Machines used to be programmed by programmers and used by users. This boundary has been dissolved by the rise of the web and its increased user participation, the rise of home automation, and the emerging Internet of Things (IoT). We now observe different configurations of people interacting with computers, content, and each other, typically mediated by social websites. Popular examples are Facebook and Twitter. Other examples include Wikipedia (with its co-creation of encyclopedic knowledge) and GalaxyZoo (crowd sourcing of astronomical image classification). Social machines can be defined as computational processes governed by collective, harnessed, and focused social interaction between humans and computers.

Donath’s book is designed to be a manifesto of what a connected physical-virtual world can be like, a place where the inhabitants have the awareness and tools to shape their world. Technology is not determinism, and in order to shape the world around us, we need to know about the materials we have at our disposal, their characteristics and properties, and the manifold world that these can be transformed into. This book provides a grand tour of what a social machine is, the many tools that are being used to construct social machines, the histories of their development, the experimentation that has been carried out using the techniques and tools described, and the results of these experiments.

After reading this book, the reader will come out with an appreciation of the pros and cons of social machines, especially of how he or she can be part of their construction.

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