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. 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:
- The suggestion that the web should represent a shift or collapse in "identity"
- The need to prove purity of 'online culture' by foregrounding immersive MUDs and MOOs
- 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...
Comments
Please stay on-topic, informative and polite. I reserve the right to remove comments for whatever vague capricious reasons seem reasonable at the time.
I wouldn't worry so much about the shifting sands of fashion. There will always be the quiet undercurrent that continues to develop the better answer. While history has shown this does not necessarily mean the better answer wins, on the Internet at least we have the advantage of keeping our efforts persistent for longer periods--proviso we try--and that means maybe one day we can ratchet ourselves forward, even in the long now. It gives me great satisfaction to believe that MeatballWiki will still be around in fifty years after all today's blogs have died.
When I started MeatballWiki almost three years ago, my goal was to create a holistic pattern language of social interaction. I started by cataloguing the historical uses online. I've since learnt that the rather short history of online communication speaks only very little--an important little, but little nonetheless--towards the problem of how to improve social interaction with the network. By studying the history of human interaction, I think we could learn a lot more about the future than by studying our imaginations. Human nature is about the only thing that hasn't changed all that much in five thousand years.
Anytime someone says to you that everything is going to change, they're of course lying (to you or to themselves). Sometimes it's exciting to believe you're at the cusp of the future, but we're always at the cusp of the future. I heard today that Albert Camus pointed out that the best way to contribute to the future is to give everything to the present, and I have to add the corollary that the only way to give everything to the present is to understand how we got here. I say the "post-WELL" environment we are in now in 2003 is a simple return to daily life. And speaking of which, I have some hacking to do on UseModWiki's new translator, so no more waxing eloquent.
→ Posted by: Sunir Shah at January 8, 2003 3:14 AM
I went to a lecture recently where Richard Stallman was talking about copyright in the digital age and he started by saying one really interesting thing. Basically it can be summarised as:
Changes in technology do not change fundamental ethics, but ethical decisions may have radically different consequences in context.
ie. Ethics remains the same but the way in which technology brings some elements to the fore or pushes them back into irrelevancy depends on technology. It's very easy to confuse our current historical mode of 'being ethical' with the underlying nature of 'being ethical', because while the former is a child of the latter, they are very much not the same. I think the same is probably true about 'being human'. If we can dislocate ourselves up and out of our preconceived notions of human behaviour then we might be able to find a 'deep grammar' of interaction that allows us to make more transformative technologies...
→ Posted by: Tom Coates at January 10, 2003 9:25 AM
"If we can dislocate ourselves up and out of our preconceived notions of human behaviour then we can..."
As if this urge was itself a new idea. It's so critical for designers, programmers, or whomever to realize that new technologies don't confer on us any special perceptive abilities; i.e., if those who've come before us in many fields haven't been able to "dislocate" themselves out of their own preconceived notions of human behavior, why in the world would we be able to do it? (Unless you're thinking of someone in particular?)
→ Posted by: Andrew at January 10, 2003 5:36 PM
First things first, I'm not claiming any new ideas or insights here - I'm just combining them in different ways or bringing them to the attention of new and emergent communities. Secondly, I think the point I was making was that there's a tension between contingency and essentialism - and that that's what we explore. You say that 'if those who've come before us in many fields haven't been able to 'dislocate' themselves out of their own preconceived notions of human behaviour, why in the world would we be able to do it', but I would argue that that process has actually happened many hundreds of thousands of times over the years. It's the sense of being able to pull ourselves out of PRECONCEIVED ideas that I'm talking about - not dislocating ourselves from 'being human'.
The hope is that we work around the facilitation of fundamental human instincts and skills - we work to augment those, facilitate those interactions and help compensate for an overload that such a process might engender. But we can't' confuse our current perception of the limits or instincts of humanity - which will tend to be inherently meshed in with our understanding of our place in relationship to current technology and culture - to what the actual potential might be. A comparable example - a few hundred yeras ago it was believed that human beings couldn't survive when travelling over 30mph. The fact that those perceived limits were innaccurate does not undermine the fact that the human body does have limitations. What those limitations might be (and how they might be changed, compensated for or removed) is essentially why we are here...
→ Posted by: Tom Coates at January 11, 2003 8:04 PM
Here here, Tom! The point you've made picks up on one of my most consistent complaints about non-technical new-technology evangelists - the fact that they're often guilty of throwing entire maternity wards out with the bathwater because they're not sufficiently knowledgable about issues they're dissing. Discussion groups like emint agonise about how to make online communities functions smoothly. They realise that a single button placement can be the difference between an easy, enjoyable forum experience with a vibrant community, and a nightmare that you give up on in 15 seconds. Those who are more ignorant of the issues assume that any problem they once had logging into a bulliten board was in fact symptomatic of a heretoforth unnoticed structural flaw in the whole of BBS systems! Which then (handily) signifies the need for a new paradigm! And a new book!
So, as you rightly suggest, the idea then spreads that the current generation of technologies 'isn't easy enough for the big time'. Instead we need new technologies which, unsurprisingly, are SO COOL that can only be expressed using lots of words like 'paradigm' and 'holistic user experience'. This is because the writers really don't have a clue how to make it work, or even how to keep an IRC chan with 5 people in it interested.
Meanwhile, the real builders of the next generation - such as the authors of vBulliten or upmystreet.com , just keep quietly improving their products, drawing people in, integrating, ammassing and expanding, slowly involving more and more real web users. They've already captured a huge proportortion of all the people online looking for any kind of help or assistance with any kind of issues - no small feat.
Let's be honest - we don't need a totally new kind of social software. We just need steady improvement to what we have, and more channels of access to it. The ideas are already so good they've transformed the lives of people engaged deeply in online communities. They will keep doing so if we don't abandon the path of incremental improvement in favour of the pursuit of radical bollocks.
PS: For a completely analagous situation - check out the foul mouthed rant I added as a comment to the end of this post about an 'intellectual' view of gaming.
http://www.theisociety.net/archives/000448.html
→ Posted by: Tom Steinberg at February 27, 2003 12:55 AM
Great observations, I've been bothered by some of the same things. There seems to be a serious regression in the conversation quality now that people spend all their time blogging instead of talking on boards and lists.
Posted more on my site.
And of course that's a perfect example of one problem with blogs, they are structured to fragment the conversation onto dozens of sites, making it hard, if not impossible, to follow along.
→ Posted by: William Blaze at April 10, 2003 12:23 AM
The troll-friendly wiki is one of the best proposals for how to deal with political excesses of fascism among social software sysops.
→ Posted by: trolls at May 31, 2004 5:35 PM