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Tech Report kmi-98-03 Abstract


Managing Persistent Discourse: Organizational Goals and Digital Texts
Techreport ID: kmi-98-03
Date: 1998
Author(s): Tamara Sumner, Simeon Yates, Simon Buckingham Shum and Jane Perrone
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Prior to digital communications media, texts were primarily judged using hidden but assumed institutional practices (e.g., journal peer review processes, editorial mediation). Increasingly, digital communications media can make these previously invisible discursive practices visible in a persistent medium. Doing so transforms these discourses into texts where they are subject to: (1) a reader's interpretation and judgment and (2) explicit manipulation by writers or publishers seeking to influence this interpretative process. In this article, we focus on managed persistent discourse where explicit practices and roles are adopted within an institution to actively manipulate and transform digitally-preserved discourse, with the aim of influencing readers' interpretative processes in ways that reflect organizational goals. We examine in detail two cases political manifestos in the UK and an interactive journal with on-line peer review to illustrate these new roles and practices, and the different organizational goals the managed discourse is used to support.
 
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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.