Editing Social computing (section)

== History ==
Social computing begins with the observation that humans&mdash;and human behavior&mdash;are profoundly social. From birth, humans orient to one another, and as they grow, they develop abilities for interacting with each other. This ranges from expression and gesture to spoken and written language. As a consequence, people are remarkably sensitive to the behavior of those around them and make countless decisions that are shaped by their social context. Whether it is wrapping up a talk when the audience starts fidgeting, choosing the crowded restaurant over the nearly deserted one, or crossing the street against the light because everyone else is doing so, social information provides a basis for inferences, planning, and coordinating activity.

The premise of 'Social Computing' is that it is possible to design digital systems that support useful functionality by making socially produced information available to their users. This information may be provided directly, as when systems show the number of users who have rated a review as helpful or not. Or the information may be provided after being filtered and aggregated, as is done when systems recommend a product based on what else people with similar purchase history have purchased. Alternatively, the information may be provided indirectly, as is the case with Google's page rank algorithms which orders search results based on the number of pages that (recursively) point to them. In all of these cases, information that is produced by a group of people is used to provide or enhance the functioning of a system. Social computing is concerned with systems of this sort and the mechanisms and principles that underlie them.

Social computing can be defined as follows:

    <blockquote>"Social Computing" refers to systems that support the gathering, representation, processing, use, and dissemination of information that is distributed across social collectivities such as teams, communities, organizations, and markets. Moreover, the information is not "anonymous" but is significantly precise because it is linked to people, who are in turn linked to other people.<ref name=Schuler>From "Social Computing", introduction to Social Computing special edition of the Communications of the ACM, edited by Douglas Schuler, Volume 37, Issue 1 (January 1994), Pages: 28 - 108</ref></blockquote>

More recent definitions, however, have foregone the restrictions regarding anonymity of information, acknowledging the continued spread and increasing pervasiveness of social computing. As an example, Hemmatazad, N. (2014) defined social computing as "the use of computational devices to facilitate or augment the social interactions of their users, or to evaluate those interactions in an effort to obtain new information."<ref name="IGI Global">From ''Social Computing'' in Encyclopedia of Information Science and Technology, Third Edition. IGI Global, 2014, p. 6754.</ref>

[[PLATO (computer system)|PLATO]] may be the earliest example of social computing in a live production environment with initially hundreds and soon thousands of users, on the PLATO computer system based in the [[University of Illinois]] at Urbana Champaign in 1973, when social software applications for multi-user [[chat rooms]], group message [[Internet forum|forum]]s, and [[instant messaging]] appeared all within that year. In 1974, [[email]] was made available as well as the world's first online newspaper called NewsReport, which supported content submitted by the user community as well as written by editors and reporters.

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|James Surowiecki's]] book, [[The Wisdom of Crowds]]. Examples of social computing in this sense include [[collaborative filtering]], [[online auctions]], [[reputation systems]], computational social choice, tagging, and verification games. The [[social information processing]] page focuses on this sense of social computing.