Dear colleagues, Robert Gehl and I would like to invite you to consider contributing to our proposed edited collection exploring the technological, social, cultural, and ethical aspects of *socialbots*. Please see our Call for Papers below and do not hesitate to contact us with questions, or to discuss the idea further. Best, Maria --- Dr. Maria Bakardjieva Professor, Department of Communication and Culture University of Calgary, Canada --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Robert W. Gehl, University of Utah Maria Bakardjieva, University of Calgary *CFP FOR AN EDITED COLLECTION EXPLORING SOCIALBOTS* Many users of the Internet are aware of the existence 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. A new form of software robot has been making its presence felt in social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter lately – the socialbot. Unlike more familiar 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. Socialbot makers have suggested or demonstrated many uses for these 'bots, including exposing security flaws in Facebook, healing social rifts, bringing brands to life, quelling dissent on the behalf of governments, creating the appearance of popular support for politicians, infiltrating activist networks, or correcting misinformation circulating online. Socialbots can automate friending, liking, and tweeting, playing the odds to gain followers. They are built out of datasets produced by social media users and thus reflect our social media use back on us. They exploit our penchant for "hot" profiles, the triadic closure principle, and our need to make an impression and to get feedback. But they also give us a neutral sounding board, a means to pass the day, and a new form of friendship. As a cutting-edge AI technology, socialbots are only the latest in a long line of mechanical and software-based creations that humans live, talk, work, love, and struggle with. From the Mechanical Turk to the Turing Test to ELIZA to Cleverbot, from robotic factory workers to emotionally-attuned customer service telephone systems, from Rossum's Universal Robots to Robby to HAL to Colossus to Data, AI presents us with a wide range of philosophical, ethical, political, and economic quandaries. Who benefits from the use of robots? Who loses? Does a robot 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? Can research be done to create these bots but still uphold the ideal of informed consent? As a way to explore these questions – and many others – we seek chapter proposals for an edited book. Potential topics could be: • Socialbots and artificial intelligence • Genealogies of bots on the Internet • Socialbots and big data • Utopian and dystopian socialbot futures • Uses of socialbots • Socialbots and politics • Socialbots and marketing • Socialbots and posthumanism • Human/machine relations • Political economy of socialbots • Sociable bots in popular culture • Ways to program socialbots • What socialbots tell us about social media • Socialbots and human sociality • Socialbots and anonymity • Socialbots and identity politics • Socialbots versus spambots We encourage proposals from people working in a wide range of fields, including communication, humanities, social sciences, computer science, software engineering, software studies, science and technology studies, philosophy, marketing, and media and cultural studies. We want accessible, well-researched chapters that not only inform others about these 'bots, but also establish socialbots as a new object of inquiry from many perspectives. We are currently talking with several academic publishers about this edited collection. TIMELINE • 500 word abstracts due to socialbotbook@robertwgehl.org: October 15, 2014 • Notification about abstract acceptance: November 15, 2014 • Full chapters due: March 15, 2015 EDITOR BIOS ROBERT W. GEHL www.robertwgehl.org | robert.gehl@utah.edu Robert W. Gehl is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Utah, USA. His forthcoming book is Reverse Engineering Social Media: Software, Culture, and Political Economy in New Media Capitalism (2014, Temple). His work is at the intersections of science and technology studies, political economy, and cultural studies and explores network culture. He has published research that critiques the architecture, code, culture, and design of social media sites such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and blogs in Social Text, Lateral, The International Journal of Cultural Studies, New Media and Society, Television and New Media, Computational Culture, and First Monday. He is a member of the editorial board of Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies. His current project is a genealogy of software engineering. MARIA P. BAKARDJIEVA www.ucalgary.ca/~bakardji bakardji@ucalgary.ca Maria Bakardjieva is a professor in the Department of Communication and Culture, University of Calgary, Canada. She is the author of Internet Society: The Internet in Everyday Life (2005, Sage) and co-editor of How Canadians Communicate (2004 and 2007, University of Calgary Press). Maria held the position of editor-in-chief of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication from 2011 to 2013. Her research has examined Internet use practices across different social and cultural context with a focus on the ways in which users understand and actively appropriate new media. Her work on the topics of Internet use in everyday life, online community, e-learning and research ethics has been published in numerous international journals and edited collections including Media, Culture and Society, New Media and Society, The Information Society, Philosophy and Technology, Ethics and Information Technology, Sage Benchmarks in Communication, Volume 4 and others. Her current projects investigate the social and political implications of social media and look at the interactions between traditional and new media with the objective to identify opportunities for broad democratic participation in the public sphere.