I am a Ph.D student working on social computational systems. Though I am in my fourth year, I still am a baby in this area of research. I would not go into the details of my research, except that YES! social media plays an important part in it. I was kind of disillusioned seeing Senator Coburn's take on social media. Mind you, every grad student thinks that his or her is THE groundbreaking research that is going to change the world. So the obvious question in my mind was "Is this how the world thinks what I am doing?" I should add that I belong to the computer science community, and I should say that computer researchers (esp. the young grad students (read: my friends)) have been a bit cynical of social computation during
"intellectual" computer sc. grad student conversations (ref: PhD comics), and this report just added fuel to this heated debate.
This workshop has helped me to collect my thoughts and maybe understand social computation better.
It just struck me that during the panel for inter-disciplinary research, Prof. Dey pointed out that one of the main problems in interdisciplinary research was the language barrier- people from medical science did not understand the language of the people from computer science. Is it possible that people dealing with social computational systems, though inter-disciplinary, are already developing into a community of their own? In this process, they might be developing a culture and language of their own. In the culture of this community, we realize the complexity of games like WoW or Farmville. However, we must remember that the people outside this community are just getting a glimpse into the community. I can almost imagine a cynic as a child peeking into this community through a window and catching words like "Farmvile", a word which he knows and associates with frivolity and through associative learning, attaches this attribute to the community studying "Farmville". I feel that some of us are still so blinded by the sheer complexity of machines that man has created that we tend to underestimate the power of the man that created the machine (add thousands of these and hola! you have a complex 'crowd' computing system more complex that any cloud computing system).
What are your thoughts?
