In Information We Trust
To Assistant Professor Jennifer Golbeck, Facebook is the largest social science experiment ever devised. She marvels at the ability to analyze 500 million people interacting with each other—something that scientists could have only dreamed of as recently as 10 years ago.
Golbeck, a computer scientist in the iSchool who works in the Human-Computer Interaction Lab, is known for her groundbreaking research into how people use social media, including how people perceive information they get through Facebook or Twitter and how much trust they place in that information.
“There’s a lot of power in understanding who people’s friends are, what their preferences are, what their relationships are and how they maintain those relationships,” says Golbeck. “If you can really understand how they interact and what they do, you then have the power to bring them more information in a way that they are receptive to,” she says.
Golbeck is also studying the amount of trust computer users place in what they read or watch on the Web, since so much of its content is user-generated.
Understanding who and how much to trust, she predicts, is going to become increasingly critical as the volume of information grows exponentially.
“I think social media has the potential to change the way that people use the Web in the same way that search engines changed it,” she says.