Social Computing

My Space Ten years ago you would have probably thought that it was a trying phrase used by a faint hearted coward as a sorry excuse for him to emancipate himself from his current relationship....But oh, how times have changed..... Today, however, myspace is best known as a social network that allows people to build personal web pages and then connect with friends to share content and communication (Mayfield, online 2007)-that is not to say that it is still not used as a sorry mitigation.

In the past decade there has been an explosion of social networks and computing that provides an abundance of information readily available to the masses due to recent rectifications in technological developments, with an estimated 100 million videos a day being watched on Youtube and more than 200 million profiles created by users on Myspace (Mayfield, online 2007), ensuring that social computing is a mechanism that the throng of people are acquainted with.

The swift expansion of social computing leads one to question as to whether the amplification of social computing enhances or detracts from an individual's effectiveness in work and studies in an age of information abundance and attention scarcity.

Social computing can be described as a broad group of people consisting of a world wide audience that are ready and eager to interact and share information with one another and have most if not all of the following characteristics according to Antony Mayfield's e-book What is Social Media? An E-book from Icrossing:

Participation: social media encourages contributions and feedback from everyone who is interested. It blurs the line between media and audience. Openness: most social media services are open to feedback and participation. They encourage voting, comments and the sharing of information. There are rarely any barriers to accessing and making use of content - password-protected content is frowned on. Conversation: whereas traditional media is about "broadcast" (content...