And so it begins...
If you find yourself at this page, welcome.
The owners of this site are a bunch of students that have been challenged to go out and wage bloody mayhem upon the IT unbelievers who challenge the righteousness of the Knights of Sociotechnology... by providing them with the course materials from our social media course, posting our ranting and ravings on all matters slightly associated with the topic and, along the way, entertaining &, we hope, illuminating you.
Our Social Media course lecturer, PJ Wall, is trying to get us techno-heads to use the latter a bit more. Our first answer to everything is “I know an app for that”. So he is challenging us to put some social media platform together to try and get us to grasp the challenge of using the technology to deliver the course content to our classmates & the wider public.
But not just content. No, he’s not content with just content.
He’s pushing us to be aware of the social aspects, the political implications and the cultural norms under which we operate. We must look at how these influence the deployment of technical systems, that by ignoring them you dramatically increase the chances of failure. A technocentric view will give you a great technical system but will irritate your users who have to worship at the wonderful technoaltar you built.
A sociotechnical viewpoint, on the other hand, looks at the people as an integral part of the overall system. And the order of the words, socio before technical, shows that without understanding the people, without respecting their culture and without understanding the political environment in which you offering will operate, you will most likely fail....or at least irritate a lot of people.
You are welcome to accompany us on our journey. We will post items that we find illuminating, we will post dry course minutes, we will post questions & look for answers, we will post...and by it grow.
So on-wards, hopefully upwards, with the odd inter-spaced blank period of “I can’t think of anything else” which is as good a way to end this as any...