This presentation has been revisited especially for the ICT socieiteit of Zoetermeer, based on the original presentation by René Jansen and Wim Bouman at the Social Media Congress. Both are members of the Maatschap and Research Fellows at the University of Amsterdam. In this version Bolke de Bruin, Mark Nijssen and Tim Hoogenboom (also part of the Maatschap and the University of Amsterdam) illustrate the importance of the concept of object-centered sociality to explain the the apparent natural behavior on social media, to guide designers, by offering alternative and more realistic post humanistic-perspectives. In the first part the importance of sociality is explained, replacing the focus on functionality as design objective in social media. Sociality also forms the basis to explain why we actually engage in constructing and reproducing our social relations (on blogs, wiki's and other forms of social media). The last part explain the layered structure of constructing and renegotiating meaning (popularly devised as 'knowledge sharing') in social media. In which the construction and reproduction of social relations is pre-conditional for knowledge construction to take place, in comment sections of blogs. We hope this presentation inspires others...

1. The Curious
Case of Sociality
Bolke de Bruin
Mark Nijssen
Tim Hoogenboom

2. Imagine…

3. Imagine…

8. how to explain? sites
that social networking (e.g.) code
of ‘consumption’?

9. the SOCIAL isconstructed
technologiesare
the meaning of a rose
is neither in its inherent properties
nor in its economic price
BUT
is imaginatively constructed
in people’s interaction

13. Socialiteit is een wicked problem dat we nooit
kunnen oplossen
(maar gelukkig wel doorgronden)

16. View on People
Purposive
People are Conscious beings who
Self-reflexive
shape their own behaviour
= a voluntaristic image of
human behaviour

17. what kind of togetherness
is there in acting together?
social software a context of
participation
voluntary
different kinds of sociality
communal sharing
authority ranking
equality matching
market pricing
in everyday life, we blend these kinds of sociality

18. individualization
increasing reflexivitybecause
we are thrown back on our own
+
objectualization
spread of expertsystems
to everyday life
expansion of object worlds
work and leisure environments
promoting and requiring
relations with objects
+
post-human/social sociality
human limitations transcended
by nonhuman objects
offering new sources of the self,
forms of togetherness and
social cohesion

19. The role of objects in constructing, orderning and
reproducing social relations
durable relations
ephemeral relations
s
a te
c ip
rti n sm
pa tio di
a nu
t .fm r rel l s
as you g ita yve
L Di H
in on

20. what?
instruments??
OR
goal
knowledge ready-to-use
objects are and output ofpractices
are open, question-generating and
have a ‘structure of lacks’
and force us

21. We need partial
images
We need to have a relation
before we can unfold
By which we construct knowledge

22. Unfolding knowledge object
Knowledge objects unfold
Complete, of the shelf,
resolutions,
Will not unfold, and
won’t do because wicked
problem

23. Unfolding

24. Designing for Object-centered Sociality
IT-based systems do exist in reality,
We need an archive but social software do not exist as such;
they appear and unfold themselves in use
in their formative context only
Functionality
SOCIALITY Soft Systems Thinking
Design for a practice
Social software systems are IT-based systems, engaged by
their users as an unfolding object for constructing and
reproducing their social relations.

25. AUTHORITY RANKING

27. MARKET PRICING

28. COMMUNAL SHARING