Computer Culture

By Henry Woodbury

Computers may still be binary calculating machines, but their social impact is profound. According to a New York Times report on the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board “2016″ symposium, computers have become so integrated into scientific and popular culture as to drive qualitative changes in how people interact — and how social scientiest can study them:

The new social-and-technology networks that can be studied include e-mail patterns, buying recommendations on commercial Web sites like Amazon, messages and postings on community sites like MySpace and Facebook, and the diffusion of news, opinions, fads, urban myths, products and services over the Internet. Why do some online communities thrive, while others decline and perish? What forces or characteristics determine success? Can they be captured in a computing algorithm?

Don’t miss the “a Web Site as a Living Organism” diagram linked to the article. The format is a fairly typical node map, but adroit display of multiple properties of each node makes for an engaging graphic.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/31/science/31essa.html (free registration required)