Media: BBC's Bill Blog looks at Social Software and Informed Opinion

Bill Thompson on the BBC website has got his teeth into 'social software' in quite a big way. He's having a go at the hype building up round it and the way that it's being given transformational powers in society. 'Fire, agriculture and the wheel are probably the only three transforming technologies that have been around long enough to have observable consequences for basic human physiology and psychology, so we should not expect too much from social software in the next 18 months,' he says.

He also asks why so much attention is currently being paid to some high-profile blog commentators when years of academic work on community and computer-mediated communication is being ignored:'I am saddened that the last 20 years of research into human computer interaction, and the last 100 years of research into human psychology and the ways we manage communication with each other, has been totally disregarded by the people discussing social software. The ongoing debate about social software is generally uninteresting, intellectually shallow and largely irrelevant.'

On another part of the BBC site, a news story relating to the topic, and covering a new I-Society report on social software and social capital, gives more background to what Thompson is on about, if you are interested: Online communities get real.

Associated Link: BBC: A Little Less Conversation...

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