MakerLab - Defending Social Practice Development - Makerlab.org

Defending Social Practice Development

Title *

SummaryResponses to some pushback on appropriation of the word social practice art as it reflects on software development.

Description *> Some questions around the topic: Paige wrote, > > At the tail end of (an invitation email sent from Jive Software) they refer to "social productivity software" > > Is that similar to social practices development? distinctly different? an extension? is this a new trend? > how can you brand the "social practices development" idea better to fit this? or should they be fitting you? > > It seems a larger philosophical movement for you. > Which frankly I don't know if it is related at all to the social practices art movement since that is about freedom, and free experiences. > Are you talking about the same thing? Anselm wrote, There are 3 terms here that are fighting each other: 1) Jive Software's use of the phrase "social productivity" in their recent mail-out, Social productivity here is acting as a euphemism for "productivity". By letting people talk to each other more easily - especially in an age of work-at-home and dial-in-conferences - this will make more dollars. I think Jive is brilliant but the marketing here is more a nod towards capitalism than a critical analysis. Nevertheless it is a spur on defining terms. 2) Artist use of the phrase "Social Practice", This is something that you have talked about and made statements about. My understanding of it comes from the degree to which you have either communicated or failed to communicate the idea - much in the same way that the degree to which you understand things such as HTML or Ruby on Rails comes from the degree to which people around you have successfully or unsuccessfully communicated the ideas. My understanding so far is that it is not about a particular artistic medium such as sculpture, or oil, and not about a particular artistic style, such as abstract or realistic, and not even about some of the things that artists try to do such as challenging people to see things in their world that they have not noticed before, such as challenging their values, their assumptions. Rather it is about recognizing the role of the conversation between artists, recognizing that art itself is a kind of language, and that artists can work with each other in a social setting; spatially proximate, or at least with a constant exchange of creative works. Clearly we can ask Google and Wikipedia for their opinion of which there is much of; multi-facted and polemic. But that's where my own intuition and awareness is right now. 3) "Social Practice Development" as a new phrase, The software hackers have long recognized that working together in close physical proximity to other people fosters better code. My own experiences, even at my very first video game programming job at Discovery Software in 1988? reflects this. Hunching down over the assembly language with other eyeballs made it almost impossible to make mistakes, and one person was researching "high"; thinking about algorithms and methods; and the other person was thinking "low"; typing stuff in; dealing with optimization of the assembler mnemonics and interleaving of memory and computation operations in order to keep the bus saturated and the cpu and video graphics performance at peak. It was hard to even type in a mistake something without the other person saying "oh, there's a typo" instantly. Today of course we have real time bug checkers that do some of this but back then it made code so effortless. What was also especially pleasurable was the shared mind aspect, and having you and a friend, and indeed the entire hacker lab listening to the same loud music and being on the same wavelength. It meant that the workplace was the relaxation and fun and the social; one did not have to leave to recuperate - it was not anti-human. Twenty years later and it is Agile Development that is a formalization of this. Agile recognizes that two or more people literally sharing the same computer can actually perform faster than two people each with separate computers. The reasons for this are complex - but I see three obvious reasons today. One part of this is that having a person that you are working with keeps you from becoming distracted or unfocused. A second part of the reason is that two sets of eyeballs do indeed do a much better job of catching mistakes: one person can be typing and the other person can be looking at what they type, and catch mistakes as they are being typed in. There is a back and forth in the roles, one person is thinking more deeply, and the other person is just doing tactics. A third reason that agile methods work well is that people get lonely. Working by yourself is a lonely depressing process. It is unsustainable. Working socially is more sustainable because it meets general human needs and helps prevent the ennui and dissatisfaction that ultimately set in from being alone. Part of what makes Agile great is the same reason people like many outdoor activities. It is often not about hiking or ice climbing or spelunking or bagging peaks but rather about the social rapport. The long uninterrupted blocks of time to really talk through hard issues. To build fluid models in the mind at a much faster speed than the tedious nature of paper and powerpoint. This also speaks to broader issues; issues about involvement and attention and visibility and how it affects success and survivability of things that are not themselves sentient and things that are not able to sustain themselves. As humans we make things live by our continued participation within them. Houses stay up because we continue to pay attention to them. It is a constant and energetic process of engagement. Below a certain threshhold things die, above a threshhold they get to continue to exist. [ Beyond the scope of this essay this applies to our natural ecosystems as well that are in such dire straits. If we want to protect things and enshrine things that we need to constantly be engaged with them; to be in forests and mountains and oceans if we want to protect them - not to try to set them aside as reserves that only a few can exploit without anybody else knowing or caring... ] A few weeks ago we barn raised Calagator ( http://calagator.org ) with the charge led by Audrey and a whole pile of other fine folks. There was a strong stone soup quality to the production where everybody brought something, although some people secretly brought a lot more than others. But there was a strong sense of social participation and the site itself was running within a few days and is already a completely invaluable resource for myself and others. This for me underscored the value of Agile, both as a formalism of language that one can use to cite behavior, and as an actual behavior that one can do. Yet I do not think that Agile fully captures "social practice". One thing I don't like about Agile Development is in the labeling. We do not need Business Language or business like terms to legitimize the act of working together in close physical and or intellectual proximity with another person. It is clear that before the age of the Internet and before the age of computers that people worked together all of the time, raising buildings together, planting gardens... I don't like the way Agile tries to capture this language. I do concur that Agile is clearly better than working by oneself. We were raising a generation of solopsists who didn't know how to compromise, didn't know how to groom themselves and generally just didn't know how to interact socially. It was an anti-pattern. Yes I loved working alone in dark rooms for long periods of time; to be truly virtuoso to not slow down; but the actual products of that private work were fewer than the products of work with others. To elaborate on this, one could say that the classical pathology of the modern age is that we think of people as "individuals" rather than as a group organism with specializations. There are many kinds of things that make no sense when you think of a person as an individual - we often end up in logical conundrums - such as is one persons life worth more than another persons life? People often ask if you would save your own life versus the lives of ten others? And there is more of this style of inane Peter Singer style philosophical calculus of suffering through-out the web than one can shake a stick at. We even think of things like self-reproducing machines; rather than thinking of a system of agents that all work together to build an instance of another agent - our whole thinking is rife with this kind of "the singular is all powerful". It is best to say that there is a class of persons, or a group of persons that one wants to protect and empower, and in deciding which things to protect and foster that one should look to protect the "systems of" behavior that one likes - rather than protecting an individual to the nth degree over all else. We just don't seem to be systems thinkers. Social Practice is about more than Agile; it is not just a process for doing work; it seems to be a process for studying interaction, driving a wedge into the hidden layer of how we interact to try and understand how we interact. There's an assumption that shared minds are working together. This may be at best an intense back and forth; not entirely dissimilar from the way neurons within a single brain will fire messages back and forth to each other at a high speed. The group is is one mind. By necessity it is geographically proximate; people within feet or even inches of each other. The spatial geography of communication is not yet entirely supplanted by the Internet because the bandwidth of physical communication is still much higher. Social Practice Development takes this observation and applies it to programmers. That programmers working closely together can iterate on their own thoughts much more quickly and much more successfully than people working alone at home, or even people working with other people over the internet. Social Practice Development could include people working at home over the internet but I do think that the best development is in close spatial proximity. I see Social Practice Development at one level as a way to think and create better, to push boundaries, to have satori moments of sudden increased understanding and apprehension of the world, and to overall perform better and happier. And I see it at another level as a kind of critique of process. As a way to reflect on the engagement itself, to reflect on the grammar or the dialogue, to hopefully improve that grammar or to make not just progress in an aesthetic sense; of producing better work, but to make progress in a sense of a critical assessment and understanding of the aesthetic sense itself.

Preview | Cancel

Responses to some pushback on appropriation of the word social practice art as it reflects on software development.
Added by Anselm Hook 142 days ago

Some questions around the topic:

Paige wrote,

At the tail end of (an invitation email sent from Jive Software) they refer to "social productivity software"

Is that similar to social practices development? distinctly different? an extension? is this a new trend? how can you brand the "social practices development" idea better to fit this? or should they be fitting you?

It seems a larger philosophical movement for you. Which frankly I don't know if it is related at all to the social practices art movement since that is about freedom, and free experiences. Are you talking about the same thing?

Anselm wrote,

There are 3 terms here that are fighting each other:

1) Jive Software's use of the phrase "social productivity" in their recent mail-out,

Social productivity here is acting as a euphemism for "productivity". By letting people talk to each other more easily - especially in an age of work-at-home and dial-in-conferences - this will make more dollars. I think Jive is brilliant but the marketing here is more a nod towards capitalism than a critical analysis. Nevertheless it is a spur on defining terms.

2) Artist use of the phrase "Social Practice",

This is something that you have talked about and made statements about. My understanding of it comes from the degree to which you have either communicated or failed to communicate the idea - much in the same way that the degree to which you understand things such as HTML or Ruby on Rails comes from the degree to which people around you have successfully or unsuccessfully communicated the ideas.

My understanding so far is that it is not about a particular artistic medium such as sculpture, or oil, and not about a particular artistic style, such as abstract or realistic, and not even about some of the things that artists try to do such as challenging people to see things in their world that they have not noticed before, such as challenging their values, their assumptions.

Rather it is about recognizing the role of the conversation between artists, recognizing that art itself is a kind of language, and that artists can work with each other in a social setting; spatially proximate, or at least with a constant exchange of creative works.

Clearly we can ask Google and Wikipedia for their opinion of which there is much of; multi-facted and polemic. But that's where my own intuition and awareness is right now.

3) "Social Practice Development" as a new phrase,

The software hackers have long recognized that working together in close physical proximity to other people fosters better code.

My own experiences, even at my very first video game programming job at Discovery Software in 1988? reflects this. Hunching down over the assembly language with other eyeballs made it almost impossible to make mistakes, and one person was researching "high"; thinking about algorithms and methods; and the other person was thinking "low"; typing stuff in; dealing with optimization of the assembler mnemonics and interleaving of memory and computation operations in order to keep the bus saturated and the cpu and video graphics performance at peak. It was hard to even type in a mistake something without the other person saying "oh, there's a typo" instantly. Today of course we have real time bug checkers that do some of this but back then it made code so effortless. What was also especially pleasurable was the shared mind aspect, and having you and a friend, and indeed the entire hacker lab listening to the same loud music and being on the same wavelength. It meant that the workplace was the relaxation and fun and the social; one did not have to leave to recuperate - it was not anti-human.

Twenty years later and it is Agile Development that is a formalization of this. Agile recognizes that two or more people literally sharing the same computer can actually perform faster than two people each with separate computers. The reasons for this are complex - but I see three obvious reasons today. One part of this is that having a person that you are working with keeps you from becoming distracted or unfocused. A second part of the reason is that two sets of eyeballs do indeed do a much better job of catching mistakes: one person can be typing and the other person can be looking at what they type, and catch mistakes as they are being typed in. There is a back and forth in the roles, one person is thinking more deeply, and the other person is just doing tactics. A third reason that agile methods work well is that people get lonely. Working by yourself is a lonely depressing process. It is unsustainable. Working socially is more sustainable because it meets general human needs and helps prevent the ennui and dissatisfaction that ultimately set in from being alone.

Part of what makes Agile great is the same reason people like many outdoor activities. It is often not about hiking or ice climbing or spelunking or bagging peaks but rather about the social rapport. The long uninterrupted blocks of time to really talk through hard issues. To build fluid models in the mind at a much faster speed than the tedious nature of paper and powerpoint.

This also speaks to broader issues; issues about involvement and attention and visibility and how it affects success and survivability of things that are not themselves sentient and things that are not able to sustain themselves. As humans we make things live by our continued participation within them. Houses stay up because we continue to pay attention to them. It is a constant and energetic process of engagement. Below a certain threshhold things die, above a threshhold they get to continue to exist.

[ Beyond the scope of this essay this applies to our natural ecosystems as well that are in such dire straits. If we want to protect things and enshrine things that we need to constantly be engaged with them; to be in forests and mountains and oceans if we want to protect them - not to try to set them aside as reserves that only a few can exploit without anybody else knowing or caring... ]

A few weeks ago we barn raised Calagator ( http://calagator.org ) with the charge led by Audrey and a whole pile of other fine folks. There was a strong stone soup quality to the production where everybody brought something, although some people secretly brought a lot more than others. But there was a strong sense of social participation and the site itself was running within a few days and is already a completely invaluable resource for myself and others.

This for me underscored the value of Agile, both as a formalism of language that one can use to cite behavior, and as an actual behavior that one can do.

Yet I do not think that Agile fully captures "social practice".

One thing I don't like about Agile Development is in the labeling. We do not need Business Language or business like terms to legitimize the act of working together in close physical and or intellectual proximity with another person. It is clear that before the age of the Internet and before the age of computers that people worked together all of the time, raising buildings together, planting gardens... I don't like the way Agile tries to capture this language.

I do concur that Agile is clearly better than working by oneself. We were raising a generation of solopsists who didn't know how to compromise, didn't know how to groom themselves and generally just didn't know how to interact socially. It was an anti-pattern. Yes I loved working alone in dark rooms for long periods of time; to be truly virtuoso to not slow down; but the actual products of that private work were fewer than the products of work with others.

To elaborate on this, one could say that the classical pathology of the modern age is that we think of people as "individuals" rather than as a group organism with specializations. There are many kinds of things that make no sense when you think of a person as an individual - we often end up in logical conundrums - such as is one persons life worth more than another persons life? People often ask if you would save your own life versus the lives of ten others? And there is more of this style of inane Peter Singer style philosophical calculus of suffering through-out the web than one can shake a stick at. We even think of things like self-reproducing machines; rather than thinking of a system of agents that all work together to build an instance of another agent - our whole thinking is rife with this kind of "the singular is all powerful". It is best to say that there is a class of persons, or a group of persons that one wants to protect and empower, and in deciding which things to protect and foster that one should look to protect the "systems of" behavior that one likes - rather than protecting an individual to the nth degree over all else. We just don't seem to be systems thinkers.

Social Practice is about more than Agile; it is not just a process for doing work; it seems to be a process for studying interaction, driving a wedge into the hidden layer of how we interact to try and understand how we interact.

There's an assumption that shared minds are working together. This may be at best an intense back and forth; not entirely dissimilar from the way neurons within a single brain will fire messages back and forth to each other at a high speed. The group is is one mind. By necessity it is geographically proximate; people within feet or even inches of each other. The spatial geography of communication is not yet entirely supplanted by the Internet because the bandwidth of physical communication is still much higher.

Social Practice Development takes this observation and applies it to programmers. That programmers working closely together can iterate on their own thoughts much more quickly and much more successfully than people working alone at home, or even people working with other people over the internet. Social Practice Development could include people working at home over the internet but I do think that the best development is in close spatial proximity.

I see Social Practice Development at one level as a way to think and create better, to push boundaries, to have satori moments of sudden increased understanding and apprehension of the world, and to overall perform better and happier. And I see it at another level as a kind of critique of process. As a way to reflect on the engagement itself, to reflect on the grammar or the dialogue, to hopefully improve that grammar or to make not just progress in an aesthetic sense; of producing better work, but to make progress in a sense of a critical assessment and understanding of the aesthetic sense itself.

Defending Social Practice Development

Comments