Social Computing as an Intersection of Computational Systems and Social Behavior - Assignment Example

Social Computing Introduction Papadopoulou et al. defined social computing as one of the areas of computer science that is concerned mainly with the intersection of computational systems and social behavior, which is significant for use in business. Social computing is therefore the interactive and shared aspect of online behavior. Any form of technologies that entail implicit or explicit computer mediated interactions and communications among people is considered as social computing. Dasgupta (2010) stated that in a shallow sense social computing involves creating social contexts and social conventions through the application of technology and software. Ideas of social computing are illustrated from the use of social software that include email, blogs, instant messaging, wikis, social bookmarking, and social network services among others. In deeper sense, social computing involves technologies that allow various computations to be carried out by different groups of individuals in the world where the users produce value to the new applications by contributing content, ratings, links, tags, and other software components. Web 2.0 is the concept that is related closely to social computing and is the framework of the various applications that support the process of social computing. Ozok et al (2011) affirmed that the application of social computing within organizations motivates and empowers the employees and hence creating many benefits for the businesses in the society. This study will first present the benefits of social computing at various sectors including the paradigms of mobile social computing, disadvantages and the challenges of social computing. The paper will then discuss the future prospects of the information management tools of social computing in organizations. Benefits of Social Computing Yang et al. (2012) observed that social computing is significant in organizations as it helps in the motivation and empowerment of employees hence resulting in successful businesses. For instance, Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) is type of social computing that provides the employees of organizations a platform to create, manage, share documents and to customize Web services hence enabling the employees to improve their services for the organizations. Social computing is important as it enables the businesses to promote their various brands of products and have a closer relationship with their customers. Chua (2007) stated that the customer relationship management (CRM) of organizations is enhanced by social computing as it gives the businesses a chance to follow the public opinion on their product’s brands and therefore being in a position to respond to the customer issues quickly. Social computing is a cohesive experience that is embedded in our physical and virtual world especially with the technologies that are increasingly emerging like internet applications and Smartphone. The equipments make it possible for the users to access contents from other devices, mashup and co-create their photos, texts, and videos with many traditional contents when they are interacting with others in different places in the world. Mobile social computing is the most commonly used by individuals in the world since the social computing applications that are backed by telecom operators instantly tap into the social network of the many existing phone users and do not have to go through the cold starting period like other applications based on the web (Lytras, 2008). The portable nature and rich capable sense of Smartphone enables the mobile social computing applications to interact with the real world physically and the digital information space. Lytras (2008) confirmed that the four paradigms of mobile social computing show the relationship of the basic principles of social computing with the common design patterns of mobile phones. The four paradigms include: Mobile collaborative filtering Lytras (2008) acknowledged that the technology of collaborative filtering is significant in social computing as it has enabled individuals to investigate digital information space, for example using Amazon.com to search for important books and Dianping.com to select attractive restaurants. Collaborative filtering facilitates the collection of user feedbacks like clicks and ratings from the massive users whose collective opinions present powerful mechanisms for dealing with information overload. Evans and Mckee (2010) stated that petabytes of information about transactions, communication patterns, and human movements are generated continuously by the mobile phones hence gaining insights of the dynamics of group and individual behaviors by capturing location, communication, activity, and proximity information therefore building models for predictions and monitoring. Collaborative mobile data sharing and annotation The mobile phones are commonly used as a platform for individuals to upload and create data on the many social computing applications such as Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, and Foursquare, among others. Jain (2010) affirmed that researchers from Google uses the data from geo-tagged multimedia to recognize landmarks automatically that are the popular destinations for tourists and building visual models using the photos. Social computing is important as many restaurants and shops use Foursquare as their marketing platform and hence motivate the users by providing rewards such as discounts and free drinks to the active users to encourage them to make visits at their various venues. Collaborative mobile content creation According to the writings by Vliet (2011), the mobile devices have advanced sensing and capturing capabilities that produce data that is more complex beyond Wikipedia’s textual knowledge. The products of social computing such as wiki-based systems facilitate easy and quick content generation and enable the enormous number of users to edit and distribute information. Agarwal and Liu (2009) observed that Wikipedia offers an incredible potential for the users to capture great information from the minds of many people and resourcefully connect those with information to those seeking it hence enabling social computing to be successful. The wiki principle is important as it enables individuals to correct errors and provide information feedback using navigation devices hence the saving the cost of collecting geospatial data. Collaborative human computation Ekins et al. (2011) stated that collaborative human computation is social computing paradigm that involves human beings as part of the computing powers whereby the individuals’ brains are considered as processors in the distributed social computing system where each brain has the capability to perform small parts of extremely difficult computations. Juhlin (2010) declared that this paradigm of social computing is important as it enables organizations that need their tasks done to use Mechanical Turk APIs to access many other registered workers to do the tasks required and return the results, which could be directly integrated in the organization’s processes and their systems. The mobile platform enables the power of the human brain to be used to process digital information and the utilization of the mobile workforce that is used intelligently to process the surrounding environment than then the use of surveillance cameras that is a traditional technology. Seising and Sanz (2012) stated that social computing is a significant strategic platform for raising the workforce knowledge management and collaboration. The application of social computing techniques in the organizations leads to streamlined communications, process innovation, and retention of employees, improved productivity, and engagement of employees during the operations of a business. Social computing is important as expands the market research for businesses and enables organizations to implement marketing campaigns for the products and services by directing their customers and interested individuals to their web sites that they have advertised their businesses. The businesses are provided with an opportunity to widen their business contacts and target great audiences hence making the business successful. Disadvantages of Social Computing Pauwels (2009) observed that social computing is the new trend of various businesses where they use the social network to analyze the profiles for potential employees, encourage interactions among employees and promoting businesses, which is advantageous for organization but a risky exercise. Organizations use websites such as twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook, among others, which offer advertising services with other benefits free, but the application of social computing opens up the business to various disadvantages. The disadvantages of social computing include the following: Employee relations The use of the various forms of social computing such as the Facebook and Twitter, among others has the capability of hurting the employees within various organizations, whereby one of the employees could send messages with negative information regarding another employee hence hindering their ability to work in the same organization in peace. Employees are not free to display their emotions concerning their bosses on the social media when they have a bad day at work because other employees who are their friends could relay the information to their employers hence causing resentments among the employees and tension at the work place. Pauwels (2009) argued that social computing enables the employees to have private conversations with each other throughout the office working hours without the possibility of others overhearing hence leading to an alarming increase of off-task conversations. Employee productivity Hoganso (2007) argued that the businesses that allow their employees to various forms of social computing technologies such as Twitter and Facebook during the working hours most probably lose 1.5 % of the productivity. The social networks have attractive applications such as games that are addictive and could make the employees forget their work and engage in online games with people in the office or people from other countries. The organizations that encourage employees to use Facebook make their employees unproductive because they may be updating their status and spending their time on a whim checking the comments all through the day instead of performing the tasks related to their work. Hoganso (2007) stated that allowing the employees to access the social networking sites during business hours to check activities that are business related has a few benefits but the available distractions outweigh the benefits. Company image and confidentiality Ozok et al. (2011) confirmed that the use social computing at various organizations opens up for possibilities of breaches of their confidentiality and a flecked Company image. This is because the workers in the business may post tweets or status updates about important business information and promotions that the organization may not be prepared to publicly release hence providing relevant information for the competitors to use against the business. The use of social computing is risky as the employees could accidentally sent vital information to the wrong person when they are sharing confidential information using the social networking websites hence leading to a leakage of information. The image of the organization is destroyed when the employees are allowed to post negative things about the business since the post could be shared to many other users in the social networks. Social computing opens up the probability of the hackers to launch virus and spam attacks hence committing fraud. The virus leads to loss of important information that is essential for the success of the business. Ozok et al. (2011) observed that the use of social computing increases the chances of the employees to fall prey to the online swindles that may seem to be genuine hence leading to identity theft or data theft. Challenges of Social Computing There are various challenges that limit various businesses to use social computing networks, which include: Lack of knowledge and skills Some employees in organizations lack the knowledge and skills required to work using the social networks, SharePoint, and the blogs in involved in social computing. This makes it difficult to for other employees to pass information and to share ideas in SharePoint and hence have to use the traditional forms of sharing information. The employees from the old generations where they rarely used improved technologies are slow to change and the knowledge and skills to operate computer and mobile phone applications hence forcing the other employees to remain backward too. The business therefore has to take initiative to train the employees who are not computer literate to learn how use the new applications of social computing that help in the growth of successful businesses. Lack of infrastructure Dasguta (2010) acknowledged that the systems used in social computing need to support the content of the current generation to enable it to support the communication and collaboration of users in real times. It therefore requires the businesses to have a very vibrant data management infrastructure. The data indexes in the business need to be updated regularly to ensure that the technologies and systems used in the organizations retrieve the most current information. Some business lack the facilities to change technologies and systems as they improve hence making the organization stick on the traditional forms since the employees need to be trained on how to use the new technologies too. Increased insecurity Papadopoulou et al. (2011) observed that the freedom and openness of the various communication forms that social computing provides new challenges in terms of security since the information from the social networks can be hacked and confidential information of the organization leaked to the competitors or individuals who want to make the business fail. The employees who post status updates and tweets about important events happening in the business such as promotions and other private events that the organization was not ready to publicly announce causes security threats to the organization because their private affairs are known by active users of the social networks. Social computing makes the lives of the employees of organizations to be insecure because their profiles are published on the social networks hence anybody who wants to know more information about them can access the information by reading their profiles. The social computation systems need to ensure that they provide mechanisms that help employees and other users to control the security and privacy settings automatically to minimize the chances of sensitive confidential information from being misappropriated. Lack of resources Chua (2007) affirmed that the application of social computing technologies and systems require to have stable internet connections which some businesses find it challenging to access all the time because of lack of resources. Business lack finances for training their old employees on the developed technologies, hence high competition from the organizations that have employees that are conversant with the use of social computing. The mobile phones that use social computing systems have small screens hence limiting the chances of reading more information and straining for those using the applications. Case Example of Social Computing Intel is a real life example of enterprise Social Computing. Intel is one of the leading companies in technology that began defining their social computing strategies and implementation in the early 2008. Intel recognized that social computing would transform the ways in which their employees interact and connect with one another which led to greater collaboration and communication. Intel needed to improve the challenges they were facing which included increasing the innovation speed, improving knowledge sharing, protecting their intellectual properties, providing good leadership and facilitating employee learning. Intel Company used these challenges to set up goals whereby they would use social computing strategies to address for them to be considered successful. Intel considered the need for executive support, risk assessment, and governance to ensure a successful business. After doing research on the various circumstances that affected the operations of Intel, they ensured that they understood how their employees were collaborating and communicating at that time so that the introduction of the new technologies would improve the user experiences. The research effort enabled the organization to understand the pain points of the employees, hence correcting the necessary errors that could interfere with the operation of the business. Intel Company focused on their business culture, challenges, processes, and goals before initiating discussions about technology. Intel Company then selected an architecture that reflected the need of integration of new tools of the social media with the existing networks and platforms, which addressed concerns about investment, employee adoption, and processes. Future Prospects of Social Computing Agarwal and Liu (2009) argued that social computing is spreading widely and many individuals and organizations will continue using the social networks, blogs, and wikis, instant messaging, social bookmarking, and emails to enhance communication and collaboration in the future. In the future social computing will become a cohesive single experience embedded in the daily activities of individuals and technologies. Juhlin (2010) stated that the application scope of mobile platforms that are mostly used by users, are foreseen to expand quickly beyond Web 2.0 hence becoming an essential component of the customers’ offline experiences. The emerging applications of mobile social computing will launch various new dimensions in the future to social networking by upgrading individuals into the latest era of united experiences unbounded by time ,location, distance or any other physical constraints. In the future, drivers will use the GPS systems to know what is happening on the roads and find different routes to avoid traffic. Individuals will use reminders on their phones to know what facilities they are lacking at home and instantly get sales statistics of the products and online reviews hence knowing if it is good enough to satisfy their needs. The individuals who like reading books will be able to use their phone browsers to access sites like Douban, which is a Web 2.0 Chinese website, that provides recommendation and review services for books, music, and movies hence knowing more about the books they are planning to purchase and where to find them at affordable prices (Ekins et al., 2011). Social mapping sites will make the lives of individuals interesting in the future since individuals will be able to locate the places they find difficulty finding such as the new restaurants in towns using online maps. Individuals who like lying about where they are will also begin saying the truth because the social mapping sites on the mobile phones will enable people to locate the current locations of the people they are interested in finding. This shows that the social computing technologies and systems will improve the lives of the people and businesses in the future and with the development of new social networks, communication between individuals will be made easier. Conclusion Social computing is one of the areas of computer science that is concerned with an intersection of computational systems and social behavior. Social technology refers to various technologies that support the social activities like emails, blogs, wiki, and instant messaging among others. Social computing is beneficial to organizations as it helps in the motivation and empowerment of the employees hence enabling them to work towards the success of the business. Through social computing businesses are able to advertise their commodities free online hence having a closer relationship with their customers. The disadvantages of social computing include reduced employee productivity and ruining the company image through bad comments about the organization. The challenges of using social computing in organizations include the lack of resources to train employees on the new technologies and increased insecurity. There is hope for improved social computing technologies and systems in the future where the work of individuals and businesses will be made easier by accessing all the things through the social software. References Agarwal, N., and Liu, H. (2009). Modeling and data mining in blogosphere. [San Rafael, CA], Morgan & Claypool Publishers. Chua, S. J. (2007). A meta-search tool for expertise location that uses social computing services. Thesis (M.A. Sc.)--University of Toronto, 2007. Dasgupta, S. (2010). Social computing: concepts, methodologies, tools and applications. Hershey, PA, Information Science Reference. Ekins, S., Hupcey, M. A., and Williams, A. J. (2011). Collaborative computational technologies for biomedical research. Hoboken, N.J., John Wiley & Sons. Evans, D., and Mckee, J. (2010). Social media marketing: the next generation of business engagement. Indianapolis, Ind, Wiley Pub. Hoganso, K. (2007). Concepts in computing. Sudbury, Mass, Jones and Bartlett Publishers. Jain, S. (2010). Incentives in social computing. Thesis (Ph.D., School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (Computer Science))--Harvard University, 2010. Juhlin, O. (2010). Social media on the road: the future of car based computing. London, Springer. Lytras, M. D. (2008). Emerging technologies and information systems for the knowledge society first World Summit on the Knowledge Society, WSKS 2008, Athens, Greece, September 24-26, 2008 : proceedings. Berlin [etc.], Springer. Ozok, A. 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Social computing and the innovation development process a paper about the motivation of people to use social computing to contribute to different phases of the innovation development process. Rotterdam, Erasmus Universiteit. Read More