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

[Dr. Daniel A Smith]

To add to the reasons why a mailing list might be a social machine, from the Weaving the Web, Berners-Lee school of thought on social machines, it does indeed use machines to do the admin of pushing our messages around to the right people, while allowing us to the creative part of thinking and responding - so it’s suitably up the infrastructure stack, compared to just raw e-mail, where we would have to do a bit of admin ourselves (although modern e-mail clients remember all of my contacts for us now, so its not exactly hard admin).

In terms of something needing to be webby - we’ve said in discussions before about Ushahidi making heavy use of SMS for non-web rural mobile phone users, yet undeniably being successful social machines.

Dan


On 29 Oct 2013, at 11:34, Darren Richardson <dpr1g09 at ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:

> I suppose that would depend on what people mean by email. If they’re referring to the the nuts and bolts of the technology then I would certainly say it was not a social machine, merely a cog that can be used to build one. However, if they’re referring to a service like Gmail, then the waters are murkier. 
> 
> Input: At least some of the correspondence of every internet connected person on the planet (If you don’t use Gmail, you’ve almost certainly sent an email to somebody who does!)
> Outputs:
>   For Google: Increased Ad revenue and better customer awareness
>   For the users: A free email service (I pay 69p a month for mine!)
>   For the advertisers: Increased revenue
> 
> This looks like a machine to me. It really depends on whether we include general purpose machines in our Social Machine definition or restrict it to only include machines that do social computation.
> 
> Darren..
> 
> 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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