Social Software Culture

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The following text by Chris Blunt stresses that the concept of social software is primarely a culture, referring to the way such software is made, through a particular relationship with the user community.


Citation

Chris Blunt at http://www.chrisblunt.com


Social software reflects the "juice" that arises from people's personal interactions. It's not about control, it's about co-evolution: people in personal contact, interacting towards their own ends, influencing each other.’ (Boyd 2003)

In Post-modern Virtualities, Matthew Fuller (2002) endows social software with a dual definition that emphasises the co-evolution Boyd describes:

'Primarily, it is software built by and for those of us locked out of the narrowly engineered subjectivity of mainstream software...[secondly], it is software that is directly born, changed and developed as the result of an ongoing sociability between users and programmers in which demands are made on the practices of coding that exceed their easy fit into standardised social relations.’ (2002)

Unlike centrally administered, proprietary software solutions built through and upon central administration, social software – and implicitly, open-source software - actively encourages all-party communication in both construction and use. Although Fuller goes on to reveal how the two definitions are heavily interlinked, he nevertheless exposes an internal restrictiveness of open-source software. Citing the open-source productivity application kOffice as an example, he asserts that '[kOffice] is dead from the neck up. Its composition determined entirely by a sumissive relation to the standards set by Microsoft' (2002). The same restrictions can be seen in the popular OpenOffice.org suite, which from a human-computer interface (HCI) perspective bears a striking resemblance to Microsoft's Office products. Fuller advocates that, in order for software, or standards, to become truly open, experts must not occupy the space belonging to those standards. To do so would instigate a form of centralisation: 'There is a far more important need to recognise and find ways of coming into alliance with forms of intelligence that are excluded from the depleted culture of experts' (Fuller 2002). Social software, as Fuller describes it, has an elegant, self-driven nature.

It actively discourages expert intervention or prevention:

'This is a software that has built itself up on learning from and through what occurs unofficially, the ways in which people, networks, drives, languages coalesce to circumvent, parasite or overturn what codes, produces and regulates them.' (2002)

Social software is an emergence, a set of practices borne of the desires of one or many distributed groups. Fuller’s observations, though, lend support to the result of social software: the open-source movement and satisfying the greater needs of the user base than the dictations of proprietary software providers." (From a PhD thesis by Chris Blunt, at http://www.chrisblunt.com)