Social-Computational Media
Social-Computational Media seek to combine people and computer systems for synergies neither people nor computers can achieve in isolation. By investigating such synergies at all scales, new forms of knowledge creation and representation, emergent behaviors, and new forms of culture become possible.
Social-Computational Media are interdisciplinary by definition and need support from many fields; from the engineering to the social sciences and the arts. The need to collect, analyze and interpret large amounts of data make artificial intelligence and machine learning important sources of external knowledge. The need to build robust systems that operate in the real world make robotics an important contributor. The need to understand human beings as complex social beings and to organize interdisciplinary teams for complex tasks makes sociology and management important allies.
Social-Computational Media differ from the technical field of Social-Computational Systems by explicitly including the knowledge base of media arts and the self-reflective processes by which they combine technical systems and everyday life. Social-Computational Media are to Social-Computational Systems what architectural design is to the construction drawing.
Social-Computational Media address many emerging fields and current concerns such as collective intelligence, environmental monitoring, ambient intelligence, privacy design, responsive architecture and political representation, to name some of the important ones.
See www.realtechsupport.org and www.buffalo.edu/~mrbohlen/courses.html for further info.