3 Characterising Social Embeddedness

3.2 Being Socially Situated

In a physical situation the internal models may be insufficient because of the enormous computation capacity, amount of information and speed that would be required by an agent attempting to explicitly model its environment. In a social situation, although the speed is not so critical, the complexity of that environment can be overwhelming and there is also the obvious external computational resources provided by the other agents and their interactions. This means that an agent can be said to be socially situated by analogy with being physically situated - in both cases the balance of advantage lies in using external causal processes and representations rather than internal ones. The fact that the source of this imbalance in each case is due to different causes leads to a different `flavour' of the situatedness, but there is enough in common to justify the common use of word `situated'. Of course, social environments vary greatly and the fact of being socially situated will thus be contingent on the particular agent and its social context.

The frequent sensing and probing of the physical environment can be translated into `gossip', one of whose functions is the frequent sampling and testing of the social environment. The reliance of external computational resources and models is arguably even more pronounced in social situations than physical ones - social agents may accept the output of external sources (including other agents) as a direct influence on their decision making, e.g. in fashion.

Capturing Social Embeddedness: a constructivist approach - Bruce Edmonds - 30 OCT 98

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