10 March 2003

Clay Shirky writes about "Social Software and the Politics of Groups": "Social software has progressed far less quickly than single-user software, in part because we have a much better idea of how to improve user experience than group experience, and a much better idea of how to design interfaces than constitutions." "We have historically overestimated the value of network access to computers, and underestimated the value of network access to other people, so we have spent much more time on the technical rather than social problems of software used by groups. "One fruitful question might be "How can we test good group experience?" Over the last several years, the importance of user experience, user testing, and user feedback have become obvious, but we have very little sense of group experience, group testing, or group feedback." 9:24:54 AM    comment []

Joi Ito publishes an email from Dee Hock (founder of Visa) in response to Joi's emergent democracy paper. The email is a thoughtful commentary on the challenges of creating new forms of democracy, in particular on the way that culture becomes codified as law and fails to scale when it exceeds its founders' historically constrained vision. In a postscript, Dee Hock talks about the globally-interconnected Visa network and compares it to a dazzling vision of blogging as a global network of individuals triggering each other's intellect and imagination by trading in a currency of ideas: "At the heart of [Visa] is a communication network linked in an unimaginable number of ways.... Every neuron trusts the other neurons to perform in an acceptable manner which results in the trust between cardholder and merchant that is essential to the functioning of the system. Multiply this single transaction by twenty thousand banks, 220 countries, millions of merchant locations and more than a billion card holders and you have a whole hell of a lot of excitement. Imagine what such a system would look like if its currency were ideas and concepts rather than money. Is this what you mean by blogging?" 3:07:24 AM    comment []