As Paolo Massa and Barry Wellman point out, all of these terms -- ICT, new media, CMC, etc -- are anchored in specific research programmes, historical periods, and technologies. They are not interchangeable. While it would be great to improve Wikipedia, I suggest that a useful source might be a book by Loader and others, which is part of the Key Concepts series of Routledge. It is a 2004 publication, but this discussion might encourage them to update Cyberculture: Key Concepts. See: http://informationr.net/ir/reviews/revs143.html In my opinion, these terms matter, so its great to see that a single post has generated such a stir around the meaning of closely related by distinct terms. Bill -----Original Message----- From: air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org [mailto:air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of paolo massa Sent: 26 July 2006 17:15 To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Cc: aoir list Subject: Re: [Air-l] Social software and ICT on Wikipedia I found the blog post "Tracing the Evolution of Social Software" [1], published on October 13, 2004, very interesting. It starts with "The term 'social software', which is now used to define software that supports group interaction, has only become relatively popular within the last two or more years. However, the core ideas of social software itself enjoy a much longer history, running back to Vannevar Bush's ideas about 'memex' in 1945, and traveling through terms such as Augmentation, Groupware, and CSCW in the 1960s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. By examining the many terms used to describe today's 'social software' we can also explore the origins of social software itself, and see how there exists a very real life cycle concerning the use of technical terminology." So here there is one more term "social software", luckly enough nobody mentioned "Web2.0" [2] yet ... ouch! ;-) And about ICT, you might like to know that there is no page for ICT on Wikipedia, in fact the "Information and communication technology" Wikipedia page [3] redirects to the "Information technology" Wikipedia page. Of course I'm not saying that if something is not on Wikipedia then that something does not exist but simply that someone might want to edit the Wikipedia pages related to the many concepts we are discussing on this mailing list, such as for example the CMC one [4] P. [1] http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2004/10/tracing_the_evo.html [2] http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web- 20.html [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_and_communication_technology [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer-mediated_communication _______________________________________________ The air-l@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/