Comments on: What is social?

By: brynn

brynn — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 22:21:11 +0000

I have to link to a great discussion on this topic over at Kwippy: http://www.kwippy.com/tinythoughts/kwips/2008/sep/24/195304/

By: Jesper Laugesen

Jesper Laugesen — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 10:17:59 +0000

very interesting!

However, I think it show that people’s perception of the ’sociality’ of a medium is very much dependant on how they, themselves interact with it.

Most users use wikipedia as a source of information. They read it, and reading is by default not a social action.

My personal definition of ’social’ is that I have a sense of somehow being driven by a community, of which I am a part. And by that standard, wikipedia, many blogs (and myspace (!)) is left out. Facebook, Twitter, Inselkampf and other blogs are ‘in’.

What I know to technically be a social site does in no way always correlate to what I perceive as one.

By: Sanjay Kairam

Sanjay Kairam — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 21:10:50 +0000

The question of whether or not Wikipedia would be consider social was actually the one that mostly drove the study. As a collaboratively-edited document complete with a discussion forum, it’s amazing to think that most people don’t think of it a social entity, but it just goes to show how as end-users, many of those people were only considering the end-product. Dave, I do bet that if you were to sample the people who contributed to Wikipedia, they would probably overwhelmingly say that it is social.

I get the impression that this line that users draw between ’social’ and ‘informational’ plays into older notions of what people consider ‘trusted’ news and information sources. If this is true, then the notion that users consider Wikipedia to be “informational” (and thus assign it “trusted” status) is troublesome when you consider the politics that surrounds edits (think of what happens with Palin’s page before the VP nom announcement).

By: http://raconteuring.com/

http://raconteuring.com/ — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 20:12:20 +0000

I like the conclusion you drew, that there is a difference between intended use and actual use. I think that happened with Twitter. Those guys had no idea what they were making, and the service is so open-ended that users have hijacked it as a means to do all kinds of things. My next twitter project is going to be a messaging bus between all my computers.

The wikipedia responses surprised me. Even though most people don’t use it socially, there’s quite a bit of social going on to make the wiki function. Perhaps this is something the average person isn’t aware of? I bet if you sampled wikipedia maintainers, you’d get very different answers.

Is the moral is that a social graph and social tools does not a social site make? Perhaps if the lay user does not need to use social tools to take advantage of the site, then it isn’t social.

Btw, I love your Love and Penguins quote. Derek Powazek has been my hero since high school.