I don’t know of one instance of computers socializing. People have been communicating through machines for over a hundred years, but that’s human interaction. I never began a friendship over a “wrong number” on the telephone, but I have enjoyed joking with them. I have been interacting and learning from people on the internet since before there was a WWW, but I don’t call them “friends” and we are not in a “relationship”.
Microsoft now has a Social Computing Group, which employs many non-computing people whom other wise might not have a job outside of academic research. I viewed a video from a conference they had in Redmond and a young woman with a PHD was telling about her “experience” on the friendster website. When she began to speak of her encounters with members of the KKK I fell off my chair. “On the internet nobody knows you’re a dog” says the famous New Yorker cartoon, when someone tells you they are a 14 year old girl with blond hair named Brittany, that’s 38 year old Bob with a fat belly and he is employed by the FBI. So instantly I recognized that these KKK members were in fact New Jersey teenagers taking the piss out of that PHD and she is presenting this as “research”!
For several years I participated on the News Forums of the New York Times but it was too easy for anyone to create multiple identities and this tactic was often used by the moderator himself who was British and now holds a PHD thanks to his efforts of deception.
Over the past four months several employees of Microsoft have conducted a “grand experiment” called channel9. I had a link to the site on my blog before it went live, there was much excitement at the start,, but in the past few weeks it has become a kiddy pool with many (or one) Brit s pissing in it. Another problem is that people address Microsoft when they post rather then engaging in a conversation with the community. The most popular topics thus far have been: Linux, Apple, Google, IE and Linux. The videos have been insightful and are all worth watching and Mike Hall’s picture frame was the highlight thus far.
I’m six months blogging and the experience has gone beyond anything I could have imagined, you’ll never understand blogging till you begin one yourself. The Social Computing between my blog and the hundreds of blogs I have been associated with through links and trackbacks has been amazing. I see my blog as some sort of notebook that tracks my progress learning computer programming. I have also witnessed the shameless self promoting of certain blogs constantly linking back to one another creating an echo effect that is obvious, obsessive and obnoxious but gets you a high ranking on the Technorati top 100.