danah boyd

The Value of Social Software

Biography
danah boyd is a Ph.D. student in the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California, Berkeley where she studies how people negotiate their presentation of self in mediated social contexts to an unknown audience. She has an A.B. in computer science from Brown and a M.S. in sociable media from MIT Media Lab; her research has ranged from developing interactive social visualizations to analyzing how sex hormones affect the prioritization of depth cues. Currently, she is investigating blogging, Friendster and other social software developments through an ethnographic approach.

Papers: http://www.danah.org/papers

Blog: http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/

Position Paper
Clay Shirky (re)claimed the term “social software” to encompass “all uses of software that supported interacting groups, even if the interaction was offline” while organizing the “Social Software Summit” (Allen, 2004). While Shirky typically uses the succinct “stuff worth spamming” (Shirky, 2004), Tom Coates notes that “Social Software can be loosely defined as software which supports, extends, or derives added value from, human social behaviour - message-boards, musical taste-sharing, photo-sharing, instant messaging, mailing lists, social networking” (Coates, 2005).

Shirky intentionally rejected terms like “groupware”—he saw them as either polluted or a bad fit for the scope of technologies that concerned him. Although his definition is flexible, those invited to the Summit were invested in the development of new genres of social technologies and the term took on the scope of that community, referring only to the kinds of technologies emerging from the Summit attendees, their friends and their identified community.

The term proliferated within this community and spread to where this community regularly exercises its voice, most notably the blogosphere and at events like the O’Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference. These gatherings often reinforce the notion that social software primarily refers to a particular set of new technologies, often through the exclusion of research on older technologies.

Given the large blog audiences of many involved in the social software community, the term social software spread widely, much to the dismay—if not outrage—of some. The primary argument is that it is simply a hyped term used by the blogosphere in order to make a phenomenon out of something that offers no new contributions. Embedded here is irritation that social software is simply a political move to separate technologists from researchers, elevating one set of practices over another.

The efforts of this community have prompted a resurgence of media and entrepreneurial interest in sociable technologies. Of course, the intellectual and innovative contributions of this community are often as contested as the term itself. I believe that the advances of social software are neither purely technological nor social, but a product of both—the significance of social software stems from the rapid iteration of development in ongoing tango with massive user participation.

Social software represents a new generation of social technology development—a generation that is dependent on moving beyond the laboratory and into mass culture. Its manifestations are already staggering, from blogging to Flickr, social networking to tagging. These advancements complicate critical theoretical ideas about the nature of the public(s), the role of relationships in sharing, and the collective desire to organize information. At the same time, there are limitations to social software’s current approach—namely its inability to fully understand the sociological implications of its advancements. Reflexive failures limit the potential since much of its significance comes from the interplay between the technology and the use.

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