Social Computing - Part 3

Deaconu Sorin Marian

The history of social computing and social software is deeply entangled with
the evolution of the (personal) computer and the Internet.

Social computing is an area of computer science that is concerned with the

intersection of social behavior and computational systems. It is based on
creating or recreating social conventions and social contexts through the use
of software and technology. Thus, blogs, email, instant messaging, social
network services, wikis, social bookmarking and other instances of what is
often called social software illustrate ideas from social computing, but also
other kinds of software applications where people interact socially

Social computing refers to systems that support the gathering, processing

and dissemination of information that is distributed across social collectives.
Furthermore, the information in question is not independent of people, but
rather is significant precisely because it linked to people, who are in turn
associated with other people.

The immense uptake of social computing applications is clearly having an

impact in the private sector. New players have entered the market (such as
the news and entertainment industries) and new business models are
emerging rapidly.

There are multiple areas of social computing that have been able to expand
the threshold of knowledge in this discipline. Each area has been able to have
a focus and goal behind it that provides us with a deeper understanding of
the social behavior between users that interact using some variation of social
computing.
Social

Media
Social Networking
Wiki Pages
Blogs
Online Gaming
Crowdsourcing
Collective Intelligence
Online Dating

In this chapter three categories of impact political, socio-cultural and

organisational will be described:
Political impacts
One

of the crucial political impacts of social computing is the emergence of volatile, causeoriented forms of civic involvement in politics. Through social computing websites (e.g.
Facebook, MySpace), people can instantly be mobilised around specific political issues. Within
online communities all kinds of advocacy and issue groups instantly emerge and disappear.
Another political impact may be that political practice is becoming more transparent. We have
found dozens of websites on which political information is structured and published.
Furthermore, the social computing trend seems to stimulate the creation of political hypes.
Videos of politicians, polemic blogs and political rumours disseminate with unprecedented
speed and can generate great and acute attention to a political subject or event. Political
incidents can be viewed by millions of citizens, turning the incident into a considerable
phenomenon that impacts the image of politicians or their party.
New forms of party financing are emerging and the political process seems increasingly to be
organised as a grid rather than by committee spokes around a hub. Finally, social computing
seems to open up politics. Mashups and crowdsourcing websites enforce the cognitive surplus;
the political knowledge of citizens. As a result, citizens are increasingly empowered to hold
politicians accountable for their promises, statements and actions.

Socio-cultural impacts

When considering the socio-cultural impact of social computing, the literature and anecdotal
evidence show that social computing (and other technological trends) particularly enhances
existing offline social behaviour and dynamics.
Social networking websites support sociality among users; maintaining contacts with friends,
lurking profiles of others and polishing of their own profile. Relationships are maintained on
social networking websites and new relationships are created.
A socio-cultural impact is that personal behaviours, attitudes, values and lifestyles are being
influenced by participation in social networks. As the uptake of social computing is
considerable, the opportunities for mutual online influencing are growing.

Organisational impacts

Social computing technologies have the potential to disrupt existing organisations. Although
government institutions have not yet changed significantly as a result of the social
computing trend, there seems to be a considerable potential for disruption.
If the trend towards networked provision of public services continues, it is likely that the
character of government bureaucracies will change.

The Internet and social computing technologies evolved over the years into an
autonomic system that connects everything in the virtual and physical realm. This
process further accelerated the degree of innovation. Advancements in ambient
intelligence technologies increased the Internets intelligence: it anticipates citizens
needs in real-time. All data that are generated make our lives transparent and
personalised.
Some future opportunities may be that the social computing trend enhances the
transparency of citizen demand and of government services and processes. In
addition, public sector services may become more accessible and personalised as
users are more involved in service provision. In addition, the efficiency of
governments may increase. Social computing platforms enable groups of
government practitioners to allocate resources in an efficient way.
A future risk may be that principles of good governance (e.g. legitimacy, integrity,
inclusion of all) are not automatically embedded in forms of user-generated public
services. Furthermore, it is likely that the potential threat to privacy will grow due to
the sensitive information that citizens publish on social networking sites. The quality
of the information generated within communities is questioned by experts but also
by users themselves.