The Social Machine: Designs for Living Online
Judith Donath's thorough, in-depth look at social media is worthy of detailed, careful reading, but it also wonderfully supports opening at random, then reading and pondering. Want examples? Although interacting with people through technology is not as good as actually being with them, sometimes it can be better. What does it mean to be a stranger in the world of social media? "The stranger," she suggests, "may cease to exist." What do these observations mean for us as people and as a society? A book worthy of repeated reading, repeated pondering.(Don Norman, author ofThe Design of Everyday Things, revised and expanded edition)If you use social media and especially if you design social media,The Social Machineis a must-read. Judith Donath has spent years studying, building, and using online communication media and shares what she has learned in a readable, detailed, prescriptive book. The truth of her observations can be verified by looking at the media you use and the way you use it. Every user experience and user interface designer in particular should readThe Social Machineto learn what they didn't teach in engineering school.(Howard Rheingold, author ofNet Smart)Delightful, informative, and comprehensive,The Social Machineby Judith Donath provides a sumptuously illustrated overview of important design concepts for the design of mediated sociality. Donath's book will make you look at every social interface anew--wondering what the design process was that produced it and why specific design choices were made. The text informs us but also invites us to engage with the ethics of choices that have been decided and that lie ahead of us. It will make you want to review your own history with social media and mediated interaction, evaluate and critique the current landscape, and imagine future possibilities. As we move into a world exploding with social media and with representations of us in data and in digital form, this is the book to read to understand the history and garner a foundation for thinking about the future.(Elizabeth F. Churchill, Director of Human Computer Interaction, eBay Research Labs, and co-author ofFoundations for Designing User-Centered Systems)The Social Machineprovides new insights gathered from decades of research and practice by artists and technologists in visualizing the social landscape. Drawing from her own pioneering work in making networks of human relationships visible at the group, institutional, and Internet scales, Donath succeeds in painting an unusually deep and personal portrait of the continually expanding universe of social media.(John Maeda, Design Partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers)