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The first course taught at Rutgers on the topic of social media is open for registration. "Understanding and Building Social Media: An Interdisciplinary Approach" will be taught to graduate students by faculty members in the Department of Communication and the Department of Library and Information Science.

The course, which is also cross-listed in the Department of Computer Science, is open to graduate students from across Rutgers' New Brunswick Campus. It is a truly interdisciplinary course, with faculty members from different departments actively seeking a class composed of students interested in social science, information science, computer science, and other disciplines.

"The course should have combination of the people who are skilled enough to build new technologies, as well as people in the social sciences who are interested in why people might use it and seek to produce data to test some theoretical ideas," said Jeff Boase (pictured above, on the right), assistant professor of communication at SCILS.

Boase and Mor Naaman (left), who is an assistant professor of library and information science, are both interested in social media, but from different perspectives. Naaman, who was a research scientist at Yahoo! before joining the SCILS faculty, began with an interest in how people manage their own personal media.

"It's clear that in the last few years there has been a big social aspect of how people do this," Naaman said. "I started studying the types of actions and behaviors people show in regard to media and social space."

Boase is interested in social networks and interaction. "Communication is critical to that. There is this opportunity to communicate with people in a mediated space," Boase said. "What does that mean for people's relationships? Do they have more interaction overall? We'll be looking at these questions and others next semester."