[Sociam-soton] Re: scope of social machine

[Paul Smart]

Yang,

We have been trying to grapple with these sorts of issues in the context of the ITA program. In particular, we have been trying to understand the nature of the relationship between the notions of social computing, human computation, crowdsourcing, collective intelligence and social machines. The approach we have taken is to cast social machines as socially-extended computational systems. What this concept entails is a commitment to the idea of social machines as specific forms of sociotechnical system in which both the human and machine elements are playing representationally and computationally significant roles relative to the realization of system-level information processing goals. 

With this concept in place, we have argued that social computation and human computation are particular ways of organizing the computational economy so as to exploit human capabilities or (better yet) the properties of the social environment. Some social machines may exploit these kinds of approaches (esp. social computing approaches), but we do not feel able to say that all (e.g.) social computing systems are social machines. 

In general, we do not tend to regard crowdsourcing systems as particularly compelling examples of social machines. The reason for this warrants a fuller discussion, but it essentially relates to the degree of 'sociotechnical entanglement' relative to the realization of system-level features. What we are essentially saying is that in order to identify a social machine you have to see the social and technological elements as part of the material substrate that realizes some process at the system level (i.e., at the level of the larger systemic organization comprising people+Web elements). Sorry, that sounds hopelessly vague in summary form.      

We regard collective intelligence as a property of the larger system formed by the effective merger of social and (sometimes) technological elements. We suggest that some social machines may exhibit this property, but it is not a necessary feature of all such systems. The main problem here is that the notion of collective intelligence is itself somewhat vague. It also seems to entail a necessary commitment to the notion of social machines performing cognitively-relevant functions. This, to my mind at least, is not at all clear.   

In summary, we see partial overlaps between the categories of social machines, social computing systems, human computation systems and systems exhibiting collective intelligence (the overlap between social machines and social computing systems is probably quite extensive). In general, we would not tend to see any overlap between social machines and crowdsourcing systems, although much depends on how you wish to characterise a crowdsourcing system.

I can't say we are fully committed to any of this at present, but hopefully it will serve to stimulate debate and discussion. I am currently working on a paper that clarifies much of the above. I will let you have a copy when it is in somewhat better shape that it is at present. 

best wishes
Paul

>-----Original Message-----
>From: sociam-soton-bounces at ecs.soton.ac.uk [mailto:sociam-soton-
>bounces at ecs.soton.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Yang Y.
>Sent: 01 March 2013 19:07
>To: sociam-soton at ecs.soton.ac.uk
>Subject: [Sociam-soton] scope of social machine
>
>Hi all,
>
>As you may know that there are many research terms such as Collective
>Intelligence, Social Computing, Crowdsourcing etc overlap/has intersection
>with the concept of Social Machine.
>
>I tried to draw a venn diagram to describe the scope of Social Machine and
>its relationships between other concepts for the workshop paper. Elena and
>I have different opinions on this. I think it is just matters of which area
>we would like to investigate.
>
>
>I have summarised all definitions of these related terms in this document.
>Any comments are welcome, and maybe worth to discuss in the meeting on
>Monday?
>
>https://docs.google.com/folder/d/0B2ssmNSs4_VuOUh6WjhIdE51cE0/edit?pli=1&do
>cId=0B4vZ7xqPkS3BYk9QZHdyVjI1VjQ
>
>Thanks and hope you all have a good weekend,
>Yang Yang
>
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