Many users of the Internet are aware 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. More recently, a new software robot has been making its presence felt in social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter – the socialbot. However, unlike other 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. Who benefits from the use of software robots? Who loses? Does a bot 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? Socialbots and Their Friends: Digital Media and the Automation of Sociality is one of the first academic collections to critically consider the socialbot and tackle these pressing questions.

Many users of the Internet are aware 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. More recently, a new software robot has been making its presence felt in social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter – the socialbot. However, unlike other 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. Who benefits from the use of software robots? Who loses? Does a bot 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? Socialbots and Their Friends: Digital Media and the Automation of Sociality is one of the first academic collections to critically consider the socialbot and tackle these pressing questions.

This is an open access book.The 3rd International Conference on Public Management and Intelligent Society(PMIS 2023) will be held on March 10-12, 2023 in Shanghai, China. PMIS 2021 and PMIS 2022 have been successfully held in the last 2 years, providing an academic exchange platform for participants from all over the world. The conference discussed the latest topics in the field of public management and intelligent society, and the wonderful presentations were given by invited distinguished speakers and praised by scholars. Building an intelligent society and studying public management have always been a leading and hot issue. PMIS 2023 will focus on public management in an intelligent society, technological innovation in an intelligent society and advanced intelligent transportation system to discuss further. The aim of PMIS 2023 is to bring together innovative academics and industrial experts in the field of Public Management and Intelligent Society to a common forum. The primary goal to promote research and developmental activities and another goal is to promote scientific information interchange between researchers, developers, students, and practitioners in related fields.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Computational Social Networks, CSoNet 2015, held in Beijing, China, in August 2015. The 23 revised full papers and 3 short papers presented together with 2 extended abstracts were carefully reviewed and selected from 101 submissions and cover topics on social information diffusion; network clustering and community structure; social link prediction and recommendation; and social network structure analysis.

Approachable yet sophisticated and comprehensive presentation of the key concepts and theories of persusaion. Key text for an increasingly relevant course taught in various departments, such as communication studies and psychology. Fresh attention to online influence and new examples of persusaion today, including within health campaigns, attitudes, communicator appeals, dissonance, and ethics. Updated companion website that includes an instructor’s manual, lecture slides, sample test questions, and links to relevant articles and videos illustrating concepts presented in the text.

Gaming the System takes philosophical traditions out of the ivory tower and into the virtual worlds of video games. In this book, author David J. Gunkel explores how philosophical traditions—put forth by noted thinkers such as Plato, Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, and Žižek—can help us explore and conceptualize recent developments in video games, game studies, and virtual worlds. Furthermore, Gunkel interprets computer games as doing philosophy, arguing that the game world is a medium that provides opportunities to model and explore fundamental questions about the nature of reality, personal identity, social organization, and moral conduct. By using games to investigate and innovate in the area of philosophical thinking, Gunkel shows how areas such as game governance and manufacturers' terms of service agreements actually grapple with the social contract and produce new postmodern forms of social organization that challenge existing modernist notions of politics and the nation state. In this critically engaging study, Gunkel considers virtual worlds and video games as more than just "fun and games," presenting them as sites for new and original thinking about some of the deepest questions concerning the human experience.

This book showcases various ways in which digital archives allow for new approaches to journalism history. The chapters in this book were selected based on three overall objectives: 1) research that highlights specific concerns within journalism history through digital archives; 2) discussions of digital methodologies, as well as specific applications, that are accessible for journalism scholars with no prior experiences with such approaches; and 3) that journalism history and digital archives are connected in other ways than through specific methods, i.e., that the connection raises larger questions of historiography and power. The contributions address cases and developments in Asia, South and North America and Europe; and range from long-range, big-data, machine-leaning and topic modelling studies of journalistic characteristics and meta-journalistic discourses to critiques of archival practices and access in relation to gender, social movements and poverty. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Digital Journalism.

The SAGE Handbook of Human-Machine Communication has been designed to serve as the touchstone text for researchers and scholars engaging in new research in this fast-developing field. Chapters provide a comprehensive grounding of the history, methods, debates and theories that contribute to the study of human-machine communication. Further to this, the Handbook provides a point of departure for theorizing interactions between people and technologies that are functioning in the role of communicators, and for considering the theoretical and methodological implications of machines performing traditionally ‘human’ roles. This makes the Handbook the first of its kind, and a valuable resource for students and scholars across areas such as communication, media and information studies, and computer science, as well as for practitioners, engineers and researchers interested in the foundational elements of this emerging field. Part 1: Histories and Trajectories Part 2: Approaches and Methods Part 3: Concepts and Contexts Part 4: Technologies and Applications

This volume aims at assessing the current approaches and technologies, as well as to outline the major challenges and future perspectives related to the security and privacy protection of social networks. It provides the reader with an overview of the state-of-the art techniques, studies, and approaches as well as outlining future directions in this field. A wide range of interdisciplinary contributions from various research groups ensures for a balanced and complete perspective.

Intersectional Automations explores a range of situations where robotics, biotechnological enhancement, artificial intelligence (AI), and algorithmic culture collide with intersectional social justice issues such as race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and citizenship. As robots, machine learning applications, and human augmentics are artifacts of human culture, they sometimes carry stereotypes, biases, exclusions, and other forms of privilege into their computational logics, platforms, and/or embodiments. The essays in this multidisciplinary collection consider how questions of equity and social justice impact our understanding of these developments, analyzing not only the artifacts themselves, but also the discourses and practices surrounding them, including societal understandings, design choices, law and policy approaches, and their uses and abuses.