A study on social computing among students of agricultural sciences in Varanasi

Abstract

The term Social Computing refers to applications and services that facilitate collective action and social interaction on the Internet, such as blogs, wikis, social networks, and discussion forums. Social computing is an information and communication technology (ICT) tool with a new direction in computing and a field for researchers both in information and social sciences. Over the past two decades, social software, from email to blog, has fundamentally changed our ways of living, working and interacting with each other. newlineThe history of social computing or social software is deeply entangled with the evolution of the computer and the internet. The actual term Social Software surfaces in the eighties but takes off after 2002 when it is used to describe the new kind of social networking tools that seem to drive a new generation of web communities. Social computing has exhibited a prolific growth since its genesis in 2003 and, since 2005, has achieved unprecedented levels of global usage (Huijboom et al., 2009). In 2006, the amount of content created, captured and replicated on the internet was about 3 million times larger than the information contained in all the books ever written (Gantz, 2007). Based on the considerations in our study, social computing may be defined as the system concerned with information generated and used by the students in computer-mediated social networks and platforms. In other words, social computing may be defined as the process of interaction and sharing of information among the members of a social group through web-based social softwares to achieve their common goals. newlineSocial computing has grown from a marginal community pastime to become the dominant Internet trend today. Thus, social media is becoming an important component of peoples social environment and it has recently been receiving increasing research attention. The success of social computing systems, whose content is created almost entirely by user contribution, depends on the willingness of the participants to share. newline