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

[Leslie Carr]

Although a machine can only hold a metaphorical relationship to a social machine, there are some interesting restrictions that the concept of a machine would seem to imply:

It has a creator (or owner/operator).
The creator/owner imbues it with a purpose.
The machine is finite in scale and scope.
The machine can be 'operated', specifically it can be stopped and started.

Email - too distributed, too purposeless. 
A mailing list - yes, if it has a purpose. But then, any form of moderated discussion would be ok. Including a meeting or conference call. The platform is more or less irrelevant. 


Sent from my iPhone

> On 29 Oct 2013, at 10:45, "Ian Brown" <icb1g12 at soton.ac.uk> wrote:
> 
> I was about to echo Hugh’s thought ..
> 
> Is a meeting room a social machine or a telephone ?
> 
> I think there needs to be a distinction between something that enables (a tool or medium) and something that orchestrates or guides ..
> 
> Ian
> 
> 
> On 29 Oct 2013, at 10:35, Hugh Glaser <hg at ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:
> 
> 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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