Social computing

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Introduction

See also Social media | Social networking | Web 2.0

Social computing is a term used to describe a type of computing concerned with the intersection of social behaviours and computational systems. Social computing is said to be based on creating social conventions and contexts through the use of information technologies especially social media. Therefore, blogs, email, instant messaging, social networking, wikis, social bookmarking and other instances of what are often called social belong to the concept of social computing.

Social computing is also about supporting the “computations” that are carried out by groups of people, an popularized in James Surowiecki's book, The Wisdom of Crowds. Examples of social computing include collaborative filtering, online auctions, prediction markets, reputation systems, computational social choice, social tagging and verification games.

Where does social computing originate?

Social computing begins with the observation that human beings — and human behaviour — are profoundly social. From our very first breath, human beings become attached to one another, and once they grow into fully-launched human beings they develop a range of social abilities to interact with each other that start with facial expressions and gestures and continue to spoken and written language. Consequently, people are remarkably sensitive to behaviours of people and make countless decisions shaped by their social context. Whether it's wrapping up a talk when the audience starts fidgeting, choosing a crowded restaurant over the nearly deserted one or crossing the street against the light because everyone else is doing so, social information provides a basis for decision-making throughout the lifespan.

The premise of social computing is that it is possible to design information systems that support useful functionality by making socially produced information available to users. This information may be provided directly, as when systems show the number of users who have rated something helpful or not. Or information may be provided after being filtered and aggregated, as is done when systems recommend a product based on what people with similar purchasing histories have purchased. Or the information may be provided indirectly, as is the case with Google's page rank which orders search results based on number of pages that (recursively) point to them. Information produced by a group of people is used to provide or enhance the functioning of a systems in social computing; it is concerned with systems of this sort and the mechanisms and principles that underlie them.

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