Seen the article in the Grauniad today? (link)

→ Posted by: jen at May 8, 2003 1:53 PM

Several people sent me pointers to this, so I thought I would offer a few resources for those who are inclined to look at the historical roots of this new phenomena. First, I applaud the reference to Engelbart, because the social aspects of computer augmentation was very much on his mind as early as the 1950s. I wrote about that in 1985 (link). At that time, and in many conversations since then, Engelbart stressed that his originally framework for augmentation included "humans, using language, artifacts, methodology, and training," although most emphasis by most people in the intervening decades has been on the visible part, the artifacts. In that sense, the emphasis on social software today is (or ought to be, in my opinion) a reminder that the real capabilities of augmentation lies not in the hardware or software but in the thinking and communication practices these tools enable. Of course, in 1993 -- hard to believe it was a decade ago, I wrote about the Well, BBSs, Usenet, Muds, IRC, etc. in The Virtual Community. So much verbiage has flowed around the notion of "community" in this context that it doesn't make a lot of sense to rehash it now. I would only note that when a particular group of people uses social software for long enough -- whether it is synchronous or asynchronous, deskbound or mobile, text or graphical -- they establish individual and group social relationships that are different in kind from the more fleeting relationships that emerge from task-oriented group formation. Although the enterprise of Electric Minds is long forgotten, I talked a lot about "the social web" in 1986-87. The original conversations are gone, but a snapshot of Electric Minds exists here. http://www.abbedon.com/electricminds/html/home.html In 2001, I updated "The Virtual Community" with a new chapter that went into detail about the community debate and brought in the notion of social networks (here) and three years ago, Lisa Kimball and I wrote about the advantages to enterprises of establishing Online Social Networks (here). And of course many others from the social sciences, political science, and the technology side have studied and written about the way people use computer-mediated communications in teams, group formation, and social networks. Certainly, we have much more to learn. And I applaud the reinvigoration of interest in a phenomena that popped up just as soon as people could send email to distribution lists (HUMAN-NETS was one of the oldest: link) I think the emerging field would do well to acknowledge and build on this earlier work. Something new is happening, truly, in terms of the kinds of software available, and the scale of use. But in many ways, this something new would not be happening if many people over many years had not coded, experimented, socialized, observed, and debated the social relationships and group formation enabled by computer-mediated and Internet-enabled communication media.

→ Posted by: Howard Rheingold at May 8, 2003 6:02 PM

Definitely - from my perspective the concept of social software is either an extension of the work in online communities that has been done over the last several decades or an attempt to recontextualise that work in light of several intriguing leaps of some kinds of socialising software into the semi-mainstream. The field is looking more creative now than I think it has since the web achieved dominance in the early 1990s when the internet gradually came to be associated more with publishing than with interaction and social activity...

→ Posted by: Tom Coates at May 8, 2003 6:17 PM

Augmentation is a tool analogy: we seek to increase our leverage, to channel our power. But social software should also refer to process interfaces that subsume the mere individual, like elections or the economy, or say, software that indexes our online presence and reports a (false) consensus while we remain passive. Social software might not remove any limitations on behaviour or compensate for human inadequacies, but only acknowledge or take advantage of them. I agree with your values for design goals, but if you want to harness emergent processes your definition should be neutral with regard to personal control and include the possibility that such processes may be blind. (Blind from the process point of view; to have unseen influences from ours.) This is important as the phenomenon grows: as we become "fully delegated" to processes we can't comprehend.

→ Posted by: Rick Thomas at May 8, 2003 6:29 PM

The tool analogy that Rick points out is worth keeping in mind, because it does condition the way we think. Nardi and O'Day point out in their book, "Information Ecologies," that computer-mediated communication and other computer-aided activities are seen differently if they are regarded as a tool (one grasps tools and wields them) or a medium (one or many use a medium as a channel for social connection or information exchange) or an ecology (read what they say about it here. for more detail, but they briefly note: "We define an information ecology to be a system of people, practices, values, and technologies in a particular local environment. In information ecologies, the spotlight is not on technology, but on human activities that are served by technology.")

Engelbart's original goal was to find ways for humans to better solve the complex problems that our own civilization, knowledge, science, and technology have created for us. In 1950, he saw that these problems were growing more and more complex. So he saw computers and screens and voice media as part of an entire "ecology," although he didn't use that term (and of course it wasn't in common usage then) that would enable teams of people to work together more effectively. He didn't really talk about emergent effects, but his emphasis on "bootstrapping" came from his conviction that when people work with new symbol-manipulating media, it changes how they think and communicate, and their changed thinking and communication can, if properly supported, lead to improved media and practices. He's still talking about that necessity today (bootstrap.org). In that regard, I think the emphasis in the social software movement today on affording emergent social phenomena is an important complement to the more engineering-design oriented approach of bootstrapping. The two approaches, ultimately, need to integrate.

BTW, I thought some more about my first post here, and blogged it here.

→ Posted by: Howard Rheingold at May 8, 2003 7:01 PM

Thanks Tom for the interesting post - and I did begin to comment on it this morning, but might add a few thoughts here after reading Rick's and Howard's comments.

Engelbart's idea of augmentation is indeed a tool or engineering analogy - but one that specifically advocated a functional systems approach to humanity in terms of increased efficiency and productivity. In this respect, not only was it meant to help us solve problems we had created for ourselves, it also naturalised the notion that efficiency and productivity are among the ultimate goals of civilisation. And clearly, that sort of thinking is historically and politically located within capitalism and industrialisation. (Arguably, Engelbart's own history of growing up during the Depression and later working within the military industrial complex greatly influenced his models for computing.)

I think we need to be very careful about assuming that technology (objects-in-themselves) can "remove limitations" or "compensate for human inadequacies" - here is where Nardi and O'Day's ecological metaphor becomes more useful as it repositions technology within broader socio-cultural spheres of interaction - since some of these limitations and inadequacies can just as easily be advantages and strengths.

→ Posted by: Anne at May 8, 2003 8:55 PM

I agree with your practical analysis, Anne, and I think we should be careful not to create unrealistic expectations for social technologies.

What has changed - I think via the evolution of the weblog - is the sense that conversations were encapsulated by technology (inside forums, chat rooms, etc.). We're beginning to build technologies that expose conversations. We're evolving a more public social ecology.

→ Posted by: Jon Lebkowsky at May 8, 2003 10:08 PM

Anne - I think you're right of course, but at the same time one of the wonders of the current spate of thinking around this area is that there are a wide variety of different collaborative models emerging at the moment - there's some really fertile thinking happening. And I think that - at least at the broad-strokes levels that we're operating with at the moment - the utility or otherwise of various human attributes that we consider inadequacies at present will emerge in this space of play... Broadening our sense of the implications of our models is enough for me (if only because I'm not sure that any of us get to decide which technologies will manifest or leap into the mainstream).

→ Posted by: Tom Coates at May 8, 2003 10:13 PM

This "social software" business seems to be one of those ill-understood hodgepodges that mean anything that the speakers variously want it to mean. For instance:

   - a continuation of the BBS cultures chronicled in Boardwatch magazine last decade before it became an ISP trade rag. Except note that those cultures were not driven only by discussion board s/w design, but also by conection and networking regimes, connection speeds, "local dial-up" geometries, etc., etc. "Software" per se, as computer code, played only a part in this, and was not determinative of things overall.

   This was a "social, network-and-computer-mediated environment", not a "social-software mediated environment." No one designed around all the non-software elements via software only. It just didn't work that way then, and can it really work that way now?

   - I don't generally participate in discussions here. I note a rather chilling feeling of "software" as some kind of intentionally designed add-on to the human mind, and a lot of grandiose notions of manipulating dynamics of groups of human beings.

   Why not do things more simply? e.g., If there is some problem with holding three way conversations in standard linear form, (as opposed to the possibility of some sort of "trialectical" form), AND if people are fascinated by the possibility of being able to hold such conversations in more entertaining ways, then just design discussion software to support that functionality, and let the rest of it develop (I hate this word, but will use it anyway) "organically", in a continuous-feedback development process.

   It's the difference between "possibility-opening" design, and "possibility-determinative" design. The former is like life itself. The latter is the same old humanoid hubris, as if living beings could be encapsulated in small bubbles of ideas.

   - Why aren't traditional architects at the forefront of this field? They're the ones who have studied this topic to death. Or, if you want to say this is really about technology and media effects, then where are those working in the tradition of McLuhan?

   - How about bringing the work of Henri LeFebvre into this discussion? I haven't read "The Production of Space", but it's theme - architecture as a reflection, and implementation, of the structure of society - would seem to be on point. His last work, "Elements of Rhythmanalysis" brings his approach to rhythm as reflector and determinant of society, and should be available in English next year.

   - This grandiose vision of designable "social software", without benefit of being fit into the larger historical and world patterns that (believe it or not) engulf "the computer phenomenon", runs the risk of being so conceptually tunnelvisionized that it could easily result - quite apart from whatever the narrow "intention" might have been - in all kinds of new constrictive human control regimes.

   - Last note: I saw a comment of "productivity" and "efficiency" as primary goals. Huh? Efficiency at doing what? Nature does not even work that way. Those of God's creatures/species that survive in any given environment (yay, I connected with the "ecology" theme) are not necessarily optimized in terms of the aspects of efficiency and productivity of their bodily operations. Those aspects work "well enough for survival", but not necessarily one whit, jot or tittle better.

   With better energy sources/distribution (i.e., what if cold fusion worked, etc.), I doubt any of us would be heard uttering "productivity and efficiency", except for the artists . "Productivity and efficiency" are not goals, they are never more than a measure of constraints.

→ Posted by: Lance Rose at May 9, 2003 2:37 AM

Sorry about that double-post. When I posted, the site came back at me with some sort of "server error" page, which is what prompted me to post again. Is that "server error" response a normal feature/bug around here?

Anyway, let me repeat: the Architects are all over "social software" already. It's what they do every day.

The designs of public spaces shape the worlds of the people who move through them. Everyone builds internal models of these spaces, as a natural concomitant of the need to move through them without crashing into things too often. These rigorously constructed models then create the basis for shared perceptions in a shared social world.

These models of physical 4D spaces are models in software - the software of mind and language, at the practical level. Architects have worked this field forever and a day.

One reason I bring this up is that the work of architects as "social software" designers has been relatively benign over the centuries. Not absolutely benign, of course not - just today, in a book on Frida Kahlo, I noticed a comment, attributed to a mid-century Marxist, that Frank Lloyd Wright was "against the people" because his expansive, low-set building style spread people out over the land.

But compare this to the sort of "social software" being bandied about here, where the action of psychological cues on the minds of users hunched over their screens can be used to hit fairly deep neurological buttons, fairly directly. This is a highly determinative molding of the brain-computer interlock, locking us into tight perceptual loops. It reminds me of the 2nd X-Men movie that I just saw: we are each Professor Xavier, powerful of mind but nonetheless helplessly lost in delusion, because sitting right behind us in his own wheelchair is Jason Stryker, architect of the software environment within which Professor X is trapped.

All that said, back around '92 or so I was fascinated by the possibilities of differently shaped online discussion areas. And even, what it means for such things to have "shapes."

→ Posted by: Lance Rose at May 9, 2003 6:20 AM

Lance - I don't think it's at all obvious that architects are doing the same job as a social software designer - unless you really are pushing the metaphors of 'social spaces'. That's not to say that they don't have an input here, but I can think of a variety of other kinds of designers that work with the interactions of more than one person simultaneously - politicians and game theorists for example. When we talk about efficiencies or inefficiencies - often we're talking about very specific cases where there is a clear goal. If a piece of software is designed to facilitate decision-making - say - then you can structure it to force steps along the way. This is no more arcane or ludicrous than having an election system to decide our political leaders or having an agenda for a meeting. I think we do ourselves a disservice if we conflate social software design with architecture while leaving out people working in HCI, CMC, group psychology, politics etc...

→ Posted by: Tom Coates at May 9, 2003 9:56 AM

Jon - good points, thanks. And while I agree that a more public social ecology is emerging, it is a public like the Greek agora, a forum for only some members of society ... Also, without wanting to be too picky ;) I might suggest that technologies are not exposing conversations as much as they are helping to create them.

Tom - you are, of course, right to point out the variety of possible approaches - there's some brilliant work being done! And it has always, and only, been a small group of scholars interested in the more "meta" implications ... I'm just grateful that the question has been asked in any form ;) Because the history of computing is so intimately connected to cybernetics and cognitive (psychological) models, the social and cultural are often overlooked.

And Lance - actually I didn't say anything about efficiency and productivity being the goals of social software ;) I brought it up in relation to Engelbart's work and historical understandings of "civilisation" ...

→ Posted by: Anne Galloway at May 9, 2003 2:12 PM

I've gotta leave it to the master of ceremonies (the MC) about who I (or anybody else) am "doing a disservice" to (or as any MC would say today, "dissing"). That rhetoric makes this whole thing look like "we're in on the "ground floor of a Gol. . . . den Opportunity", as in The Producers.
   [As an aside, why hold this highbrow discussion of "social software" using a discussion board system that can't even deal with line breaks or paragraph breaks???? Thoughts need to be bent and changed here to handle the lack of paragraph breaking.]

   As to architects - frankly, I think you guys are doing THEM the disservice. Software dudes retreating behind invisible, yet opaque, walls of software system design to proclaim themselves the grand designers, while abandoning a tradition of social space design measured in thousands (yes, that's thousands) of years. It's the kind of "now is all that counts" social/historical amnesia that plagues everything these days, especially in California . In the meantime, defensive maneuvers aside, how many politicians and game theorists have looked to the traditions of architecture for material on designing social software? How many of you have done so? I submit that those who do gulp from that fountain may get the competitive edge within this Golden Opportunity.

   Here's some more social software: language itself. Primal, primordial Language. It programs us, it gives us our mental worlds, and in many cases, we never escape its total control. Those designing "social software" are at great risk of designing within their own unquestioned presumptions about language. So the subject of social software design (isn't it interesting how we refer to these people as "subjects", while they're really being perceived and treated as if they're "objects"?)

   We end up with levels and levels of illusion. The illusions of our biology; the illusions of language; the illusions of the family; the illusions of the tribe; the illusions of organized religion; the illusions of the print-propagated ideas of civilization; the illusions of mass media/virtual reality; and now, the illusion of social software design. That's a veddy, veddy grand layer cake, Monsignor. I'm lost in the frosting. How about an illusion decoder ring?

→ Posted by: Lance Rose at May 9, 2003 4:22 PM

I'm pretty new to this stuff, but as a facilitator of Open Space Technology meetings, I'm really interested in the way face to face networked conversations handshake with social software. Coming at the problem from the other side maybe? I've posted some more thoughts with links that work here.

→ Posted by: Chris Corrigan at May 9, 2003 7:40 PM

I've put up some thoughts, not so much about this, but inspired by it... iSociety

→ Posted by: Will Davies at May 10, 2003 12:16 PM

Wow, Lance, you're definitely on a roll here. My own sense of 'social software' is that it emerges from a realization of something you and Howard and I have known for years, that the real value of computer networks is in their ability to bring people together and facilitate collaboration.

   For the half decade or so from '93 to '98, on Internet as facility for publishing, for commerce, for data interchange - you rightly noted that the 'net is not a medium, but an environment in which many kinds of media may exist at the edges. To extend your architectural metaphor, this new - or I would say renewed - emphasis on social software seems to me to focus less on structured space ("buildings") and more on open space (the agora, as Anne mentions above). Developers in this space aren't looking for ways to manipulate - they're creating more and better ways to connect and collaborate.

   And you really can break paragraphs here.

→ Posted by: Jon Lebkowsky at May 10, 2003 12:36 PM

Lance - I think you'll find that a hell of a lot of people are working with architects on this kind of thing. No one disputes the value that architects can bring into this field. On the other hand, there are a lot of false assumptions that they can bring in as well. We may use spatial metaphors a lot, but they are metaphors, we may talk about cyberspace, but you know full well that that space isn't the same as physical space. I repeat - suggesting architects have an obvious superiority when it comes to designing non-spatial, non-geographical ways of helping groups of people interact with each other socially is not obvious. Otherwise architects would be designing political systems, designing meeting agendas, designing teleconferencing equipment and the like.

   Dealing with your aside for a moment - the reason we are having this discussion here on this part of my weblog is because in this case I started the conversation. The reasons that it doesn't work in quite the way you want it to are several-fold - firstly because Movable Type which I use to run my weblog isn't absolutely perfect in every way, and doesn't run perfectly on my server. Secondly, I don't have the time to design and build bespoke solutions to all my weblogging needs. Thirdly, because for a variety of reasons, I've turned off several of the options concerning formatting. If you want to insert line breaks or paragraph breaks at the moment you have to do it manually - but I'd ask you not to. And links also work - but I'd rather people wrote them in HTML than cut and pasted them into the page.

   Finally, and importantly from my perspective, while I have a significant - and long-term - interest in the cultural effects of online community work / social software, I don't believe that a single paradigm is likely to emerge, nor do I think that building a piece of social software is commensurate with developing an over-arching software-mediated-state online. As such, I have a certain amount of faith in the ability of people to create a wide spectrum of interesting models that will either catch on or not catch on - perhaps concentrating on different fields or kinds of interactions, perhaps interoperating with each other (and perhaps not). Perhaps here we have another example of the differences between physical architects and social software designers - when the former builds something they know that it's going to have a massive and singular impact on a large number of people and those around them for the next thirty to three hundred years. If it doesn't work - if it imposes an unliveable and oppressive ideology on the people within it - then it's disasterous. The product cycle in software is much faster and more fluid - the unworkable paradigms collapse through lack of use, the workable ones multiple exponentially and immediately with little replication cost. Let's build things we believe to be of value to people and see which ones they take hold of and use...

→ Posted by: Tom Coates at May 10, 2003 2:26 PM

what's this reading of *Production of Space* that nobody's read? I dug around for my copy but must have sold it--forgive me, I had to eat. At the time I was into Bourdieu, so if you happen to pick up my old copy somewhere, the underlined passages should articulate with his (Bourdieu's) theory of practice. IIRC the book's not about architecture as a profession or architects per se, but rather it's more of a Marxist/Structuralist reading and preliminary deconstruction of the relations embodied in built environments. Think of Panofsky's seminal Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, updated and focused on everyday kinds of spaces.

Lance, it's good of you to admonish the designers of social software to question their assumptions about language. What are yours? Here's one of mine: Language is essentially about relations; the best metaphor for that is the metaphor. Architecture and tool use and ecosystems are interesting metaphors for the software designer, but in and of themselves they may be uninteresting and safely disregarded when they are not needed.

Now Bush's memex that H. Rheingold wrote of is sounds neato, but it ain't going to keep people from talking about works they haven't read or grossly misread or partially misread and completely misremembered; and, more crucially, it's going to take a long time for the memex to realize its potential and overcome the limitations stemming from the relations of production characteristic of print capitalism. Yeah, I'm whining. But think about it. What's keeping us from hyperlinking Lefebvre? Well, we can of course, but what we get is fragmentary and not ideal, not Bush's ideal to be sure. The problem for the developers of social software is how to deal with the hyperfragmentation of cultural memory, whether to work in the marginal spaces of print capitalism, where communities do indeed emerge, organically as it were--but what are their properties, their temporal and spatial spans?--or whether to focus on more "authentic" nascent communities that presumably will form the basis of knowledge systems in the latter half of this XXI Century. Because the social dynamics are not the same, and neither is the code. I think you can come up with your own examples from the blogosphere, bloggers who link to subscription services, the colonial outposts of the print media, and who may themselves be employed or peripherally involved in print media, vs. forums where information flows more freel--and the noise! Either way, the need is to develop tools, architectures, environments that sustain and nourish coherence, knowing that in the not too distant future this will be taken for granted and need not be remembered. (Losing my point....)

Peace out.

→ Posted by: shawn at May 11, 2003 9:41 PM

Social software is a self-referential term if software is to be a placeholder for ways to communicate. Isn't a social structure explicity defined by communication?

   Social software is a technology-driven conception although it tries to overcome this techno-centrism (a paradox). The definition Tom Coates created is very technology-driven in the sense that it implicitly artiulates criteria for progression in the field that are very "engineering"-like: ... removing limitations "placed on behavior" ..., compensating human inadequacies ..., creating tool-sets ...

   Many people pointed out that social software seems to be a new term for things well known for many years. I feel reminded about the discussion about virtual reality (a paradox again) when researchers had to learn that illusion of reality has always been a strategy to mislead (or convince) - even in nature (yay, I made it to the ecology mark as well!). The only news was the computer here.

   So if we want to get to the point, we need to ask what the computers role in this play other than supporting social activity that happens (luckily) in this or that form anyway.

   Just speculating:

   One question that comes to my mind is if it could be the other way around: Is it maybe true that we already have passed a barrier where the computer is not the tool for being social, but rather we already (involuntarily perhaps) aquired ways of being social that can be computed and processed by electronic devices? In other words: If it doesn't compute it won't construct the social reality?

→ Posted by: Oliver Wrede at May 13, 2003 12:07 AM

Very good discussion! My question, what is the best social software out there right now (ie. Open Space Technology, ItsNotWhatYouKnow, etc) and how long do you think it will be until people really embrace this technology? The difference between just a couple years ago and now is huge, but IMO no where near where it could be 5 years from now.

→ Posted by: Annie at May 13, 2003 10:02 PM

I have to say that I'm really not particularly convinced that software is by its nature communicative. Does Word communicate with anyone? Does the software inside my VCR or oven or the software that runs nuclear power plants? I don't think this is a tautology at all - I think it's quite clear that social software as a phrase (which is a phrase that I've had some issues with) refers to a subset of softwares which facilitate or mediate social contact. As to the 'engineering metaphors' - well I don't really have a problem with that either - I have a grounding in philosophical / theoretical models of the mind. People have been using these kinds of metaphors and they continue to do so today in almost every analysis of how people's minds operate and how they interact with one another. Effectively, when you're talking about building tools then you talk in terms of pragmatics - what can it do, how does it work, how does it interact, what are its implications etc (because if something doesn't do something that either benefits a person or satisfies a need in them, then that something will fairly swiftly be thrown aside).

→ Posted by: Tom Coates at May 13, 2003 11:39 PM

Hi Tom, *Defining* social software turns out to be a challenge. I reread your definition with this question in mind: "Is an accounting system social software?" And yes it falls square in the middle of your definition. And the definition's still not general enough to cover all the historical points, current inititives, and future scenarios mentioned above. And those are just the practical problems! Maybe a definition is fundamentally impossible because the process is continuous with the human invention of human language in evolutionary time. Not to give up on useful characterizations, but why seek an abstract definition when what you want is given simply by a fuzzy set of cases: Social software includes things like weblogs and other messaging software with a similar structural footprint. Then describe the ongoing ferment of design ideas; the ideal of universal cooperation; the social process of invention.... Maybe you have started writing a book and just don't know it yet.

→ Posted by: Rick Thomas at May 14, 2003 2:56 PM

I actually would have only limited angst at someone's attempts to fit accounting systems under the social software umbrella. In fact I think many workflow-related software-mediated processes would sit quite comfortably on some kind of spectrum within it. I think one could probably make a case for there being a difference on emphasis - that the social and collaborative component was very much further down the list than the software's other objectives, but I'd still not quibble that much. I'm very keen on computer-mediated workflow and its relationship to some of the community stuff we build. I think there's a lot of potential in investigating that further...

→ Posted by: Tom Coates at May 14, 2003 3:06 PM

Here's an interesting overview with some definition aspects to it ...
http://www.darwinmag.com/read/050103/social.html

Also, good luck on the search!

→ Posted by: Rick Thomas at May 17, 2003 4:50 PM

FYI - Here's an article with some interesting social software definitions:
http://www.darwinmag.com/read/050103/social.html?action=print

→ Posted by: Rick Thomas at May 18, 2003 7:29 PM

Thanks for the information. I've taken some of your concepts for my thesis (about socialnetworks) so this url will be on the bibliography.

→ Posted by: Andres Santos at September 15, 2005 4:01 AM

This term software-prosthesis is an interesting one? I think of all kinds of scifi stuff, but, I assume that this term actually has some sort of academic or pro background, could you you explain a little what is actually ment bt this term?
For your knowledge: I have produced a rather interesting e-learning application called www.edu.fi/magazinefactory, I suppose it is social in the sence that a lot of students use it together with their teachers.
Perhaps, there is a shift, trend towards this type of activity, also within education, eventhough the reality parameters of the new millennium learners look a little bit different from the fairly fixed configurations of the formal learning milieu.
I am currently working within an oecd project NML (New Millennium Learners). I would be greatful for any help on this issue.

→ Posted by: Christian Komonen at June 12, 2006 10:41 AM