I’ve written before about new communication theory which describes Masspersonal Communication as a framework to think about our Interpersonal communication that takes place in a Mass Media environment. The theory is actually a lot richer than that. So much so that as I was re-reading the paper where it discusses trust and how we form trust among each other I started to ask myself how do web services, a.k.a. non-humans, gain our trust?
I think a lot of it boils down to a shared history and the ability to rely on that service for personal needs. Some services or objects are easier to anthropomorphize. Which coincidentally is the premise behind Sherry Turkle’s book Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other.
I’ve also written before about the crazy, cool, scary work that @TimHwang has been doing with the @WebEcology project and something that has been as, extreme social gaming.
Today I stumbled upon this article in the Technology Review that again shows the progress that the @WebEcology project is making and again, I find it crazy, cool, scary all in one.
“A lot of people you can hire now say they are really good at community engagement,” says Tim Hwang, one of the authors of a research paper describing the socialbot experiments. Hwang and his colleagues wondered, “Can we measure those claims?”
The Web Ecology Project set up an experiment in which teams of researchers competed to gain the most Twitter @replies. Since there was no rule against automating the process, a few teams quickly realized they could compete better by using bots.
Hwang and two other researchers created their own organization, called the Pacific Social Architecting Corporation, to keep studying and developing socialbots. And they set up another experiment to further study bot-human interaction, and to measure socialbots’ ability to go one step further and catalyze new human-to-human connections.
The geek in me gets very excited about the progress we are making in social media. The anthropologist and communication theorist is fascinated by what we’re learning, but the human inside there (somewhere) still sometimes get’s nervous that we could just as easily end up in a social media dystopia.
Related articles
- Researchers Flood Facebook With Bots, Collect 250GB Of User Data (wall-notes.com)
- Do We Need Tougher Social Media Policies in Schools? (wall-notes.com)
- What are the occupational hazards of working in social media? (newcommbiz.com)
- Humanizing Your Business Is Your Greatest Challenge. Here’s How To Do It. (newcommbiz.com)
- [Social Media Daily Reflection] I am not an expert, I am a human being (newcommbiz.com)
- The Rise Of The Profersonal In Social Media (wall-notes.com)
- Researchers Use Twitter-Bots To Increase Human-To-Human Interaction By 43% (readwriteweb.com)
