation, which is now becoming a mainstream feature in connective technologies and social networks. These programs, like image generation in Midjourney's Discord Server allow participants to have fun making silly or beautiful images within their community servers. However, AI image generation systems have the potential to create sexist and racist results due to the databases and processes used to train the models ( fig. 2). When used in commercial or connective technology, such images can seriously jeopardise an individual's capacity to connect, their feeling of belonging, or can perpetuate stereotypes, leading to lack of empathy. from the same set of input images (Vitova, 2022).
Similarly, additions to existing connective technologies should be well designed and considered, especially in immersive formats or formats with haptic feedback, like the metaverse. A disturbing example is sexual harassment in metaverse virtual reality games. While harassment in virtual reality already feels more realistic and embodied (Frenkel and Browning 2021;Basu 2021), it is even more impactful when wearing haptic suits, a physical computing feature of the metaverse which allow players to "feel" actions occurring in the game (Frenkel and Browning 2021). The perpetrators, like those of cyberbullying, are typically anonymous, and physically feeling harassment seriously compromises the safety, self-worth, and interactions of especially female players.
Results like these show that tools used in our online interactions must be carefully designed, deployed projects carefully monitored, and problems acted upon when they arise. While it is not the individual designer's responsibility to fix these tools or the datasets they use, it is their responsibility to notice harmful trends and act on them. In the example of fig. 2, if a company or client wants to use LENSA AR or its underlying models as a part of their service, designers and programmers should test the proposed AI models with images of people with different skin tones and genders. If there are alarming results, they should inform clients of the dangers and create products and features using other AI models. In the example of the haptic suit, some companies and online platforms where the harassment occurred responded with updated design decisions. These included a 'Safe Bubble' and 'V-Gesture' to push offenders away or stop their approach (Basu 2021). While this initially seems like the critical approach described above, offenders were not reprimanded for their actions, nor were safety features monitored and improved as time went on, even though the same events continued to happen (Basu 2021).

THE CONNECTION FRAMEWORK
Ultimately, connective technologies are tools which require a commitment to make conscious design choices which support uplifting social connection. Because these designs and developments often begin in ideation and prototyping meetings, designers and programmers are in a unique position to steer these developments. We propose a framework based on the research presented above which can help designers and developers critically evaluate the features they create during the ideation, production, and after the deployment of a connective experience or technology.

How the framework works
Seven parameters based on the above research guide designers to critically evaluate their work. The current project provides a "connection score" based on the relative position of these different parameters, which gives the creators an idea of how much and where their project could impact social connection. The positive parameters are: Authenticity, Empathy, Focus, and Social Support, as defined above. The negative parameters include Social Comparison (unhealthy comparison to others), Steering (intervening in or steering individuals towards specific products or groups), and Potential For Dangerous Situations (including physical harm, bullying and harassment). While it relies on an honest evaluation from designers and developers, the connection score tool is supported by a rubric, examples, and questions which designers and developers can ask during and after the creation of a project, as well as a series of examples in the form of a card set.

Development and goal
If adopted on a large scale, frameworks like this could also begin to introduce social accountability for the creators of connective technologies and be used to gauge a project's impact over time. The goal of this framework is to provide environments and features which encourage social connection. Of course, positive social connection will not be possible in every single case, nor can designers and developers shift an entire society alone. The implementation of work which supports uplifting social connection will require a commitment from companies which provide connective technologies, the creators who code and design them, and the users themselves. However, designers and developers remain in the unique position of being able to forge environments which give the audience the best possible chance of engaging in uplifting social connection. Not everything can (or should) be controlled, but the features of connective technologies should not cause negative effects.

CONCLUSION
Ultimately, uplifting social connection is important, and is heavily influenced by choices which are made in the design of connective technologies. Because of this, the people who are responsible for the creation of these apps, networks, and experiences are uniquely positioned to build environments for positive human interactions. As new technologies and features enter the market, understanding connection and responsibly acting on that understanding will continue to be critical, starting with frameworks that make the importance and process of connection clear to the people who have a hand in facilitating it. Basu, T. (2021) The metaverse has a groping problem already. Technology Review. https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/12/16/104251 6/the-metaverse-has-a-groping-problem/ (retrieved 13 January 2022).