digitaldust

Wow. It was over year and a half ago that I committed myself to writing a chapter for this and now it is finally published. As always there is an excitingly random selection of pages available on google book search. I don’t recommend you run out and buy it. At a staggering 1000+ pages it is longer than a Neil Stephenson epic and the £300 price tag is also a little steep.

Handbook of Research on Socio-Technical Design and Social Networking

Press Release for:
Whitworth, B., & DeMoor, A. (Eds.). (2009). Handbook of Research on Socio-Technical Design and Social Networking Systems. Hershey PA: Information Science Reference.

A state-of-the-art summary of knowledge in an evolving, multi-disciplinary field, distinctive in its depth and breadth of scholarship, variety of international authors, and combination of practical and theoretical views.

Socio-technical systems have both social and technical aspects. Examples include Wikipedia, e-mail, chat, text-messages, instant messages, social networks (Facebook), online learning (Moodle), job markets (Monster), blogs, twitter, social bookmarks (Digg), online multi-player games (World of Warcraft), online simulations (Second Life), bit-torrent media sharing, online voting, online news, reputation systems, recommender systems, collaborative writing, and many other forms. The socio-technical evolution has massively changed the Internet as we know it.

This book is a breakthrough. Not just social factors in technology settings, or the effect of technology on society, the Handbook of Socio-Technical Design goes a step further. It asks how social ideas can inspire new technology forms, and how technology can empower new social forms. While common approaches are social or technical, the socio-technical vision is that people and computers are more than people or computers. Social and technical are separate domains with different ideologies, but they must work together for higher performance synergies.

This book is multi-disciplinary. The socio-technical approach is not an easy path, as it needs people with both social and technical knowledge and skills. Yet it is the only way for society and technology to move forward successfully. A society that rejects technology will fall behind. A technology that ignores social values will run rampant. Only their combination can succeed.

This book is timely. The Internet was initially coded as a technical system. Today it is increasingly a social system. E-mail spam is what happens when technical systems ignore social needs – in this case the right to privacy. The socio-technical gap, between what computers do and what society wants, is why some argue we need a new Internet, as this one is “broken” (see www.nytimes.com).
We need to replace current technical designs by socio-technical designs.

This book is important. In the socio-technical vision, social values must enclose technical power. Just as atom bomb technology made us choose world peace over mutually assured destruction (MAD), so social applications ask us to choose social good. The Internet can be for freedom or state control, can benefit millions or cheat them. Unless social values like privacy and democracy are explicit, technology cannot support them online, where “code is law”. Technology advances force us to choose our future, and this book is about making informed choices in the new global information society.

Not every tag cloud has a silver lining. The worlds first performance tag cloud will be digitally bodged live next Tuesday (28/08) at the Cube, Bristol’s own indie microplex. It’s time for the Grumpyman.tv night,a miserable mashup between the cube.tv events and the Grumpy Man DJs.

Ed and I will be doing miserable and annoying video surfing, supported by a real world participative tag cloud. It’s Grumpyman 2.0. And if that doesn’t get on your tits then we’ve got more that’s guaranteed to make you morose, tetchy and downright angry.

The rest of the night promises to hold melancholy music videos and angst film whilst we do the sad web weirdness. There’s a bar and music as well as pictures. So come along and drown your sorrows. We will be.

I’ve nearly caught up with the rest of the web universe.

Dude, that is so yesterday afternoon, about 3pm.

Yours,

Rik

—–Original Message—–
From: Dan Dixon [mailto:dan@headshift]
Sent: 03 May 2006 14:35
To: headshift1
Subject: web design death clock

http://www.pingmag.jp/2006/05/01/the-web-design-trend-obituary-death- clock/

Partly because of a cunning trick I’ve implemented in my RSS feeds. With a little inspiration from a friend of Al’s, I’ve gone for a much simpler and, I’ve now found, much more effective set of classifications.

1. Good
2. Possibly Good
3. Possibly Crap
4. Crap I have to subscribe to for some reason but cant be asked reading

In one avian bird flu swoop I’ve made my feeds manageable. Now I only subscribe to 99 feeds (excluding my flickr feeds, that would at least double it), so maybe I can’t complain compared to other information junkies around who do 3-5 times that much. However I don’t inject meth-amphetamine into my eyeballs like I catch some other people around the office doing.

I went from thousands of unread items to less than 100. the other thing I noticed was that all the my “Good” blogs had relatively low posting rates (except WMMNA and frankly I have no idea how she does it).

I’ve also noticed that the stuff I read is the good stuff and I skim the headings of the “Crap I have to….”, to stay peripherally across various business and pleasure things I simply must stay across. Both of which are relatively low volume.

Apologies for the meta/geek/lifehack stuff. These things are nearly as bad as the proverbial cheese sandwich post.

PS: Rik is reading this post before I’ve posted it. We’re trapped in a Xeno’s paradox of web awareness. But it’s better to be Achilles than the tortoise – even if he is left behind he’s got great abs.

Phew, now I know what I get every morning, it’s not that I’m lazy or go to bed to late, I’ve got Social Jet-lag. Some crazy german researcher is claiming that 50% of the world has permanent jet lag – rather than just a few people liking to stay up late and have a lie in. Perhaps he needs to use occam’s razor in the morning, it’s the best thing for shaving whilst under the effects of Social Jet-lag.

Professor Till Roenneberg, of Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich, said this meant that at least one person in two was “in effect, socially jet-lagged all the time” because their body clock did not conform with their working hours.

…

Prof Roenneberg suggested altering school and work start times to fit better with this pattern would make a “huge difference” to exam results and productivity. He suggested more companies should start work at 10am rather than 9am because the biggest problem is with people who have not fully woken up in the morning.

Suits me fine! I was just looking to see where I could live if I want to live in a timezone an hour behind – but I’ve not got a lot of choice, it’s either Iceland or Morocco. I think I would be quite happy splitting my time between the two if I could.
(via my loose and occasional trawl of gizmondo, no funky gadgets just silly scientists and jet lagged zombies)

It also occurs to me that the term social has nothing really to do with this jetlag/sleep idea. Just that the word is increasingly cool to use at the moment. Social Jet-lag should be being a few hours behind the conversation. Which I also feel quite often, usually to do with the other sort of social jet-lag.

We’re looking for more staff at Headshift. More cat herders, jacks-of-all-trades, get things done type folks. We’re doing lots of exciting next gen web stuff and. Here’s a couple examples of what I’m mostly involved in at the moment to give you a feel of what’s going on… exposing a think tank’s research processes via social software cool aid, lubricating a banks IT security team with ruby juice and sweet small pieces and besides that building wiki wizrdrs.

Do have a look at the rest of the site and check out the full job description there is more and if that gets you going get in contact: jobs@headshift.com

Opportunity
Headshift is a professional online social media consulting and development company, which is rapidly emerging as the UK market leader in this specialist sector. We work with a range of knowledge-based organisations to create successful online communication projects that exploit the power of social networking.

Our solutions cover the full spectrum from bespoke development to pure software integration. Most of the systems we develop use web services, and we have also developed our own modular social networking and knowledge sharing platform.

We now have an immediate need for 2 professional web producers / project managers to take on a range of exciting client projects, taking on responsibility for delivering these on time, on spec and to budget, working as part of a friendly, committed and highly professional technical development and design team in our open-plan offices by Butler’s Wharf in London SE1.

More details on the Headshift site.

This rather infectious Ross Mayfield, Joi Ito, meme has even been sniffed out by CNET. When I first heard it I started thinking country clubs and elitism straight away, and the guy writing at CNET picks up on the same connotations.

There is a good, long and sometimes heated discussion about the concept over on Terranova. A lot of people try to focus on the differences, the social side is highlighted but the golf and sport aspect keeps coming back in for a lot of people. Guys, it’s not really about the golf. It’s just the same as a bridge club, mah jong or sipping G&Ts watching the cricket. The country club concept is the one that comes up again and again when thinking about this.

I wonder if this phenomena is more prevalent in Korea or Japan (golf the world over fulfills the same business/social function). With a greater penetration of MMOGs, especially in Korea, I would be surprised if Country Club Guilds werent more prevalent there.

Whew! What a mouth full. So what was this pervasive application lab thing I’ve just been to? It’s a long, long story about a long long week packed with interesting people and wild times. I fully intend to post some more on what we did discuss about pervasive applications and other things that occur to me as the idea of pervasiveness percolates through my mind.

First thing though, there was a ton of debate about what the term pervasive meant (more latter). The multi-user bit was fairly well understood. The application bit did seem to drift towards games as a large part of the gathering had game design and development background and if not games certainly the majority of time was spent describing game-like and playful interfaces.

(more…)

Heather and I went to the Hansard Society annual debate last night which I blogged over on the headshift web site.

The speakers (who definitely did not debate) were a bit like paraplegics in a whore house. They all knew something was going on down there with this internet stuff, it’s getting bigger and it’s really exciting, but they’re not sure what to do with it.

I put this tag cloud thing from, very imaginatively named company/site, called tagcloud.com.

I have to say it looks very very non-useful. Mostly it seems to pick up stylesheet stuff. So my tags are full of arial, helvetica, 666666. Very informative.