Bamblog

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Our research group (that is Prof. Theis-Berglmair, Florian Mayer and me) had an interesting meeting with Prof. Christoph Schlieder the other day. Schlieder’s holding the chair for computing in the cultural sciences at Bamberg University and recently started a project called "Communication-Oriented Modeling (COM): Modellierung und Simulation gesellschaftlicher Kommunikationsprozesse" [Modelling and Simulating societal communication processes; no homepage yet]. He’s quite interested in getting some input from communication science, since his project deals with aspects of computer-mediated communication and the emergence of structures based on communicative acts. [BTW: It is part of a research agenda called "Sozionik - researching and modelling artifical sociality", where computer scientists and sociologists collaborate.]

As a starter for some of the ideas he is pursuing in his project he pointed us to an article on "Communication without Agents? From Agent-Oriented to Communication-Oriented Modeling" (Coauthor is Thomas Malsch, an sociologist from TU Hamburg-Harburg). Their focus is on formally modelling communication processes, and they propose an approach focused on the message rather than on the agent. Although I don’t agree with their basic premise, that the communication-oriented model (COM) is more appropriate than the agent-oriented model (AOM) (see below), they develop some interesting ideas.
For example, they talk about the "social visibility" of messages being dependent on a) the way messages are temporally ordered and b) the reference structure a given application provides. Think about Usenet messages, for example - with the google archive, any given message is accessible in principle ("out there", if you will), but of course only a small proportion is "socially visible", that is: has a chance to be read or draw follow-up messages. So if you think about networks/structures of texts, the social visibility of a message is a prerequisite for the continuation/expansion/reproduction of networks. [Although not the only one; certain kinds of messages have a bigger chance of getting a response than others, think about questions vs. statements, provocative vs. well-balanced statements, …]

I don’t agree with Malsch/Schlieder on the point of preferring COM over AOM, though. They’re probably right if it comes down to modelling/researching large-scale structures (they mention some arguments in the paper), but I’d like to keep the perspective on both the text/message AND the author. There are networks of authors as well as networks of texts, and both constitute social structures in Cyberspace - it is interesting to combine them analytically, maybe arriving at some kind of model/framework that takes actors, texts and the underlying architecture all into account.