Christopher Allen gives a useful overview of the evolution of terminology of software supporting social interactions, including such terms as bulletin boards, groupware, and the currently popular social software:
In examining the origins of 'social software' we can see the terminology for the field has moved through a sort of life cycle. There have been many terms for this type of software, some of which have taken off, and some of which have not.
Typically, a visionary originates a term, and a community around that visionary may (or may not) adopt it. The diaspora of the term from that point can be slow, with 10 or 15 years passing before a term is more generally adopted. Once a term is more broadly adopted, it faces the risk of becoming a marketing term, corrupted into differentiating products rather than explaining ideas.
Is 'social software', which just now gaining wide acceptance, destined for the same trash heap of uselessness as groupware? And, if so, what impact does the changing of this terminology have on the field of social software itself? Only the future holds those answers ...
Danah Boyd continues this much-needed discussion:
The term bothers me because the software is helping the hardware mediate between two people engaged in a social interaction. I've always loved 'computer mediated communication' (CMC) because it describes the action and then we can talk about CMC hardware/software and CMC behavior. In CMC, the focus is on the communication with the computer and its role as mediator being a description to the primary activity: communication. With social software, the adjective is describing our focus: software. I know that the term is used by technologists who build things instead of dealing with social interaction, communication or even hardware, but it still bothers me. I feel as though the term allows us to emphasize the technology instead of the behavior that it supports.
The "half-life time" of terms related to technologies supporting social interactions seems to be short, despite thousands of the brightest minds on the planet having been involved in the R&D on these concepts for at least five decades. From my background, being Information Management rather than hardcore Informatics, this confusion can be quite easily explained, however. The intended use of technologies is not the same as their actual use. A mailer is usually aimed at supporting communication between human beings, although many people also quite happily use it for filing and retrieving project information. On the other hand, a database can be used for human coordination and communication, for example when it sends a notification of an update to a database operator who is also the project manager.
Thus, looking at the technological functionalities alone is not sufficient. What is lacking in the analysis is the usage context of the technology. Simply speaking, there is no social software, although there is a lot of software that is very suitable for social purposes. To reduce the confusion, we need to think more in terms of socio-technical systems instead of talking about social technologies per se. Such systems analysis focuses on the roles that technologies play in a particular social setting. By making these roles explicit, we can ask such questions as: what are the gaps in functionality provided to the community? What are alternative functionalities for a particular social need? What type of community could best benefit from this particular technology? Do we perhaps need a very different kind of technology or a set of technologies? Playing a good game of cards can be an excellent "same place, same time" technology to break the ice before using an advanced electronic decision support system... Systems thinking thus steers away from isolated functionality suboptimization, while trying to optimize the holistic system of human and technological elements and their countless relations.
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