Towards Scalable Governance: Sensemaking and Cooperation in the Age of Social Media
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13347_2016_246_ReferencePDF.pdf
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4.76 MB
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Author(s)
Rahwan, Iyad
Date Issued
November 2016
Journal
Philosophy & Technology
Publisher
Springer-Verlag
Citation
Rahwan, Iyad. “Towards Scalable Governance: Sensemaking and Cooperation in the Age of Social Media.” Philosophy & Technology 30, 2 (November 2016): 161–178 © 2016 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Cybernetics, or self-governance of animal and machine, requires the ability to sense the world and to act on it in an appropriate manner. Likewise, self-governance of a human society requires groups of people to collectively sense and act on their environment. I argue that the evolution of political systems is characterized by a series of innovations that attempt to solve (among others) two ‘scalability’ problems: scaling up a group’s ability to make sense of an increasingly complex world, and to cooperate in increasingly larger groups. I then explore some recent efforts toward using the Internet and social media to provide alternative means for addressing these scalability challenges, under the banners of crowdsourcing and computer-supported argumentation. I present some lessons from those efforts about the limits of technology, and the research directions more likely to bear fruit.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Media Laboratory
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Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-016-0246-y
