This experiment from Tim Hwang is a GREAT case study to talk about the interdependence of humans and digital machines. He created a clandestine competition  for teams to program bots that would influence twitter users. 

Teams, armed with the latest tools, have been architecting and launching swarms of robots to compete in influencing and shaping the social behavior of online communities on the mega-scale. What’s come out of these competitions? And where will it go into the future?

Winning teams scored the most points in getting people to follow, DM, & RT.In this talk, he highlights the success of the winning team that used Amazon Mechanical Turk where humans, for several pennies, responded to requests from bots to write twitter responses. (New Scientist has a great article about the project.)

The thing that stuck out to me was that the winning project was a combination of HUMANS and COMPUTERs. I started thinking of Mark Poster’s argument in Information Please, Poster  where he makes an argument for the increasing interdependence of human and computers from a global stand point:

“I propose here to discuss the assemblage of networked digital information and humans in relation to globalization. I intend this combination of humans and machines to designate not prosthesis, not a machine addition to an already complete human being, but an intimate mixing of human and machine that constitutes an interface outside the subject-object binary.” (p. 48)

I also find Tim’s project to be a much more nuanced way of speaking about how gaming can change real world interactions than all the feel good stuff out there on “gaming to make the world better.” (i.e. Jane McDonigal).

While Tim’s project illustrates that people are able to engineer bots to create homophily - similar social network structures -  it would be misleading to think that the understanding of structure alone can tell the whole story about how and why the social ties cluster, cohere, or bridge the way that they do. Interaction within peer groups don’t even hold the same meaning across peer groups and regions.

I look forward to reading more about the studies that come out of this project Tim!

via kenyatta: