DEINITION
A social network is a web-based service for communities of people who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others. Within this service there are tools to interact such as chat, messaging, email, video, voice chat, file sharing, blogging and discussion groups etc. It has assisted to revolutionize the way we communicate and share information with one another in today’s society through log-ons by millions of people on a regular basis as part of their everyday life. Popular social networks recently are My Space, Facebook, Friendster, Hi5, Xanga, Mixi and Cyword.
There are two broad categories of social networking services such as internal social networking (ISN – closed or private community) and external social networking (ESN – open/public, “invite only”), both of these can raise the feeling of community among people. Users can upload a picture of themselves and can often be "friends" with other users. In most of these services users have to confirm that they are friends before they are linked, having to be approved by a friend, or otherwise there are networking properties such as “favourites” that does not require approval from another. There are often privacy control features that enables users to pick who they want to view or who they want to be viewed or contacted.
REVOLUTION OF SOCIAL NETWORKS
Social networks has been studied for decades by sociologists as they tend to create ties between people in families, organizations and even towns or countries. The beginning of early internet enabled people to communicate and network with applications such as Usenet and bulletin board systems. With rapid technology during the mid 90s people could connect with one another in a more visually appealing and public way. First there was Classmates.com which allowed an online connection between classmates, closely followed by SixDegrees.com which offered a way to meet friends of friends. Soon after there was a dot.com bust in 2000 that eventually brought Friendster to be the leader in social networking sites. These applications all share a common feature of having“friends”of each user maintained, and having people to invite more friends via their connections. Even though there were eventually uncountable users on Friendster, the service was plaqued by various technical issues. Friendster then started to lose its popularity and people started moving over to new services such as MySpace and Xanga to which enabled not only a garnish look profile but also facilitated a customizable page of embedded music and video sharing. Facebook emerged as a rival to MySpace in the year of 2004 providing a close network for basically just college students, and later opening the site to all comers, letting people to create mini-applications or widgets for the site.
IMPACT
On a social level it has impacted the world with identity i.e. creating self profiles; e-learning; privacy and social capital with its free access. You can keep up with friends and families, share photos and videos, control privacy online, reconnect with old classmates, discuss interests and hobbies, plan parties and other events.
In the business application, social networks connect people at low costs which is then beneficial for businesses to expand their contact base, advertise via banners and text ads, as well as being a general relationship management tool for selling products and services. Global businesses can thus use social networks to communicate with contacts anywhere around the world.
With these imagined communities participants can certainly express who they are and locate themselves in a cultural level online. They are typically free to join, and once you become a member of the network you can have a homepage with funny/cool photo albums, some basic personal information and places where you can write about yourself. Message contents does not have to be real yet they serve to maintain contact or to have cheerful comment conversations that can be posted and read by other friends creating an online identity. What differentiates these social networks from other computer-mediated communication is this function to allow members to articulate and publicly display their relations to one another to traverse the network.
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COLLABORATIVE LEARNING
In terms of collaborative learning people become actively involved in the process and provide general awareness to shared knowledge of who is participating in the project or the community. This could mean knowledge of whether a certain person is available for interaction or not, and what kind of work he or she is doing at present. It also allows for informal and unplanned conversations between multiple number of people who share experiences or ideas in focused collaboration working simultaneously together on the same task. People who live far away from each other are able to do work together, or update members who were absent from group gatherings. Peers are oriented towards socialization and maintenance of personal relationships.
1.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_network
2.http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_12/boyd/index.html
danah boyd, social researcher
3.http://newsletter.alt.ac.uk/e_article000993849.cfm?x=b11,0,w.
Mike Thelwall, lecturer from University of Wolverhampton
4.http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2007/08/digging_deeperyour_guide_to_so_1.html
Mark Glaser: Journalist, Critic, Facilitator, New Media Expert
