Categories
Social Software

My working definition of social software…

A while ago I wrote about a potential definition of social software based around Englebart’s theories of augmentation. Shortly before I went to ETCon I was talking about related issues with Will Davies of the iSociety and included (in my comments) a revised version of that definition, which I have since revised still further. So then, this is my current rough working definition of what it is I’m talking about when I’m talking about social software.

Social software is a particular sub-class of software-prosthesis that concerns itself with the augmentation of human social and / or collaborative abilities through structured mediation (this mediation may be distributed or centalised, top-down or bottom-up/emergent). Social software augments these abilities by:

  1. Removing the real-world limitations placed on social and / or collaborative behaviour by factors such as language, geography, background, financial status, etc;
    [This can also be seen as the basic aspiration of first-generation online discussion software as well as the gist of the world-changing hyperbolae of the press during the dot com years]
  2. Compensating for human inadequacies in processing, maintaining or developing social and / or collaborative mechanisms – in terms of information overload, generating appropriate filtering mechanisms, building in solutions to compensate for reptile-brain activity, developing structures that are immune to blame-culture, recrimination etc. This in particular can be seen as the replacement of the inherent limitations of geography (1 above) with mechanisms that generate parallel senses of ‘similar, different’, ‘near, far’ etc. This also includes feedback loops and the like;
    [Some of the more interesting work that people have been talking about already sits in this area – particularly Clay’s work on groups when he’s quoting Bion.]
  3. Creating environments or distributed tool-sets that pull useful end results out of human social and / or collaborative behaviour – for example, generating software that facilitates human creative processes in groups, structuring the process (or having the process emerge through apparently unrelated interactions) so as to have a distinct and productive end result;

That’s probably as close as I’ve got as of yet… Any thoughts?

Categories
Politics Science Social Software

Steven Pinker and the Perfectibility of Man…

There’s fragments of a paper in my head. I need to find ways of noting this stuff down that doesn’t collide with my writing on this site. It goes back before Clay, to a place of darkness that is somewhere around the edges of some work I did in classics about a million years ago around constructivist and essentialist views of human nature and history (of which there is much written). Arts disciplines normally concentrate on that which makes the past a different place – alien and weird. Science concentrates on what is permanent and unyielding. The questions are always relational – is science skeletal to humanities meat (or meat to skin maybe)? Are the bones of science demonstrated to be brittle by philosophical poststructuralist critiques? Or are the relativisms of cultural studies shed like the masquerading shell of a scientific Terminator?

So this is the point where I talk about Freud and my interest in models of the mind at that abstracted level – that it’s maybe ‘unscientific’, but it’s still essentialising (just at a different level). I delivered a paper on anachronism and identification in Aristotle and Freud a million years ago at a conference in New York. I can’t remember what I said – and I finished it on sheets of hotel stationary while inhaling the minibar, so I’ll probably never find a useful copy of it anywhere either… Maybe there’s stuff that’s permanent – maybe we just accept that. I believed that then and I think I believe it now… Interesting, but not obvious questions these – whatever you may wish to believe…

So Steven Pinker’s on TV and he’s talking about the perfectibility of man and that sense of a “Blank Slate” that he writes about in his latest book of the same name. And he’s talking about stuff I already knew, but I don’t know where from – the association of the political left with ideologies that deny human nature as something fixed and permanent (which explains to me the resistance that feminism always had to Freud and reminds me of an incredibly brief and nerve-wracking conversation that I had with Alan Sinfield [profile] back when I was an intellectual before I became an artisan). He said that Freud was “bad for gay people”. Same thing. Is essentialising philosophy bad for the left? Anyway – and Pinker is also talking about the right’s acceptance of natural humanity – that the right operates on assumptions that society works around and in concert with fundamental humanity (greed, acquisition, ambition, competition) while the left abstracts out – tries to find ways to make the world more fair by denying or suggesting we change human nature… [cf Juliet Mitchell’s earlier work]. That this ideology of human perfectibility can be considered to lie behind China’s revolution and communist ideology (for example) which considered people malleable enough to be transformed into good non-competitive, collaborative citizens.

And anyway – so I’m back to thinking about Clay again and how much my personal ideologies of community development and the value of social software coincide with his, but that at the same time the statements that he made at ETCon (that I missed, but which were extensions of comments that I’ve heard him say before) are not obvious – “groups act against their own interests” is a statement that needs contextualising. And that although we may feel comfortable asserting it, the ways in which studies of this kind are phrased and the fact that they are based on statements of limited cultural or historical difference between individuals – of an essentialised abstracted almost timeless humanity – might be correct, but are also implicated in much larger battles about the nature of identity and what it means to be human, and what is permanent and what can change. That difference between human groups is obvious and pronounced in many areas of hierarchy and interaction – as obvious as the similarities and that the line between what is human nature and what is acculturation or interpolation/relationships with language is not and may never be entirely clear. Which is not to say that it’s not appropriate to use research of this kind as the basis for social software work – simply that the very principle that we balance out inbuilt human limitations with prostheses and band aids (this is very much core to one of the senses of social software that I’m most comfortable with) is potentially wrapped up in a much larger and scarier and less morally or politically obvious debate than we tend to acknowledge…

This may make no sense to people who aren’t me. It’s messy enough to be only vaguely useful for me – gestural vocabularies, messy arguments and references are all I can offer… But maybe it’ll help me feel less uncomfortable with some of the collisions between my current and previous occupations…

Categories
Random

The Webb 2000…

While we were in San Francisco, my Webb 2000 started to act up a bit. So I did what anyone else would have done, I went to the depot to see if I could get him fixed. Turns out there was very little wrong with him – he just needed a quick mental service. That’s the problem with these high-powered models. You get tremendous speed out of them – great power – but the parts wear out so quickly. While I was there I checked out some of the other models available, but although there was no obvious difference between any of them, I found I’d grown rather attached to mine. So I just got him some coolant, and we went back to work…

many_robot_matts.jpg

Categories
Random

Maxicontent votes…

My browsers (both Camino and Safari) are now totally drunk on information. They’re so full of tabs and bookmark-bar stored links that they’re sluggish and clumsy and unresponsive. So in an attempt to help them back to a semblence of normality, I’m going to stick two metaphorical fingers down their collective throats and help them vomit up their linky goodness all over the blogosphere in the form of a massive blast of microcontent votage:

  • Ben’s Brain on Blog
    One of the best experiences of ETCon for me was actually getting to know Mr Hammersley a bit. I had tremendously good fun arsing around with him in arch-English accents in the middle of the Westin hotel while Webb looked on indulgently. While we were out there he told us about these places you could go and pay $1000 for a full body scan. And now he’s gone and done it for the Guardian. I’m looking forward to reading about that…

  • Awesome USBV spywatch
    It’s probably the least comfortable piece of tech ever made (apart from some chastity belts that Webb kept talking about in San Francisco – but you can’t put MP3s on them). Probably best to wait until tech like this is bluetooth-enabled. That would actually be pretty useful;

  • Meatball on Feature Karma
    I like the concept of “Feature Karma”, which basically says that every time you add a feature you should simplify another one or even remove it. That way you keep a site or a software project clean and simple and user-intuitive. It’s more use as a buzz-word or a piece of short-hand, though – since you’d have to find the optimum level of simplicity / utility first, otherwise you’d never have any functionality at all…

  • Defining Spam
    Wired’s coverage of the efforts to legislate against spam e-mail has been uniformly intelligent, apposite and good-natured. The most frustrating part of the debate is the obvious self-serving of some of the people concerned. Here’s a bit of the article: Wientzen argued that marketers should be able to contact consumers “at least once” by e-mail to ascertain whether the individual might be interested in receiving marketing messages. “How do you send solicited e-mails if there is no way to initially solicit interest?” he asked. The crowd responded with boos. How profoundly stupid can you be? You can’t encourage people to respond to those e-mails to help out the legitimate marketers if – in the process – it would get horribly abused by a thousand times as many illegitimate ones!
Categories
Random

On Apple, music & piles…

  • Deep inside Apple’s piles
    The metaphor of piles of documents (that Apple are supposedly integrating into the next version of OSX) seems to me to be one that would work really well in a weblog context as well – loose aggregated groups of posts that don’t really constitute ongoing categories but which have similar associations…

  • Acquisition X
    Now we have the Apple Music Store we probably won’t need file-sharing applications any more. Which is a shame, because Acquisition X is far superior to Limewire as a Gnutella client;

  • Tesugen on iTunes
    “I have shared smart playlists such as Songs Played Today, Best Songs Played Today, and also a dumb playlist into which I drag songs that I like at the moment. (Of course, I’ve also shared my default smart playlist, which plays songs randomly selected from all that are rated 2?5, and that haven’t been played in the last 4 weeks.) Witness iTunes becoming social software?” I’m not convinced myself;

  • Time magazine talks to Steve
    And Steve says, “This is really hard. Over the last several years we’ve created an infrastructure to pump oceans of bits out in the world for movie trailers and stuff, and that’s tens of millions of dollars for server farms and networking farms ? it’s huge ? and we’ve already got that in place. And to have millions of transactions, and to get our online store all tied into SAP and have the auditors bless it, that’s tens of millions of dollars…” [Is $1 too much for a track?]

  • Credit Card Micropayments
    A really interesting article on how Apple may have made micropayments economically viable… “So Apple’s new music store sells songs for 99ยข per track. That sounds suspiciously like a micropayment (or at least a “minipayment”) system to me. Somehow, Apple is pulling it off using the traditional credit card system. Everyone knows your profit margin is eaten alive in transaction fees for multiple small credit card purchases. So how is Apple doing it? I think I know.”
Categories
Random

Shaving's for girls…

shavings_for_girls.jpg

Shaving your facial hair is, as they say, for girls… And before you start – I do not look like a tramp, and I’m trying to get more sleep…

Categories
Personal Publishing

Andrew Orlowski is a weblogger…

So a few days ago William Gibson announced that he was giving up weblogging (at least for the moment) because he had a book to write. Wired talked to him about it:

Gibson began his weblog this year in early January. He has posted entries on an almost daily basis, barring sporadic periods when he has been on a reading tour for his latest novel, Pattern Recognition. Gibson is currently winding up the book tour in Ireland and Britain. Once it is over, he’ll end the weblog, he says. “I have to go do whatever it is I do, to find the next novel,” he said. “Writing novels is pretty solitary, and blogging is very social.” Fans have flocked to the relatively reclusive author’s site for insights into his novels and for his crisp observations on a plethora of topics.

So to summarise – he enjoys weblogging, finds it useful and interesting, enjoys the contact with his readers, who also enjoy reading his site where he makes ‘crisp observations on a plethora of topics’.

Noted Register troll Andrew Orlowski had a rather different take on the whole thing, however. While lauding Gibson’s skill as a writer to hyperbolic levels, he decided to give his opinion about his second-favourite author’s decision:

Gibson told Lillington that the daily confessional might ruin his creative process. He’s quite right to think so. He’s an artist, which means he collects and refines ideas over time, and has a gift for organizing his language to maximal effect. Put another way, he chooses his words carefully, and he chooses the contexts in which they will have most impact. (Optimizing compiler writers will understand what we mean – blabbing webloggers probably won’t).

Now obviously I don’t have any interest in pointing out that Gibson specifically talks about starting up his weblog again after writing the book, and that he’s found substantial value in it. There’s no point in debating the finer points of journalism here, because Andrew’s piece actually has no journalism in it at all. At best he writes Opinion editorials – writing that drips with his own personal (and I believe ill-thought-through) opinions and vengeful grumpiness towards the weirdly elitist, powerful, Google-manipulating (and yet trivial, impotent and babbling) cabals of weblogging culture.

Intriguingly this leaves me looking at his piece with a newfound insight – because it seems to me that the natural home of personal opinion of this kind on the internet would seem to be the weblog rather than an online magazine. In fact, if you look at it closely, it’s difficult to work out if anything really is different between the stuff that Andrew writes on the Register and the stuff that I write on plasticbag.org. When you come right down to it, what is the difference between the way Andrew presents his opinions and the opinions of the tens of thousands of webloggers around the net?

I can only see three significant differences. Firstly, Andrew’s weblog is published on TheRegister.com – which purports to be a ‘serious’ publisher. Secondly, he probably gets paid for it. And finally, most webloggers I know are rather better at spelling and grammar than he is.

In fact – rather than just declare Andrew a weblogger, I think we should go further. Andrew’s writing style, hawkish vocabulary, obsession with his own interpretation of events and unwillingness to listen to opposing viewpoints seem to me almost totally comparable a very specific subset of weblogging. It’s terrifyingly similar to the rabid opinion-mongering seen in warblogging’s least salubrious ghettoes (the subset of that noble faction that continually puts ideology before evidence and force of argument ahead of plausibility or logical debate). In fact, let me make this totally clear – not only is Andrew Orlowski a weblogger in all but name, he’s also not a very good one…

Categories
Random

Just look away…

This post isn’t meant for you people. Just go on – sod off. It’s important that I have some kind of record of this stuff for the years ahead when I’m all old and insane and bitter and… Hmm… Sounds an awful lot like now, actually…

I’m going to end with two appeals – could anyone who’s out there who got pictures of ETCon stick a link to them in the comments (below) and while we’re at it – there’s been talk about how many women were at the event. It’s a legitimate question, but I’d be equally interested to know how many gay men and women were there… If you want to make yourself known, there’s a whole lotta comments facility just begging to be used…

Categories
Random

London from the air…

When flying back over London, Webb took this picture with my camera… At the bottom, the Millennium Dome. Towards the top-right, Canary Wharf…

London-from-the-air.jpg

Categories
Social Software

Writing a Hydra Conference Template…

During the second-to-last presentation I attended at ETCon, I decided it was about time to try and drag the format of the collective annotations into some kind of order. There’s a certain amount of pleasure lost by overly structuring these things, but it was beginning to become clear that some people had such different levels of collaborative expertise that having a workable template to start off with might actually be a tremendously useful first step. I think I would expect any group of people who used Hydra regularly to swiftly find their own best model of working. But in the meantime: Hydra_Conference_Template.txt

Anyway – I thought I’d go through some of the basic decisions I made in producing this first draft. If people want to take it stage further and work to adapt it more or push it in a different direction, then they should feel free to do so…

  • The template is seventy characters wide, which should mean that it can be easily copied and pasted into an e-mail without wrapping (and may even survive being indented if that e-mail is forwarded);
  • All headings / headlines are in upper-case, because that’s the least likely format for all subsequent text to be formatted in. That means they should be easy to visually navigate;
  • All ‘variables’ (ie. placeholders for information that will be added during the proceedings) are spaced with and surrounded by underscores. This makes it clear that they are a distinct kind of content, but more importantly means that a simple double-click in Hydra will select the whole variable allowing it to be replaced quickly;
  • Instructions / tool-tips on how to use the template are surrounded by curly brackets again to distinguish them from characters that people are actually likely to utilise in the course of their annotations;
  • All sections that could contain content with variable line-lengths have some initial space provided. This is for two main reasons – (1) so that people don’t have to start each annotation process by creating space which is time-consuming and can result in people over-writing one another in very busy sessions and (2) to make it clear immediately where user-generated content is supposed to be positioned;
  • The distinction between real-time notes and references is quite arbitrary, except that it allows individuals to take on different roles through a presentation – one can decide to create an outline, others can annotate that outline, and one final one can decide merely to note down all references, or find articles online that support or refute the case being made on stage;
  • There are two sections for putting information about yourself on the template. The first is for contributors and asks that people put in substantial information about themselves (they deserve to be contactable and the information they provide here can act as a kind of authority eg. “Oh it’s someone from Google commenting on this presentation about search engines- it’s probably worth reading…”)
  • The second information section is the e-mail bounce-back. This is so that once the presentation is over and all the annotations have been completed, the owner of the Hydra document can easily send the paper to anyone who’s demonstrated interest. This is different from contributors for these reasons:
    • Someone may be merely a spectator and not a contributor (this is not uncommon – people can get multiple information streams concurrently and there’s value in getting a commentary, even if you don’t decide to add your own input);
    • Someone may wish to add the names of other interested parties who were not party to the initial process;
    • While it’s important to get information about contributors, actually having a whole range of information can present some trouble. Imagine trying to send out the document to all the participants and finding that to do so you had to cut and paste each e-mail address individually. If there are twenty contributors, this would become tedious quite quickly. But if there is a separate field where e-mail addresses are just inserted serially with commas in-between, then the whole list can just be cut-and-pasted into a TO: field and the document sent off immediately. Much neater… Much less annoying…
  • The copyright notice is more of a placeholder than a formal declaration, but since it becomes impossible after the document has been closed in Hydra to see who wrote what, it seems impossible to actually enforce anyone who insists that hey wrote one particular part of the document. Someone more legally minded should probably look at that stuff. A Creative Commons license – in this case – would probably be a pretty good thing to apply here…

I’d be interested to hear the thoughts of anyone who has actively used this template in a conference situation. It’s simple, but I think it’s clear and hopefully some other people will find some utility in it…