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

[ByrneM Gmail]

Was going to say exactly the same thing, but not as clearly. 
Maire

Sent from my annoying non-Android device


On 29 Oct 2013, at 11:24, "Kieron O'Hara" <kmo at ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:

> I think a halting condition would be at best sufficient but certainly 
> not necessary for social machineness.
> 
> So, halting is a defined, if undecidable, property of Turing machines. 
> But then we need to consider the disanalogies between Turing machines 
> and social machines.
> 
> One disanalogy, and to my mind (one of) the most important, is that a 
> TM's definition includes a set of final states which we can take as 
> collectively defining the goal of the computation. In that context, it 
> makes sense to discuss halting - can we show that from an arbitrary 
> state the TM will eventually achieve one of those final states or not? 
> (even though we know that that question is undecidable for an arbitrary TM).
> 
> On the other hand, with a social machine, although it is goal-directed, 
> it seems a bit of a stretch to say that it is defined *by* its goal, 
> because its goal(s):
> (a) may be different at different levels of the system (e.g. recaptcha, 
> where the designer has one goal for the system, and the users 
> ('components' of the system) want the system to do something completely 
> different. Each goal has to be achieved for the machine to continue 
> functioning), and
> (b) may change in use, when the 'components' of the system may simply 
> decide to participate in the social machine for a different reason, and
> (c) need not be such as to bring the machine to a halt. Achieving the 
> goal of a good conversation, or some interesting game-play, for 
> instance, is actually a reason to carry on with the machine rather than 
> halt it. The halting condition of a mailing list is that it *hasn't* 
> achieved its goal. The halting condition of Wikipedia is that it has 
> completely failed to tell us anything interesting about the world. 
> Having failed to achieve their goals, people will stop using them.
> 
> So for a social machine, even if it had a set of final states at a time 
> t0, there is no guarantee that the same final states would be in place 
> at a later time t1. Whereas a Turing machine's set of final states is an 
> invariant.
> 
> Kieron
> 
> 
> On 29/10/2013 10:54, Leslie Carr wrote:
>> Does a mailing list have a halting condition? Can it ever finish its task?
>> 
>> Sent from my iPhone
>> 
>> On 29 Oct 2013, at 10:50, "rt506" <rt506 at ecs.soton.ac.uk<mailto:rt506 at ecs.soton.ac.uk>> wrote:
>> 
>> I agrees with Les, however, if we talk about having an agenda/purpose, would a mailing list with a specific purpose be a social machine where email is one if the tools within the social machinery network?
>> 
>> Ramine
>> 
>> 
>> Sent from Samsung Galaxy Note
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> -------- Original message --------
>> From: Hugh Glaser <hg at ecs.soton.ac.uk<mailto:hg at ecs.soton.ac.uk>>
>> Date: 29/10/2013 10:35 (GMT+00:00)
>> To: Kieron O'Hara <kmo at ecs.soton.ac.uk<mailto:kmo at ecs.soton.ac.uk>>
>> Cc: sociam-soton at ecs.soton.ac.uk<mailto:sociam-soton at ecs.soton.ac.uk>
>> Subject: [Sociam-soton] Re: Is email a social machine?
>> 
>> 
>> 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<mailto: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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