Clay Shirky's ETECH presentation on the politics of social software

Here are my notes from Clay Shirky's inspiring presentation at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego: "Shut Up! No, *You* Shut Up: A Pattern Language for Moderation Strategies." Clay's talk recapitulates one of the most important ideas about technology I know of, Mitch Kapor's seminal notion that "Architecture is politics." He works though how the design of social technologies produces political outcomes, and calls on designers to join an online conversation about the politics of their design:

Pattern language for moderation strategies
   * Increasingly a developer problem
   * No catalog of successful/unsuccessful strategies
Imagine "communal freedom" -- the X axis
   * How much freedom does the software allow the group to have in intercommunication
   * Notepad can't catalyze group conversation
   * Usenet is for group conversation -- no restriction on user-registration, no control, implicitly global
Imagine "annonyingness" -- the Y axis
   * Flaming, trolling, etc
The more communal freedom, the more annoyingness
Even moderate amounts of communal freedom yields lots of annoyingness

Link

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

More at Boing Boing

Eurovision 2013: An American in London

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

Comments are closed.