Emergence in Social Networks: Modeling the Intentional Properties of Multi-Agent Systems

This paper examines some methodological and conceptual challenges concerning the study of emergent patterns of behavior in communication networks. We discuss the notion of intentionality in collectives in the light of two case studies. The first one regards the mechanisms of communication in a community of insects. The second case study concerns the “smart mobs” phenomena in human societies. The focus of our discussion is the detection of what we call emergent fingerprints, which signal the presence of a system of agents behaving in a manner identical to a social structure whose intentional behavior under some known set of constraints we have modeled. These structures are used to attribute some intentionality to social systems, even in the presence of noisy data sets.