Nalini Kotamraju

Social Computing Is Resisting the Social

Contact Information
User Researcher, Software eXperience Design, Sun Microsystems, Inc
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Sociology
University of California at Berkeley
Barrows Hall 410, Berkeley CA 94720
http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~nalinik

Biography
Nalini P. Kotamraju is completing her Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of California at Berkeley this spring. Her dissertation, titled “Technology: Lifestyle versus Social Class,” addresses whether and how people integrate digital technology into their lifestyles. Her previous projects and publications include research on young people’s use of mobile devices in the US and the UK, the symbolic meaning of pagers, and the development of web design skill. She holds a M.A. in Sociology from the University of California at Berkeley, as well as a B.A. cum laude in Social Studies and a B.A. in Women’s Studies, both from Harvard College.

Nalini is also a researcher in the Software Experience Design (xD) Group at Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Position Paper
Social computing technology needs to wrestle more with the meaning of social. Despite the no-doubt intentional ambiguity of the term, in order to develop and use truly “social” computing technology, we need to examine our assumptions about what it means to have social interactions or to exist as social individuals. In thinking about social computing, we need to challenge ourselves not to work with an impoverished understanding of social as anything that involves more than one person. If “social” remains unexamined, it becomes a meaningless term; social as opposed to what? The individual? The machine?

The social in social computing needs to mean more than interaction between individuals or any aggregation of individuals. Thinking of social in a more complex way, moving away from the primacy of the individual is challenging. We are comfortable with the individual as the unit of analysis and less comfortable with the messiness that ensues from moving away from such a unit. Once you leave the clearly bounded individual, how does one deal with the fuzzy contours and shifting salience of group existence like religion, families, cliques, class, race, gender, friendship networks? These discussions of the social need to happen outside of the digital divide framework and outside of a perspective that posits technology as a solution to social inequality.

We do interact with digital technology as individuals rather than in any other mode. A mobile phone for each individual complements, if not supplants, the landline previously shared by the household. We watch television alone more often than ever. We log in to web sites with individual user names and passwords, send emails from individual email accounts and cc other people’s individual accounts. We log in to social networking web sites, such as Friendster, as individual nodes looking for other individual nodes.

We need to ask critical questions, such as how do we bring social to our technology-mediated interactions with other and how do we produce social in those interactions. We might look harder for technologically-mediated instances in which something greater than the individual and approximating the group might occur, such as the pack-like mentality that sometimes emerges in digital gaming. We might also be willing to concede that digital technology might never be able to replicate the beyond-the-individual nature of social life. Texting might facilitate a flash mob, but perhaps the full sociality of mobs, in which the group takes on qualities beyond its components, can only exist with physical presence.

The challenge of the academic and technical work on social computing is to determine whether, how and to what degree computing and a rich sense of the social can align. While many contemporary social practices are increasingly individualized, our fundamental practices—producing sustenance, choosing mates, raising children, waging war, practicing religion—are social, in the fullest and most complex sense of the word, and social computing needs to engage with precisely that understanding of social.

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