There are some great bookmarks posted in this group centers around this week’s theme of social and political effects of social software. I particular enjoyed reading the shirky’s A Group is its Own Worst Enemy (https://landing.athabascau.ca/pg/bookmarks/read/67353/shirky-a-group-is-its-own-worst-enemy) recommended by professor Jon. The part where he describes the invisible social pressure that affects one’s judgement is very true.  He gave a few examples in his 2003 article with one illustrating a social gathering situation -party and how one’s decision is affected by the social context and another example is with a group of neurotic patients. Also with a story about the demise of a BBS called Communitree that were overrun with high school students flooding the system with irrelevant and salacious posts. All of above examples point to the common problems of social group in the context of social computing that are less technically related but rather communally related. A lot of issues arise from within the group rather than from external factors.

During my research I discovered some interesting social effects social software impose on us that were not obvious at first but becomes increasing apparent once routinized. I came across this article (http://0-ieeexplore.ieee.org.aupac.lib.athabascau.ca/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=4755406) and shared it in our group bookmark which is exactly what I was looking for as a concrete feature of social software that is ubiquitous. Folksonomy – not synonymous to tagging (thanks professor Jon for the correction), is a classification system of managing content metadata in a bottom-up fashion that harness the power of the crowd. Taxonomy, on the contrary, is done in a top-down fashion.

“Tagging” is commonly used as a way to annotate and attach metadata to shared content. The tags are essentially keywords chosen subjectively by the creator whereby the keywords are indexed and used for content retrieval. Tagging can also be seen as a form of knowledge management in which tacit knowledge can be extracted from social context. In this article (http://0-ieeexplore.ieee.org.aupac.lib.athabascau.ca/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=4755406.), Boeije at el. coin the term “connected knowledge” to differentiate tacit knowledge from the explicit and looking at knowledge itself from two very different views: Commodity and Community View.
So how does tagging exerts its influence on people and ripple its effects towards changing human behavior? From the creator’s perspective, tagging make it easy to insert subjective association of semantic to information and objects. This “sensemaking” process enables individual to associate meaning to their own experience, demonstrate the “bottom-up” approach in information classification rather than forced to use a limited set of predefined keywords. The effects on information classification are twofold; in my opinion, first there is a great level of subjectivity involve in semantic relevancy. It encourages independent decision making in building common vocabularies that add to the overall semantic graph of the related words. Second, it supports browsing or serendipitous discovery of interesting resources when used with the “Tag Cloud” which creates long tail effect of the keywords.

In addition to tagging, Web 2.0 is about creativity, a read and write web and collaborative model. Social software that defines Web 2.0 such as Wiki, Blog, and Forum created community based culture on the internet. It is now easier than ever to participant in conversation on topics that are of interest to an individual in an interactive environment. The internet becomes a platform that is conducive for collaborative problem solving due to: 1) Lack of geographical constraints. 2) Relatively low cost to establish communication. 3) Support for both asynchronous and synchronous communication. Wiki and blog created a cultural shift towards collaborative knowledge sharing. Prominent examples such as Wikipedia (www.Wikipedia.com) and Blogger (www.blogger.com) provided the fundamental infrastructure for massive scale collaboration to take place. The underlying Web 2.0 technology that supports it enables a read/write web paradigm. These changes the way people deal with information. The model under Web 2.0, specifically, the aforementioned social software encourages co-creation of information and move away from the traditional sheer consumption mentality. I particularly enjoy the talk “Cognitive surplus” (http://www.informationweek.com/blog/229212514) by Clay Shirky in which he describes Web 2.0 allows the larger society to harness the extra brain power that would otherwise been wasted on traditional media outlet like watching TV. The shift from passive to participatory mode is enough of an important shift that changes the way we deal with the surplus of cognitive power and time. It really doesn’t matter if people are spending time on social networking site like Twitter and Facebook or online multiplayer gaming, the important thing is to participate in the process of information exchange because people then understand there exists a two-way communication platform where your opinions can be heard, however trivial or mundane, is a low cost way of reaching out. As well, as Shirky argues, the process itself would make us smarter overall instead of just being on the receiving end of the information flow.

This brings to the next point of social/policy effects caused by social software. Take the recent Japan earthquake event as an example. The large influx of earthquake reports flooded the internet with information as it was happening. I witness this myself as I watched a youtube video of someone’s recording footage of the quake happening while in his apartment. And that recording was uploaded to youtube only minutes after event had happened. People were taking the advantages of Twitter to send short messages to report missing person and that leads to the People Finder app (http://japan.person-finder.appspot.com/?lang=en) (an adhoc app created by Goolge after Haiti Earthquake) where family members and friends can use this tool to locate messages from loved ones. This is all possible because: 1) The technology is ubiquitous and high affordance. This includes the mobile devices and social media. 2) The understanding of the use of technologies including social media as way to cry for help. 3) Collaborative nature of Web 2.0. 4) Human empathy. This further led to the development of crisis mapping (http://blog.ushahidi.com/index.php/2011/03/16/crisis-mapping-japans-earthquake-and-how-you-can-help/) for the incident. Again, deep inside the framework of Web 2.0, particularly the loosely coupled mashup APIs, enables the ability to mix and match different technologies needed for the creation of thematic map visually displaying geolocated tweets. Bringing together all the information from all sources (twitter, google map, etc.) is now possible to do with relatively low cost.

Dickson