Social Computing

Background

Throughout the last few decades, computational technologies have grown increasingly more capable, useful, and connected at an exponential rate. While this general boon in computational power may have occurred fairly recently, discussions relating to the ideas of interconnected computational systems and instantaneous, widespread information exchange began much earlier. As one example, we can turn to the early efforts of Vannevar Bush, who helped facilitate and institutionalize cooperations between the United States government, business communities, and academicians for the advancement of military-centered scientific research endeavors. This formal cooperation would pave the way for later initiatives, such as the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA, and subsequently DARPA) and the project, ARPANET, which would serve as a precursor to the modern Internet.

The real fruits of early theoretical and engineering groundwork such as this, however, would become apparent on a much larger scale beginning in the 1980's and throughout the early 1990's, a timeframe that would mark the development of several early communications technologies, including Usenet (a decentralized system of distributed discussions), Internet Relay Chat (IRC; a real-time, multiparty text communication system), and the World Wide Web (WWW), which would set a new standard for the electronic presentation and dissemination of text and media contents.

Though some of the fundamental characteristics of social computing had already been cemented even in these early technologies (real-time user content distribution, for example, was a natural prerequisite of Internet-mediated chat), the Web and consumer technologies were still in their infancy. Technical limitations (such as a lack of bandwidth for widespread distribution of rich media, as well as limited processing power available to consumption devices), lack of user adoption, and the lengthy development of new standards for how best to utilize new mediums for communication each constricted the advancement of more powerful social computing applications.

By the start of the new millennium, however, a movement known as “Web 2.0” was quickly gaining traction. The motivation behind this development was to acknowledge the evolving state of 1) consumer Web-enabled technologies, which boasted continuously increasing processing and display capabilities, 2) advancements in the overarching Internet infrastructure which allowed for decreased latency and increased throughput of data transmissions, 3) more widespread adoption of Web technologies, and 4) increased user and developer activity surrounding collaborative and social technologies. As Fischer (2009) observed, this paradigm could be succinctly characterized by its objective of “fostering and supporting social production and mass engagement and collaboration.”

While this term (Web 2.0) may have been merely a label — considered little more than jargon even by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web (Laningham, 2006) — the notions it represented provided the foundation for social computing as we know it today. Through the course of just over a decade, the Web had gone from the nascent realization of a technical dream, to a medium where users could stay constantly connected via the exchange of text, images, audio, and video media, from the comfort of their home, or abroad with their mobile devices.