Social computing as an umbrella term for technologies, virtual spaces, and their associated communities seem to cover a lot of ground. Its relationship to online social networks, or “social network sites (SNSs)” as described by Boyd and Ellison is obvious. Examples of SNSs include MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. All such SNSs are virtual communities built to support users in connecting with their friends or peers; all are egocentric, where each individual is at the center of their community. As such, SNSs are driven by the virtual space where the individual “lives.” From this space, each user can travel around his community to explore the virtual spaces of other users. The means by which they can travel will be dictated by the technology involved (which I will discuss in more detail).
Its relationship to Web 2.0 applications, of which SNSs are but one, are also apparent. Beer and Burrows detail several other examples, such as blogs and wikis. Blogs, like SNSs, are egocentric virtual spaces by its very nature, but depend on a community of followers to flourish. Wikis on the other hand, are built and supported by the community. Both blogs and wikis are forms of social computing.
Tenopir’s article, while not directly addressing “what is social computing,” actually brings up the point I’d like to make. She points out several concerns about Web 2.0; namely, that anonymity can be used to mislead and democratization of information reporting can degrade its accuracy. Both points are valid, but I would argue that the masses have and will adapt. To provide an umbrella question for Dr. Gazan’s umbrella definition, who is in the driver’s seat, technology or society? Are our actions determined (and limited) by Web 2.0 technology or is society driving the development of technology to support our needs? Tenopir shows the signs of a technological determinist; if she believes that an anonymous conveyor of information will deceive the masses, or that we will go to blogs and YouTube for our world news, then her view is that technology is herding the masses to behave in a directed manner. Instead, I believe that society will have the final say. My evidence is only in my own personal experiences and anecdotes. There are many times I’ve heard a “breaking” story first on a blog, or websites such as Slashdot, but never have I taken it as the absolute truth unless I’ve also seen it on cnn.com, nytimes.com, or another reputable news site. This may have served to move the major news sites from my primary source to a secondary/verifying source, but it also reinforces those news companies’ reliability. Another example is a site such as Digg, which takes the news portal idea and extends it to support the Web 2.0 democratization; Digg accepts user posted stories that come from anywhere in the web. It requires “votes” for a story to become popular, but most popular stories are usually ones where the attached discussion includes different sources, as people look for verification.
The two papers concerning blogs (Nardi, et. al, Herring, et. al) give another view of social computing. It’s interesting that both papers, published in 2004, never use the term Web 2.0; however, it’s clear that many characteristics of Web 2.0 applications are already recognized in blogs – defined as “possessing a socially-transformative, democratizing potential.” The in-depth content analysis provided clues that blogs served as a bridge between static web pages and CMC systems. Many of those bridging features (e.g. user generated content, asynchronous reader responses) are the beginnings of Web 2.0. Nardi’s paper supports my idea that blogs are socially driven, giving examples of users that develop blogs based on their audience, and others that started blogs because they were asked to. However, her research also reveals the speed of the internet; she made several suggestions on blog design, most of which are already commonplace in blog software: spell checking and other integrated document editing tools, file sharing, photo management, etc. As blogs became more popular, many social aspects of it were expanded. Instead of just an online diary (or radio shows, Nardi might argue), different media have been included to give a much richer experience to both writer and reader alike.
From a general definition of social computing, I find that it’s essential to bring in the relationship between the technology and the social (although I hope there are not Latourians in the class). Beer and Burrows strongly advocate research in “sociological description as applied to new cultural digitizations,” but I think the balance with the technological, as determined by the interactions between the two, is needed. Studying how users interact with different systems, whether by broadcasting, as in blogs, or networking, as in SNSs, or mass democratic knowledge contributions, as in wikis, there are different social and technical interactions involved in each. I’d be interested in – and also define – social computing not as a general description of the different technologies or communities that relate to Web 2.0 or any other online application, but rather how the “social” and the “computing” interact and affect what users do online.
Brooklyn Surfer 