Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship - Research Paper Example

?Social networking websites exhibit a level of cultural significance that is reserved for few global phenomena. Facebook, LinkedIn, and other websites that stress the importance of online networks between individual profiles represent some of the most profitable businesses in the world, due to the worldwide demand for social and professional connections. Despite the widespread popularity of a select few social networking websites, thousands of these websites exist to cater to specific interests and practices. The diversity between these websites range in terms of opportunities to meet new people, backgrounds of the users, and the tools users can use to organize and sort information being presented to them (Boyd and Ellison 211). Each of these components of social networking in the 21st century is a drastic change from traditional models of communication, which depend on notions of the richness of live, interpersonal contact. In contrast, an online social network values the organization of information above the medium by which one makes those connections. In this vein, there is a wide range of academic research to draw upon in surveying the ways in which human communication has been unalterably changed by the advent of social networking websites, which is a change becoming increasingly evident as younger generations invest so much time into maintaining their personal networks. Firstly, one should note that social networking has changed the interpersonal interaction environment from solely face-to-face to primarily computer-to-computer. Instead of wondering how their physical environment can affect people’s social behaviors, studies into social networking now focus on how social behaviors can be affected by web interface design (Benevenuto, Rodrigues and Cha 49). One upshot of this is that user’s interactions on a social networking website are all logged and kept permanent, whereas oral language is not kept permanent outside of an electronic recorder and the memories of those involved. Having a recorded message or conversation makes using data for improving interpersonal interactions possible to some degree. Secondly, it should be noted that in the 21st century, social networks have changed the standards for individual personas. Lange (2007) creates the distinction between “publicly private” and “privately public” in her studies of user behaviors on the social networking and video sharing website YouTube. “Publicly private” behavior occurs when a video maker reveals his or her identity, but her content is not widely accessed; “privately public” behavior involves sharing accessible content with a large number of users, but limiting access to the maker’s identity to few (Lange 361). In the age of social networking, it is indeed possible, looking at this nomenclature, to manage one’s personal by managing one’s involvement in social networking websites. This falls in contrast to the era of interpersonal communication before the popularity of these websites, in which a person’s reputation depended on one’s real-time persona. In the 21st century, this persona is more carefully managed in order to meet the individual’s self-professed goals. Thirdly, and on a similar tangent, social networking has had effects not only on the management of public personas but also on narcissism, which is strongly tied to a notion of public persona (Buffardi and Campbell 1303). Participants in an experiment looking at perceptions of narcissism among Facebook users revealed that a higher degree of social activity with the online community led to an increased rating of perceived narcissism on the part of the networking website user. Factors such as the quantity of social interaction, profile picture self-representation, and personal attractiveness also played a significant role in whether the profile owner was judged narcissistic (Buffardi and Campbell 1309). Taken together, these results indicate that social networking has changed 21st century interactions between people with respect to a rise in perceived narcissism, even if this narcissism is unjustified or untrue in an individual’s case. The nature of a networking profile, which is a promotion for the self, feeds into the emphatic concern for one’s own online persona. Notions of friendship, which are central to any account of how individual people interact with each other, have not been immune to semantic shifts due to social networking websites. The concept of a “friend,” thanks to Facebook, has become associated more with the idea of an acquaintance than a close connection. Some analysts propose that the activity network, based on the actual interaction of one profile with another, is a more conclusive way of measuring the strong and weak links between two individuals than their “friend” connection facilitated by the social network itself (Viswanath, Mislove and Cha 37). Over time, these actual links grow stronger and weaker, which is a commonality they share with face-to-face relationships between contacts. In addition, like real-life links, there is a decreasing trend of activity as a social network link between contacts ages. However, with social networks in particular, these links are measured quantitatively with logged data sets to produce an idea of graph-theoretic properties, which accurately model social networking interactions (Viswanath, Mislove and Cha 40). These ideas of a fundamentally altered state of discussion due to the advent of 21st century social networking raise a corollary question regarding whether social network connections imply meaningful relationships, or whether the relationships represented in social networks actually signify a real-life connection between two human beings (as opposed to between two personal profiles). Researchers have asked this question in wondering whether social links are valid indicators of real user interaction (Wilson, Boe and Sala 205). Answering this question based on social graphs of Facebook usage alone is inadequate because it requires examining real-life interactions between people that are connected in their social networking usage. The implication presented here is that communication is no longer measured in purely qualitative terms: that is, in terms of evaluating the content of user interactions. Instead, it seems user interactions are reduced to their quantifiable elements. Accordingly, our concept of interaction is heavily shaped by our methods of measuring a particular instance of interaction. Another compelling route that recent research has taken revolves around the relationship between cooperation and social networks, particularly in how “cooperative behavior cascades in human social networks” (Fowler and Christakis 5334). The theory on which this assertion rests is that a number of behaviors can spread through human social networks, whether in-person or online. In a controlled experiment, researchers corroborated this theory by showing cooperation increased through multiple generations of interactions, starting from a cooperative act between two people interacting through a computer connection with a stranger. From this result, one is left thinking that cooperation (as a character trait of some interactions) is actually increased through the use of social networks, which may offer some insight into new developments into the way human beings interact with each other in the 21st century. Nevertheless, since individuals may choose to befriend people with similar (that is, similarly cooperative) behaviors, it is difficult to draw a causal inference between cooperation and the use of social networks. Considering social networking more generally, one is inclined to ask how such websites are affecting particular demographics. In college students, the website Facebook consumes an average of 30 minutes per day, most of which is spent observing content rather than creating it. For the majority of these young adults, Facebook serves as a means of keeping up with and socially interacting with individuals with whom they had previously established a relationship with offline. In addition, Pempek, Yermolayeva and Calvert (2009) indicate that Facebook (and social networking websites) are used to establish an individual’s identity, which is another way of saying “persona” (227). An immediately clear observation from these findings is that spending most of 30 minutes per day on a social networking website “observing” content means that there is less of a necessity to engage one’s friends to find out what is going on in their lives. Since it is already posted to Facebook, there is no sense in engaging in one-on-one conversations. That is a significant change in how individuals interact with one another. To continue on this theme of understanding changes in human interaction by looking at how individuals use social networking websites, Subrahmanyam, Reich, Waechter and Espinoza (2008) analyzed how both adolescents and emerging adults use social networking websites—including both MySpace and Facebook. The researchers found that participants “often used the Internet, especially social networking sites, to connect and reconnect with friends and family members” (Subrahmanyam, Reich and Waechter 420). Thus, as was mentioned previously in the context of the Pempek et al. (2009) study, online social networks and offline contacts are complementary modes of interaction: neither conflicting nor totally aligned in a meaningful way. However, in contrast to Pempek et al. (2009), Subrahmanyam et al. (2008) notes that this overlap is an imperfect one that depends on how emerging adults chose to use different online contexts to strengthen some aspects of their offline connections. What one is left with, then, is not a picture of social networking online as a replacement for face-to-face contact with others, but a tool for strengthening those live connections. Taken to its logical conclusion, the authors believe social networks have not significantly changed modes of interactions, but have rather given a tool to individuals looking to make connections. Social networking has undoubtedly served a crucial role in shaping how generations in the 21st century interact amongst themselves. From the growing research literature in the field, one can begin to see how these changes are qualitatively and quantitatively manifesting themselves. Nevertheless, one should not take social networking websites as a substitute for real, live interactions with offline contacts. While the literature points to ways in which people no longer accept the classical model of interpersonal interaction, some parts of the literature also emphasize a somewhat limited role in the social lives of most people (despite its time allocation). It is important to understand these things in order to understand the online lives of younger generations absorbed in Facebook culture. Works Cited Benevenuto, Fabricio, et al. "Characterizing user behavior in online social networks." 9th ACM SIGCOMM Conference on Internet Measurement. New York: SIGCOMM, 2009. 49-62. Boyd, Danah M. and Nicole B. Ellison. "Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship." Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13(1) (2007): 210-230. Buffardi, Laura E. and W. Keith Campbell. "Narcissism and Social Networking Web Sites." Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 34(10) (2008): 1303-1314. Fowler, James H. and Nicholas A. Christakis. "Cooperative behavior cascades in human social networks." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107(12) (2010): 5334-5338. Lange, Patricia G. "Publicly Private and Privately Public: Social Networking on YouTube." Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13(1) (2007): 361-380. Pempek, Tiffany A., Yevdokiya A. Yermolayeva and Sandra L. Calvert. "College students' social networking experiences on Facebook." Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 30(3) (2009): 227-238. Subrahmanyam, Kaveri, et al. "Online and offline social networks: Use of social networking sites by emerging adults." Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 29(6) (2008): 420-433. Viswanath, Bimal, et al. "On the evolution of user interaction in Facebook." 2nd ACM Workshop on Online Social Networks. New York: ACM , 2009. 37-42. Wilson, Christo, et al. "User interactions in social networks and their implications." 4th ACM European Conference on Computer Systems. New York: EuroSys, 2009. 205-219. Read More