  Online social dynamics based on human endeavours exhibit prominent complexity
in the emergence of new features embodied in the appearance of collective
social values. The vast amount of empirical data collected at various websites
provides a unique opportunity to quantitative study od the underlying social
dynamics in full analogy with complex systems in the physics laboratory. Here,
we briefly describe the extent of these analogies and indicate the methods from
other science disciplines that the physics theory can incorporate to provide
the adequate description of human entities and principles of their
self-organisation. We demonstrate the approach on two examples using the
empirical data regarding the knowledge creation processes in online chats and
questions-and-answers. Precisely, we describe the self-organised criticality as
the acting mechanisms in the social knowledge-sharing dynamics and demonstrate
the emergence of the hyperbolic geometry of the co-evolving networks that
underlie these stochastic processes.
