Kevin Marks
Biography
An area of particular interest to me is how the affordances
provide by social software tools interact in subtle ways with their users to
shape discourse, and how we can use insights from the humanities to guide users
to more useful interactions.
I disagree with the strong form of the Sapir-Whorf
hypothesis; language does not limit thought, but different languages do affect
how the thoughts end up being expressed and communicated. Some things are easier to say in one language than another, but if we have a new idea we need to share,
we will converge on a term like ‘blog’ or ‘podcasting’ to express it.
Social software tools, having different affordances, tend to
encourage differing kinds of discourse. Blogs amplify individual voices. Unlike
mailing lists, they don’t get lost in the hubbub. Wikis blur authorship, and
drive towards a consensual style. Blogs’ temporal flow creates an affordance
for reflective conversation that is diluted and washed away in Wikis.
It is not inevitable that blogs become personal, wikis become
consensual, and mailing lists become confrontational, but that is the tendency
of each form.
There are some obvious generalisations that help when
designing new modes of interaction—for example, preventing comment spam. If
people know that their comments will be attributed to them and persist fro a
long time, this moves them from a Prisoners Dilemma to an Iterated Prisoners
Dilemma, and changes their view of how they should write, improving the quality
of discourse with strangers.
Similarly, the growth of bottom-up classification through
tagging is encouraged to converge when the tags used are made public and
shared, mirroring how shared vocabularies are constructed in natural languages.
Which principles of sociology can be brought to bear in the
design of new social software? Property ownership? Public shaming? Hayek’s
kosmos? Jane Jacobs’ theories of city neighbourhoods?
I’d like to discuss and explore these mappings from theory to practice in new areas, based on real work in protocol and software design.
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