So said Clay Shirky in this article over four years ago. I remember reading it shortly after it came out, and feeling excited about the promise that social software held. Headlined Social Software and the Politics of Groups, here are a few extracts to try and encourage you to read the original:
Because there are so many patterns of group interaction, social software is a much larger category than things like groupware or online communities — though it includes those things, not all group communication is business-focused or communal. One of the few commonalities in this big category is that social software is unique to the internet in a way that software for broadcast or personal communications are not.
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The radical change was de-coupling groups in space and time. To get a conversation going around a conference table or campfire, you need to gather everyone in the same place at the same moment. By undoing those restrictions, the internet has ushered in a host of new social patterns, from the mailing list to the chat room to the weblog.
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The thing that makes social software behave differently than other communications tools is that groups are entities in their own right. A group of people interacting with one another will exhibit behaviors that cannot be predicted by examining the individuals in isolation, peculiarly social effects like flaming and trolling or concerns about trust and reputation. This means that designing software for group-as-user is a problem that can’t be attacked in the same way as designing a word processor or a graphics tool.
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Earlier generations of social software, from mailing lists to MUDs, were created when the network’s population could be measured in the tens of thousands, not the hundreds of millions, and the users were mostly young, male, and technologically savvy. In those days, we convinced ourselves that immersive 3D environments and changing our personalities as often as we changed socks would be the norm.
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Any system that supports groups addresses this tension by enacting a simple constitution — a set of rules governing the relationship between individuals and the group. These constitutions usually work by encouraging or requiring certain kinds of interaction, and discouraging or forbidding others. Even the most anarchic environments, where “Do as thou wilt” is the whole of the law, are making a constitutional statement. Social software is political science in executable form.
While we have all this kerfuffle about usage and abusage of social software, while we have Blefuscudian polarisations all over the place, it is worth remembering that we have barely begun the journey. There is a lot for us to learn about how we operate as virtual groups, how we use social software; there is even more for us to learn about how to build and deploy social software.
Some of this learning will draw from ancient history; some of it will rely on the recent past; and some of it we will experience for the first time as we try things out. It is important for us to support all this experimentation with an open mind.