Before taking this
course, I've never thought about anything intensive in the field of social
networking,though I have used various social network websites for several years.
As representatives in this area，Facebook and Twitter are famous websites all over the
world and millions of people get addicted to them.In China, social network
websites, such as,renren and weibo are also welcomed by many people, especially
teenagers. However, not long ago I just thought they are something for fun,
just like some entertainment websites.This course have changed my point of view
on these sites, and I have understood more about social networking gradually.
By learning lecture 1-3,I understand that online social networking
is very complex, these social networking websites are not just platforms for
peoples to communicate or share something interesting with others,neither they
are simply for fun. Actually，social networking concerned with the conduction of various social
behaviors over the internet, as well as the underlying technologies. It is an
interdisciplinary subject involving multiple fields including computer networks
and applications, psychology, as well as sociology. In the first 3 lectures, we
defined social media,social computing,social networking, the relationships of
them,as well as applications.From the lecture,I also obtained knowledge about
social experience and its model, values/benefits in a social environment, and
social nature of human activity, in which we learned human information
processing and interesting things about our memory.Furthermore, I learned about
how our mind is engaged in social networking environments,and how should we
design social environments.
Up to now,the concept impressed me most is social
computing.Because I've never known the technologies behind social networking
before,and it is the area closely related to information engineering.I'll share
something about social computing as follows.
Social computing is a general term for an area of computer science that is concerned with
the intersection of social behavior and computational
systems. It has become an important concept for use in business. It
is used in two ways as detailed below.
In the weaker sense of the term, social computing has to do with
supporting any sort of social behavior in or through 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.
In the stronger sense of the term, social computing has to do with
supporting “computations” that are carried out by groups of people, an idea
that has been popularized in James Surowiecki's book, The Wisdom of Crowds.
Examples of social computing in this sense include collaborative
filtering, online auctions, prediction markets, reputation systems,
computational social choice,
tagging, and verification games. The Social Information
Processing page focuses on this sense of social computing.
Social computing has become more widely known because of its
relationship to a number of recent trends. These include the growing popularity
of social software and Web
2.0, increased academic interest in social network
analysis, the rise of open source as a viable method of
production, and a growing conviction that all of this can have a profound
impact on daily life.
