Social software is the experimental wing of political philsophy

06-April-2006

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"Social software is the experimental wing of political philsophy, a discipline that doesn't realize it has an experimental wing", says Clay Shirky

Quotable stuff from Clay Shirky speaking at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference last month, as reported by Nathan Torkington.

Social software is the experimental wing of political philsophy, 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.

O'Reilly Radar > ETech: Clay Shirky

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Update: Mike Malloch bookmarked some more notes from the Shirky talk:

If you have javascript enabled, you should see a live linkroll of the items Mike tagged below.


Graham Attwell; 06-April-2006 11:26:06; forum (0) help

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