Joseph
-------- Original Message -------- Subject: [discuss] Flaming and the design of social software Date: Fri, 26 Nov 2004 14:18:34 -0600 From: michael <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Reply-To: Canadian Open Source Discussion <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Organization: CanOpener To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
I found Clay Shirkey's "Group as User: Flamming and the design of social software" a welcome deep breath :
http://shirky.com/writings/group_user.html
"Flame wars are not surprising; they are one of the most reliable features of
mailing list practice. If you assume a piece of software is for what it does,
rather than what its designer's stated goals were, then mailing list software
is, among other things, a tool for creating and sustaining heated argument.
(This is true of other conversational software as well -- the WELL, usenet,
Web BBSes, and so on.)
This tension in outlook, between 'flame war as unexpected side-effect' and
'flame war as historical inevitability,' has two main causes. The first is
that although the environment in which a mailing list runs is computers, the
environment in which a flame war runs is people. You couldn't go through the
code of the Mailman mailing list tool, say, and find the comment that reads
"The next subroutine ensures that misunderstandings between users will be
amplified, leading to name-calling and vitriol." Yet the software, when
adopted, will frequently produce just that outcome. "
--
Michael Francis
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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