New day, new writing task. This is a reflection I wrote for the Social Computing course. I will tackle this in three parts, based on the references linked below:
The first topic for this analysis is Cicada 3301. A mix of scavenger hunt, viral post online and a very unsatisfying ending (out of the media) makes me think this group were radical activist recruiting people to make a stance, sort of “anonymous” style. It will explain how they managed to create social controversy, but at the same closes the activity when something goes wrong along the line (some secret service getting close to them and so on). This is somehow related with my second topic of choice: how people made this mediatic is hinting at us that computer science is no longer a one-dimensional discipline, but it also involves social sciences at a certain scale. You have the “novelty factor”, a “need” to be covered -> the mystery behind it. As the marketing people will say, “when there is a need to be covered, there is a good opportunity to start a business”. The fact that this was not profitable and looked like a recruitment process also hints at radical online activism of some sort.
The second topic of my choosing is “Why computing belongs withing social sciences”. This is a topic that resonates with me given that I come from a background in economics. “Computational thinking” seems to hint all other disciplines to implement coding way of thinking, but we face the same problems that the LLM training. We are only focusing on one dimension (logical thinking), while there are several other factors influencing a decision. By implementing multi-disciplinary courses, we are making sure that IT graduates can collaborate with other departments, taking away part of the arrogance of “my discipline is more important”. Also, it can lead to better software development where someone takes in consideration not only what the demographic is and so on, but also the ethics and consequences that their software might have in society. There is a saying that goes “once online, you can’t delete it”. Shouldn’t the person designing the software consider that while designing a software?
The last topic to discuss is “A review of mobile robotic telepresence”. There is a model that has widely go viral in social media recently: a portable robot that looks like a mini camera, used by couples on a long-distance relationship. That satisfies the need of fostering social interaction between two individuals, like is mentioned on the paper. One way to do it is using tablets as main components, but that limits the range of motion of the robot. Using the tablet / mobile as a controller, on the other hand, rather than a main component is a better use of the functionality and allocates for portable customization. The main problem seems to be the ability to customize the volume level for both the person on the other side of the screen and the one interacting with the robot, and that can be affected due to several factors. All the people in hospital care expressed the desire to have telerounds be conducted for supervision.