Social Software: The Philosophy of Modern Conversation

I have a confession to make. I actually studied philosophy and other arcane subjects known as the Classics in college. I spent four years enthralled with the works of some of the greatest thinkers in Western Civilization. I struggled through calculus and Kant, and was delighted by the elegance of the Socratic dialogs and Mozart’s Don Giovanni. You might ask how this education prepared me for a career in technology, much less a perch in the blogosphere. Reading the reviews of speeches given this week at eTech I was reminded of the answer. I didn’t master any of those subjects. I learned how to think, and how to have a conversation. 

Scott Karp has a substantive post this week on the absence of meaningful conversation in the blogosphere. He compares most blog posts to an array of vapid corporate meetings, and makes the case that more attention needs to be paid to the process of the conversation, not just to the velocity.

 
“Conversation is a process — but the most useful conversations also have a sense of progress and, in rare instances, a destination.”

I understand his point. But after reflecting on the many, many hours I spent in quiet, old, musty classrooms, struggling to understand the flow of the conversation from Kant to Hegel, I suspect there’s something else at work in the blogosphere. In some ways it is eminently superficial, and in others quite profound.

What’s important about the momentum behind blogging and other forms of social software is not the “software” it’s the “social”. These tools and technologies are enabling new forms of conversation on a global scale. They’re empowering individuals to express themselves in new media. And they’re facilitating the flow of information beyond social and political barriers. In sum, they’re forming the technical foundation for the democratization of information.

Day to day I beat the drum on some of the pragmatic reasons for the importance of this shift. Reading an excerpt from Clay Shirky’s ETech presentation reminded me of their nobler antecedents. This shift has the potential to inspire imagination and real change – from the bloggers in Iran and China to the new successes of Mom & Pop shops in Shreveport and Los Angeles.  Let’s hope that we remember that reason for excitement and inspiration as we continue to explore, argue, and innovate.

So with apologies to those who aren’t as enamored of philosophy and great old books, I’ll close today’s post with a rather long quote from Mr. Shirky.

Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan advanced the argument that humans in our native state lead lives of such chaos that we need a monarch to impose control and without it our lives would be nasty, brutish, and short. If from time to time tyranny happens, (it’s) still better than the alternative.

Rousseau wrote later that might is not right. (The) leader must support (his) subjects, and subjects have (the) right to agitate against leader if they're not being well served.

This is the direction that the conversation around social software is taking. Hobbes would say that Dave (Winer) had the right and all was good. Rousseau would reply, "no he didn't, software systems that don't allow the users to fight back are immoral."

Social software is the experimental wing of political philosophy, a discipline that doesn't realize it has an experimental wing. We are literally encoding the principles of freedom of speech and freedom of expression in our tools. We need to have conversations about the explicit goals of what it is that we're supporting and what we are trying to do, because that conversation matters. Because we have short-term goals and the cliff-face of annoyance comes in quickly when we let users talk to each other. But we also need to get it right in the long term because society needs us to get it right. I think having the language to talk about this is the right place to start.

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Blogging, Clay Shirky, Democracy, ETech, Marketing 2.0, Social Media, Web2.0