Sometimes discussions about computers and Internet give me a déjà vu feeling. As if I read about it in the sociological and cultural studies literature before. Yesterday I had such feeling with the concept of social architecture. The association might be not that obvious, so I may be just using two different ideas to develop my own. Anyways…

According to wikipedia.org, social software is a kind of software that lets people communicate and collaborate through computer networks. Using this software people create shared, interactive spaces. As I understand from the post about social architecture as the foundation of the blogosphere (see the link above), social architecture refers to a combination of components of human-computer interaction based on social software.

Three components or "social agents" are present in the blogosphere: the human creators, the human readers and the social software (machines). Humans leave social traces or "gestures" (by linking, tagging, etc.), while machines analyze the blogs to provide relevant or valued information according to users’ needs. Again, I'm not sure I understood the idea completely, but it seems that social architecture consists of humans who somehow connect and communicate and software (and hardware?) that allows them to do it. This idea (of agents, gestures and relationships) reminded me of the idea of a cultural diamond.

W. Griswold in her book "Cultures and societies in a changing world" (2003, 2nd ed.) talks about a cultural diamond that represents elements of culture and relationships between them. Four points of the diamond are cultural creators, cultural receivers, cultural objects (symbols, beliefs, values and practices) and social world (the context in which culture is created and experienced). A complete understanding of any cultural phenomenon requires understanding all four points and links between all of them.

The blogosphere as a cultural phenomenon can be represented with a blogging pentagon.

Understanding the blogosphere and its social architecture characteristics becomes clearer and richer if we take the blogging pentagon into consideration. Some points of this pentagon need further elaboration (e.g. What a blog gesture would include? Or why it's social software and not the software-hardware-networks combination) but 5 points and 10 relationships should provide a comprehensive list of emerging issues to deal with. And it should be better than the concept of social architecture because it refers directly to the blogosphere and implies multiple relationships between various elements.