Authors:
Ron Wakkary, Erik Stolterman
This issue's cover story brings to the fore an issue that lurks behind the phenomenon of social media. But what socialbots do is far from passive lurking; in fact, it may be better described as supercharging the interactions of people to people, and people to systems, in social media. Tim Hwang, Ian Pearce, and Max Nanis have collected four pieces by a diverse group of authors that explore the double-edged innovations of socialbots and how they impact social media. The lessons are clear, namely that digitization drives botification, meaning that the use of technology within our human activities fosters the creation of software to act in place of humans. Moreover, the sophistication of socialbots and the degree to which they are embedded in social media can significantly shape human systems. The article gives space to software engineers, researchers, marketing specialists, and users of social media to explore and analyze the growing phenomenon of socialbots in social media.
You may notice that this issue's cover story diverges from our usual approach. We invited Joe McCarthy, editor of our Social Mediator forum, to edit our cover piece. We will do this periodically, as it gives us a chance to shine more of a spotlight on the important issues and themes of our forums. Look for this again in an upcoming issue.
In our November + December 2011 issue, we included a special-topic section brought together by Harry Hochheiser and Ben Shneiderman. The special section explored the challenges and opportunities for HCI in electronic medical records (EMRs)clearly an important issue that bridges HCI and the health sector at large. We received considerable and critical feedback on the articles in this section and so have devoted a greater amount of space to our Feedback section to present this collection of comments. This bodes well for more special topics in the future, especially those that bridge communities and concerns. Please send us your ideas!
In this issue, Tad Hirsch presents his last article as the editor for the Community + Culture forum. We want to thank Tad for getting this new forum off the ground! For fans of the forumdon't worry, it will not go away. Christopher Le Dantec will take on the editor role and keep focusing on this key theme in HCI and interaction design.
As always, we invite your comments and ideas for new articles, special topics, and features to help us supercharge (in a human way) HCI and interaction design.
Ron Wakkary and Erik Stolterman
[email protected]
©2012 ACM 1072-5220/12/0300 $10.00
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