the keystone to my thesis: motivation theory

On the outside looking in many things probably seem obvious, but as you are immersed in a thesis project attachments grow to certain terminology that actually create tunnel vision. Up until now, I have been calling it "synergy". I knew that this was a key aspect to my cognitive artifact that would differentiate it from other attempts to mediate the social networking dilemma. While I was enlightened to the relationship that my cognitive artifact had to have with the participant, I never viewed it as an entry point into the architectural and interactive system map that I needed.

I had just finished taking a 3 day online workshop for CoAT (Certificate of Accomplishment in Teaching), and the topic was Motivational Teaching Strategies. We were instructed to read an article called, "Student Motivation: Putting Theory to Work in the Classroom" by Michael Wuthrich when I noticed parallels between what Wuthrich recommended in the classroom and what I wanted my cognitive artifact to do. His implementation of motivation theory in the classroom indicated the effectiveness of a synergistic relationship between the teacher and student. Therefore, if I approached the design of my cognitive artifact through the lens of the theory of motivation, synergy would be an implicit result.

The three objectives that Wuthrich describes for encouraging motivation are balance, goals, and clarity. I reflected on how those objectives aligned with my participant's actions, motivations, and goals. As I was mapping this out I became enlightened by my sub-questions. I had an instinct at the beginning of this project that the reason that participants had disillusions of a trusting environment while social networking was because they (1) didn't understand the susceptibility of the future self, (2) didn't see the patterns of their online behavior that was placing them at risk, and (3) they did not understand the permanence of their online information. When I discovered danah boyd's properties of networked publics and began aligning them into a matrix of researchable points, I noticed that my sub-questions directly correlated with those properties. I initially rationalized this as an objective that I had to meet (the sub-question) at a particular touchpoint (the property of networked publics), but once I stepped away from that matrix I did not know where to go with it. It made sense, but fell flat. What I came to realize—while mapping out how the theory of motivation could be the platform for my cognitive artifact—is that my sub-questions are not separate from the properties of networked publics, they are just a concrete rephrasing.

What my sub-questions really get at—and what ends up being the overall goal of my cognitive artifact—is the following long winded question that will make sense and find a proper rephrasing in the near-future:

How can I bring clarity to the properties of networked publics that contribute to the bad actions which impede the participant's goals, by incentivizing towards the participant's motivations in an effort to refreeze the participant's behaviors towards their explicit goal?

I promise this will make more sense later, but for now....a major breakthrough.