Reflection and Review of Social Networking

Nowadays, more and more people, especially adolescents, are spending much more time on the internet than ever. Many surveys say that this situation occurs mostly because of the emergence of so-called social network such as Facebook and twitter. When talking about the Social Network, apart from those social network site, the second thought comes to you might be the movie “The Social Network” in 2010. The movie is about how the famous social network website, which would become known as Facebook, be created by a Harvard student named Mark Zuckerberg.

The front cover of the movie The Social Network

The trailer of The Social Network

We all know that the general development of social networking began with the Theory of Six Degrees, followed by the stage of making friend with stranger and the stage of entertainment. And for now, thanks to Facebook, we have walked into the stage of socialgram connected to the real world networking. We may also know that many SNS (Social Networking Services) nowadays aim at helping people to establish social networks of Internet application service, in the meanwhile, we are familiar with the other SNS called Social Network Sites including RenRen and KaiXin. So, what’s the difference between social network and social networking?

So far as we know from the lecture in the first week, there are some differences between social network and social networking. While social network is a kind of social structure whose “nodes” (individuals or groups) are bonded by one or more types of relationship or interdependency, social networking is the bridge connects those “nodes” by service/technology provided. For instance, there is a group of people who fascinate about movies and we maintain that those people have the same property of interest, then it can be defined these people have connection with each other by the property, and these people become the "nodes" in the social network. Social networking can be a platform or website forum that building the relationship among people, such as DouBan Group and IMDB Community.

Besides the comparison of social network and social networking, Professor Rosanna also talked about the topic of social media versus social networking. In my opinion, social media uses technologies such as blogs, podcasts, wikis, and vlogs (videoblog) to let people discover or read news and information. Theoretically, these news and information will be propagated through the Internet without the limitation of time and region, and that propagation process will be done through social media. As the definition of social media, we can know that social media include social networking websites. Social networking sites mostly can link and share those news and information from social media sites, just like a citation in research paper, but the social media still dissociate from social networking websites. For example, you hardly can define Wikipedia as social networking website because of its not helping people being linked in a specific orientation, but you can always cite and link those wiki into your WeiBo or Facebook to let your friends know the information. Your friends may reply or forward it and that's exactly the connection between you and your friends has been linked. Thus, we can conclude that social networking concentrates on building the relationships among people and rethink that social media is just a shift in how people discover and read news and information.

As for me, I really like SNS and quite want to build a mobile software platform or application like Path to link my close friend to share my life through picture, video and my location. And that’s why I study in this course to get more knowledge of social networking.

User Interface of Path