3Qs: The social impact of social networks | news @ Northeastern

How do you predict social networks and digital communications will continue to shape our society?

A few things come to mind. Although I do not believe that dig?ital media are fun?da?men?tally changing our social prac?tices, one thing that is changing is the extent to which our social prac?tices are recorded. In the past, most of our social inter?ac?tions were pri?vate and undoc?u?mented. That is increas?ingly not the case. When we interact with others through the Internet, we leave dig?ital records behind. Com?pa?nies like Face?book and Twitter have huge data?bases full of all kinds of infor?ma?tion about our social behav?iors. We are just starting to har?ness the power of that infor?ma?tion, using online social net?work data to, for example, pre?dict voting behavior and the spread of infec?tious dis?eases. I think we will see a lot more of that in the future ? using data about your social net?works and behav?iors to cus?tomize all kinds of expe?ri?ences, from tar?geted mar?keting and adver?tising, to per?son?al?ized web browsing, to health?care informed by your social?history.

I also hope that the rise of social media will help to remedy some long-??standing gender and racial inequal?i?ties in the com?puting and infor?ma?tion tech?nology pro?fes?sions. Women and minori?ties have long been under?rep?re?sented in these fields, but as social media grow, so too does demand for people who are trained in fields such as com?pu?ta?tional social sci?ence, dig?ital human?i?ties and health infor?matics. These areas draw from fields that have his?tor?i?cally attracted women and minori?ties and I hope the move towards social com?puting will make IT more inclu?sive in the future. Women and minori?ties have a lot to con?tribute, and having a pop?u?la?tion of tech?nology pro?ducers that is more reflec?tive of the pop?u?la?tion of tech?nology users would be great for everyone.

Source: http://www.northeastern.edu/news/2012/10/3qs-the-social-impact-of-social-networks/

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