Rationalizing Sociality: An Unfinished Script for Socialbots

Abstract

This article takes the concept and some of the existing applications of socialbots—software robots that operate on social networking sites and present themselves as human users—as an occasion to trace the evolution of online sociality. The argument mobilizes theories of social rationalization from Max Weber to contemporary critical theory to demonstrate that the appearance of automated profiles (socialbots) on social networking platforms can be seen as a logical step in the progressive enclosure of online social interaction in standardized, simplified, and trivialized forms, frames, and gestures. Critical questions concerning what the growth of robo-sociality may mean for individual users and the online public sphere are posed with a view to charting the directions for a needed public debate.

Keywords:

• Čapek
• critical theory
• rationalization
• robots
• social media
• socialbots
• sociality
• Weber

Notes

1. Claude Shannon's idea to apply Boolean logic to the design of electrical switching circuits, which is considered the prime move of digitization, was developed in his master's thesis in the late 1930s and first reported in a conference paper in 1938 (Shannon 1940). I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pointing out the relative temporal proximity of these events.

2. Note that these tests have not been peer-reviewed by a scholarly publication or forum. They have been published in the news media only.

3. A value postulate can be understood as an ordered system of values and norms governing a specific realm of life. Such systems can have different orientations, for example, ethical, philosophical, and aesthetical, and generate diverse evaluative standpoints: “Not simply a single value, such as positive evaluation of wealth or of the fulfillment of duty, a value postulate implies entire clusters of values that vary in comprehensiveness, internal consistency, and content. Thus, this type of rationality exists as a manifestation of man's inherent capacity for valuerational action” (Kalberg 1980, 1155).