{"id":1332,"date":"2004-10-13T23:57:14","date_gmt":"2004-10-13T23:57:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ubuntu.my\/wp30\/archives\/2004\/10\/13\/the_term_social_software.html"},"modified":"2004-10-13T23:57:14","modified_gmt":"2004-10-13T23:57:14","slug":"the_term_social_software","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/archives\/2004\/10\/13\/the_term_social_software.html","title":{"rendered":"the term social software"},"content":{"rendered":"

Christopher Allen does an excellent job of tracing the history of the term ‘social software’ – a resource for us all.<\/a><\/p>\n

Of course, i still despise the term (sorry Clay) and its (ab)usage.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1332","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-social-software"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1332","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1332"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1332\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1332"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1332"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1332"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}