Beyond Being Social: Prospects for Transformative Social Computing

An important analytical lens for considering future trajectories and research issues for social computing is the perspective of positive design, that is, the perspective that asks how collaborative technologies like wikis, e-mail, instant messaging, blogging, microblogging, tagging, social bookmarking, collaborative filtering, social networking services, and online communities of various sorts could support social endeavor in ways never before possible, how they can strengthen the extant strengths of human social interaction. This perspective contrasts with the approach of investigating how inherent limitations of collaborative technology can be ameliorated. This article describes recent design work addressing the challenge of supporting activity awareness in new ways with social computing technologies.