The excesses of 'social software' pundits

I'd recommend anyone going along to this Thursday's iSociety debate at The Work Foundation in London to first read - if they haven't already done so - Tom Coates' brief blog last January on plasticbag.org about the "The excesses of 'Social Software'", and some of the comments responding to it. As Tom so rightly says, 'social software' is not a paradigm shift from what has gone before. So why the social software mob doesn't seem to talk to the existing 'communities' people and all the other people with experience in this area beats me. Communities of interest like emint have a wealth of professional experience in such fields as building trust online, and the complexities of online reputation, for example. Then there's a mass of work already available in areas such as computer-mediated communication and computer-supported co-operative work. No, the social software proponents are quite right, not all group communication is 'business': but much of it *is* decision making, negotiating, making arrangements, and so on, not just 'communicating'.

Why throw entire maternity wards out with the bathwater, as Tom Steinberg so rightly states in his comment to Tom Coates' article? Do the proponents of social software believe that this one idea will somehow do away with the human and group behaviour that every other person, thing, group, system, has to contend with? While I don't agree with many of the things he has to say on the matter, Clay Shirky adds some sense to the pot when he states: "We have spent much more time on the technical rather than social problems of software used by groups." For the record, I don't count myself as part of that 'we'.

Perhaps the introductory paragraph to the iSociety debate puff gives the game away: "Virtual community is an idea whose time has passed. But what should take its place?" Sez who? A bunch of people who know little about it, but are keen on selling their techno-punditry by promoting the next cool, new new thing. And you can only promote the new by dissing what's already there.

We see the same kind of thing among business school pundits, who must slate all that has gone before to sell their particular flavour of revolution. Remember re-engineering the firm, anyone? Total quality management? (My experiences within BT HQ management as they attempted to implement TQM I shall leave for another day.)

The same with economists: remember how Ken Binford (from my old department, UCL Dept. of Political Economy) back in 2000 (when I arrived back in the UK, so I remember it well) sold the UK government on the idea of a game theory-driven auction to get telephone network operators to bid high prices for 3G licences, only for the government to discover that none of the companies behaved in the way predicted during the bidding process (it fact it almost bankrupted the entire telecoms sector in the UK), and British society may well have lost out as a result (as John Naughton so rightly states in this week's Observer). Others - including Jim Bryant - of Sheffield Hallam - have different ideas about how people really behave within the context of game theory.

Fundamental to all these issues is the - not new - idea that both technology pundits and theorisers from certain academic disciplines assume that people behave in certain ways (have certain preconceived ideas about how people behave), but never looking at how they do behave. Further, they believe that new systems or processes can be imposed that ignore real patterns of behaviour. That way, they can conveniently ignore all the work that has already been done by others.

Getting back to the field of IT, we've certainly been here before with push technology, portals and vortals, ASPs and all the other fads that have assailed us over recent years.

Anyway, back to the topic in hand: for another view of social software - this time sceptical of both the BBC's involvement through iCan, and the government's interest through the PM's Strategy Unit - have a quick look at Martyn Perks' blasting of social software, Social software - get real. While Perks' arguments are sometimes (often?) not particularly well-informed, and there is a whiff of grinding of political axes about the positions he adopts, he does stand on the opposite side of the podium from the technological determinists busy adding to the talking up of everything social. But once again, Perks' position is deterministic: this time not assigning determinism to technology, but supporting the idea is that politicians and political interests determine. Everything. A little more tasty is Ross Mayfield reacting to Perks.

In general, though, there sure is a lack of rigour in this debate, with a generalised acceptance of male pundits pushing various flavours of determinism. Exceptional are people like Tom Coates (of plasticbag fame) and Tom Steinberg, supporters of the step-by-step, incremental approach to change in the society-technology interface. Just the kind of thing software engineers are supposed to support - but claim to rarely have the time for.

Will the others (editors of computer magazines, consultants for big-four consultancies, speakers at pundit-rich conferences) ever learn? Probably not, because I suspect they are at the autistic end of the spectrum. Collectors of things, phenomena, personal theories. Theorisers, list-makers, database-makers, with no relationship to society.

But perhaps such sad blokes could do with reading The Essential Difference: Men, Women and the Extreme Male Brain by Simon Baron-Cohen and brooding in the corner while the rest of us get on with real life.