An increasing amount of social interaction is taking place online: analyzing this data computationally offers enormous potential to address long-standing scientific questions, and to harness and inform the design of future social computing applications. With an increasing amount of social interaction taking place online, we are accumulating large amounts of data about phenomena that were once essentially invisible to us: the collective behaviour and social interactions of hundreds of millions of people. Analyzing this data computationally offers enormous potential to address both long-standing scientific questions, and to harness and inform the design of future social computing applications. In this talk, Jure discusses how the computational perspective can be applied to questions involving the structure of online networks and the dynamics of information that flow through such networks.