When Machines Speak to Each Other: Unpacking the “Social” in “Social Media”

This manifesto offers three approaches to understand the “social” in “social media.” Drawing from emerging practices, discourses, architectures, and research, the manifesto argues that while it is important to look at how the emergence of digital media changes, regulates, and shapes the social structures of governance and inter-personal communication, it is also necessary to look at how sapient technologies communicate and talk to each other, thus creating a new sociality that emerges from machine architecture and interface design rather than human intention and social norms.