It Scope and Applications

Scope and applications Early on, social-computing studies focused on technological and user acceptance issues surrounding computer-supported collaborative work and groupware. In the last 10 years, the scope of socialcomputing research and practice has expanded tremendously with the adoption of Web and mobile technologies and with the virtualization of many facets of everyday life. From a methodological viewpoint, social computing is a crossdisciplinary field with theoretical underpinnings in computational and social sciences (see the March/April 2007 Trends & Controversies department). Social computing relies on frameworks and findings from areas such as human-computer interaction and communication as well as on sociological, economic, psychological, organizational, and behavioral theories. ICT fields such as Web computing, agents, and mobile and ubiquitous computing have been providing platforms and specific technological components to enable social-computing implementation and applications. Social computing plays a central role in developing current and next-generation social software, computerizing various aspects of human society such as community-based decision making, and helping analyze how changing technologies and policies affect political, social, and cultural behavior. Significant social-computing applications in recent years have focused on Web-supported online communities, games and interactive entertainment, e-business applications, and forecasting and decision making in the public sector. Social computing is a crucial next step, following personal computing, in computing’s evolution.