ABSTRACT
The goal of this book is to draw attention to the arrival of a new socio-technical entity-the socialbot. This arrival has not been bombastic, but rather quiet for now. The first sightings of the socialbot across the digital media field date from only a few years ago. It remains an evasive creature and an object of fantasies and rumours. Nobody knows for sure where it will turn up next, how it will figure in established social practices and even less in what way it may change them. The meaning of the socialbot is being invented in laboratories, appraised in the marketplace and construed in the mass media as we speak.
