[ecrea] CFP for an edited collection of essays exploring SOCIALBOTS

Robert Gehl and I would like to invite you to consider contributing to 
our proposed edited collection exploring the technological, social, 
cultural, and ethical aspects of socialbots. Please see our Call for 
Papers below and do not hesitate to contact us with questions, or to 
discuss the idea further.

Best,

Maria
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Dr. Maria Bakardjieva
Professor, Department of Communication and Culture
University of Calgary,
Canada

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Robert W. Gehl, University of Utah
Maria Bakardjieva, University of Calgary

A CFP for an edited collection of essays exploring SOCIALBOTS

Many users of the Internet are aware of the existence of bots: automated 
programs that work behind the scenes to come up with search suggestions, 
check the weather, filter emails, or clean up Wikipedia entries. A new 
form of software robot has been making its presence felt in social media 
sites such as Facebook and Twitter lately – the socialbot. Unlike more 
familiar bots, socialbots are built to appear human. While a weatherbot 
will tell you if it's sunny and a spambot will incessantly peddle 
Viagra, socialbots will ask you questions, have conversations, like your 
posts, retweet you, and become your friend. All the while, if they're 
well-programmed, you won't know that you're tweeting and friending with 
a robot.

Socialbot makers have suggested or demonstrated many uses for these 
'bots, including exposing security flaws in Facebook, healing social 
rifts, bringing brands to life, quelling dissent on the behalf of 
governments, creating the appearance of popular support for politicians, 
infiltrating activist networks, or correcting misinformation circulating 
online. Socialbots can automate friending, liking, and tweeting, playing 
the odds to gain followers. They are built out of datasets produced by 
social media users and thus reflect our social media use back on us. 
They exploit our penchant for "hot" profiles, the triadic closure 
principle, and our need to make an impression and to get feedback. But 
they also give us a neutral sounding board, a means to pass the day, and 
a new form of friendship.

As a cutting-edge AI technology, socialbots are only the latest in a 
long line of mechanical and software-based creations that humans live, 
talk, work, love, and struggle with. From the Mechanical Turk to the 
Turing Test to ELIZA to Cleverbot, from robotic factory workers to 
emotionally-attuned customer service telephone systems, from Rossum's 
Universal Robots to Robby to HAL to Colossus to Data, AI presents us 
with a wide range of philosophical, ethical, political, and economic 
quandaries. Who benefits from the use of robots? Who loses? Does a robot 
deserve rights? Who pulls the strings of  these 'bots? Who has the right 
to know what about them? What does it mean to be intelligent? What does 
it mean to be a friend? Can research be done to create these bots but 
still uphold the ideal of informed consent?

As a way to explore these questions – and many others – we seek chapter 
proposals for an edited book. Potential topics could be:
•    Socialbots and artificial intelligence
•    Genealogies of bots on the Internet
•    Socialbots and big data
•    Utopian and dystopian socialbot futures
•    Uses of socialbots
•    Socialbots and politics
•    Socialbots and marketing
•    Socialbots and posthumanism
•    Human/machine relations
•    Political economy of socialbots
•    Sociable bots in popular culture
•    Ways to program socialbots
•    What socialbots tell us about social media
•    Socialbots and human sociality
•    Socialbots and anonymity
•    Socialbots and identity politics
•    Socialbots versus spambots

We encourage proposals from people working in a wide range of fields, 
including communication, humanities, social sciences, computer science, 
software engineering, software studies, science and technology studies, 
philosophy, marketing, and media and cultural studies. We want 
accessible, well-researched chapters that not only inform others about 
these 'bots, but also establish socialbots as a new object of inquiry 
from many perspectives.
We are currently talking with several academic publishers about this 
edited collection.

TIMELINE
•    500 word abstracts due to (socialbotbook /at/ robertwgehl.org): October 
15, 2014
•    Notification about abstract acceptance: November 15, 2014
•    Full chapters due: March 15, 2015

EDITOR BIOS

ROBERT W. GEHL
www.robertwgehl.org | (robert.gehl /at/ utah.edu)

Robert W. Gehl is an assistant professor in the Department of 
Communication at the University of Utah, USA. His forthcoming book is 
Reverse Engineering Social Media: Software, Culture, and Political 
Economy in New Media Capitalism (2014, Temple). His work is at the 
intersections of science and technology studies, political economy, and 
cultural studies and explores network culture. He has published research 
that critiques the architecture, code, culture, and design of social 
media sites such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and blogs in 
Social Text, Lateral, The International Journal of Cultural Studies, New 
Media and Society, Television and New Media, Computational Culture, and 
First Monday. He is a member of the editorial board of Communication and 
Critical/Cultural Studies. His current project is a genealogy of 
software engineering.

MARIA P. BAKARDJIEVA
www.ucalgary.ca/~bakardji
(bakardji /at/ ucalgary.ca)

Maria Bakardjieva is a professor in the Department of Communication and 
Culture, University of Calgary, Canada. She is the author of Internet 
Society: The Internet in Everyday Life (2005, Sage) and co-editor of How 
Canadians Communicate (2004 and 2007, University of Calgary Press). 
Maria held the position of editor-in-chief of the Journal of 
Computer-Mediated Communication from 2011 to 2013. Her research has 
examined Internet use practices across different social and cultural 
context with a focus on the ways in which users understand and actively 
appropriate new media. Her work on the topics of Internet use in 
everyday life, online community, e-learning and research ethics has been 
published in numerous international journals and edited collections 
including Media, Culture and Society, New Media and Society, The 
Information Society, Philosophy and Technology, Ethics and Information 
Technology, Sage Benchmarks in Communication, Volume 4 and others. Her 
current projects investigate the social and political implications of 
social media and look at the interactions between traditional and new 
media with the objective to identify opportunities for broad democratic 
participation in the public sphere.



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