[Air-l] Social software and ICT on Wikipedia

[William Dutton]

As Paolo Massa and Barry Wellman point out, all of these terms -- ICT,
new media, CMC, etc -- are anchored in specific research programmes,
historical periods, and technologies. They are not interchangeable.
While it would be great to improve Wikipedia, I suggest that a useful
source might be a book by Loader and others, which is part of the Key
Concepts series of Routledge. It is a 2004 publication, but this
discussion might encourage them to update Cyberculture: Key Concepts.
See: http://informationr.net/ir/reviews/revs143.html

In my opinion, these terms matter, so its great to see that a single
post has generated such a stir around the meaning of closely related by
distinct terms. 

Bill

-----Original Message-----
From: air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org
[mailto:air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of paolo massa
Sent: 26 July 2006 17:15
To: air-l at listserv.aoir.org
Cc: aoir list
Subject: Re: [Air-l] Social software and ICT on Wikipedia


I found the blog post "Tracing the Evolution of Social Software" [1],
published on October 13, 2004, very interesting. It starts with "The
term 'social software', which is now used to define software that
supports group interaction, has only become relatively popular within
the last two or more years. However, the core ideas of social software
itself enjoy a much longer history, running back to Vannevar Bush's
ideas about 'memex' in 1945, and traveling through terms such as
Augmentation, Groupware, and CSCW in the 1960s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. By
examining the many terms used to describe today's 'social software' we
can also explore the origins of social software itself, and see how
there exists a very real life cycle concerning the use of technical
terminology."

So here there is one more term "social software", luckly enough nobody
mentioned "Web2.0" [2] yet ... ouch! ;-)

And about ICT, you might like to know that there is no page for ICT on
Wikipedia, in fact the "Information and communication technology"
Wikipedia page [3] redirects to the "Information technology" Wikipedia
page. Of course I'm not saying that if something is not on Wikipedia
then that something does not exist but simply that someone might want to
edit the Wikipedia pages related to the many concepts we are discussing
on this mailing list, such as for example the CMC one [4]

P.

[1] http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2004/10/tracing_the_evo.html
[2]
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-
20.html
[3]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_and_communication_technology
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer-mediated_communication
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