the term social software

Christopher Allen does an excellent job of tracing the history of the term ‘social software’ – a resource for us all.

Of course, i still despise the term (sorry Clay) and its (ab)usage.

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.

Its usage has grated me because folks use it as though a revolution has happened. We’ve been building software that can be labeled as social software for a long long long time. Why are we acting like giddy children who just found a new toy? Worse: it’s either far to inclusive or exclusive. Is SMS social software? What about MMORPGs? I guess retrospecticely, we’d call them that, but for the most part, we just focus on YASNS, blogging, wikis, social bookmarking and other recent developments.

Anyhow, it’s not like i have a better term. I tend to talk about social technologies or social media and i tend to use the term CMC. The problem is that CMC isn’t describing the new wave of behaviors which aren’t always about communication. Perhaps i need to use computer-mediated social interaction.

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24 thoughts on “the term social software

  1. Tom

    ‘computer-mediated social interaction:’ you might be on to something there, Danah. That phrase at least points to the fact that the tools affect the social interactions.

    Just as there is such a thing as, for example, telephone-etiquette (or more generally telephone-behavior), so probably we will begin to understand wiki behavior and comment on wiki-ethics.

    The term ‘social software,’ on the other hand, points us to… nothing.

  2. stef

    tom

    how are you!

    been working on the social networking toward med error reduction: thanks for turning me on to danah’s blog…yes…its toms fault i am here.

    there are lots of doctor patient interactions that are being integrated with email and eventually social networking software: but there is so much adverarialism between health care team and patients. lots of resistance to the ideas of healthcare blogging. can’t figure it out; its almost the med profession really doen’t want the patients to aument and increase their understanding of medical problems; i find that with blogging, and wiki’s, the amount of knowledge gets shift out towards more persons learning and going to the next higher cognitive level.

    Hi Chris!

    stef

  3. stef

    tom

    how are you!

    been working on the social networking toward med error reduction: thanks for turning me on to danah’s blog…yes…its toms fault i am here.

    there are lots of doctor patient interactions that are being integrated with email and eventually social networking software: but there is so much adversarialism between health care team and patients. lots of resistance to the ideas of healthcare blogging. can’t figure it out; its almost the med profession really doen’t want the patients to aument and increase their understanding of medical problems; i find that with blogging, and wiki’s, the amount of knowledge gets shift out towards more persons learning and going to the next higher cognitive level.

    Hi Chris!

    stef

  4. joe

    So, is there a term that you *do* like? That is, we need terms to talk about these things in the abstract… there more placeholders thant anything else, aren’t they?

  5. stef

    tom

    how are you!

    been working on the social networking toward med error reduction: thanks for turning me on to danah’s blog…yes…its toms fault i am here.

    there are lots of doctor patient interactions that are being integrated with email and eventually social networking software: but there is so much adversarialism between health care teams and patients. lots of resistance to the ideas of healthcare blogging. can’t figure it out; its almost the med profession really doesn’t want the patients to aument and increase their understanding of medical problems; i find that with blogging, and wiki’s, the amount of knowledge gets shifted out towards more persons learning and going to the next higher cognitive level. But its all a power issue with some social networking issues, as well as how doctors control things with patient’s care. Autonomy is a two way street: and blogging tends to encourage personal rights and self determination where as other forms of informatics tends to place the individual at an intellectual lockdown. Why not surf issues and deconstruct the evidence of certain treatments?

    This whole vioxx thing highlights something that many doctors suspected about CHF and MI’s: but the drug companies kept on sending out detail persons and marketed the medicine as not that dangerous. So the wisdom of seeing multiple cases have bad outcomes with vioxx, would have been on the radar screen with the puplic if a wiki/p2p system of med info sharing that is community based, where the doctors and the patients form small clinical sousveillance teams, the infromatics framework to technocrati/google count, and find the true prevalance from a larger patient cohort regarding the problems: but someone needs to lead this type of effort and it can’t be totaly p2p anarchy left to the laisee faire system.

    Its sort of like the stuff Danah has been saying about social networking and monitoring for voter fraud. Here we see the power structured evaluated in a Milgramian manner, and hense, public watchdogs monitor a problem and get the word out to the EFF or ACLU.

    This applies to lots of other stuff as well.

    alot of what Eric Thompson had implied with the loom project touches upon collecting tone of social behaviour info from the enviroment: alot of what danah and her community of blogger do, is to put the individual back in the center.

    danah got mad at me for trying to learn everything about her work: well, i’m a slow learner. Docs do the same thing to patients when they don’t get it right away. it all fits into the Milgram stuff Danah has been posting as well. So as all this stuff evolves and converges, we will have to deal with alot of social phenomenas yet to be appreciated. I am finding many doctors to be centered on pick a diagnosis, and treat it with a medication: we are not consciously making the effort to know who the patient really is.

    Hi Chris!

    stef

  6. beau

    I would have thought Social Software (ss) to be a sub-category of Computer Mediated Communication (cmc.) Until I read your mini-rant I thought of ss as limited to software that aimed at mapping or displaying relationships between entities (be they friendster accounts or foafed blogs) but perhaps I erroneously over-tightened the definition in my head. I certainly wouldn’t have included email or blogs. (I might have used the term for muds in pre-foaf days before ss achieved buzzword status, but muds wouldn’t qualify by the tighter definition I’d argue for today.)

    You know you’re being quixoitic, right? Part of the problem is the inability of media, generally, to use precise language because they would thereby lose their audience. A prime example is the confusion around cracker/hacker. What really screws things up, however, is that new entrants into a field come with the inappropriate or inaccurate terms in place and have to go through a subtle, and too often neglected, reeducation to get up to speed on the valuable nuances of nomenclature. Put differently, you might get some rigor on this issue with some of your smarter classmates or professors, but don’t expect the Times to print the distinction. And remember, tilting at windmills does more damage to you than to it.

    Sancho

  7. Liz Lawley

    I’ve been tending towards “social computing” lately, because it removes the focus on “software” but doesn’t have the sense of academic pretentiousness of “computer-mediated blah blah” (I don’t mind the more academic terminology, but it’s a lot harder to sell in an undergraduate curriculum. :).

    I’ve noticed that the corporate research labs seem to be swinging towards “social computing,” as well.

  8. Allen Searls

    I agree that “social software” doesn’t sound right. I’d add to your points that when I think of software, I think of things you download, not web apps, which is what most of these are. I think there’s already a trend toward using “social media” instead, but hadn’t heard “CMC.” Maybe I’ll start using it and then anyone that understands will by default belong to the implicit social circle of people that read your blog 🙂

  9. Mark Donovan

    But how does CMC make things less technology centered? In fact I’d argue that “computer” (while technically correct) is loaded in a way that puts the most pervasive platform for social connection and organization–the mobile phone–out of view.

    SMS, MMS, mobile “presence,” location awareness are massive (SMS) or major emerging trends. They do require software, but also hardware, interoperability between devices and network operators and so on so “social software” incompletely describes the situation. “CMC” requires people to think about phones as computers–which they are–but this requires a conceptual leap for most people. (Nokia, btw, doesn’t talk about “phones” or even “handsets” but “terminals”).

    What IM, email, blogs, SMS, Friendster/Orkut, Flickr, RSS, MMS, etc etc have in common is that they are technologies enabled by IP data networks.

    I dunno what I’d propose . . . “Networked Social Communication” . . . anyone?

  10. bruce

    hi, i just found out ur blog few days and i find ur research r very interesting and im kinda person like social research too. very impressive jobs so far. keep up ur good job and happy blogging.

  11. zephoria

    Mark – in CMC, computer-mediated is describing communication, the primary key. (What’s the linguistic term to describe that?) I definitely don’t think that CMC is as extensible as it should be, and you’ve pointed out some critical flaws.

  12. zephoria

    No Stefanos – don’t misinterpret me. I’m irritated with your inability to understand the social norms that i’ve tried to set for this blog and my life. Your lack of respect towards me has prompted me to ignore you.

  13. Adina Levin

    danah, I finally understand your objection to the “social software” term.

    It’s not a broad enough term for the discussion of the social patterns of networked communication.

    For the study of social patterns, the term “social computing” also seems to head in the wrong direction. The noun is “computing” which implies calculation rather than relationships, play, and collaboration.

    Computer-mediated communication is better; networked communication is better still.

    Social software is still a useful term when the subject is the software tools that facilitate networked social interaction. Remove the term “social software”, and we don’t have a word to describe the common properties of Flickr, LiveJournal, playlist sharing, and Technorati.

  14. zephoria

    Adina – ::nod:: although CMC and networked communication are starting to cause trouble for me because not everything i do is about communication per say. Or at least not communication as we know it. A lot of what i do is about sharing – networked sharing perhaps.

    And yes, Social Software is a term that we can collectively use to reference a certain body of work, but it’s important to note that the reason that it’s useful is partially because it’s referring to a body of work that was recently developed, primarily by West Coast folks in a post-boom culture. There’s a lot of development out there that would fit under Clay’s definition of social software that is not called that.

  15. stef

    I’ve looked at the comments: there I haven’t done anything wrong: maybe I am tangental, but not disrespectful. i just am not connecting with what it is that i did wrong: this could be a lake of the metacommunication of gestures and voice intonation that indicates irony, humor, and sensitivity. It is tough to see beyond the words typed.

    I got my own blog now and i realize it takes time to write meaninful blog entries.

    sorry: (heartfelt sorry with a hope towards cyberforgiveness: i will keep my post to almost nil, exept for what intersects with my scattered brain)

    stef

  16. Tom Mandel

    Adina — in the term ‘social computing’, the noun ‘computing’ doesn’t refer to calculation but to the use of computers — and, by metonymic extension, networks of computers.

    ‘Networks’ points specifically at relationships. We can’t use the term social networks, because it has been pre-empted to refer to support of *specific* networks of people online. That’s ok.

    But, again, the real question is – why any such term? Computers have been used for communication and social interaction since forever. What is the gain in the term? And, more importantly, when we talk to larger groups of people — where is *their* gain from such a term?

  17. Tom Mandel

    I should mention that I started this little firestorm — on a list that Adina, Danah, Ross & I are all on. Danah’s original post above is snipped from an email to that list in response to the following words from me (which i should have blogged). They are about http://www.jot.com, a new wiki company:

    “One thing to note is that the phrase ‘social software’ doesn’t appear on jot’s site, and none of the people who talk to each other using that phrase appear to be involved. Do you think this will hurt them?”

    Obviously, I was tweaking the SocialText gang a bit — the intent was gentle, tho we seem to see a little firestorm of dialogue forming around my teeny spark.

  18. Monkeymagic

    Reasons to be cheerful

    In the origins of social software, computer mediated communication, and why for me “social software” is software that concerns itself with socially negotiated truths.

  19. Monkeymagic

    Reasons to be cheerful

    In the origins of social software, computer mediated communication, and why for me “social software” is software that concerns itself with socially negotiated truths.

  20. Monkeymagic

    Reasons to be cheerful

    On the origins of social software, computer mediated communication, and why for me “social software” is software that concerns itself with socially negotiated truths.

  21. sean

    “Social Software” bugs me too because of its emphasis on software.

    CMC helps in that it moves the focus to “communication” from software. But it still bugs me.

    It’s that first “C” — “computer.” My grandfather and my little cousin think “computer” = either a laptop or a desktop computer. To them “computer” doesn’t bring to mind mobile phones, cars, games, cameras, speakers, music players, supermarket scanners, or the rest of the digital sensors and displays and audio thingies that already pervade our environments. “Computer” evokes some physical box that you hunch down in front of for long periods of time to get things done. A “computer” is supposed to be focused on to the exclusion of the people and things nearby.

    Isn’t the term “digital” widely recognized now? People see it as covering all sorts of electronics, some of which can talk to other electronics, many of which do their thing without people having to devote much attention to them.

    I like “digitally enhanced X” or (when addressing geeks and business types) “digitally mediated Y.” That’s still pretty stilted; in a sense they’re more stilted than “social software.” But at least X or Y is the focus — whether X/Y is journalism or placemaking or activism or games or travel or honey buckets or whatever is the human activity at hand.

    I’m glad to see the focus shifting from “work” as in Computer Supported Cooperative Work, which sounds creepy and not very hopeful..

  22. Monkeymagic

    Reasons to be cheerful

    On the origins of social software, computer mediated communication, and why for me “social software” is software that concerns itself with socially negotiated truths.

  23. Monkeymagic

    Reasons to be cheerful

    On the origins of social software, computer mediated communication, and why for me “social software” is software that concerns itself with socially negotiated truths.

  24. Operating Manual for Social Tools

    Scoping “Social Tools”

    I’ve never enjoyed coming up with pithy terms, labels or titles. While i loathe this form of production, i recognize that articles need a title and a phenomenon needs a label. We need common language to talk particular issues or…

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