Institute For The Future

"Which comes first, the social or the software?"

Sometimes, long after you finish an article, you notice something that you should have said-- an important point worth making, a twist in your argument that would have strengthened your thesis.

In the piece on collective intelligence that we've published in the 2005 Perspectives, I talk about the rise of social software and its deep meaning for the future of knowledge work. I think the piece does a decent job of breaking down the differences between traditional knowledge management and the new generation of collective intelligence tools; explaining how KM and CI tools reflect very different notions of what knowledge is; and talking about how the aim of CI tools is neither to replace traditional forms of social interaction, nor to serve as a medium through which most collaboration takes place, but to weave their way into extant social interactions and collaborations.

But there's one thing that I don't talk about: the degree to which social software-- which I see as an early version of collective intelligence tools-- should be thought of as a set of social innovations, versus a collection of software innovations.

danah boyd, in a somewhat Italo Calvino-like move, has posted an abstract of an article she plans one day to write, that gets into some of this territory. Or will once she writes it:

 

The Significance of "Social Software"

[I]t is undeniable that this community has created a resurgence of interest in a particular set of sociable technologies inciting everyone from the media to entrepreneurs, venture capitalists to academics to pay attention. What is questionable, and often the source of dismissal from researchers, is whether or not the social software community has contributed any innovations or intellectual progress.

In this paper, I will explore the contributions of social software. I will argue that there have been notable technological advancements, but that their significance stems from the rapid iteration of development in ongoing tango with massive user participation. In other words, the advances of social software are neither cleanly social nor technological, but a product of both.

I will explicitly address three case studies central to the narrow scope of social software - Friendster, blogging and Flickr. I will discuss how tagging, audience management (such as ACLs) and articulated social networks are neither technological advances nor social features, but emerge as a product of collective action and network affects. While parts of these technologies have been built in research, the actual advances are impossible to construct in a laboratory due to the sociological effects necessary for maturation.

 

[via Continuous Computing]