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Hello fellow computer scientists, I am writing this post simply because I took a college course on social media, and chose to observe yours. I did this because, like many of you, I am interested and am involved in computer science, so I wanted to learn and read about something I am passionate about. Simply put, I was fortunate to have had some knowledge about computer science before studying this subject. I have gathered over the last three months that the blogger sites about computer science reflect much of the CS population. Computists are known not to be the most social group, and whether or not this is true in real life, it most certainly is true on the web. I believe the general unfriendliness to newcomers might be a reason why computer science is such an unrepresented study for the amount of potential the subject has. Computer Science offers a high starting salary, easier acceptance in a computer science school because there are not many applying, job stability, and other perks to the study, yet only a small percentage of people choose a future on computing.

The main problem with computer science blogging is user friendliness. Other blogs, like cooking, sports, and other sites welcome newcomers with their arms open, and give them easy to read posts and encourage them to contribute to the sites themselves. Blogging in the computer science world as a newbie, on the other hand, is like sticking your hand in a lions mouth. The lingo on almost every site is geared towards the elite of the computer science world, those that don’t worry about learning base languages and are already creating programs used by major companies. Partly, it is the intellectual talk between the masters that scares away many of the potential computer scientists. There is also the sites themselves. For sites geared towards computer science, they are awfully confusing to navigate and are a poor representation of online usage online. It took me quite a while to learn how to find what I wanted to, and even now I am lost on many potential additions to these sites. Finally, the online community is brutal. The online posts I read coming from curious people looking to go into computer science were scoffed at, and these people were told to go ask their mommies or do their own research before joining the “elite group”. What many of the computer scientists don’t seem to understand is the online blog isn’t just a facet for sharing new public and personal discoveries in the field, but rather it it a place for help and learning those who do not understand the advanced topics.

This is not a bash on any of your intelligence or computer science, but rather it is a plea to change the ways we operate on the web. Computer science is respected in its difficulty and the passion required to work in this field, but why shouldn’t we help people who are curious, and make the field easier to begin working in for those curious souls? If we could pause our work for just a bit, and open a new window in the computer and contribute more to these sites, it could do wonders for the image and output of the computer science field.