Social Super-Orders?

Posted May 3, 2004 11:06 PM.

Really briefly, there's a fascinating and short post over at zephoria called Social Technology from MPD to Aspergers in which Danah says:

I have a funny feeling that social technology is back to developing software based on disorders and instigating new ones in people. Only, we've move away from schizophrenia and onto autism. Did you ever get the sneaking suspicion that this new wave of "social software" is not really making social life easier, but permitting the kind of social awkwardness that is recognized in Asperger's?

Having read this I started to wonder to myself whether or not our attempts to gradually improve of ways of socially interacting online would see us pass through a whole range of psychological disorders. Perhaps the limits and barriers to social interaction and identity online really do have very clear offline parallels. Perhaps we won't be able to enable truly effective collaborative online spaces until we've finally started modelling or facilitating these social encounters effectively. And maybe then the various new affordances of the internet will truly come into their own. But what will we have then? I'll tell you what! A new form of ultra-enabled socially superordered men and women - their prosthetic social enhancements compensating for and transforming any individual awkwardness into truly collaborative endeavours?