Social Serendipity: Mobilizing Social Software

Mobilizing partnerships for social change.

Everyday Serendipity as Described in Social Media

Serendipity has received much attention from library and information science, psychology, and computer science. Yet not much is known about serendipity in the context of everyday information behavior. In general, a key challenge in the study of serendipity is obtaining accounts of serendipitous experiences that provide insight into the phenomenon. The exploratory research reported here approach...

Social Serendipity: Proximity Sensing and Cueing

We present a system of cueing informal interactions using the combination of Bluetooth hardware addresses to identify people and a database of user profiles. We outline the synergies between the mobile and social software infrastructures, and present a novel architecture for instigating face-to-face interaction designed to meet varying levels of privacy requirements. Finally we present a discus...

Social Software

We suggest that the issue of constructing and verifying social procedures, which we suggestively call social software, be pursued as systematically as computer software is pursued by computer scientists. Certain complications do arise with social software which do not arise with computer software, but the similarities are nonetheless strong, and tools already exist which would enable us to star...

A Social Semiotic Analysis of Social Actors in English-Learning Software Applications

This study drew upon Kress and Van Leeuwen’s (2006, [1996]) visual grammar and Van Leeuwen’s (2008) social semiotic model to interrogate ways through which social actors of different races are visually and textually represented in four award-winning English-learning software packages.  The analysis was based on narrative actional/reactional processes at the ideational level; mood, perspective, ...