Category: Social Software

There’s a post over at Matt Jones’ site at the moment concerned with attempts to define and discuss social software [Defining Discussing ‘Social Software’] and I find myself reacting to it in a completely unexpected way. Social software of one form or another has formed the core of most of the stuff I’ve worked and played with for the last several years, and I expected myself to find this resurgence of interest in these kinds of interactions fascinating and useful. But there’s something about the abandonment of concepts of ‘online community’ and the complete rejection of familiar terms and paradigms like the message board that worries me. There seems to be a bizarre lack of history to the whole enterprise – a desire to claim a territory as unexplored when it’s patently not. And more importantly a remarkable lack of implementation and experiment around the place. Where are the projects that people are assembling and playing with? Where’s the experience in running communities? Where’s the actual engagement in how people operate with each other in online environments…

The other aspect of the whole situation that I find interesting (to go off at a tangent) is this repeated assertion that social software, message-boards and the like, are over-complex paradigms that confuse the general public. A phrase I’ve heard a lot recently asserts that when we build these social spaces, these tools or devices – these workflows of human interactions – that we should always remember that we’re not building them for us. There seem to be two assumptions operating here – that the general public are profoundly stupid and that (because they have as yet not noticed this fact) designers are probably pretty thick as well. In my experience neither is true (although to be fair neither is strictly false either).

This phrase – not for us – is being used a lot at the moment about types of site (like message boards and instant messaging applications for example) that already have a significant amount of history and precedent behind them – types of site that have at least partially ‘gone mainstream’. But rather than adapt and evolve these sites (firstly making them simpler or removing extraneous functionality and then taking these simpler sites and adding new struts or concepts into them) the urge seems to be to abandon them completely and build something new – something that this time will be simpler and more effective than all the other paradigms that have fallen by the wayside already. And what are we likely to end up with after all of this process has been conducted? Sites that fulfil many of the same functions (if not exactly the same functions), but which fulfil them via completely new paradigms that have been designed rather than evolved – meaning that they’re sites that people are now forced to try and understand from scratch with little or no precedent to rely on. And these paradigms normally cannot adapt with the increasing demands of users or their increasing web savvy. To make a specious analogy – when you give people a space-hopper rather than a bike with training wheels, you can’t really be surprised when they never graduate to the bicycle in adulthood… The bicycle in this example being those forms of interaction that have spontaneously emerged out of the web’s memespace and proliferated naturally and easily across the web – sites like the message board or the weblog or even the Wiki have done…

That’s not to say that innovation isn’t important because clearly it is, but the innovation must come with the realisation of how to fulfil a need – and to do that we have to look at how those needs have been met to date and where there’s scope to bring our insights to bear. In Clay Shirky’s inspired piece that touched on the failings of early community software he talked about the assumptions that had led us to our current unsatisfactory ‘social software’ (this was before the definition of social software became victim of the urge to split it so commensurately from earlier, more familiar ‘community’ definitions). And he came up with these problems:

• We have the wrong historical models and exotic “extremist” ideologies:
  1. The suggestion that the web should represent a shift or collapse in “identity”
  2. The need to prove purity of ‘online culture’ by foregrounding immersive MUDs and MOOs
  3. Assumption (because of scarcity of humans online) that we would be using this technology to meet people we didn’t know offline

All these assumptions were led by a fascination with the extreme possibilities of technology available at the time rather any investigation of what people were likely to – in the long-term – actually want or indeed functionally be able to do. The current hysteria reminds me very much of this attitude, these errors of first-principle and this disrespect for history and observable characteristics of how human beings actually seem to behave. It would be a terrible shame if the potentially functional, interesting and intelligent uses of social software were delayed by an explosive interest in fashionable concepts¹ followed by a ten year trough of frustration – abandoning individual web-users and independent creative types like the webloggers, message-board implementers and wiki-owners to quietly (and unfashionably) get on with it like they’ve been doing for years…

Notes: (1) I’m sorry, but Slashdot.org is not an emergent system. It’s just not. That’s a facile analogy…

The Excesses of Social Software: There’s a post over at Matt Jones’ site at the moment concerned with attempts to define and discuss social software [Defining Discussing ‘Social Software’] and I find myself reacting to it in a completely unexpected way. Social software of one form or another has formed the core of most of the stuff I’ve worked and played with for the last several years, and I expected myself to find this resurgence of interest in these kinds of interactions fascinating and useful. But there’s something about the abandonment of concepts of ‘online community’ and the complete rejection of familiar terms and paradigms like the message board that worries me. [more …]

A quote from Jonathan Franzen’s Why Bother? (from his book of essays How to be Alone) that I think is interesting in that it presents a different perspective – a tangential perspective perhaps – on the loss of social capital that is described in Putnam’s Bowling Alone:

“Superficially, at least, regionalism is still thriving. In fact it’s fashionable on college campuses nowadays to say that there is no America anymore, there are only Americas; that the only things a black lesbian New Yorker and a Southern Baptist Georgian have in common are the English language and the federal income tax. The likelihood, however, is that both the New Yorker and the Georgian watch Letterman every night, both are struggling to find health insurance, both have jobs that are threatened by the migration of employment overseas, both go to discount superstores to purchase Pocahontas tie-in products for their children, both are being pummeled into cynicism by commercial advertising, both play Lotto, both dream of fifteen minutes of fame, both are taking a serotonin reuptake inhibitor, and both have a guilty crush on Uma Thurman.”

Another quote from the same collection (only this time from the essay Imperial Bedroom) casts an unconventional eye over the issues of privacy in the 21st Century. There’s much here to respect, if not agree with:

The “right to be left alone”? Far from disappearing, it’s exploding. It’s the essence of modern American architecture, landscape, transportation, communication, and mainstream political philosophy. The real reason that Americans are apathetic about privacy is so big as to be almost invisible: we’re flat-out drowning in privacy.

I’ve been reading Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework, by D.C. Englebart (Stanford, 1962) and there’s this really interesting paragraph in it that I think is true:

The process of developing this conceptual framework brought out a number of significant realisations: that the intellectual effectiveness exerxised today by a given human has little likelihood of being intelligence limited — that there are dozens of disciplines in engineering, mathematics and the social, life and physical sciences that can contribute improvements to the system of intellect-augmentation means: that any one such improvement can be expected to trigger a chain of coordinating improvementsl; that until every one of these disciplines comes to a standstill and we have exhausted all the improvement possibilities we could glean from it, we can expect to continue to develop improvements in this human-intellect system; that there is no particular reason not to expect gains in personal intellectual effectiveness from a concerted system-oriented approach that compare to those made in personal geographic mobility since horseback and sailboat days.

Anyway this got me thinking about social software and what it’s relationship was to this kind of intellect-augmenting philosophy and I suppose I came to the conclusion that the objectives of social software were to do with the cyborgisation or augmentation of human beings. In particular I thought of that the functions of social software were threefold:

1. removing the limitations placed on social contact by external factors such as language and geography.
2. compensating for the overloads that this removal of limitations might generate.
3. uncovering and improving on the mechanisms that people use in their social interactions with one another – making rational decisions about which are still appropriate and which can be replaced by software or technology.

I have to think about this a bit more fully, but I’d appreciate any thoughts anyone might have…

While doing a routine purge of my computer I stumbled upon three graphs made to illustrate the difference between an increased marginal ‘effort’ cost and an exponential one. This is a flashback to a now old argument about whether or not usable systems should scale badly in order to counteract large volume-abuses of a system.

If this graph shows the effort needed to accomplish a certain number of things on a normal website…

Then this one would show what would happen if the accomplishment of each ‘thing’ required extra effort – say if it required a small additional amount of financial cost…

The problem with that system would be that your ability to abuse through volume is directly proportional to how much money you have. The rich (effort or financial) get to flood the system however they want. But a system that self-consciously scales badly in terms of user effort would look more like:

I don’t really want to comment on it any further, but I thought it might illustrate the concept I was talking about a few weeks ago.

A few thoughts on Wikis:

• There aren’t enough simple sets of instructions for people who are completely unfamiliar with Wikis. It’s quite hard to make the mental leaps necessary to get past that very initial stage of frustrated apathy. But once you do it’s tremendously easy to use and has essentially no further technical learning-curve. Suggestion – someone writes a guide to starting a wiki in non-wiki format for a change.
• The most significant aspect for me is this sense of pottering, of idle investment – that it’s not important to achieve perfection, consensus or conclusion and so any small piece of work you do feels like a valuable contribution – a step in the right direction. They’re even faster to use than weblogs, and more flexible (with all the benefits and problems that involves).
• The next stage in development would seem to me to be an aesthetic one and a usability one – there’s clearly work that needs to be done before they go fully mainstream, and if publishers are going to approach this kind of stuff then they’re going to want some reassurement that the content won’t simply be lost – so some kind of collaborative moderation system will probably have to emerge there (at least for commercial applications).

Little to say except that I’ve spent some of this evening working to install my first ever Wiki using UseMod. I’ve got a very specific project in mind – getting a group of less-than-totally-tech-savvy community members to get together and assemble their own FAQs, site history and help files. Adrian Hon’s recently got something similar going with the Metafilter Wiki which I’m very impressed with. This feels extremely interesting and experimental – very much like weblogging did three years ago – but as far as I can tell Wikis already have a weight of history building behind them. I’ll keep writing about how the project appears to be going (but I’m not planning to link to it from plasticbag.org just yet).

In the interests of fair exposure, I’m going to link back to Scott’s response to my response to his comments on my thoughts about manufactured scarcity, although I’m going to have to leave a more thorough response for another day as I have much to digest and process on other issues today. In the meantime, I’m just going to make two small points. When he says:

People in modern China (or even in a future America where the government has been granted broad control of its citizens) may have a valid desire to maintain anonymity online that is clearly more important than my annoyance with spam. (Capital letters my own)

This was in fact my initial point – that one can’t strip anonymity from the net without destroying much of its power for the disenfranchised. Hence when we’re assembling our micro-community structures online, we work to build a way of interacting that celebrates as much of the power of the web while simultaneously working to stop some uses of that power that could cause that community to collapse in upon itself completely. The nature of the web, web programmers and free software / open source projects (and indeed the market itself) means that there will probably not soon be a monopoly on community technology that stops people simply choosing another form of software to declare their home if the one they are in fails to meet their needs. That is probably the best place to resolve this debate – in net citizens’ interactions with, choices between (and accomplishments enabled by) various types of community software.

I don’t see how Tom’s example system could prevent a user from sitting at a single computer all day creating identities and then passing those identities around to other computers — assuming it can even prevent a computer from doing the same.

Again – it wouldn’t at all. But in my initial rough gestural example, the logging-in process would be time-consuming – which would mean that very specific speed bumps would be placed between new identity creation and new identity posting. This could radically slow down the amount of new users that someone could effectively maintain per computer. It’s a question again of difficulty – you do not have to make something impossible in order to stop it happening – you simply have to make something not worth the energy, time or money that you’d have to invest. That’s how public key cryptography works – not by making it impossible to break the code, but by making it take impossibly large amounts of time…