Shirky: Social Software and the Politics of Groups - 0 views
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One of the few commonalities in this big category is that social software is unique to the internet in a way that software for broadcast or personal communications are not.
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we had almost nothing that supported conversation among many people at once
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The radical change was de-coupling groups in space and time
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groups are entities in their own right. A group of people interacting with one another will exhibit behaviors that cannot be predicted by examining the individuals in isolation, peculiarly social effects like flaming and trolling or concerns about trust and reputation.
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ended with the rise of the Web in the early 1990
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three assumptions
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they could be of any size; anyone should be able to join them; and the freedom of the individual is more important than the goals of the community.
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most of the work on mailing list software has been around making it easier to set up and administer, rather than making it easier for the group using the software to accomplish anything
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enforceable community norms that constrain individual freedoms
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Social interaction creates a tension between the individual and the group
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tension between personal goals and group norms arises at some point in most groups
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Social software is political science in executable form.
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we have a much better idea of how to improve user experience than group experience, and a much better idea of how to design interfaces than constitutions
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many of the communities that have done well have bounded size
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features for mailing lists are not that different from the original LISTSERV program in 1985.
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We have historically overestimated the value of network access to computers, and underestimated the value of network access to other people, so we have spent much more time on the technical rather than social problems of software used by groups.
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Over the last several years, the importance of user experience, user testing, and user feedback have become obvious, but we have very little sense of group experience, group testing, or group feedback.
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"How can we test good group experience?"
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software may be harming the group goal by encouraging tangents rather than focus.
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If a group has a goal, how can we understand the way the software supports that goal?
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conditions that foster good group work
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may well upset some of the individual participants.
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methods for soliciting user feedback assume, usually implicitly, that the individual's reaction to the software is the critical factor
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tilts software and interface design towards single-user assumptions, even when the software's most important user is a group.
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"What kind of barriers work best?
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a membrane separating the group from the rest of the world
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energy required to join
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getting a sponsor
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acquiring a password or key
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Sometimes the membrane is binary
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Sometimes its gradiated and internal
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Can we produce diagrams of social networks in real time, so the participants in a large group can be aware of conversational clusters as they are forming?
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thousands of other questions
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Published in 2003 (OLD) Ways in which social software(conversations among many people at once) is new & unique & the issues this raises - how these may differ from individual user issues & the social tensions created between the individual & the group. "Socail software is political science in executable form," 3 big issues 1.) size/ size limits 2.) boundaries/barriers - open/invitational 3.) goal of the community - enforcing norms that counter individual freedoms Groups de-coupled from space & time Historically emphasis on technical access rather than access to each other How can we test good group experience? "If a group has a goal, how can we understand the way the software support that goal?"