PIII. Social Software Sublime

Technophiles routinely and notoriously invest their tools with superlative and even spiritual significance, just as technocrats notoriously confuse the intractable political quandaries of reconciling diverse human aspirations with more straightforward engineering problems. It is not always easy to disentangle the powerful and weird overlapping registers in which what appear at first to be primarily technical terms manage to exert their actual cultural significance and force.

For example, “social software” is a general term that has relatively recently assumed prominence as a description of a whole constellation of network applications that facilitate and support collaboration and conversation among their users.

Some of these, like bulletin boards, discussion lists, chatrooms and other online fora, have been around for some time (in the lightning-flash fast-forward dog-year reckoning of web time). Others are rather newer.

There is social networking software that facilitates job searches, helps users make professional contacts, maintains connections among friends and acquaintances, provides matches for more selective dating, or opportunities to find likely sexual partners –- and who is to say how long the terms with which we associate these applications will retain any currency, “LinkedIn,” “Tribe,” “Friendster,” “Orkut,” among many others...

There are wikis, which are sites to which users can publish their own content as they see fit, but also edit the content they find there (often only to find their own edits quickly superseded by fresh edits by others). And there are bookmarking applications in which users variously annotate, tag, or signal special interest in online materials, offer up lists of enthusiasms, associations, rankings, taxonomies, and from aggregations of which information sometimes emerge curiously powerful and novel organizations of information.

There are blogs, of course (about which I will have still more to say later), and there is, after all, the “Web” itself, the cyberspatial sprawl, that “consensual hallucination” or hallucination of consent we are all weaving, weaving around, woven into all at once.

And there has been, of course, a comparable host of exhilarated claims made along a long trajectory of hype and hope from technophiles and “digirati” through waves of recent decades of computer and media developments. It is interesting to notice in this connection the extent to which one of the best and most influential histories of social software available so far, Christopher Allen’s “Tracing the Evolution of Social Software” is a tale that will be very familiar in many of its own landmarks, figures, and textual canon to scholars of computation and especially the “internet” already, a tale in which the protagonists are Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think” (1945) and “memex” device, Doug Engelbart’s “Augmenting Human Intellect” (1962), J.C.R. Licklider’s “The Computer as a Communication Device” (1968) and ARPANET, through various incarnations of “Groupware,” to Ted Nelson and K. Eric Drexler’s Hypertext and “Xanadu.”

While there is no question that there really is something breathtaking about the pace and churn with which new social software applications arrive on the scene, solicit hectic experimentation, and then combine and sublime away into new forms, this does not seem to me to be enough to account for the pre-storm ozone reek of anticipation in the air, at once weirdly indefinite but definitely palpable, whenever handwaving enthusiasts really get going about “social software.” The revolutionaries say “software,” but their eyes seem to have something like liberty, emancipation, or democracy (along with stars) in them.

Consider further a few of the terms that persistently re-appear in discussions of emerging digital networked information and communication technologies, and especially in discussions of social software: end-to-end, peer-to-peer, and open source.

As I will have occasion to discuss at greater length in Chapter Two, the end-to-end principle remarks that there is usually a crucial tradeoff between optimizing a network to perform any particular function or facilitate the working of any particular application as against optimizing a network to accommodate as many functions as possible. To the extent that what is wanted is a network that will not be rendered quickly obsolete in the face of ongoing innovation, the principle encourages the design of “dumb networks” in which intelligence and functionality are pushed off to the periphery or the terminals of the network as much as possible. The internet as a “network of networks” has incarnated this principle across its many layers, and has readily accommodated wave after wave of experimentalism, tinkering, attack, and reinvention as a result.

End-to-end (e2e) bears more than a family resemblance to another technical phrase, peer-to-peer. That term acquired its currency partly as a repudiation of the uncharacteristically hierarchical client/server model that arose in the era of the internet’s explosive growth from 1994-2000, but defines a network design ethos that long predates its present popularity. “Peer-to-peer” describes systems (and the collaborative projects they facilitate) that take advantage of radically decentralized resources under conditions of variable network connectivity.

A third term, open-source, describes software whose source code is freely available for scrutiny, modification, and distribution by its users.

There are powerfully prophetic deployments available for terms like “peer-to-peer,” “open source,” and the “end-to-end principle” that one will sometimes hear in the language of technology enthusiasts who are struggling to convey their sense that digital networked information and communication technologies might have profoundly emancipatory uses and mobilize revolutionary energies. These radical discourses aren’t really always so easy to square with the otherwise more flat-footed deployments of these terms in their strictly technical senses.

How can we take a sensible measure of the distance between these deployments?

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