Where’s the humanity in social software?
As a few others have pointed out, the current excitement over “social software” is somewhat odd because this group is hardly the first to discover many of the issues they’re tackling. Maybe I’m not looking hard enough, but I see little evidence that they’re building on the work of fields such as computer-supported cooperative work, computer-mediated communication, and social informatics, all of which have which have been around in name since the 80s hashing over many of the same issues with which social software now tackles.
Furthermore, as Matt Jones states, the tech concerns of social software seem to be overriding the human-centered concerns. One might argue that it’s a different approach to design - build the infrastructure, then let everybody tinker - but that still seems like engineering/requirements-driven design rather than design informed by human behavior and needs.
Here’s a post from Tanya with links to several good introductions on social informatics. She also mentions another article that contains a good overview of computer-supported cooperative work and also discusses ethnography, library and information science, computer-mediated communication, and computer-supported cooperative learning. Other approaches like social computing also come to mind, and I’m sure social scientists would have more to add as well.
In the end, I guess I don’t have a problem with people rallying around a new name - this is about group-forming, and new groups love to recognize/differentiate themselves with names - but it’s distressing to see decisions made that either aren’t informed by previous research or are made in the interest of technology without thinking long and hard about the human issues first.
Brian Dear said,
June 2, 2003 @ 10 pm
Amen to that. But it’s even worse than you think. The level of ignorance about what’s been done in the past, what’s been discovered to work and not work so well, is pretty profound. I’m writing a book about the history of one system most people have completely forgotten — PLATO — yet this system is one of the seminal influencers for the whole field of social software, CSCW, and groupware. Heck, Lotus Notes emerged right out of PLATO, as Ray Ozzie says every time he talks about his background. (See http://www.platopeople.com for more on my book project.)