The Technology and Society Gateway Seminar
The T&S Gateway Seminar meets every Tuesday beginning September 30, 2008 in Harold Frank Hall 1132 (formerly Engineering I)
The Fall 2008 offering of the Technology & Society Seminar Series (re)addresses the theme of social computing and its impacts on technology and society. Even in the short two years since the first time this topic was explored, social computing technology and its use in everyday society have greatly expanded. In this version of the Gateway Seminar, we will look at three broad categories of topics:
• Technologies and Methods: data-mining, visualization of evolving social action, developing reputation or trust metrics, archiving of social data, prevention of reputation-“hacking” or reputation aggression, interoperability (including both the Facebook social markup language approach and the Google OpenSocial API approach), and information provenance (or mechanisms for capturing and conveying the origins and processing history of digital information)
• Information Credibility and Trust: source authentication in distributed information environments, user perceptions and use of reputation metrics and tools (e.g., ratings of posts on a social bookmarking site), social interaction processes for establishing document trust, comparison of the way trust develops in social computing environments with the historical diffusion of trust in older media environments (e.g., when writing was new and people had difficulty learning to trust documents), and governance structures for online knowledge-production communities
• Collective Action: the influence of social computing on coordinating collective action, the impact on collective action of lower organizational overhead costs and lower individual “buy-in” costs of time and money (e.g., the ability to use the Internet to inexpensively publicize and coordinate an event, or to conveniently register support for a cause by a simple online action), the paths by which general purpose social computing sites evolve into goal-directed platforms for social action, how people address sociopolitical issues differently online and offline, the level of social trust needed to instigate online collective action, and other issues
As always, in this seminar series, graduate students from all departments are invited. New and previous attendees are equally encouraged to attend. The content of the seminar is driven by student presentations on their research or topics of interest, followed by round-table discussion. The exact agenda of the seminar will be set by students’ interests. The seminar typically includes participation by several faculty from diverse backgrounds.
