The best paragraph in Social Translucence: An Approach to Designing Systems that Support Social Processes is the last:

From our perspective, the digital world appears to be populated by technologies that impose walls between people, rather than by technologies that create windows between them. We suggest that understanding how to design digital systems so that they mesh with human behavior at the individual and collective levels is of immense importance. By allowing users to “see” one another, to make inferences about the activities of others, to imitate one another, we believe that digital systems can become environments in which new social forms can be invented, adopted, adapted, and propagated— eventually supporting the same sort of social innovation and diversity that can be observed in physically based cultures.

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_translucence