| This project concerns the ways in which social computing functions as a rational steering medium in network societies. Exploring cases that include the structured data protocols of an ascendant "Web 3.0", Google PageRank and collaborative filtering services, the work unearths some key intellectual commitments at work in the technologies. Each software structure constructs a kind of social rationality, by combining the lived experience of users with its rationalizing computational processes. The cases have been chosen as among those digital tools increasingly relied upon to coordinate action in everyday life: organizing people and knowledge in diverse ways, recalibrating the operations of large bureaucracies and institutions, serving as new feedback mechanisms for the network economy, and functioning as novel formats for everyday communication between friends, family and citizenry.;To help compare the cases, the project outlines several philosophical forms of rationality. Doing so helps in turn to highlight three aspects of social computing: how certain conditions of epistemic validity and successful action are being encoded into software algorithms and protocols; how each case rationally models the achievement of consensus, via some configuration of the semantics and pragmatics of language, and finally, how each case enrolls distributed social participation to potentiate the conditions of its operation. |
