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.

Moosehunt from Simon Evans on Vimeo.

My first thought was NO, technological determinism! But then after thinking about it, the answer is of course YES! Whether it was intended to be or not the idea is actually incredibly liberating. The role of a teacher is to do the things that cannot be replaced by a machine. If a teacher is doing something that can be replaced, then it is good for everyone to have it replaced. If a lecture can be replaced with a video, questions answered by the web or learning facilitated by a VLE then great. In fact if I can get a robot to do my job then I would be very happy.

A lot has happened, and now that I write this, I see that a lot of things have happened for the first time. It has been a rather eventful twelve months.

• Finishing my first full year of teaching
• Being published for the first time
• Presenting my first academic paper at a conference
• Organised my first conference
• Starting working with the Pervasive Media Studio
• Finished my teacher training
• Being a parent for the first time. Hello Noah

I would try and say something smart or detailed about it, but Iain has already done that, and much better than I would. For an app that looks very simple it has had a lot of thought put into it, and it works like a well evolved piece of the web coral reef, hooking into last.fm, twitter and myriad of those other micro-blogging corals that are co-cohabiting the reef.

So here is the music that makes me want to shout, let me hear yours. http://blip.fm/invite/digitaldust

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.

Art is the proper task of life.

Art and nothing but art!

When one wants to play the Hero’s part onstage, he should not think of being in the chorus, he should not even know how to speak in chorus.

Over breakfast this morning, as one does, I got to thinking about Nietzsche, art and blogging. One of Nietzsche’s central themes was that one should live one’s life as art and seek out art in all things. One part of being an artist is having (and usually documenting) a process that is not revealed, it’s the final product that is important. Finally blogging, and maybe I’m thinking more about the life/micro-blogging things like twitter/jaiku/tumbls/FB status’. Are these things in opposition? If you want to live your life as art, should you hide away the artistic process behind your life?

One angle is that exposing the process is not bad. Some art does do this, many conceptual pieces play with the idea of the process and may not have a final artefact. Though that opens a can of worms about whether the documented process is the final artefact.

A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.

Another angle is that blogging like this is performance and that it is edited from the process of “real” life. The readers are an audience, like any other performance, even if the blogger doesn’t think that. I’ve heard and also felt that other people are living more interesting and cool lives. Then there is also the confusion between “real” blogs and “fictitious” blogs, lonelygirl15 or Belle de Jour. But then as it’s art who cares. Nietzsche was against the idea of Truth, it’s all a matter of perspective.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

All truth is simple… is that not doubly a lie?

I surpised that there isn’t more on Nietzsche and blogging in this line. I’ve only managed to chased up a couple of blog posts. One is interesting in that as he says, blogging works to fracture the nature of truth, so works well with the perspectivist position.

And interestingly at the end, something that has fascinated me. Nietzsche, started as an ancient art critic (philologist) but did he become an artist himself, either in his work or his life?

Maybe, just maybe, with the advent of all these multi-touch screens, drafting desks would come back. They are better for working on this kind of interface, neither upright like in the Minority Report or flat out would work for these things in a single user situation.

And the steampunk in me hopes that 21st century drafting desks’ll keep all the pulleys, gears and polished wood too.

We make scalpels not swiss army knives.

Good tools, for the right person, in the right context. They don’t need to do more than they need to. More examples of Why? in design rather than Why Not?