CPSC 077. Social Computing

Social computing is the study of how technology mediates social interactions between humans, including interpersonal relationships, teams, crowds, communities, institutions, and entire societies. It explores how technology shapes human social interaction and vice versa, as well as the design of new social computing technologies or systems. The field encompasses the study of social media platforms (e.g., TikTok and Snapchat), crowdsourcing platforms (Mechanical Turk, Wikipedia), online communities (Pokemon Go, Tumblr), collaboration software (Google Docs, Figma, Slack), among others. This course will examine the landscape of social computing, taking a systems-oriented perspective to examine and imagine new social computing systems to address societal issues. We will read literature on different subareas of social computing to learn why some posts go viral and others don’t, how sociotechnical algorithms are perceived to work and how they actually work, why some platforms fail while others succeed, and how platforms enable both incredibly prosocial and occasionally terrifying behavior. We will also learn to use different web programming languages and application programming interfaces (APIs) to augment existing social computing systems or build entirely new ones.
1 credit.
Spring 2025. Venkatagiri.
Catalog chapter: Computer Science
Department website: https://www.swarthmore.edu/computer-science

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