Abstract
Current discussions of social machines rightly emphasise a human's role as a crucial part of a system rather than a user of a system. The human 'parts' are typically considered in terms of their aggregate outcomes and collective behaviours, but human participants are rarely all equal, even within a small system. We argue that due to the complex nature of online identity, understanding participants in a more granular way is crucial for social machine observation and design. We present the results of a study of the personas portrayed by participants in a social machine that produces creative media content, and discover that inconsistent or misleading representations of individuals do not necessarily undermine the system in which they are participating. We describe a preliminary framework for making sense of human participants in social machines, and the ongoing work that develops this further.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Proceedings of the Companion Publication of the 23rd International Conference on World Wide Web Companion |
| Place of Publication | Republic and Canton of Geneva, Switzerland |
| Publisher | International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee |
| Pages | 897-902 |
| Number of pages | 6 |
| ISBN (Print) | 978-1-4503-2745-9 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2014 |
Keywords
- creative media production, identity, online communities, social machines, user-generated content