Social Computing
Social computing — systems whose content is other people
Why do systems full of people never behave as designed?
Social computing deals with systems whose content is other people. Such a system is not the sum of its features: people watch and react to each other, norms and dynamics form that no designer intended, and those are what the experience actually consists of.
Norms the designer never wrote
That leaving a message on read becomes rude, that reply speed becomes a measure of interest, that a phrase means something only inside one community — none of it was ever shipped as a feature. Yet to the user this is the service.
When an AI takes one of those seats
The dynamics do not disappear when the other party is not a person. A late reply still means something; being forgotten still stings. People carry norms grown among people straight over to an AI. That is why I do not treat social computing and human–AI interaction as separate problems.