I have been reading around a lot of your stuff: why do you have to write in such dense academic jargon? It is possible to use simple language interspersed with the occasional piece of necessary terminology. Unless of course you have to make it inpenetrable to get further research grants

If you take a simple example such as weblog software, it is obvious that the guys who thought it up and the guy who started the algorithm on which the programming was based probably didn’t say,”This is going to be “Diary software”. It probably became apparent that this was a good way of encouraging its use once it was built. You could argue that the software might have been designed (with text manipulation “holding” and “carrying” facilities built into the package) to have a rapid up take, in order to carry advertising. Perhaps no one designing it cared at all what it was used for contentwise as long as the banners appeared at the top each time a weblog was loaded. Note how many free weblogs there are.
You talk a lot about metaphors in your writing when it would probably be easier to start with analogies (the old saw: there are only three ways to explain : model, analogy, metaphor).
If we ask in what way a typewriter is or is not analogous to a weblog, it becomes apparent pretty quick that that the weblog technology though providing, immediacy, rapid editability and mass readership (with the help of the internet/web) basically does the same job as a typewriter, post, compositor and rolling print.
Are they really fundamentally different? The typewriter typed sheet went to the letters page, or the opinion column (by mail or by hand) and was read by millions in the same way as the weblog/website is.
Where there is a difference (given the ability to change, store, replicate, link) is there is less feed back in the conventional print system. In a sense add-ons such as the counters and comments are the more advanced part of the weblog software. It is the feedback system that has been created which makes a weblog or general website different from traditional non-computer systems. Email is a feedback system. Links have been around since the beginning of the internet.
I have only just read about Friendster. It had a specific design/purpose which was quickly forgotten by the majority of users because they saw no point in it, or perhaps saw it didn’t nbenefit them or were not comfortable with too much personal disclosure.
I started off today with Blogdex which gave me Rachelle Winterton’s weblog via Glassdog at number 1. I had never seen LiveJournal before, but quickly saw that it provided for a friendship network. I used the open access to try to find out more about Rachelle through her “friends”. I wanted to see if any of them went to the same school, and if they might disclose more about her than her weblog. One boy wrote a poem in remembrance of Mrs. Winterton. By the way, Wikipedia has done a whole piece on her with a picture. The only pic of her I could Google was her basketball team (she’s number 21!).
I concluded in Norfolkskies, after a cursory look at her posts, that she was a manic-depressive, then found a post where she mentioned that she had visited her doctor, who said she was. The contet of her blog obviously did not give anything away about her real motivations and plans. She manged to hide everything except her pain. The “Friendship” links are no more than perceived commonalities.

It is obvious that the friendship networks go on for ever in something like LiveJournal, though not many nodes away Rachelle knows none of them. In LiveJournal it is other people who chose whether Rachelle is her friend, just as she choses friends for herself. It is a one way process that seems as if it is two way when you look at a personal profile. In Rachelle’s case some of her LiveJournal friends were actual school or local friends. But most of the 8 or so she listed on her site were kids from other parts of the states.

It is possible (once linked one way) for the lower level friend to make contact with the next level friend, but this friendship can only be based on what has been put in the next level up friend’s profile, while (Fraudster…) all or parts of the information (e.g. music preferences) may be true or false. What I am trying to say is that all you end up with is a simple network with each node containing nothing of any use.
You or one of your associates mentioned the proposed business intra-networks: that workers would not be happy for everyone else to know what they had done and were planning to do. This wouls be especially true in rigid hierarchies, though presumbly less so in flatter management structures.
The note-passing/”back-channelling” you mention is a perfect example of where the technology is discovered to be capable of something which makes a process less efficient (emailing, playing games, looking at porn during work time) until the activities are reorganised and directed (software that monitors activity such as keystrokes, bugs to monitor movement) towards the primary gaol – in this case understanding the lecture. The students were (are)using the ICT to avoid the lectures (or, as you say, to debate the topics amongst themselves), now they are to be forced (now that what they have been doing has been discovered)to use them in a way they do not want in order to increase the learning or at least direct it in the way the lecturer wants. In practical terms, the syllabus in an undergraduate course has to be stuck to.

A

And, that total sphere of relationship, inclusive of the relationships with the environment, is the who that the social software is ultimately about.