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

[Kieron O'Hara]

Hmm, not sure about this. Sorry to continue to be boring, but I don't 
seem to be able to stop.

Is the feedback loop characteristic? Couldn't we have a social machine 
that left the affordances of the technology unchanged?

Obviously, any activity on the Web changes the Web in a basic sense by 
leaving traces and links and altering the amount of information that can 
be gathered from it. But if (say) a group of people on the Flowers 
estate used Facebook to coordinate their responses to crime, it would 
leave the affordances of Facebook unchanged in any serious sense, 
wouldn't it? But we might still want to call it a social machine, even 
though the feedback loop is very tenuous.

Are there any examples of tech/social feedback loops that do not produce 
social machines? Not entirely sure, but here is one possible example: an 
al Qaeda group dedicated to blowing up communications lines in 
Afghanistan (there are such, apparently). There is a set of technical 
affordances, allowing Web-based and other communications between remote 
areas and sectors of government. The group blows up the cables, 
stations, etc, which are so sparse these will seriously disrupt Internet 
communication (social behaviour changing the technical features). New 
infrastructure is built with new security features, which then means the 
group has to alter its tactics but continues to disrupt the Afghan Web 
(technical features changing social behaviour). But I'd be very 
reluctant to call the al Qaeda group, still less {the al Qaeda group + 
the Afghan Web infrastructure}, a social machine except in a very 
degenerate sense.

So we can have social machines without feedback loops and feedback loops 
without social machines.

This is not to say that the feedback loop isn't important - it is. But I 
would still argue very strongly that it is goal-directedness that is 
characteristic. And that email in general isn't a social machine, 
although individual email systems may well be (maybe in the same way 
that an individual Black & Decker workbench is a machine, but the 
totality of B&D workbenches isn't), and email will obviously be part of 
the structure of very very many social machines. I'd also, incidentally, 
argue against spam being a social machine, whereas individual spamming 
operations such as those Dave describes in the citizen science example 
would be.

OK, I'll stop now and lie down.

Kieron


On 30/10/2013 08:05, Wendy Hall wrote:
> Below is a thoughtful comment from someone at the dinner last night. It was really cool to be part of a discussion at dinner here and a parallel one on email about email as a social machine. Very spooky
>
> SPAM is often used as an example of when "social machines" go wrong because the designers didn't foresee potential harmful side effects. So I'm veering on email having become a social machine even if it started out as a service
>
> I got confused with the email discussion about halting conditions and outcomes of social machines. Some are purely emergent or evolve to become something they were not "designed" to be and by their very nature may not have a halting condition?
>
> Lots of lovely food for thought
>
> Wendy
>
>
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> Begin forwarded message:
>
> From: Graham Klyne <graham.klyne at zoo.ox.ac.uk<mailto:graham.klyne at zoo.ox.ac.uk>>
> Date: 30 October 2013 10:00:54 GMT+10:30
> To: Wendy Hall <wh at ecs.soton.ac.uk<mailto:wh at ecs.soton.ac.uk>>, "David F. Flanders" <dflanders at unimelb.edu.au<mailto:dflanders at unimelb.edu.au>>
> Cc: David De Roure <david.deroure at oerc.ox.ac.uk<mailto:david.deroure at oerc.ox.ac.uk>>, Kevin Page <kevin.page at oerc.ox.ac.uk<mailto:kevin.page at oerc.ox.ac.uk>>, Dave Crocker <dcrocker at bbiw.net<mailto:dcrocker at bbiw.net>>
> Subject: Is email a social machine?
>
> Dear Wendy, and all,
>
> (I'm cc'ing Dave Crocker who has a had a hand in email design since before RFC822, and who is also a psychologist by training, so may be well placed to contribute to this debate.)
>
> The question that came up last night about whether or not email is a social machine seems, to me, to be a defining question (among many), because it forces some separation of the characteristics a social machine from the characteristics of the web.
>
> In our discussion, I think you said the defining characteristic of a social machine is the feedback loop between computational system and its social environment:  i.e. technical features giving rise to social behaviours, which in turn result in changes to the technical features.
>
> The more I think of this question in light of the above working definition, the harder I find it is to consider that email is not a social machine.  I understand that some of the original design elements of Internet email were socially rather than technically driven (Dave could expand on that, if needed.)  But also, I can think of numerous examples of peoples behaviour being affected by the nature of email, and consequent changes to the design or deployment of email systems.  I think the most prominent is spam: the nature of email has given rise to spam, which in turn has given rise to technical features such as filters, DKIM, etc.  And the arms race isn't over yet.
>
> I think one of the refutations of of this position mentioned was that email technology is no longer changing in response to social behaviour.  I'm not sure that;'s true, but if it is, I think it gives rise to another question:  do social machines tend to converge to a steady state?  Or if some do and some do not, what are the characteristics that might predict such convergent behaviour?  (e.g. is there some analog of Nyquist.s criterion for linear systems (*) that determines stability or divergence?)
>
> #g
> --
>
> (*) http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Control_Systems/Nyquist_Stability_Criteria#Example:_First_Order_System
> (My recollecton from undergrad days is that Nyquist's criterion tells us that if there is negative feedback of gain greater than unity for any frequency with with a phase difference of greater than 180% then the resulting system, is unstable.)
>
>
>
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