Moving Sociality on-line

I love the way the concept of Social Software and its understanding is evolving.

I think we need to understand this phenomenon, starting with the notion of 'Sociality' or what does it mean to be social. We as human beings are essentially social beings. Our sociality is the most evolved among all living beings - so we communicate, cooperate, collaborate, coordinate and so on. (I run out of terms beginning with 'c' here!). The point is that we have been like this for a very long time - way before there was the internet for sure.

What I believe the internet is now doing is moving more and more of our social life on-line. There are three fundamental implications here, which I will discuss here briefly.

The first is about the straightforward migration of things we do off-line to the on-line world. We make friends, we share objects, particularly social objects, we stay in touch, we communicate and so on.

Sociality on-line however does not have a one-to-one correspondence with what we know off-line. That is where the transformational impact of technology comes in. It expands our reach across space and time, it remembers our footprints in the digital world, it lets us interact and converse with the various objects (including people!), and so on. In its wake it brings issues of security, privacy, transparency etc. Not that these issues do not exist off-line, but they take on a much larger significance. So that I believe is the second aspect of this phenomenon.

The third aspect is that the on-line world is clumsy in some ways. It lacks several features that we are used to. We do not as of yet, see all aspects of the people we interact with. We are privy to some aspects in greater detail, but we miss out on their emotions and body language. The traditional markers which we use to identify spaces and people are no longer the same in the digital world. We need to now device ways of finding and navigating through this world. It all begins with having an identity. Every social object in this world needs one, and it grows more sophisticated with time. We develop more sophisticated profiles, add descriptions, tags and so on. We need ways to organize this stuff, so there are taxonomies and folksonomies, we use indicators for preferences and so on. So this notion of creating ways to interact with the sociality online is the third key aspects.

Now there is indeed a fourth one, but it does not have so much to do with sociality, as it has to do with the properties of the online technical environment. That is its ability to discover patterns in our interactions, and aggregate and correlate in way we could not do before. This property greatly enhances our experience of the online world, and quite enhances sociality too.

When we look at this phenomenon in this way, everything falls neatly into place for me. Actually it serves as an Architecture of online sociality, which I have used to think about solutions as well.