26 de junio de 2026 · [[El Abismo de Máquina/Ecos|¿qué es un eco?]] # Eco: Vídeo - Cuando el software se quedó la palabra 'social' > [!entradilla] > Interface Studies rastrea las cuatro definiciones de 'social' que ya existían antes de que el software se quedara la palabra, y qué pasó cuando la versión comercial se impuso y absorbió a las demás.  > [!tip]- De qué trata > > Es de Interface Studies, los mismos del vídeo sobre cuándo el software es un "lugar" que traje hace unas semanas. Aquí Saleh Kayyali coge una palabra que decimos sin pensar, "social", y enseña que llevaba dentro al menos cuatro significados distintos antes de que el software se la quedara a mediados de los 2000. > > El recorrido es bonito: la plaza pública donde te ven y respondes por ello, la red de relaciones que ya tenías y de pronto podías recorrer, la charla pequeña que no dice nada pero mantiene el contacto, y el paquete comercial de perfiles, amigos, feed y botón de "me gusta". Cuenta cómo ganó el cuarto significado y se tragó a los otros tres convirtiéndolos en funciones, y cómo encima se posó otra palabra resbaladiza, "plataforma", que sirve para pedir mérito y eludir responsabilidad a la vez. > > Me sirve para mirar con más cuidado el software de cada día, y para ver algo que vuelve a pasar delante de nosotros: a "agente" o "copiloto" les está ocurriendo ahora lo mismo que a "social", palabras que usamos a todas horas y que ya significan cosas distintas según quién las diga. Cuando una palabra carga cuatro sentidos y nadie hace de árbitro, las discusiones no se resuelven. > > El vídeo original de Interface Studies: [When Software Took the Word 'Social'](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7xidb5fK8c) > [!abstract]- Resumen esquemático > > #### Punto de partida > > - Antes de que el software la tomara, "social" describía una cualidad de un espacio: ser visible a los demás y responder por ello (la plaza pública de William Whyte y Jane Jacobs). > - A mediados de los 2000 "social" pasó de cualidad de una sala a categoría de producto: software social, redes sociales, web social. Al asentarse la etiqueta, se dejó de preguntar qué significaba. > - Cuando la industria fijó la palabra, ya existían al menos cuatro definiciones cuidadas, sostenidas por comunidades distintas y que no coincidían entre sí. > > #### Las cuatro definiciones > > ##### Social como ser visto (trabajo cooperativo, CSCW) > > - Irene Greif (MIT) y Paul Cashman acuñan "Computer-Supported Cooperative Work" en 1984. > - Idea clave: "Social Translucence" (Erickson y Kellogg, IBM, 2000). Tres ingredientes: visibilidad, comprensión de lo que se ve y, sobre todo, rendición de cuentas: si te veo y sabes que te veo, ambos actuamos con el otro en mente. > - Aquí lo social no es una función que se añade; es que la gente pueda verse. Aún no existen ni el contador de seguidores ni el confirmado de lectura. > > ##### Social como red (sitios de red social) > > - danah boyd y Nicole Ellison (2007): un sitio de red social tiene perfil dentro de un sistema acotado, lista de conexiones y capacidad de recorrer las conexiones de otros. > - Defienden "social network sites", no "networking": no se trataba de conocer extraños, sino de hacer visible y recorrible la red de relaciones que ya tenías. > - Lo social aquí está en la forma de tus relaciones hecha visible y navegable, no en el contacto ni la conversación. > > ##### Social como charla pequeña (comunión fática) > > - Viene de un ensayo de 1923: Malinowski llama "comunión fática" al habla cuyo fin es el contacto, no el contenido (el comentario del tiempo, el "qué tal"). > - Vincent Miller (2008) lo aplica a los nuevos medios: gran parte de la actividad online es fática (el estado que no dice nada, el toque, el "me gusta") y solo significa "sigo aquí, pienso en ti". > - Una interfaz es social cuando da formas baratas y constantes de mantener el contacto sin tener que decir nada en concreto. > > ##### Social como paquete de producto (la comercial) > > - Es la que casi todos absorbimos, porque venía con los productos. > - Linaje: "web 2.0" lo escribe primero Darcy DiNucci (1999) con otro sentido (la web saliendo del navegador a todos los aparatos); Tim O'Reilly (2005) lo fija como "la red como plataforma" y "arquitectura de participación". > - Crumlish y Malone (Yahoo, 2009), "Designing Social Interfaces": catálogo de más de 100 piezas reutilizables (perfil, activity stream, seguir, votar, reputación, comentarios). "Social" pasó a ser el nombre de esa caja de piezas. > - Cuando la gente dice "redes sociales" se refiere a este paquete: perfil, amigos, feed, me gusta, compartir. > > #### Cuando se encontraron las cuatro > > - La cuarta definición ganó y absorbió a las otras tres como funciones, pero no las ignoró: en gran parte las implementó. > - Al convertir cada idea en una pieza, cambió su propósito: la rendición de cuentas se volvió contador público de seguidores; la red articulada se volvió el motor por el que el producto se propaga; el contacto fático se volvió la unidad de actividad que se cuenta, optimiza y vende a anunciantes. > - Ningún significado viejo se tiró; se conservaron y se reorientaron para producir el engagement y los datos con los que funciona el negocio. La palabra siguió igual; para qué trabajaba, no. > > #### La palabra "plataforma" > > - Tarleton Gillespie (2010), "The Politics of 'Platforms'": las empresas empezaron casi a la vez a llamarse "plataformas" porque la palabra significa varias cosas a la vez (base computacional, escenario desde el que hablar, infraestructura neutral, programa de posiciones). > - Eso les permite deslizarse entre sentidos según conviene: escenario para los usuarios, base de negocio para los anunciantes y, ante el regulador, mera superficie neutral no responsable de lo que se publica. Piden el mérito de alojar la expresión y, a la vez, responsabilidad limitada por ella. > > #### Dónde queda > > - Hoy vivimos dentro de la versión que ganó: el paquete de participación se quedó la palabra, los significados viejos quedaron plegados como funciones y orientados a otros fines, con "plataforma" encima para gestionar qué pueden esperar la ley y el público. > - Por eso las discusiones sobre si algo es "de verdad" social, o si un feed es plaza pública o canal de difusión, no se resuelven: cada parte sostiene una definición distinta y la trata como la única. Una palabra, cuatro significados posibles y ningún árbitro. # Artículo original: When Software Took the Word 'Social' Fuente: [When Software Took the Word 'Social'](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7xidb5fK8c)  Join "Interface Studies" to help make more videos. Your support keeps new content coming. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqv7gk4p\_rB4nRz0j7B5yFA/join We call certain apps "social" and the companies behind them "platforms." Both words feel too obvious to question. Neither one means what it used to. This video is about that first word, and what it was quietly carrying before software took it. Where "social" came from, who was using it first, and why we can no longer say what we mean when we reach for it. \-------------------------- Subscribe on Substack: https://interfacestudies.substack.com/ Happy to jump on a call if it'd be useful: design strategy, experience design, critique, feedback. https://intro.co/salehkayyali Elsewhere: X: https://x.com/mskayyali BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/mskayyali.com \--------------------------- CHAPTERS \[0:00\] Intro \[3:24\] Social as being seen \[6:28\] Social as a network \[8:41\] Social as small talk \[10:48\] Social as a product \[14:37\] When the four met \[17:21\] The word "platform" \[19:37\] Where this leaves us REFERENCES \- William Whyte, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (1980) https://archive.org/details/sociallifeofsmal0000whyt \- Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) https://archive.org/details/deathlifeofgre00jaco \- Irene Greif on the coining of CSCW (1984), in Nature Electronics (2019) https://doi.org/10.1038/s41928-019-0229-y \- Computer-Supported Cooperative Work: History and Focus https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/IEEEComputer1994.pdf \- Thomas Erickson & Wendy Kellogg, "Social Translucence" (2000) https://tomeri.org/TOCHI2000\_SocialTranslucence.pdf \- danah boyd & Nicole Ellison, "Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship" (2007) https://www.danah.org/papers/JCMCIntro.pdf \- Bronisław Malinowski, "The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages," in The Meaning of Meaning (1923) https://archive.org/details/meaningofmeaning00ogde \- Vincent Miller, "New Media, Networking and Phatic Culture" (2008) https://kar.kent.ac.uk/13028/1/new%20media,%20networking%20and%20phatic%20culture.pdf \- Darcy DiNucci, "Fragmented Future" (1999) http://darcyd.com/fragmented\_future.pdf \- Tim O'Reilly, "What Is Web 2.0" (2005) https://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html \- Christian Crumlish & Erin Malone, Designing Social Interfaces (2009) https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/designing-social-interfaces/9781491919842/ (2nd edition published 2015) \- Tarleton Gillespie, "The Politics of 'Platforms'" (2010) https://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/legacy/mit6/papers/Gillespie.pdf Intro video from https://www.youtube.com/@UC3bRjPwIqgLNHYIJJzhKHiQ ## Transcript ### Intro **0:00** · welcome to Interface Studies my name is Saleh the sociability is really rather important we found that the proportion of people in groups can tell you a number of things the most used plazas tend to have a higher proportion of people in twos and threes than the less successful ones but the most sociable places also have in absolute numbers the greatest number of individuals **0:27** · a busy place for some reason seems to be the most congenial kind of place if you want to be alone or talk this man is to oneself the No. 1 activity is people looking at other people **0:44** · but it is a point that is overlooked in many many designs stand in a good public square for long enough and you'll start to notice rules that nobody wrote down people sit where they can see and be seen they drift towards the edges and then towards each other a space fills up not because it is empty and waiting **1:06** · but because there are already people in it and people turns out are the main thing that attracts people in the 1970s the urbanist William Whyte set up cameras over the plazas of New York and watched the result published in 1980 **1:25** · as The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces is a catalogue of how strangers arrange themselves when left alone years before that Jane Jacobs had described something close to it on the pavement she argued that a busy block looks after itself **1:45** · because everyone on it is visible to everyone else and that visibility does quiet work you behave a little differently when you can be seen and when you know that the people around you can see that you can see them let's hold on to that because it is in fact the oldest answer to the question this video is about **2:07** · what makes something social long before any of this touched the screen the answer had to do with being visible to one another and being answerable because of it in our story software arrived and took the word somewhere around the middle of the 2000s social stopped being a quality you might notice in a room and became a category of product social software social media the social web and once the word was doing that job **2:42** · most of us stopped asking what it meant we knew a social app when we saw it it had profiles and friends and a feed the awkward part is that by the time the industry settled on the word social already had several careful definitions held by different groups of people who studied this for a living those definitions did not agree they were not rough drafts of one another they were separate ideas about what the word named **3:14** · there are at least four of them and this video is a tour through all four ending with what happened when one of them won let's start with being able to see each other the oldest of the technical definitions comes from a field with an unglamorous name in 1984 Irene Greif of MIT ### Social as being seen **3:37** · and Paul Cashman of Digital Equipment Corporation ran a small workshop in Cambridge Massachusetts for people interested in how computers might support groups of people working together they needed a label for the gathering and the one they coined stuck computer supported Cooperative work or CSCW it became a whole research community with its own conferences and its own quarrels **4:06** · all circling one question when you put a group of people into a shared system what does the software have to do so that they can actually act as a group the sharpest answer to come out of that tradition was published in the year 2000 by Thomas Erickson and Wendy Kellogg both men at IBM's research labs **4:31** · their paper is called Social Translucence and the idea behind it is incredibly simple especially when you see it go back to the public square the reason people coordinate so well in physical space is that they can see each other and the traces of what each other is doing you can tell when a shop is busy by looking through the window you slow down at a doorway because you see someone coming the other way none of this requires anyone to send a message **5:04** · the information is just there in the open and everyone can see that everyone else can see it Erickson and Kellogg argued that you could build digital systems with the same property they named three ingredients visibility so that what people are doing is perceptible to others **5:28** · so that you understand what those visible signs mean and accountability which is the one that does the real work because if I can see you and you know that I can see you both of us behave with the other in mind **5:46** · the use of the term translucence was deliberate because there's a permanent tension between being visible and keeping some privacy a good social system holds that tension rather than resolving it in one direction on this definition an interface is social when it lets people perceive one another well enough to be answerable to one another now when it comes to features like the like the follower count the read receipt none of those exist yet in this account **6:20** · social is not a feature you bolt on it is a property of whether people can see each other at all the second definition was written down almost as an act of housekeeping it was by two researchers in 2007 ### Social as a network **6:37** · danah boyd and Nicole Ellison they both tried to define the thing everyone was suddenly talking about back then their paper Social Network Sites Definition history and scholarship set out the three features that made a site one of these new objects you build a profile inside a bounded system **7:00** · you articulate a list of other people you are connected to and you can look at your connections and walk along theirs that third part is the heart of it the novelty was not that you could meet people the novelty was that your web of relationships the one you already had became something you could see laid out and walk through your friends and your friend's friends made visible **7:27** · and clickable Boyd and Ellison were so insistent on this that they picked a fight over a single word everyone was calling these things social networking sites the two of them refused and they called them social network sites instead they dropped the I N G the reasoning was precise networking suggests going out and meeting strangers **7:52** · initiating new relationships working a room but that was not what most people were doing people were mostly mapping the connections they already had their friends from school the colleagues the family the site made an existing network visible **8:11** · it did not for the most part manufacture a new one notice what has happened the first careful definition of social in this field was already an argument that the popular word was slightly wrong the thing was social on this account because it made the structure of your relationships into something you could see and traverse not because of contact and not because of conversation **8:38** · but because of shape the third definition does not come from software at all it comes from a 1923 essay on language and meaning and it is the one that explains the part of social media that can feel the most pointless the essay drew a line around a kind of talk we all use and rarely notice a great deal of human speech ### Social as small talk **9:03** · it pointed out it carries no information at all remarks about the weather asking how someone is when you do not really want the medical history the small noises people make to fill a silence it gave this a name phatic communion **9:22** · the word phatic just means speech whose job is contact not content the point is not to transmit anything the point is the contact itself in 2008 a sociologist at the university of Kent called Vincent Miller picked this idea up and pointed it straight at the new media of the moment his paper New Media Networking and Phatic Culture **9:49** · argued that a large share of what people were doing online was phatic the status update that says nothing in particular the poke the like none of these carry much content all of them say the small thing the weather remark says I am still here I am thinking of you the line is open on this definition **10:12** · an interface is social when it gives people cheap constant ways to maintain contact without having to say anything in particular and this is worth taking seriously rather than sneering at, because phatic contact is not failed communication it is its own thing **10:31** · and humans have always done a lot of it the interfaces that thrived were often the ones that made it easiest a button you can press in half a second to tell someone you saw them is on this account one of the most social things you can build ### Social as a product **10:48** · the fourth definition is the commercial one and it is the one most of us actually absorbed because it came with the products it also arrives with a history that rhymes with everything else here'cause the label itself was going to mean something else entirely the phrase came first and it came from a designer in April 1999 **11:12** · user experience writer Darcy DiNucci published a short piece in print magazine called Fragmented Future and she is generally credited as the first to put web 2.0 into print but she did not mean what it later came to mean she was looking at a web that still lived inside a browser window on a desktop machine she was predicting that it would not stay there the web would be understood as a transport mechanism the ether through which interactivity happens **11:46** · something that would show up not just in a browser but on your television car dashboard your phone maybe a microwave her web 2.0 was about the web breaking out of the browser and spreading across devices it was a forecast about where the web would be not about what we would do with it then the phrase sat mostly unused for five years **12:11** · until O'reilly Media took it as the name for a conference in 2004 and in 2005 the publisher Tim O'reilly wrote the essay that fixed its meaning for good his central phrase was the network as platform **12:28** · the web was no longer a set of pages you read it was becoming a place you did things where the software improved the more people used it and where the users supplied the raw material he had another phrase for the mechanism an architecture of participation build the thing so that ordinary use produces value **12:53** · every review every upload every tag every link is a contribution and the contributions accumulate into something no single company could have made on its own the label had already shifted once from DiNucci's web everywhere to o'reilly's web as participation **13:14** · before most people had even heard it around the same time two designers from Yahoo Christian Crumlish and Aaron Malone were turning this into a working toolkit they had built Yahoo's library of design patterns and in 2009 they published Designing Social Interfaces **13:34** · a catalogue of more than 100 reusable building blocks the profile the activity stream the ability to follow voting and ratings reputation scores comments if you have ever wondered why so many different sites in that era felt strangely alike this is part of the answer there was a shared parts bin and social had become the name for the bin **14:01** · on this definition an interface is social when it carries the participation features it has the profile the friends the feed the like the share and this is the version of the word that escaped the labs and design studios and reached the rest of us and the reason behind that was because it was attached to things we used every day **14:24** · when most people say social media this is what they mean not visibility and accountability not the shape of a network not phatic contact it's the bundle so by the end of 2000s there were four answers in circulation social as mutual visibility from the cooperative work tradition social as visible shape of your connections from the network side scholars social as phatic contact from the anthropologists ### When the four met **14:57** · and finally social as participation bundle from the people building products four communities four definitions all using one word what happened next is that the 4th definition won and it absorbed the other 3 as features this is the part worth being careful about it is very tempting to say the commercial version was fake and the others were real and that is too clean **15:26** · the honest account is more interesting the participation bundle did not ignore the older definitions in many places it implemented them the visible light count and the receipt are a form of the visibility and accountability that Erickson and Kellogg described the friends list is the articulated network that boyd and Ellison defined the poke and the heart are the pure fatic contact **15:55** · the bundle is in large part the three older definitions cast into reusable parts but casting an idea into a part changes what it is for accountability in the social translucence sense was about people being answerable to each other when it becomes a public follower count the same visibility starts to serve a different master you are still being seen but the seeing is now measured **16:24** · ranked and fed back to you as a number that can go up or down the Visible Network which boyd and Ellison described as a way of representing relationships you already had becomes the engine that systems use to grow because every articulated connection is a path along which the product can spread the phatic contact the cheap signal that keeps a relationship warm it becomes the unit of activity that gets counted optimised and sold to advertisers **16:57** · none of the older meanings were thrown away they were kept and they were quietly reweighted they were reweighted so that the same mechanisms that let people see and reach each other also produced the engagement and the data that the business ran on the word stayed the same what it was working for did not ### The word "platform" **17:21** · there's a code to this and it involves a different word that arrived to sit on top of social that word is platform in 2010 a scholar Tarleton Gillespie then at Cornell published a paper called The Politics of platforms he had noticed that the companies running these services had started almost in unison to call themselves platforms and he wanted to know why that particular word **17:51** · what he found is that platform is useful precisely because it means several things at once it has a computational sense a foundation that others build on it has an everyday architectural sense it has a figurative sense a platform as a place from which you speak a soapbox and it has a political sense a platform of positions and opportunity **18:20** · a company that calls itself a platform gets to lean on all of these at the same time and to slide between them when convenient to users it offers a stage to speak from to advertisers it offers a foundation to build their business on to regulators it presents itself as neutral infrastructure a mere surface not responsible for what people put on it **18:48** · Gillespie's point was that the word let's the company hold these stances together and play down the tension between them it wants the credit for hosting all that expression and it wants limited liability for what the expression turns out to be platform lets it ask for both at once and this is exactly why the question is it a platform is never quite innocent **19:17** · it sounds like a technical classification it is partly a legal posture and it sits on top of the same confusion we have been tracing because a service that calls itself a social platform is invoking two overloaded words in a row each of them quietly doing more than one job ### Where this leaves us **19:37** · at the end of all this where does it leave us we now live inside the version that won the participation bundle took the word the older meanings were folded in as features and they were bent towards other ends platform was laid over the top to manage what the law and the public **19:58** · are allowed to expect so when people argue now about whether an app is really social whether a feed is a public square or a broadcast channel whether a service is a platform or a publisher they're not failing to understand each other they are each holding a different definition and treating it as the only one the arguments do not resolve because the sides are not using the same word one word, four possible meanings out of many **20:32** · and no referee this leaves social doing something odd for a word we lean on this often when we reach for it now most of us could not say which of the four we mean and neither could the people who built the thing we are describing it arrives sounding like a description of how something works and turns out to be a question that has quietly been answered at least four different ways all at once