It is also creating an increasing number of debates which are definitely related to the "social" part of it.

At the beginning was the discussion group

Discussion groups, usenet, mail lists are all examples of "social software", but I think that weblogs are at the moment at the center of this process.

Imho one of the most important dates in the short history of weblogs is the day Dave Winer decided to close the very lively Scripting.com discussion group and offer free Manila weblogs to anybody willing to open one. The significant change was that from that day everybody was invited to use their own space to express their opinions and not a shared one.

From some points of view this could be considered a step backwards from the concept of "conversation", something that we are trying to gain back with technologies such as TrackBack to be able to link together posts on different sites and figure out conversations' threads.

Still, the advantages of weblogs are significant, the most important one being that having a private and controlled space allows us to express ourselves in better and more personal ways, without any background noise within our own environment. This is creating the basis for on-line reputations that were not achievable in common areas: it's much easier to follow somebody's opinions by reading his weblog than by singling out his messages scattered among several discussion groups or mail lists.

Too much discussions?

Members of this almost ideal environment, the blogosphere, still meet in shared zones of the web from time to time and, especially recently, very often they clash into each other.

This is very social and probably something software cannot do much about.

But this is also quite unproductive.

I believe that this is happening because many creative people in this business are believers, their ideas are so strongly supported that any attack to an opinion is perceived as an attack to their very identity, thus creating conflicts.

There's a small piece of software used by people suffering from RSI that locks up the whole computer for some seconds to force them to take pauses. Maybe we should introduce something similar: a utility that prevents us from posting anything for a few minutes after we have read a message. Something to force us to cool down, to consider the world, to properly position us in space and time before letting us express anything.

There is people on the other side of software and people wants and deserve respect. We absolutely don't have to agree an everything, it would be boring, but it's important that in these early stages of development of a new world of communication we try to do our best to avoid getting something too similar to the old world.

comments: