Melanie Beltran
MCS 244
April 6, 2019
Social software a blessing in disguise because they help us interact and communicate through communication tools from the internet. In Michelle Kasprzak’s ”Abundance in Scarcity” it states, “New boundaries are built, and old ones are destroyed by those who approach from other disciplines, or by those who are forced to modify a system so that it better serves their needs…” Essentially, the development or establishment of social software was a way to better communicate with others and constantly birth new ways to find information. In Dana Boyd’s “Social Network Sites: Public, Private, or What?” it states, “In communities around the world, teenagers are joining social network sites (SNSes) like MySpace, Facebook, and Bebo. Once logged into one of these systems, participants are asked to create a profile to represent themselves digitally. Using text, images, video, audio, links, quizzes, and surveys, teens generate a profile that expresses how they see themselves.” Through social media, you can communicate by commenting on someone’s vid and/or picture and direct messaging. These two capabilities allow people to connect with one another. You can unfriend and become friends with strangers, giving them and yourself access to each other’s profiles. In Clay Shirky’s “A Group is it’s Own Worst Enemy” it states, “Writing social software is hard…the act of writing social software is more like the work of an economist or a political scientist. And the act of hosting social software, the relationship of someone who hosts it is more like a relationship of landlords to tenants than owners to boxes in a warehouse. The people using your software, even if you own it and pay for it, have rights and will behave as if they have rights. And if you abrogate those rights, you’ll hear about it very quickly.” There is purpose to softwares and the technicalities to working with them. There are different functions to softwares and ways to change those functions in a system they are installed into. People that have softwares installed into their systems, they must pay for the services given to them. That relationship helps exchange money for services to consumers the same way someone would pay for rent so they could have a roof over their head. In Clay Shirky Gin’s “Television, and Social Surplus” it states, “The normal case of social software is still failure; most of these experiments don’t pan out. But the ones that do are quite incredible…someone working alone, with really cheap tools, has a reasonable hope of carving out enough of the cognitive surplus, enough of the desire to participate, enough of the collective goodwill of the citizens, to create a resource you couldn’t have imagined existing even five years ago.” Although these softwares are not 100% effective or longlasting, there are a few affordable tools and have been created to be beneficial to humans. Although softwares have their downfalls, they have helped modify communication between people.