#socialcomputing

My Health Record: A Social Computing Tool

Social computing refers to systems which facilitate basic, social behaviours between people. Behaviours such as gathering and sharing of information is made easier with computers. Australia’s new My Health Record is an online tool which holds a summary of a person’s health information. The scheme plans to help doctors quickly access a patient’s medical information through collaborated knowledge. Recent debate has introduced the concerning question:

‘Will my privacy be protected?’

The number of social computing platforms are growing providing users with different formats and styles of blogging. Most of these platforms provide a way for users to communicate and provide feedback to one another in the comment sections of different posts. More and more of these platforms are also allowing users to create a dialogue with one another by using a messaging service. This allows the users to discuss posts and provide feedback in a more personal and private way.

Facebook changing up feedback

Comments on posts allow the poster to learn what their reader or followers’ opinions and feelings are about different posts. Facebook has recently begun to provide their users with different reactions, instead of just liking which it has been in the past. Now users can “like”, “Angry”, “haha”, “sad”, “wow” and “love” react to post and even the different comments. This way users no longer trapped with hitting the like button on bad news . These different reactions help the poster understand the overall sentiment of their post. How are people reacting to what they trying to get across?

With Facebooks community size growing to 2.41 Billion the simple comment sections became obsolete. With so many users, multiple discussions were happening in a comment section at a time, making discussions hard to follow. To combat this, they introduced the function of users commenting on comments themselves. This way communicating through the comments section became easier to follow rather than having to shift through and look for comments that were relevant to one another to understand a discussion.

Messaging Services

What does social computing do? How social computing came to be?

Have you asked yourself “what is social computing”, “what does it do” or “why people use it”? Well today I am going to answer all those questions for you using the causal model for social computing.  

First lets understand what social computing is, humans live in groups because they rely on others to obtain resources and other things they want. Social computing uses this concept but with modern technology. Lets use Ebay as a example, according to the causal model Ebay uses the technology web 2.0 in order to create the application. The application can be understood as the communication medium between the users and staff. 

Application characteristics is the qualities the application offers so content sharing gives the users information they want, aggregated knowledge is knowledge that is aggregated over time e.g. the rating of a certain item in a Ebay is rated for its quality and sellers are rated for their legitimacy. Business transactions allows the application to keep running as if the application could not generate money then there is no motivation for the people to keep working on an application. 

Emergent characteristics are the feelings that can be given through the application characteristics for example, aggregated knowledge generates trust for both buyers and sellers in Ebay while business transactions creates motivation for users to continue using the application and staff to continue developing the application.

Emergent characteristics effect the users to make decisions while interacting with the application so if a seller’s reputation is bad then the user will not buy from them but if the seller’s reputation is positive then users will buy items from them. 

This week at CHI we are presenting two research projects, a qualitative study and a system design, that highlight how the design of online communities can support creative expression and personal connections that otherwise wouldn't have existed. 

The first project, titled Journeys & Notes, focuses on the design and deployment of a production-quality mobile app that enables people to log their travels, leave notes behind, and build a community around spaces in between destinations (think of it as a Foursquare for trips). The app is playful, supports creative expression, and allows people to do this anonymously and pseudonymously. The project grew out of Justin Cranshaw’s internship project (who is now a full time member of our lab), in collaboration with designer S.A. Needham and myself. Justin is presenting the work on Wed May 11 at 4:30pm in room 210AE.

The second project, Surviving an "Eternal September," is a qualitative study of the NoSleep subreddit, an online community of horror fiction writers, was able to manage accelerated growth after being featured on the home page of Reddit. Usenet's infamous "Eternal September" suggest that large influxes of newcomers can hurt online communities, but our interviews suggest that NoSleep survived without major incident because of three traits of this community: (1) administrators, (2) shared community moderation, and (3) technological infrastructure for preventing norm violations. This research was done in collaboration with Charles Kiene, a UW undergraduate student, and his advisor Benjamin Mako Hill at the UW Department of Communication. Charles presents the work on Mon May 9 at 4:30 pm in room LL20A.

Could the better connections that computers create via social networks, e-mail and Skype change this dynamic — especially the distance issue? Hard to say — the telephone had been around a long time when this research was done

from Connected: The…