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Tech Report kmi-96-15 Abstract


Digital Genres and the New Burden of Fixity
Techreport ID: kmi-96-15
Date: 1996
Author(s): Simeon Yates and Tamara Sumner
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Stability in the production and transmission of texts has been a taken-for-granted feature of communicative acts for much of history. In the past, this fixity (i.e., the reliability of texts not to change over space and time) has arisen from the interaction between immutable technologies (used to produce text) and social rigidity (in the structure and practices of discourse communities where texts are produced and consumed). These interactions provided stable settings fostering the gradual development of rich communicative genres which, in turn, further contributed to fixity in communicative acts. In the current era of virtual communities and digital documents, this relationship between technology, social context, and fixity has been loosened. We claim the new burden for providing fixity in communications is being met by increased reliance on genre. To support this claim, we examine the four-way relationship between technologies, social contexts, social practices and genre by considering example digital documents produced by two different discourse communities.

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To appear in: Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Special Track on Genres in Digital Documents, January 1997.
 
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Social Software is...


Social Software
Social Software can be thought of as "software which extends, or derives added value from, human social behaviour - message boards, musical taste-sharing, photo-sharing, instant messaging, mailing lists, social networking."

Interacting with other people not only forms the core of human social and psychological experience, but also lies at the centre of what makes the internet such a rich, powerful and exciting collection of knowledge media. We are especially interested in what happens when such interactions take place on a very large scale -- not only because we work regularly with tens of thousands of distance learners at the Open University, but also because it is evident that being part of a crowd in real life possesses a certain 'buzz' of its own, and poses a natural challenge. Different nuances emerge in different user contexts, so we choose to investigate the contexts of work, learning and play to better understand the trade-offs involved in designing effective large-scale social software for multiple purposes.