Zachary Grayson

Dr. King

ENC 1102-0016L

10/18/12

A Trend that has Forever Changed Computer Science

In this post I will be talking about how social networking has been affecting the way people in the discourse community of computer science have started using their knowledge. Social networking became big when MySpace launched back in August 2003, and then became even bigger when Facebook launched in February 2004 as a site on Harvard and then in 2006 for everyone, in February of 2005, YouTube emerged, and in July 2006, Twitter was launched. I plan on focusing mostly on Facebook because it has the biggest population of users (Howcroft).

In 2004, Mark Zuckerberg created a social networking site that is now known as Facebook. It is a site that allows a person to make a page that has many descriptions about a person, pictures, and much more. Then that person can allow people to see what is on his/her profile page by adding people to his/her page. This was not the first that did social networking but it currently the most used and famous of them now. For someone in the discourse community of computer science programming for a networking site is relatively new. It has been around for the last fifteen years but has really emerged as something huge since about 2004 (Howcroft).

In the discourse of computer science a great deal of people have started to become more interested in working with companies that do social networking. One of the reasons that people in the discourse community of computer science want to work for a social networking site is because these companies are always needing more and more people to come up with new ideas and quicker ways to run everything. For a social networking company to run well they will need to have a great deal of people who are in the discourse community of computer science so that they will be able to run their company since it is run all over the computers and by programming.

The skills the one would need to work for a social networking company would be able to program using multiple different languages which could range from a basic language such as Python all the way up to a complex language such as Java. One would also need to be able to know how to program in HTML, XHTML, and CSS which are three extremely important languages when it comes to making a website function. Those languages allow one to build the actually website and design how it will look and function (Grayson).

Social networking has become an important part of the computer science discourse since about 2006. MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are the four biggest social networking sites worldwide and they are all changing every day. They are either changing by the fact that the company is changing them or it could be as simple as the fact that one person posts something on any of these sites and that one posts changes everything on that entire site. For example on YouTube when someone posts a new video it will change the order that all the videos are listed, the popularity, and etc. On twitter one tweet could go from being just on one page to the most popular tweet and be on everyone’s Twitters (De Girolami).

I feel that this trend of social networking is only going to get bigger than it already is over the years, and will probably not decrease for many years to come if ever. This field is strengthened greatly by having this trend growing because by it growing that means we have a need for more people to be in this discourse community and will also create more jobs for the people in this

discourse community. I feel that my future status in this field is only slightly affected by this trend because I do not plan on working on for a social networking company.

Bibliography

De Girolami, Alexis. Telephone interview. 22 July 2012.

Gee, James Paul. “Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics: Introduction.” Writing About Writing a College Reader. By Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs. Boston/ New York: Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 2011. 481-97. Print.

Grayson, Adam J.S. Telephone interview. 22 July 2012.

Howcroft, Wayne. “Social Networking Time Line… Lets Start at 1997.” Afridesign. Afridesign, 13 Sept. 2010. Web. 18 Oct. 2012. <http://blog.afridesign.com/2010/09/social-networking-time-line-lets-start-at-1997/>.

Shannon, Susan. New Developments in Computer Science Research. New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2005. Print.