Abstract
…Stumbleupon Sixdegrees, Orkut, Friendster … Metafilter, Synchronicity, Livejournal, … TagWorld, Cyworld, flickr … LinkedIn, Bebo, FaceBook, Hatebook … Reddit, MySpace, YouTube … UpComing, Jaiku, Underskog… Zoomer, MeetMoi, Twitter … iLike, OKCupid, delicious…
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Rhetorically, the account is presented through the interplay of collaborative ethnographic material developed through dialogues between the designers and a researcher, and visual material drawn from the social software environment itself and logs of Underskog in use. The text has images, charts and tables, quotes, narrative and expository text. We shift between these modes of providing a reflexive account of a multi-level, iterative design process. However, in this text we limit ourselves to the interplay between designers and the researcher, and to selections from Underskog that illustrate our argument. This study may then be expanded in a later one that makes fuller reference to a user-based analysis.
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In many ways the communicative groundwork for social software and social networking was laid by way of the emerging discourses of earlier online networks, such as the WELL (Rheingold 2000). In the 1990s, user groups, net forums and online chat each saw the emergence of online discursive exchanges that were enabled through the design of software that afforded both synchronous and asynchronous communication across time and space. These forms of computer-mediated communication have been widely studied, less in terms of their underlying communication design and more in terms of their situated uses, for example, information exchanges, threaded conversations, gendered power plays and virtual identities (e.g. Turkle 1995)
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see e.g. http://www.thefacebookproject.com/
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With Synchronicity Caterina Fake also uses the same metaphor which she says is something they discovered when making social MMO, the precursor to flickr http://www.christine.net/2006/08/caterina_fake_a.html:
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Acknowledgements
Underskog would not have been possible without the third member of the design team, Alex Staubo. Our thanks also to the participants in Underskog, to fellow contributors to this volume and to Synne Skjulstad, Ole Smørdal and Marika Luders for suggestions and comments.
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Morrison, A., Westvang, E., Skogsrud, S.S. (2010). Whisperings in the Undergrowth: Communication Design, Online Social Networking and Discursive Performativity. In: Wagner, I., Bratteteig, T., Stuedahl, D. (eds) Exploring Digital Design. Computer Supported Cooperative Work. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84996-223-0_8
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