Revisiting the Three Rs of Social Machines: Reflexivity, Recognition and Responsivity

This paper sets out an approach to Social Machines (SMs), their description and analysis, based on a development of social constructionist theoretical principles adapted for Web Science. We argue that currently the search for the primitives of SMs, or appropriate units of analysis to describe them, tends to favour either the technology or sociality. We suggest an approach that favours distributed agency whether it is machinic or human or both. We argue that current thinking (e.g. Actor Network Theory) is unsuited to SMs. Instead we describe an alternative which prioritizes a view of socio-technical activity as forming ‘reflexive project structures’. We show that reflexivity in social systems can be further usefully divided into more fundamental elements (Recognition and Responsivity). This process enables us to capture more of the variation in SMs and to distinguish them from non-Web based socio-technical systems. We illustrate the approach by looking at different kinds of SMs showing how they relate to contemporary social theory.