Abstract
Social machines are a prominent focus of attention for those who work in the field of Web and Internet science. Although a number of online systems have been described as social machines (examples include the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, Reddit, and Galaxy Zoo), there is, as yet, little consensus as to the precise meaning of the term “social machine.” This presents a problem for the scientific study of social machines, especially when it comes to the provision of a theoretical framework that directs, informs, and explicates the scientific and engineering activities of the social machine community. The present paper outlines an approach to understanding social machines that draws on recent work in the philosophy of science, especially work in so-called mechanical philosophy. This is what might be called a mechanistic view of social machines. According to this view, social machines are systems whose phenomena (i.e., events, states, and processes) are explained via an appeal to (online) socio-technical mechanisms. We show how this account is able to accommodate a number of existing attempts to define the social machine concept, thereby yielding an important opportunity for theoretical integration.
Highlights
A key trend in the recent technological evolution of the World Wide Web has been the development of applications and services that support greater levels of user participation in the generation and management of online content
Inasmuch as we accept the idea that social robots ought to be regarded as social agents, and we discover that these agents are components in an integrated mechanism, we will have met the conditions associated with the mechanistic view, and we can conclude that the robots form part of a larger system that ought to be regarded as a social machine
Social machines have been a prominent focus of research attention within the sciences of the Web and Internet
Summary
A key trend in the recent technological evolution of the World Wide Web ( the Web) has been the development of applications and services that support greater levels of user participation in the generation and management of online content. One of the topics that has been at the forefront of recent WAIS research relates to what are called social machines (Hendler & Berners-Lee, 2010; Hendler & Mulvehill, 2016; Shadbolt et al, 2019) These are typically viewed as online (i.e., Webor Internet-based) systems that support large-scale forms of social participation. Social machines are typically presented as Web- or Internet-based systems that work to support social interaction and collaboration (often at large scale) Beyond this general notion of (large-scale) technology-mediated social participation, there is little agreement as to what it is that makes something a social machine. At a more general level, we aim to draw attention to the importance of socio-technical mechanisms as a focus area for future work in the philosophy of (Web) science
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