As software engineers, we tend to overfocus on the tools we create rather than the problems that we solve. Today, a major area of interest is social computing. But when people say social computing, they tend to mean email and bulletin boards and IM and blogs and Wikis -- a set of tools for moving glyphs from one computer to another. A better way to look at it, IMHO, is as using the computer to augment human social interaction. Thinking solely about publishing and transport extends our ability to speak, it's true, but there's so much more to social interaction than that.
One book that got me thinking about this was The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell. He divides people into connectors, mavens, and salesmen. Each of these three types of people -- or these three aspects of each of us -- has very different requirements when it comes to social interaction. Augmenting the type of behavior typified by each category can amplify even further those who are already good in that area, and enable the rest of us to be better than our innate talents alone would allow.
Connectors are people who seem to know everyone, who love to talk and to listen, who form the primary, or at least the most far- and fast-reaching elements of the worldwide social network. Personally, I'm not a connector, but I've known several and I've watched them at work. For example, for each person they know, they remember their names, their relationship, their personal details (how many kids, which ones are in college, if they're divorced), and their past communication; and they reconnect from time to time just to stay in touch, or when there's an excuse like a birthday. Yet none of the address books that I've ever used has a space for "number of kids", or reminds me to send a "happy birthday" email (or just sends it automatically, for that matter), or lets me keep a record of other contacts with the person, like phone calls and meetings.
A maven is someone who knows a lot about a particular area, and is always willing to tell you about what they know. Mavens often get asked about the same area over and over. Yet mail systems provide little support for boiler-plate answers to frequent questions. Mavens usually know just where to go for information, whether it's a web site, a book, or a person. But our current systems don't support this sort of indexing and retrieval of personal knowledge, in a format that's easily converted to communication or publication.
Strangely, current systems may do more to support salesmen than the other types of user. They correct your spelling, let you use slick fonts, and let you include pictures. But they only do most of this if you know that they're good ways to raise the level of excitement in your communication. Much like Microsoft's PowerPoint makes it easy to put together slick presentations, a more salesman-friendly email or blog system might make the choices more automatic.
This is just a surface-level scratch of the possibilities if we stop thinking of existing systems as a way to move glyphs, and start thinking of them as a tool for augmenting social interaction. So long as we think of the next social computer tool as a new version of the existing ones, we'll be stuck in those preset molds. It's only when we think in terms of the problem area -- social interaction -- that we have a hope of creating something really new.
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