The social in the platform trap: Why a microscopic system focus limits the prospect of social machines

“Filter bubble”, “echo chambers”, “information diet” – the metaphors to describe today’s information dynamics on social media platforms are fairly diverse. People use them to describe the impact of the viral spread of fake, biased or purposeless content online, as witnessed during the recent race for the US presidency or the latest outbreak of the Ebola virus (in the latter case a tasteless racist meme was drowning out any meaningful content). This unravels the potential envisioned to arise from emergent activities of human collectives on the World Wide Web, as exemplified by the Arab Spring mass movements or digital disaster response supported by the Ushahidi tool suite.