[Sociam-soton] Re: Is email a social machine?

[Hugh Glaser]

Agreed.
Is a crowbar a machine?
Is steam power a machine?
They might be loosely referred to as such in use, but to people studying statics and dynamics and dynamics they aren't.

Hugh
023 8061 5652

On 29 Oct 2013, at 10:27, "Kieron O'Hara" <kmo at ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:

> Hi Wendy,
> 
> I'm definitely with your initial reaction. We define a machine in 
> general as something that does work to achieve a goal. A Turing machine 
> has a set of final states. I don't see email as having anything like 
> that kind of teleological goal-directedness, except at a very abstract 
> level like it allows people to communicate with people.
> 
> To me it's much more like a component tool or platform. The point of 
> social machines, it seems to me, is that whatever else they are, they 
> are characterised by people getting together to do something. Email is 
> something you would use for that in many circumstances, but it is not 
> itself characterised by that. It's on the level of a mobile phone 
> network, a railway system, or a social networking site, in my view. Once 
> it starts to be used to achieve some kind of goal, then it becomes a 
> component of a social machine.
> 
> Is my view.
> 
> Kieron
> 
> 
> On 29/10/2013 10:10, Wendy Hall wrote:
>> Hi
>> 
>> I'm at dinner in Melbourne and the question has arisen - is email a social machine?
>> 
>> My initial reaction was no, because email is not of the Web. But there are people here who are persuading me otherwise
>> 
>> Thoughts?
>> 
>> Wendy
>> 
>> PS Apologies if this question is already answered in the SM classification work but I don't have all the information to hand
>> 
>> Sent from my iPhone
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