Social Physics

Embedding Participation through Social Protocols and Social Physics

"An example of research into social software is the following:

Social Protocols define a social group as a particular kind of social network, and consistent with our algorithmic notion of Social Physics, groups are treated as an emergent property of certain types of rules, e.g. Social Protocols. Social Protocols frame the following seven conditions for any social network:

1. Fine grained tagging of the types of content that can be shared;

2. Terms and conditions under which certain types of content can be shared/distributed;

3. Types of interaction between parties, specifically, "speech act combinations" (request, question, introduce);

4. Network roles of participants in interactions between the parties;

5. Rules for inclusion and exclusion.

6. Triggers for dynamic assignment and revocation of participation rights.

7. The behaviors and metrics parties can see about one another.

The premise is that social control is not simply the consequence of brute force and coercion, but rather that people have evolved elaborate forms of self-organizing social control through innate "social emotions" such as, "shame and fame", a sense of reciprocity, affiliation, and peer based reputation. Hence, self-organization and social control can be scaled for large distributed networks of strangers and familiars through Social Protocols enable selective visibility for social signaling." (http://www.jclippinger.com/social.html)