The Emerging Field of Web Science

Posted on | November 9, 2006 | Comments Off on The Emerging Field of Web Science

On November 2, 2006, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Southampton in Britain announced the start of a joint research program in Web science. Ben Shneiderman, computer science professor at the University of Maryland, had this reaction, “Computer science is at a turning point, and it has to go beyond algorithms and understand the social dynamics of this vast networked space. The technologists and companies that understand those issues will be far more likely to succeed in expanding their markets and enlarging their audiences.”

To Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Web science is “a pretty big next step in the evolution of information” and “likely to have a lot of influence on the next generation of researchers, scientists, and most importantly, the next generation of entrepreneurs who will build new companies from this.”

What we’re talking about here is a marriage of social space and engineering knowledge; people connected by computers — networks, productivity, trust, responsibility, privacy, empathy — exploring one large, unanswered question: “What will connectivity bring?”

What will it bring? What has it already brought? I’d like to hear your thoughts.