Working out the plot: the role of Stories in Social Machines
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The document discusses the role of storytelling in social machines, emphasizing the need to focus on sociality rather than just the mechanical aspects of these systems. It highlights failures in collaborative platforms like Wikipedia and argues for a storytelling perspective to facilitate social interaction and innovation. The authors propose that viewing social machines through narratives allows for more dynamic communication and cooperative development.
Working out the plot: the role of Stories in Social Machines
- 1. By Sรฉgolรจne Tarte, David De Roure* and Pip Willcox Working out the Plot The Role of Stories in Social Machines * @dder
- 2. Real life is and must be full of all kinds of social constraint โ the very processes from which society arises. Computers can help if we use them to create abstract social machines on the Web: processes in which the people do the creative work and the machine does the administration... The stage is set for an evolutionary growth of new social engines. The ability to create new forms of social process would be given to the world at large, and development would be rapid. Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web, 1999 (pp. 172โ175) Social Machines
- 10. โYet Wikipedia and its stated ambition to โcompile the sum of all human knowledgeโ are in trouble. The volunteer workforce that built the projectโs flagship, the English-language Wikipediaโand must defend it against vandalism, hoaxes, and manipulationโ has shrunk by more than a third since 2007 and is still shrinkingโฆ The main source of those problems is not mysterious. The loose collective running the site today, estimated to be 90 percent male, operates a crushing bureaucracy with an often abrasive atmosphere that deters newcomers who might increase participation in Wikipedia and broaden its coverageโฆโ http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/520446/the-decline-of-wikipedia/
- 11. The Yongle Encyclopedia (simplified Chinese: ; traditional Chinese: ; pinyin: Yวnglรจ Dร diวn; literally The Great Canon or Vast Documents of the Yongle Era) was a Chinese compilation of information commissioned by the Ming Dynasty emperor Yongle in 1403 and completed by 1408. It was the world's largest known general encyclopedia at its time, unsurpassed for six centuries. http://yongledadian.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/volume/f0a4265c-c914-42fb-8a52-0eefc44cfa2a Over two thousand scholars worked on the project under the direction of the Yongle Emperor, who reigned from 1402 to 1424. The scholars incorporated 8,000 texts from ancient times through the early Ming Dynasty. Many subjects were covered, including agriculture, art, astronomy, drama, geology, history, literature, medicine, natural sciences, religion and technology, as well as descriptions of unusual natural events. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yongle_Encyclopedia
- 13. pynchonwiki.com
- 15. Stories within Social Machines Stories about Social Machines Social Machines for stories Now we consider... SOCIAL MACHINES AS STORIES
- 16. Why adopt a storytelling perspective to study Social Machines? This idea is rooted in the observation that much attention has been given to the internal functioning of a Social Machine, thereby tipping the balance towards the โmachineryโ side of Social Machines; the question that remains wide open and relatively unexplored is the following: what is social about a Social Machine? By adopting a storytelling view on Social Machines, we facilitate the exposition and expression of their sociality.
- 17. Are we looking for machines or for socials? sociality
- 18. Rather than looking at a Social Machine as an entity where the โmachineryโ is a set structure of hardware, software, and assigned roles that would somehow allow for sociality (how?), we consider the โmachineryโ as plotpoints through which stories can pass, allowing for non- deterministic communication, for non- combinatorial circulation of ideas, for non-preset cooperation, for innovation, for invention, and thereby for sociality.
- 19. STORYTELLING AS A STETHOSCOPE FOR SOCIAL MACHINES 1. Sociality through storytelling potential and realization 2. Sustainability through reactivity and interactivity 3. Emergence through collaborative authorship and mixed authority Zooniverse is a highly stori๏ฌed Social Machine Facebook doesnโt allow for improvisation Wikipedia assigns authority rights rigidly
- 20. segolene.tarte@oerc.ox.ac.uk david.deroure@oerc.ox.ac.uk pip.willcox@bodleian.ox.ac.uk Thanks to Kevin Page, Zooniverse, Bodleian Libraries and attendees of the Social Sciences and the Social Machine workshop (Oxford, September 2013) ne Tarte, David De Roure and Pip Willcox, (2014). Working out the plot: the role of stories in social machines. 2nd International Workshop on the Theory and Practice of Social Machines, in conjunction with WWW2014, Seoul, Korea, 7 April 2014. Proceedings in ACM Digital Library dx.doi.org/10.1145/2567948.2578839, preprint on http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/ora:8033 SOCIAM: The Theory and Practice of Social Machines is funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) under grant number EPJ017728/1 and comprises the Universities of Southampton, Oxford and Edinburgh. See sociam.org