Here is a thought: software tools are similar to literary genres:
- software is inifitely meleable just as literature
- to have a meaning for people a program needs to be based on some existing other software or phisical device, as a source of analogies and metaphores
- this leads to the creation of software 'genres': email reader, instant messaging, web forum, wiki etc (I've chosen communication tools just to talk about something familiar to all members here), there is very little distinction between those genres other then some convention
- software is inifitely meleable just as literature
- to have a meaning for people a program needs to be based on some existing other software or phisical device, as a source of analogies and metaphores
- this leads to the creation of software 'genres': email reader, instant messaging, web forum, wiki etc (I've chosen communication tools just to talk about something familiar to all members here), there is very little distinction between those genres other then some convention
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interaction tools, communication software, wiki....
Tue, May 17, 2005 - 9:44 PMi like where you're coming from. one problem would soon be that genre's are unstable, and often tend to undermine themselves or to bleed into their neighbors. there are films one might categorize as "black romantic comedies," "samurai westerns," "essay films," and mocumentaries (which can include rockumentaries and shockumentaries, neither of which would accommodate reality tv (or parodies of reality tv... unreality tv, surreality tv?)...
Goffman's work on frames shows, to your point, that frames can be infinintely embedded w/in one another. (a comedian tells a joke about a pope telling a joke about a rabbi posing as an airline pilot... )...
And Derrida's work showed the same; there is no truth...
what if we broke down the tools into their parts, and then tagged those up?
connection type
users: one to one
many
archives kept
no archiving
text
still picture
video
audio
real time
text search
meta search
IM is an interaction tool to me; Web forum is communication. I make that distinction based on how they each treat the "conversation," or "strip of talk". IM, for example, treats talk as an episode of real time interaction, much like face to face. it's based on face to face interaction... web discussions seem more to be modeled on bulletin boards and publishing, and so are less about real time interaction than they are about disseminating communication.
(i'm using a distinction between interaction (interpersonal talk) and communication (capturing and distributing information).... it's a distinction Luhmann makes and one that i think really helps. we can differentiate between tools that enable/facilitate interactions and those that are focused more on the information those exchanges produce.
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Re: interaction tools, communication software, wiki....
Wed, May 18, 2005 - 12:36 AMWhen you say 'it's based on face to face interaction...' about IM - that is exactly my point. To talk about IM you need to compare it to some earlier technique. After some time we shall be saying 'Some New Software is based on IM'. This is the creation of a genre - that is a form that has the only use in letting us understand the thing.
You say that IM is interaction and web forum is communication - but in fact this distinction lays only in our perceiving of those tools, you can create an application that lays anywhere between a web forum and IM. And, what's more, I think we can create a tool that will be as good for interaction as for communication. Currently we don't have something like that because we started with two separate models - but the distinction is more in our imagination than in technical possibility.
For example what if you have a double interface? IM that is integrated with a web forum - so that the web communication is inserted in the IM interaction and IM interaction is sasved to web archive.
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