Institute For The Future

danah body on the future of social software

"danah boyd is a graduate student in the School of Information Management Systems at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on "trying to understand how people present their digital identity, negotiate social contexts and articulate their relationships in the YASNS (Yet Another Social Network Service) Phenomena." She is a contributor to the Many-to-Many group weblog, and has her own blog. Here is her answer to the question I recently posed on the future of social software:

 

The term represents a resurgence of tools of a type that have been around since the beginning - CMC tools that encourage community, culture and information sharing. From email->blogging, these are all part of the same practice. The difference is that social software as a term came out of the technology community post tech crash after we realized that you aren't going to be able to sell stoves on the Internet. Everything in the boom boiled down to commerce. We're now going back to our roots and focusing on the fact that the Internet isn't a thing, but a tool to help people engage in and expand practices of everyday life. Different capabilities and features get morphed into the practices, resulting in slight twists.

I would argue that you can't say "will social software-like capabilities..." Social software is framing a set of practices, not capabilities. Certain capabilities are getting highly reported and becoming standard across new services - social networks, tagging, etc. [Of course, remember when every application had to have email?] Of course social networks and tagging will continue to be built into other software - that's part of the game.

The term social software is probably going to be a fad, but the practices aren't.

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