Fade to Play

According to this article entitled “At Some Schools, Facebook Evolves From Time Waster to Academic Study” in the Wall Street Journal some students are turning to programs that study social networks, social media, and social tools such as Facebook rather than traditional computer science or engineering programs.

A recent grad will be attending the University of Michigan program in social computing in the Fall because:

Social computing “has more of a focus on real-life applications, whereas [computer science] is very broad and more ambiguous,” he said. “I do think there’s a growing interest from students, myself included, and the universities seem to be responding to that.”

After years of worrying about how much time freshmen spend on Facebook, schools are incorporating the study of social networking, online communities and user-contributed content into new curricula on social computing. The moves, like other academic expansions into fields like videogame design, are part of an effort to keep technology studies relevant to students’ lives – and to tap subjects with entrepreneurial momentum.

Relevance: As my thesis research involves social computing and social networks, I am debating the merits of a PhD in this area vs. pervasive games. I feel that this would be useful information to share when I give my town hall workshop next month. As computing becomes more social, how does this influence the types of programs offered by universities? Would a PhD in Social Computing be as respected as one in Human Computer Interaction? Perhaps UBC should be looking at the benefits of a program in social computing or is this more applicable to SFU?