The Theory and Practice of Social Machines

Abstract

Social machines are a type of social interaction or enterprise that is, in one sense, as old as the hills, and in another, as novel as the technologies that underlie them—the World Wide Web, social networking, smartphones, and so on. We believe, in accordance with the interdisciplinary study of these technologies that has been called Web Science (Berners-Lee et al. 2006), that they deserve a place in our standard vocabulary of social cooperation and interaction, thanks in large part to the transformative effects of the increased penetration of society by technology, and to the feedback loops that result as that massive social uptake transforms the technology in return. We therefore focus in this book on the novelty of social machines, although we try not to forget that they are rooted in time-honoured forms of interaction. This new, if not unprecedented, sociotechnical phenomenon has been the object of study of a programme grant awarded by the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), entitled SOCIAM: The Theory and Practice of Social Machines, and this book describes the work of the Sociam project. The authors have all worked on, or been associated with, Sociam, from the award of the funding in 2012 until the close of the project in 2018, at its four partners: Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton; Dept. of Computer Science, University of Oxford; the Oxford e-Research Centre; and the Dept. of Informatics, University of Edinburgh. Our aim has been to map the space of social machines, to understand their development, and to produce an inventory of the skills required to analyse and engineer them and make them sustainable and effective. This is clearly a multidisciplinary imperative, and a complete picture of social machines will draw upon social science, law and regulation, network science, data science and computer science (Tiropanis et al. 2015). Our focus here is on the engineering and data elements of this coalition, but we should always remember that social machines are social as well as machines. They cannot be built; technology may suggest a certain type of interaction and provide a palette of communications, but without participants they are dead formalisms.