Response to Social Computing Workshop
by: William Waner, English, UC/ Santa Barbara
Premise of the Workshop: yes, the power of the networked computer (speed, range, the way it can accelerate social networking and the dissemination of information; the way it can blend networking and broadcasting) does give it a potential to inflect associations in all their forms, including social (human-human) association but also (to use Latour's language) human-non-human association as well.
Reinventing the wheel?: On the critical side: I can see why building trust and credibility in an on-line environment is valuable, but I don’t see it as replacing all the well-established ways of thinking the difference between knowledge and untruth (selection, editing, anthologies, peer review, etc). One striking features of the universal media machine called the networked computer is the way it can put entertainment and knowledge acquisition on the same machine (and using the same applications—like the browser). That may confuse some, but it should not blur the boundaries between them—as Larry Sanger’s rather cranky old fashioned distinction between good stuff and crap suggested. However, Sanger’s comments seemed to ignore one of the lessons of the long face off between popular culture and canonical culture: that the one can become the other: the novel moved from entertainment to literature; Samuel Richardson & Charles Dickens seemed to function as both from the beginning of their being read.
90% Social?: There was some serious nonsense spoken about the importance of the social in relation to computing. I can see why a certain polemical point is made by asserting that 90% of social computing is social, 10% is technology. However, this has the silly quality of all such arguments—“everything is economic, political, language / signs, …or, if you take language as a powerful uniquely human technology, everything is technology all the way down.” But this weighting of the social and technology begs the larger issue—what is most distinctive about social computing (in contrast to the social per se) is the computing that mediates/augments social interaction with its networks, interfaces and protocols. And, most interestingly, following a Latourian thread, this new formation produces the non-hyphenated “technohuman,” an agent where we can no longer exclude technology from our understanding of the human or the association of humans and non-humans that is basic to modern society.
Weak and Strong Social Computing: I think it is useful to distinguish social computing between strong social computing and weak social computing.
Weak social computing uses computing to extend what humans can do without computers: for example, read the New York Times on-line instead of the print version; look up a book in the library by computer instead of doing so with a card catalog; buy a movie ticket on-line instead of at the box office. Yes, there are significant entailments with each of these differences (and many can work to build on those differences in consequential ways); but in these examples the use of the computing interface does not change the underlying social relation between persons and institutions (newspaper, library, movie theater) that the computer interface mediates.
Strong social computing changes, whether by intention or through unintended consequences, the underlying social relations, the network of associations. For example, Tad’s patient cell phone networks could link non-native speakers to translators and health care workers that patients could not have benefited from without this new computer assisted human network. Moveon.org has made use of email and the web to challenge an earlier media ecology that has restricted political ideas through a symbiosis of a) elected politicians; b) their very deep-pocked supporters; and the c) conventional gatekeepers in very expensive print and television broadcasting media. What makes this a form of “strong social computing” is Moveon’s success in keeping together a progressive coalition that is there to support a wide range of causes (for example, it voted to decide whether to support Obama, Clinton, or stay neutral).
The contrast between weak and strong social computing may be demonstrated with Wikipedia: for most of its users, Wikipedia would be “weak”: it offers an alternative to on-line Britannica, but not an essentially different one. By contrast, for the many editors and contributors and would-be contributors, it could offer a way to be part of a large, distributed group that not only writes up knowledge, but also engages in complex debates and negotiation around what authoritative public knowledge should be.
The distinction between strong and weak social computing can become a research question. For example, how do we interpret Facebook? Does it augment or vitally change the way its users associate? My son Andrew Warner thinks that Facebook changes little with how one relates to one’s closest friends—the ones you see and cell phone regularly—but that it has transformed how you can know and stay in touch with a second tier of friends, especially when you are far from them.
In the lead up to the American Revolution, the Boston Committee of Correspondence set out to promote a powerful new form of political reading and writing; to the extent that it convinced others to participate, it built a powerful new political network with its distinct interface (the printed public declaration) and a distinct set of protocols (republican, gift exchange). Important for my analysis of the American Revolution: showing what makes a new form of reading and writing—for example the petition repurposed as a popular declaration spoken of, by and for the people—possible. Or put in the strongest possible way: my scholar ship how a provisional, emergence communication network becomes the ‘united States of America’.
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