Risks of using Facebook

Personal Risks

As with any SNS, possible threats lurk depending on what you post out into cyberspace. Most people do not realize that once something is posted online it will be out in cyberspace forever and most likely be vulnerable to hackers. Hackers can easily cause criminal havoc if they have access to a user's actual date of birth because it makes it easier for them to hack into credit card accounts with that type of information. If a hacker can get into your credit card account online, they will also have access to your billing address and phone number. This leaves too much at stake for a possible stalking to start. Like any other service, Facebook is not perfect and has come under attack by various groups and organizations on how safe their network really is.
Stalkers have been around for centuries now, some of which we know to be close friends of ours. Facebook is no different when it comes to the new age of stalker status as it gives way to over half a billion users around the world. Nowadays women and men alike are so eager to meet a new person whether to become friends or by taking it a step further. With Facebook, users can post any picture of either themselves or pose as somebody else. This is why it is absolutely imperative to only accept friend requests from people in which you have been in constant contact throughout your life as you never know who you may end up talking to. Younger users are more prone to being stalked over Facebook as they are very naive in the sense that they will post their address and phone number as well as update their status with the current lingo of "open crib." Having your current address and or whereabouts is a stalkers dream and makes it ten times easier for them and puts your life in danger.
Facebook in conjunction with third party applications also makes a terrible duo. Wall Street Journal reported that many of Facebook's popular third-party games and contests sell Facebook users information to other companies. During the week of March 9, 2009; Facebook was attacked a total of five times according to an article written by Carrie-Ann Skinner. Skinner goes on to address that “two of the hoax applications that have been downloaded by Facebook users include “F a c e b o o k - closing down!!!” and “Error Check System." "By downloading the app, users are giving hackers access to their profile and personal information, and also unwittingly forwarding fake messages to their friends, also encouraging them to download the programs” (Skinner). Many people can't fathom the risk they put not only themselves, but anyone he or she might know at risk as well. Continuing on with Skinner’s article, one will find that actual past Facebook chat conversations were also able to give insight to a person’s whereabouts. It seems as though Facebook is ever so changing its privacy settings to better its massive online community, however as their intentions seem good its final outcome might hinder others from continuing with the service as there seems to be a great deal of worry among the fellow Facebookers. One may think, “Well how do I avoid leaking out my personal information?” and the answer is fairly simple, know when to give out that information or better yet don’t give it out to the general public. Nothing in cyberspace truly private, if it’s online chances are that sooner or later others will be able to look it up and take one’s information and do whatever they might want once they have it.
Facebook has made personifying one’s profile a top-notch priority for the last few months, however in May of this year, Facebook hit another roadblock. George Deglin, a web security consultant, discovered an exploit that would allow a malicious site to immediately harvest a Facebook user’s name, email, and data shared with everyone on Facebook with no action required on the user’s part in which poses a major problem for everyday Facebook users (Kincaid). These sites often contain a virus known as malware which can be very tricky to remove from one’s computer because not only does it infect the mainframe, but also the executable programs which in turn causes the virus to spread throughout the whole system. Though Facebook has incorporated new ways of having one’s profile remaining private, “a recent survey from Consumer Reports found that 23 percent of Facebook users either did not know the site offered privacy controls or chose not to use them” (Wortham).
Watch this newscast on the risks of using Facebook.

Social Problems in Global Context

This course examines causes of and responses to critical social problems in different world regions with a focus on the dimensions and impacts of globalization. This course is designed to introduce you to the basic concepts that sociologists use to analyze various aspects of social life, while also discussing current global social issues. The goal is not to have you accumulate “facts” about societies, but rather to give you the tools that you need to think critically about important current social issues. Topics in this course will include: global inequalities, conflict and violence; population dynamics and issues of sustainability.
Required Text: Sernau, Scott (2012) “Global Problems: the Search for Equity, Peace, and Sustainability.” Revised 3^rd Addition, Pearson Education ISBN 0205841775
Exploring social problems on a global scale This text uses social science perspectives to examine the various dimensions of globalization, the social problems of inequality, war and violence, and environmental sustainability that are occurring on a global scale. Clear writing and vivid examples help students to better understand their role as global citizens. The book was designed for courses such as Global Issues, Contemporary Problems, Social Problems, Social Stratification, World Cultures, and Social Change. Learning Goals Upon completing this book, readers should be able to: Understand social problems on a global scale – from inequalities to sustainability See the interconnections of the world and people throughout the world Learn about issues with a multinational and multidisciplinary approach, so readers will be able to have a broader understanding of the subject

• E-Text  (180 day subscription)
• UNCG bookstore
• Half.com ranging from $3.60 to $26.08

EVALUATION

There are 1000 pts available. Grades will be calculated as the sum of the following assignments:

1. Chapter Outlines 10% (100 pts)
2. Online Quizzes 50% (500 pts)
3. Current Events Blogs 10% (100 pts)
4. Online Current Events Presentations 10% (100 pts)
5. Online discussions 100% (100 pts)
6. Attendance 10% (100 pts)
7. Extra Credit +5% (+50 pts)

FINAL GRADES are distributed according to the following percentages:

• (A+)       97.5% – 100%
• (A)          92.5% – 97.4%
• (A-)        89.5% – 92.4%
• (B+)        87.5% – 89.4%
• (B)          82.5% – 87.4%
• (B-)        79.5% – 82.4%
• (C+)        77.5% – 79.4%
• (C)          72.5% – 77.4%
• (C-)        69.5% – 72.4%
• (D+)       67.5% – 69.4%
• (D)          62.5% – 67.4%
• (D-)        59.5% – 62.4%
• (F)          59.4% and below

Twitter, Facebook, and Ten Red Balloons: Social Network Problem Solving and Homeland Security

Twitter, Facebook, and Ten Red Balloons: Social Network Problem Solving and Homeland Security

Introduction

On December 6, 2009, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) held a competition designed to, in their words, “explore the role the Internet and social networking plays in the timely communication, wide area team-building and urgent mobilization required to solve broad scope, time-critical problems.” ¹ The competition required participating teams/individuals to find “10 8-foot balloons moored at 10 fixed locations in the continental United States.” ² Just before the competition opened, the balloons were surreptitiously floated at random locations in nine states, including: California, Tennessee, Florida, Delaware, Texas, Virginia, Arizona, Oregon, and Georgia. ³
The winning team, comprised of five students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), found all ten balloons in less than nine hours. Their performance roundly beat the other 4,000 participants in the challenge and shocked DARPA, which had scheduled the competition for two weeks. Incredibly, the team learned of the competition only four days before it started, and in less than two days they had a plan, a website, and more than 5,000 signed up to help them. ⁴ They then applied that network to an extraordinarily complex problem spanning the United States. The results were shockingly accurate and swift. The significance and potential application of their system is remarkable. In a period of less than one week, five students constructed a productive, precise, layered, networked enterprise involving thousands of citizens. This essay proposes that the U.S. federal government apply the techniques developed by the MIT team into a nation-wide program designed to address discrete security issues.

The “New” Models: Social Network Problem Solving

Naturally, the system developed for the DARPA challenge does not perfectly correlate with all homeland security challenges. For example, the system would do little to physically capture a wanted individual. The system could, however, be used to locate a wanted person. It could also be applied to assist in securing physical sites, borders, cyberspace, and infrastructure. The team leader, Dr. Riley Crane, speculated on a broad range of possible applications:

Can we use this technology we've developed to find missing children or something along those lines where there's an incentive for people to really participate and help out? Often, the police will offer a reward for finding a missing child. Can we restructure that in a way that we tap the vast resources of this network? . . . Or during an emergency, maybe we need to find 10 people in a region who can operate heavy machinery, maybe a building collapsed. ⁵

This approach to problem solving is potentially expansive. Indeed, the tool is so broad and powerful, that it is difficult to pigeonhole individual uses. Suffice to say, the potential application extends to any defined, discrete issue/problem.
At the core of the system is its incentive structure, which was structured to encourage the development of a large network of interested persons. DARPA offered a total of $40,000 in prize money. The MIT team allocated this evenly between each of the ten balloons, giving each a “value” of $4,000. They gave $2,000 to the person who found each balloon. This was hardly unique; most other participating teams offered some sort of reward for finding balloons. What set the MIT team apart is that they then gave a $1,000 to the person that referred the balloon finder to their website (assuming there was a referral – if there was no referral, the finder received $2,000 and the other $2,000 went to charity). Then they gave $500 to the person who referred the referrer, $250 to the person that referred them, and so on. This diffuse incentive structure essentially propagated itself over existing social networks: people were incentivized to get as many friends working for the MIT team as possible – almost like a pyramid scheme. The speed with which this propagated itself is remarkable. Each of the five members of the team sent out an e-mail explaining the competition and the incentive structure. Within forty-eight hours, they had 5,000 people signed up to assist them.
Another interesting modern illustration is the Vanish Competition presented in an article in the August, 2009 edition of Wired Magazine. ⁶ The competition accompanied an article by Evan Ratliff, which examined instances in which people had attempted to make themselves disappear. The competition had Ratliff go into hiding for thirty days. During that time, he traveled around the United States in disguise, not making contact with family, friends or editors. He ditched his cell phone, credit cards, and online accounts. He used physical disguises and masked his movement and communications online using various technical tools. ⁷ A $5,000 prize was awarded to the first person to identify Ratliff, take his picture, and say the word “fluke”.
Almost instantly, thousands of people became actively involved in the hunt. The participants self-organized into dozens of teams, pooling resources to find Ratliff. The teams and individual participants extensively used social networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter to connect and share information. It took twenty-five days for a team to track Ratliff down on a street in New Orleans – more than 2,000 miles from where he started. Throughout his time on the run, Ratliff continuously checked up on the social networking sites to track the trackers. He was eventually caught by team members who were able to identify him online and hack through the measures he had set up to protect his identity. Other team members, physically located in New Orleans, approached him and ended the contest. ⁸
The Vanish competition provides several lessons which affirm the lessons learned from the DARPA challenge. First, thousands of individuals can be incentivized with a fairly small monetary incentive. Though the incentive function was slightly different in the two competitions, both rely on social network mechanisms. In the DARPA challenge, the incentive structure was self-propagating. In the Vanish challenge, the monetary incentive sparked the creation of teams and social networking groups. Once sparked, the teams appear to have developed a strong social cohesion – individuals likely became interested in participating and assisting because they wanted to help the group. For the technically-oriented members of the team, professional pride may have been a strong motivating factor. One member would come up with a clever way to track Ratliff’s movements through FaceBook, and another would respond by improving the tool. This highlights another important lesson learned: not only did teams form naturally, a seemingly efficient division of labor developed as well. In both challenges, existing social networks were used extensively to share information towards the completion of the challenge. Finally, the winning team in the Vanish challenge was able to find Ratliff despite abundant misinformation provided by both other teams and Ratliff himself. The team devised a way to vet information and team members, thereby guaranteeing the accuracy of information received from team members.

Crowd-Sourcing Applications

The DARPA and Vanish challenges incorporate many of the mechanisms seen in popular crowd-sourced projects. The term “crowd-sourced” is a generic term applied to describe projects whose design and construction are implemented by a community of people rather than a single corporation. The internet is replete with websites dedicated to crowd-sourcing individual items or services. The concept has been successfully applied to the design and sale of t-shirts (Threadless), ⁹ cars (Local Motors), ¹⁰ and small consumer products (Quirky). ¹¹ It has also been used to write computer programs (Linux) ¹² and make loans (Kiva), ¹³ and in a host of other applications.
For instance, at Quirky, individuals submit inventions that they would like to see developed. The members of the Quirky community vote on each project. Aspects of the project are then completed by experts in their respective fields (e.g., a professional graphic artist does the graphic design, a mechanical engineer designs the item’s mechanics, etc.). Inventors receive a percentage of all sales, as do members who worked on a given project. Further, individual members are publically recognized when the product comes to market. The Quirky online store shows a breakdown of which members get how much of the money spent on the item. The incentive structure for participation – at Quirky and other crowd sourcing sites – is both monetary and social.

The “Old” Models

To fully understand the potential of the new social media models, it’s useful to look at traditional systems that seek to employ broad public support towards a single public goal. Crowd-sourced applications have existed for years. Perhaps the most well-known mechanism is the FBI’s “Most Wanted List.” The list was created in 1950 as a mechanism for enlisting the public’s help in capturing the most dangerous fugitives. ¹⁴ Over sixty years, 494 fugitives have been listed. ¹⁵ Of those, 463 have been captured – an impressive statistic. ¹⁶ However, of those captured, only 152 (or 32 percent) where captured as the result of direct public cooperation. ¹⁷ This is hardly a commendable success rate given the fact that the list is perpetually displayed in more than 30,000 post office locations throughout the country, online, and integrated in radio and television campaigns.
One of those campaigns has been to integrate the “Most Wanted List” with another traditional mechanism for applying public participation to solve a public safety problem: the television show America’s Most Wanted. ¹⁸ The show has resulted in the capture of approximately 1,100 wanted persons over the course of approximately 1,000 episodes. ¹⁹ The show (recently at least) averages six million viewers per episode; given the cost of production and advertising, this is not necessarily the most efficient method of capturing criminals. ²⁰
Though popular, American’s Most Wanted is “old media.” People watch the show, but they are not vested in the show; a certain percentage of the viewership is simply watching for entertainment. This type of crowd-sourced application is different from the newer applications in that people can passively participate (watch and be entertained without engaging). Perhaps recognizing that the social network structure used in the “new” models of crowd-sourcing are more effective, America’s Most Wanted has made efforts to establish itself in the social network universe. At the beginning of 2011, their Facebook group has approximately 137,000 members, and the Tweet feed for the show has 3,400 followers. ²¹

National Security Application

It could be argued that the social networking model of problem solving is not as efficient as it appears. In both the Vanish and DARPA challenges, there were hundreds of unsuccessful teams. Each unsuccessful team logged countless hours and expended prodigious talent and energy, with no apparent benefit. While it's true that the losing teams gained little personal benefit – they didn't win a prize – the system gained significant benefit from their participation. ²² The potential strength of the social networking model of problem solving lies in the sheer volume of participants.
The Balloon Challenge and Vanish Challenge suggest that with little funding, de minimis incentive, and a strong social cohesive element, individuals can create efficient, layered, and accurate organizations that are able to accomplish complex objectives. Applying these systems to homeland security is a natural development.
Critics of the social networking approach would argue the system could be easily corrupted. Individuals targeted by the system could manipulate the system by providing false information. This critique presumes the targeted individuals would be aware that they (or their activities) are being publically hunted. As an initial matter, individuals may never realize they are being sought. They are simply not paying attention, or they don’t realize they are part of the enterprise being targeted. Or, just as likely, sought individuals may be reluctant to corrupt the system because they are concerned about digitally revealing their location. Indeed, this is precisely what led to the discovery of author Evan Ratliff.
The MIT team anticipated the issue of system corruption and developed a tool to allow them to quickly cull through tremendous amounts of information and a great deal of misinformation (intentional and unintentional). During the first hours of the competition, many of the 4,000 teams engaged in misinformation campaigns designed to obfuscate and confuse their opponents. The MIT team employed an undisclosed technique which allowed them to identify fact from fiction. Their success evidences the application of an extremely successful tool which was able to manage and verify, or discredit, vast amounts of information. Such an application is critical to the success in the use of social networks in homeland security applications.
The DARPA and Vanish challenges both illustrate the power of the social networks when applied to discrete problems. When properly constructed, tools can harness the power of social networks towards a singular goal. They have the potential to do this with alarming efficiency and speed. Socially networked problem solving is not (for the most part) purely altruistic. There must be some incentive in place to facilitate involvement and action. The incentive may be monetary or social (e.g., earning respect from cyber peers), or a combination of the two. The incentives need not be robust; both DARPA and Vanish demonstrate that complex goals can be accomplished with only the smallest of incentives. The most powerful incentives combine social and monetary elements, and are structured so that they self-propagate.
The U.S. government can, and should, apply the principles underlying these programs to a homeland security paradigm. Most obviously, these models could be used to locate wanted individuals – criminals, witnesses, persons of interest, individuals with particular skills, etc. This functionality, however, barely scratches the proverbial surface of the myriad of homeland security applications, both physical and cyber. For instance, a challenge could be issued to find the security flaws in a given government website. Or, programmers could be issued a challenge to build a website for a particular function.
The modern models created for the challenges can be successfully adapted by the government if adapted properly. The models share three commonalities which contribute to their success. First, they are simple programs utilizing existing technologies (e.g., simple web pages, Twitter, Facebook, etc.). Second, the models are structured to answer a single discrete question (e.g., where are the balloons?). Third, the models are fueled by their powerful incentive structures. Indeed, a government program would further benefit from another equally powerful incentive: patriotism.
A simple website, integrated with social networking sites, issuing discrete challenges, and offering small cash rewards – in short, a properly structured program has the potential to solve an array of discrete problems using a vast and powerful enterprise of active, engaged, and networked citizens.


www.All909.tk

GENDER DIFFERENCES IN USING SOCIAL NETWORKS

The purpose of this study is to determine individuals’ usage purposes of social networks with a focus on the
possible differences between females and males. Facebook, which is one the most popular and being most
widely used social network, is investigated in this study. The study group consisted of 870 Facebook users who
responded an online survey designed by the researchers. Analyses of the results showed that usage purposes can
be categorized under four categories, namely maintaining existing relationships, making new relationships, using
for academic purposes and following specific agenda. Significant differences were found between genders in all
of the purposes mentioned. While the difference on making new contacts was in favor of males, the differences
on the other three user purposes were in favor of females.
Keywords: Social networks, Facebook, gender differences, usage purposes
INTRODUCTION
Social networks have become a global phenomenon and attracted extensive population from all around the world
in different ages, cultures, education levels, etc. In addition to routinely checking e-mails, reading daily forums
and newspapers or following instant message tools, people now also check their social network profiles by
following others’ status changes, updating their profiles or looking at others’ profiles. Research has shown that
many people connect to social network sites at least once a day either to check their profiles or to participate in
different online activities (Joinson, 2008; Lenhart, 2009).
Social networks are defined as a body of applications that augment group interaction and shared spaces for
collaboration, social connections, and aggregates information exchanges in a web-based environment (Barlett-Brag, 2006). Facebook, Myspace, Youtube, Flickr, and Linkedn are the most commonly known social network
sites containing similar as well as different features. Facebook is handled among other social networks in this
study because of being the most popular and most heavily visited social network website (eBizMBA, 2010).
Facebook is defined as “a social utility that helps people share information and communicate more efficiently
with their friends, family and coworkers” (facebook.com). Despite the fact that Facebook was launched in 2004
as a Harvard-only Social Network site, it expanded to include other high school students, professionals inside
corporate networks, and eventually everyone who have access to the online world (Cassidy, 2006). Facebook
provides an opportunity to users, to create personalized profiles that include general information like education
background, work background, and favorite interests and also to add links and song clips of their favorite bands,
post messages on friends' pages, and post and tag pictures and videos, among other things (Rosmarin, 2007;
Zywica &Danowski, 2008).
People use social network sites for a variety of reasons among which ease of use, allowing rapid updating,
analyzing and sharing the continuously increasing information, reflecting on daily life, establishing and
maintaining spontaneous social contacts and relationships, supporting informal learning practices with
interaction and communication and facilitating delivery of education are the leading ones. Thus, these reasons
explain why social network sites are adopted rapidly although they first had emerged with the purpose of sharing
photos, personal information, videos, profiles and related content (Mejias, 2005; Ajjan & Hartshorne, 2008).
Most of the social network users are young individuals most of whom are university students. Hence, social
network sites are considered to play an active role in younger generation’s daily lives (Lenhart, 2009; Koca
2009). The relationship between the youth and their involvement in social network sites has attracted many
research that focused on young people’s social network activities in relation to their privacy concerns as
pertaining in their social network usage (Lenhart & Madden, 2007; Pempek, Yermolayeva & Calvert, 2009;
Zywica &Danowski, 2008). Similarly, comparisons of different social networks in terms of their features and
users’ demographics such as gender, frequency of use and their reasons for participating in social network
environments remain as the most popular research areas.
It is stated that as social networks facilitate the sharing of photos and videos with both real world as well as
virtual friends while allowing them to build unique online identities by customizing their personal profiles with a
range of multimedia elements that are open to others’ reading (McLoughlin & Lee, 2007). Because individuals
come together around shared and common goals or needs willingly in social networks, especially, tendency to
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building new communities and groups or participating in them comes up. In these environments, individuals
move from being passive consumers to fully functioning members by sharing their materials and views with
others with whom they reach sensible conclusions. Hence, this cooperative activity helps members to shape the
group identity in addition to their individual identities (Atwell, 2006).
It is important to reveal individuals’ social network usage purposes, usage areas and outcomes to understand
what motivates them to adopt social networks so rapidly and to use so actively. Various researchers have studied
users’ purposes in using social networks. Stutzman (2006)stated that social networks can be used for passing
time, learning about other people, maintaining social relations, following changes at the university, class or
school enrolled. On the other hand, Ellison, Steinfield & Lampe (2007) explained that social network can be
oriented towards work- related contexts, establishing new relationships, or reaching those with shared interests
such as in music or politics. Lockyer & Patterson (2008) also showed that users can share their personal
information with the help of their profile page, connect with other users, upload, tag and share multimedia
content they have created, link others to a variety of accessible content, initiate or join sub-sets of common
interest groups. Grant (2008) also acknowledged that social networks such as Facebook, MySpace, YouTube,
weblogs, as well as wikis are predominantly used by teenagers and young adults as an extension of their
personality to show their friends and the world who they are, what they care about, and with whom they are like-minded. According to Joinson (2008), people use social networks to keep in touch with old friends, find the lost
contacts, communicate with the like-minded people, join groups with shared interests, organize or join events,
view and tag photos, share/ post photographs, play games, update one's own status, see others' status. He also
grouped these uses under seven categories which were to keep in touch, passive contact, social surveillance, re-acquiring lost contacts, communication, photographs, designing related uses, perpetual contacts and making new
contacts. Lenhart (2009) further argued that social networks are primarily used for establishing and maintaining
personal or professional contacts, making plans such as by organizing an event or a cause, and simply flirting.
Mazman & Usluel (2009) suggested that usefulness, ease of use, social influence and innovativeness can be
considered as direct factors influencing usage of social networks whereas facilitating conditions, subjective
norms, image and community identity can be accepted as indirect factors.
When examined studies about usage purposes of social networks above, it can be suggested that, most of the
studies stated that, people maintain their relations with social networks in which they formed or joined new
networks to make new friends. It is noticeable that people generally tend to keeping in touch with friends,
maintaining their relations, making new friends, building groups with people around common background
(graduated school, department and class groups) or building new groups or joining groups with people which
they have shared interest or needs (Mazman & Usluel, 2010; Pempek, Yermolayeva & Calvert, 2009). In this
study, Facebook, being one of the most commonly used social networks is studied in relation to usage purposes
with a focus on if gender has an effect on these users’ purposes.
METHOD
Participants
The study group is consisted of 870 Facebook users who responded to the online survey accurately. The web
address of the survey was spread out in Facebook and people who took the survey forwarded the survey's link to
their friends voluntarily. In addition, link of the survey was displayed on the various Facebook groups' wall to
access an extensive crowded people. The survey was available on the web for four weeks. All of the surveyors
participated voluntarily to this research and any reward or prices promised.
The study group has showed that most of the participants were 18 to 25 ages (74.4%) and were university
students (73.6%) while 94.2% of them are members of atleast one of the Facebook groups. As can be seen in
Table 1, majority of male users are undergraduate students whereas most of the graduate students who use
Facebook are females.
Table 1. Frequency distribution of genders by educational level
Educational Level
Gender  High school  Undergraduate  Graduate
Total
Male  36  339  68  443
Female  34  296  90  420
Total  70  635  158  863
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Data Collection Tool
Data were collected by means of an online survey which was developed by the researchers. The survey consisted
of two sections. In the first section, demographic characteristics of Facebook users were collected. The second
section of survey consisted of 12 items whose responses varied from 1 (Never) to 5 (Always) in form of a five
point Likert type scale. In order to ensure the validity of the data collection tool, 7 experts’ views were collected.
Based on the feedback received from the experts, the scale was modified and finalized.
An explanatory factor analysis was also employed to determine the item factor loads and to ensure the construct
validity of the data collection. In this process, items with low factor loads and those which could be placed under
two different factors were specified and one item, (A12)was extracted from the scale. The Cronbach’s alpha
value of this 11- item scale was found to be .802 showing that this scale could be considered as a reliable data
collection tool within the context of the study.
The explanatory factor analyses (see Table 2) helped extracting the principal components of Facebook usage in
11 items among which only four factors with Eigen values higher than one were selected (3. 877; 1.521; 1.172;
1.014). These 11 items were distributed under four factors and five items, namely A1, A3, A4, A6, A8 were
placed under the first factor, namely “maintaining existing relationships” which included finding old friends and
maintaining existing friendships. Two items, namely A2 and A5 were placed under the second factor called
“making new relationships” which included making new friends, joining new groups, or building new groups
with people around shared interests and needs. A7 and A9 were placed under the third factor which included the
activities such as projects, studies, research or homework, and this factor was called “academic usage”. Lastly,
two items, namely A10 and A11 were placed under the fourth factor and included activities such as following
changes in daily life, following innovations having fun and wasting time. This last factor was called ‘following
agenda’.
Table 2.Facebook Usage Purposes Survey Factor Analysis Result
Factor Load
Factor  Item
1  2  3 4
A1  ,734  
A3  ,767
A4  ,498
A6  ,662
Maintaining existing
relationships
A8  ,538
A2    ,901
Making new relationships
A5    ,680
A7    ,863  
Academic Usage
A9    ,801
A10    ,908
Following Agenda  A11    ,886
While a total number of four factors emerged, these explained 68.951% of the total variance. The variance
accounted for by the first factor, maintaining existing relationships, being the highest proportion, is 35.244%,
following this, variance accounted by third factor, academic usage, is 13.831%, variance accounted by fourth
factor, following agenda, is 10.653% and by the lowest proportion, variance accounted by second factor, making
new relationships is 9.22%.
As a result of factor analysis, individuals’ Facebook usage purposes are grouped mainly under four factors,
namely; “maintaining existing relationships”, “making new relationships”, “academic usage” and “following
agenda”.
FINDINGS
The mean scores attained from the surveys were calculated to determine the purposes of Facebook users in using
it. As can be seen in Table 3, maintaining relationships, as a factor containing A1, A3, A6, A8 and A4 has the
highest mean score. Item A1 (I use Facebook to find my old friends) was found to be the leading purpose having
the highest mean score. While A10 and A11 (items about the “following agenda” factor) followed these, item A9
(I use Facebook to support my academic work) has the lowest means score.
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Table 3: Facebook Usage Purposes Items with Mean Scores
Item N Min Max
x
A1 I use Facebook to find my old friends. 870 1 5 4.09
A2 I use Facebook to contact with my friends. 870 1 5 4.00
A3 I use Facebook to share information and resources with my
friends.
870 1 5 3.26
A4 I use Facebook to maintain my relations by joining academic
groups (class, school, department and faculty).
870 1 5 3.54
Maintaining Existing
Relationships
A5 I use Facebook to follow changes and improvements about my
school and school friends.  870 1 5 3.29
A6  I use Facebook to make new friends.  870  1  5  2.02
Making New
Relationships
A7
I use Facebook to find out people with common interests and to
join groups with such people.
870  1  5  2.55
A8
I use Facebook to share my homework and projects with my
classmates.
870 1 5 2.16
Academic
Usage
A9 I use Facebook to support my academic work. 870 1 5 1.92
A10  I use Facebook to follow the changes occurring in our daily lives.  870  1  5  2.73
Following
Agenda
A11  I use Facebook to keep track of innovations on the agenda.  870  1  5  2.46
To determine if Facebook usage purposes differs in terms of genders, t-test analysis was carried on the total
scores by factors.
Table 4: t test of Facebook Usage Purposes in terms of genders
Gender N  x df Cohen d p
Usage Purposes
Male 446 17.5 4.02
Maintaining Existing
Relationships
Female 424 18.9 3.55
0.365  .000
Male 446
5.0852 2.03937
Making New
Relationships
Female 424
4.0212 1.80150
0.552 .000
Male 446 3.8767 1.92220
Academic Usage  Female 424 4.2925 2.05350
0.209 .002
Male 446 4.7848 2.11646
Following Agenda
Female 424 5.6085 2.27901
0.375 .000
As seen in Table 4, significant differences were found between males and females in their Facebook usage
purposes. According to these results, females use Facebook for ‘maintaining existing relationships’, ‘academic
usage’ and ‘following agenda’ more than males do while males only use Facebook for ‘making new
relationships’ more than the females. To figure out the standardized difference between the two means, Cohen’s
d effect size was calculated. The effect size between 0.2 to 0.5 were classified as small, between 0.5 to 0.8 as
medium and above 0.8 indicated the large effect size. Examining Cohen’s d effect size showed that the most
significant difference was in making new relationships (d=0.052) while the least significant difference was in
academic usage (d=0.209).
DISCUSSION
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Copyright The Turkish Online Journal of Educational Technology  137
This study revealed out the usage purposes of social networks with a focus on the differences between females
and males. The explanatory factor analysis was carried out and individuals’ Facebook usage purposes were
categorized under four categories; ‘maintaining existing relationships’, ‘making new relationships’, ‘academic
usage’ and ‘following agenda’.
It was found that, people most generally use Facebook for maintaining existing relationships. As Facebook gives
users an opportunity to communicate with their friends via messages or chat and also, to track their friends’
status messages, walls and other profile changes, people tend to benefit from these facilities of Facebook.
Similarly, in line with this study, Joinson (2008) categorized individual’s social network usages under seven
categories, namely ‘social connection’, ‘shared identities’, ‘photographs’, ‘content gratifications’, ‘social
investigation’, ‘social network surfing’ and ‘status updates’, and found that the most important uses of social
networks are related to social connections which includes ‘finding out what old friends are doing now’, ‘re-acquiring lost contacts’, ‘connecting with people you otherwise would have lost contact with.” Joinson’s (2008)
study support this study’s findings on bases of the social connection factor which reflects the ‘maintaining
existing relationships’ factor that was found to be the leading purpose of users in this study. In addition to this,
‘social network surfing’ and ‘social investigation’ factors which include statements such as meeting new people,
looking for specific types of people, and looking at the profiles of the people unknown to the user overlap with
the “making new relationships” factor of this study.
As people in Facebook, share news from newspapers, TV or magazines and also announce advertisement of
innovations, new products or event notifications related to concerts, films, theaters, sport activities etc,
‘following agenda’ factor was found to another most important usage purpose. Once again a similar factor
revealed out in Joinson’s (2008) study as ‘content’ and ‘status update’ factor.
Lampe, Ellison & Steinfield (2006) pointed at the distinction between the use of Facebook for social searching
(finding out information about offline contacts) and social browsing (the use of the site to develop new
connections). With a survey of over 2000 students, he found that the primary use of Facebook was ‘social
searching’ that is, using Facebook to find out more about people who they have met offline, or who they attend
class or share a dormitory with. The use of Facebook for ‘social browsing’, for instance, to meet someone via the
site with the intention of a later offline meeting, or to attend an event organized online, scored relatively low
amongst their sample. Lampe, Ellison & Steinfield (2006) also reported that their sample preferred “keeping in
touch with an old friend or someone known from high school, university, etc. Similarly, in this study, the
findings showed that users make a distinction between maintaining existing relationships and making new
relationships, the former being the main purpose of the users with whom the study was carried out.
Lenhart (2009) found that individuals use their social network profiles mostly to ‘stay in touch with friends.’ On
the other hand, other social networks usages were accepted as making plans with friends, making new friends,
organizing events or causes, making new business professional contacts, promoting work and flirting which are
similar to the findings of this study’s factors of ‘academic usage’ and ‘making new friendships’.
Furthermore, it is found that individuals use Facebook mostly for ‘finding old friends’. This finding can be
related with the fact that people can search for their old schools, business corporations, and classes without
needing their telephone numbers, addresses, e-mails or the city or country in which they live, or simply by
writing their names and surnames in Facebook. On the other hand I use Facebook to contact with my friendsand
I use Facebook to maintain my relations by joining academic groups (class, school, department and faculty)
have been revealed out as the other statements that have higher mean scores. This finding indicating that the
majority of users claim to use Facebook to contact with their friends and to maintain their relations by joining
academic groups shows how individuals’ communication with those with common background or interests are
facilitated with various Facebook features as chat, messaging, message walls. Interactivity can be said to enable
this interaction which in return affects users’ purposes while becoming a more popular and inviting online
application.
Females use Facebook for maintaining existing relationships, academic purposes and following agenda higher
than males while males use it for making new relationships at a rate higher than the females’. This finding shows
that males use social networks mostly for making new friends and relationships while females use it mostly for
finding their old friends and keeping in touch with the existing ones. The reasons for this finding could be
explained by the possibility that females tend to hide their identities and personal information to keep their
privacy in Internet environment. Research shows that females don’t disclose themselves to people they don’t
really know because of social pressure and traditional social roles associated with women (Bölükbaş& Yıldız,
2005; Fallows, 2005). Similarly, Mazman, Usluel & Çevik (2009) found that social influence on the decisions of
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females is higher than personal decisions while personal decisions are more dominant over social influence in
males. This finding is in line with Tüfekçi’s (2008) study which shows significant differences between males
and females on the usage of social networks that females are more likely to use social networks to keep in touch
with friends either living nearby or in other schools while males are more likely to use social networks to find
potential friends and find people with have similar interests. Thelwall (2008) and Lenhart & Madden (2007)
found that males tend to make new relationship in social network environments more than females do. On the
other hand, Korkut (2005) found that females’ communication skills are more positive than males’ and he
explained this by suggesting that females are more social than males. In our study, however males were found to
be more open to new relationships just as communication skills are important both for maintaining existing
relationships and making new relationships. Hence, findings of this study do not support Korkut’s (2005) study
on females and males in terms of their communication skills.
Social networks have millions of users whose numbers increase rapidly. In this study, usage purposes of social
networks are aimed to explain the important role of these sites in people’s daily lives. 18-25 age group who are
main common users, were found to be dominant users of social networks in most of the usage factors than other
age groups. On the other hand in terms of genders, only in ‘making new relationships’ factor, males found to
having higher scores than females. Hence, future research should investigate the reasons why females don’t
disclose themselves in internet environment as much as males do beside to the reasons affecting this reality. In
addition to this, an another statement must be investigated is why female behave uncomfortable when they are
communicating in online environments, while males tend to gain social status and image by sharing their photos
and personal characteristics with others to make new relations. Also, usages of social networks should be studied
in terms of different variables such as educational level, profession, cultural differences, etc., while the possible
sources of these differences can be examined in an in-depth manner.

About Social Networking

A Word About Social Networking


The Internet has significantly changed the way our society connects with one another, does business,
and socializes. Today’s youth have never known a world without the Internet, which is a piece of infor-mation adults must put into context when they think about and compare, generationally, social net-working to face-to-face communications. According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, more
than 93% of both teens (12-17) and young adults (18-29) in the United States use the Internet regularly,
and more than 70% use social networking sites. Furthermore, among online teens, 62% use the Inter-net to get news about current events and politics, 48% use it to make purchases (books, clothing, and
music), and 31% use it to get health, dieting, or physical fitness information.
Online social networking presents both opportunities and risks. What follows is a cursory breakdown
of both, followed by a series of lesson plans specifically targeting online safety.
ADVANTAGES OF SOCIAL MEDIA:
•  Social skills. Social networking allows people to keep up with current friends and make new ones.
When used in the right way, social media can increase self-esteem and help someone feel less
isolated.
•   Independence and self-expression. Creating your own “home page” allows people to express
themselves and discuss their interests. They can join groups and support fan pages, and find out
about other people’s interests.
•  Digital competence.Technology is evolving faster than ever before. As teens and young adults
learn to adapt to new technologies (or new applications of existing technologies), they will be
better equipped to adapt to future technology.
•  Educational development.Young adults in secondary and post-secondary education will often use
social networking to discuss schoolwork and share discussions about assignments.
•  Research. Young adults can gather information about topics that are hard to discuss with others,
such as drug use and sexual health.
•   Additional advantages for youth with disabilities:Social networking can open up a new world of
communication, integration, and community participation. Young adults can express themselves,
including their thoughts and feelings, more easily and without fear of the rejection or stigma they
may experience in real life. Research also suggests that these young adults may be more willing to
ask for help online than in face-to-face situations. Furthermore, young adults who experience
difficulty with social skills can socialize anonymously, and can experiment with different personas
and practice initiating and maintaining online friendships. They can also respond to others by
taking advantage of having time to review and edit communications before sending it on.
Ultimately, this skill may carry over into “real life” and give a sense of new courage to make and
maintain friendships in everyday life.
Mastering Soft Skills for Workplace Success
135
RISKS OF SOCIAL NETWORKING:
•   Sharing one’s personal information with the wrong crowd.Young adults need to be aware that
information given out online could also put them at risk of victimization. People looking to do
harm could use posted information to identify them or gain their trust. They can also be deceptive
by pretending to know a young person. Encourage young people to privatize their online social
networking accounts (such as Facebook and Twitter).
•  Bullying.Harassment may occur online only (cyberbullying), or it may spill over to offline bullying
committed by a person who has located his victim online. Cyberbullying can cause significant
emotional harm resulting in depression, anger, school avoidance, violence, and suicide.
•   The permanency of online profiles.Once information has been shared on the Internet, it’s out
there — forever! Retrieving information that others have read and captured is nearly impossible.
Inappropriate pictures, captions, and comments could come back to haunt youth as they start
applying to colleges or looking for jobs.
•  Disclosure. People tend to be far bolder and less discretionary with information shared online
versus in person. This means there is a greater risk of giving out information including the
presence of a disability that, given a second thought, we might not have wanted to disclose.
•  Additional potential risks for youth with disabilities: Social networking may further isolate those
who may already feel isolated or not included, and can ultimately lead to depression and
loneliness. Also, young adults with disabilities must make important life decisions regarding
disclosure of their disability (if, how, when, and to whom). Unintended disclosure is possible by
posting pictures or becoming fans of disability support groups, for example. While this might not
be an issue, it makes the “disclosure” discussion even more important. For more information on
disability disclosure, see The 411 on disability disclosure: A workbook for youth with disabilities
(available online at:  http://www.ncwd-youth.info/411-on-disability-disclosure) and Cyber
Disclosure for Youth with Disabilities (available online at: http://www.ncwd-youth.info/cyber-disclosure).
The process of empowering youth to make safe and responsible decisions online can be compared to
the process by which they may have learned to safely cross the street. First they hold hands with an
adult, and then they gain a little more independence and might be watched from afar. Ultimately,
they become capable of making safe and responsible decisions on their own. Educating youth about
social networking communities must be grounded in the providing of knowledge, skills, and values so
that eventually they can be expected to independently exercise good judgment.
Skills to Pay the Bills


CyberSmart! is a free curriculum and part of Common Sense Media’s education programs. Common
Sense will be updating the CyberSmart! lesson plans and adding video, interactive components, and a
rich complement of parent resources to create an integrated K-12 Digital Literacy and Citizenship
curriculum.
YOUR ONLINE IMAGE
http://cybersmartcurriculum.org/safetysecurity/lessons/9-12/your_online_image/

Students explore the consequences of unintended audiences viewing their social network profiles.
They consider four key characteristics of social networking sites and how they might affect teens as
they try out new identities. Then, students collaborate to write a letter to parents demonstrating
their understanding of issues related to unintended online audiences.
MAKING GOOD DECISIONS
http://cybersmartcurriculum.org/safetysecurity/lessons/9-12/making_good_decisions/

Students take a true/false quiz about the risks to teens regarding online sexual victimization by
adults. They use an analysis of the results as the basis for a classroom discussion of how they can
harness the power of the Internet while avoiding risky behavior that can lead to involvement in
criminal sexual activity.
ACCEPTABLE SOCIAL NETWORKING
http://cybersmartcurriculum.org/safetysecurity/lessons/9-12/making_good_decisions/

Students explore a scenario in which an angry student creates a false online identity in order to seek
revenge. They explore ways to resolve the situation and develop a list of tips to help other teens
avoid cyberbullying situations.
CONNECTED 24/7
http://cybersmartcurriculum.org/cyberbullying/lessons/9-12/connected_247/

Students explore how bullying behaviors on social networking sites and cell phones can affect teens
around the clock. They identify positive actions that bystanders can take to alleviate a particular
scenario. Then they write a letter to the editor discussing the positives and negatives of social
networking sites, messaging, and cell phone technologies used by teens.
And From the Office of Disability Employment Policy:
CYBER DISCLOSURE FOR YOUTH WITH DISABILITIES
http://www.ncwd-youth.info/cyber-disclosure

A supplement to The 411 on Disability Disclosure: A Workbook for Youth with Disabilities, this
publication focuses on the advances in technology that have changed what youth need to know about
disability disclosure.

Social Network History

Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship
danah m. boyd
dmb@ischool.berkeley.edu
School of Information
University of California-Berkeley
Nicole B. Ellison
nellison@msu.edu
Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies, and Media
Michigan State University
Abstract
Introduction
Social Network Sites: A Definition
A History of Social Network Sites
Previous Scholarship
Overview of this Special Theme Section
Future Research
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
About the Authors
Abstract
Social network sites (SNSs) are increasingly attracting the attention of academic and
industry researchers intrigued by their affordances and reach. This special theme section of
the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication brings together scholarship on these
emergent phenomena. In this introductory article, we describe features of SNSs and
propose a comprehensive definition. We then present one perspective on the history of
such sites, discussing key changes and developments. After briefly summarizing existing
scholarship concerning SNSs, we discuss the articles in this special section and conclude
with considerations for future research.
Introduction
Since their introduction, social network sites (SNSs) such as MySpace, Facebook,
Cyworld, and Bebo have attracted millions of users, many of whom have integrated these
sites into their daily practices. As of this writing, there are hundreds of SNSs, with various
technological affordances, supporting a wide range of interests and practices. While their
key technological features are fairly consistent, the cultures that emerge around SNSs are
varied. Most sites support the maintenance of pre-existing social networks, but others help
strangers connect based on shared interests, political views, or activities. Some sites cater
to diverse audiences, while others attract people based on common language or shared
racial, sexual, religious, or nationality-based identities. Sites also vary in the extent to
which they incorporate new information and communication tools, such as mobile
connectivity, blogging, and photo/video-sharing.
Scholars from disparate fields have examined SNSs in order to understand the practices,
implications, culture, and meaning of the sites, as well as users' engagement with them.
This special theme section of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication brings
together a unique collection of articles that analyze a wide spectrum of social network sites
using various methodological techniques, theoretical traditions, and analytic approaches.
By collecting these articles in this issue, our goal is to showcase some of the
interdisciplinary scholarship around these sites.
The purpose of this introduction is to provide a conceptual, historical, and scholarly
context for the articles in this collection. We begin by defining what constitutes a social
network site and then present one perspective on the historical development of SNSs,
drawing from personal interviews and public accounts of sites and their changes over time.
Following this, we review recent scholarship on SNSs and attempt to contextualize and
highlight key works. We conclude with a description of the articles included in this special
section and suggestions for future research.
Social Network Sites: A Definition
We define social network sites as web-based services that allow individuals to (1)
construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of
other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of
connections and those made by others within the system. The nature and nomenclature of
these connections may vary from site to site.
While we use the term "social network site" to describe this phenomenon, the term "social
networking sites" also appears in public discourse, and the two terms are often used
interchangeably. We chose not to employ the term "networking" for two reasons: emphasis
and scope. "Networking" emphasizes relationship initiation, often between strangers.
While networking is possible on these sites, it is not the primary practice on many of them,
nor is it what differentiates them from other forms of computer-mediated communication
(CMC).
What makes social network sites unique is not that they allow individuals to meet
strangers, but rather that they enable users to articulate and make visible their social
networks. This can result in connections between individuals that would not otherwise be
made, but that is often not the goal, and these meetings are frequently between "latent ties"
(Haythornthwaite, 2005) who share some offline connection. On many of the large SNSs,
participants are not necessarily "networking" or looking to meet new people; instead, they
are primarily communicating with people who are already a part of their extended social
network. To emphasize this articulated social network as a critical organizing feature of
these sites, we label them "social network sites."
While SNSs have implemented a wide variety of technical features, their backbone
consists of visible profiles that display an articulated list of Friends
1
who are also users of
the system. Profiles are unique pages where one can "type oneself into being" (Sundén,
2003, p. 3). After joining an SNS, an individual is asked to fill out forms containing a
series of questions. The profile is generated using the answers to these questions, which
typically include descriptors such as age, location, interests, and an "about me" section.
Most sites also encourage users to upload a profile photo. Some sites allow users to
enhance their profiles by adding multimedia content or modifying their profile's look and
feel. Others, such as Facebook, allow users to add modules ("Applications") that enhance
their profile.
The visibility of a profile varies by site and according to user discretion. By default,
profiles on Friendster and Tribe.net are crawled by search engines, making them visible to
anyone, regardless of whether or not the viewer has an account. Alternatively, LinkedIn
controls what a viewer may see based on whether she or he has a paid account. Sites like
MySpace allow users to choose whether they want their profile to be public or "Friends
only." Facebook takes a different approach—by default, users who are part of the same
"network" can view each other's profiles, unless a profile owner has decided to deny
permission to those in their network. Structural variations around visibility and access are
one of the primary ways that SNSs differentiate themselves from each other.
After joining a social network site, users are prompted to identify others in the system with
whom they have a relationship. The label for these relationships differs depending on the
site—popular terms include "Friends," "Contacts," and "Fans." Most SNSs require bi-directional confirmation for Friendship, but some do not. These one-directional ties are
sometimes labeled as "Fans" or "Followers," but many sites call these Friends as well. The
term "Friends" can be misleading, because the connection does not necessarily mean
friendship in the everyday vernacular sense, and the reasons people connect are varied
(boyd, 2006a).
The public display of connections is a crucial component of SNSs. The Friends list
contains links to each Friend's profile, enabling viewers to traverse the network graph by
clicking through the Friends lists. On most sites, the list of Friends is visible to anyone
who is permitted to view the profile, although there are exceptions. For instance, some
MySpace users have hacked their profiles to hide the Friends display, and LinkedIn allows
users to opt out of displaying their network.
Most SNSs also provide a mechanism for users to leave messages on their Friends'
profiles. This feature typically involves leaving "comments," although sites employ various
labels for this feature. In addition, SNSs often have a private messaging feature similar to
webmail. While both private messages and comments are popular on most of the major
SNSs, they are not universally available.
Not all social network sites began as such. QQ started as a Chinese instant messaging
service, LunarStorm as a community site, Cyworld as a Korean discussion forum tool, and
Skyrock (formerly Skyblog) was a French blogging service before adding SNS features.
Classmates.com, a directory of school affiliates launched in 1995, began supporting
articulated lists of Friends after SNSs became popular. AsianAvenue, MiGente, and
BlackPlanet were early popular ethnic community sites with limited Friends functionality
before re-launching in 2005-2006 with SNS features and structure.
Beyond profiles, Friends, comments, and private messaging, SNSs vary greatly in their
features and user base. Some have photo-sharing or video-sharing capabilities; others have
built-in blogging and instant messaging technology. There are mobile-specific SNSs (e.g.,
Dodgeball), but some web-based SNSs also support limited mobile interactions (e.g.,
Facebook, MySpace, and Cyworld). Many SNSs target people from specific geographical
regions or linguistic groups, although this does not always determine the site's
constituency. Orkut, for example, was launched in the United States with an English-only
interface, but Portuguese-speaking Brazilians quickly became the dominant user group
(Kopytoff, 2004). Some sites are designed with specific ethnic, religious, sexual
orientation, political, or other identity-driven categories in mind. There are even SNSs for
dogs (Dogster) and cats (Catster), although their owners must manage their profiles.
While SNSs are often designed to be widely accessible, many attract homogeneous
populations initially, so it is not uncommon to find groups using sites to segregate
themselves by nationality, age, educational level, or other factors that typically segment
society (Hargittai, this issue), even if that was not the intention of the designers.
A History of Social Network Sites
The Early Years
According to the definition above, the first recognizable social network site launched in
1997. SixDegrees.com allowed users to create profiles, list their Friends and, beginning in
1998, surf the Friends lists. Each of these features existed in some form before SixDegrees,
of course. Profiles existed on most major dating sites and many community sites. AIM and
ICQ buddy lists supported lists of Friends, although those Friends were not visible to
others. Classmates.com allowed people to affiliate with their high school or college and
surf the network for others who were also affiliated, but users could not create profiles or
list Friends until years later. SixDegrees was the first to combine these features.
SixDegrees promoted itself as a tool to help people connect with and send messages to
others. While SixDegrees attracted millions of users, it failed to become a sustainable
business and, in 2000, the service closed. Looking back, its founder believes that
SixDegrees was simply ahead of its time (A. Weinreich, personal communication, July 11,
2007). While people were already flocking to the Internet, most did not have extended
networks of friends who were online. Early adopters complained that there was little to do
after accepting Friend requests, and most users were not interested in meeting strangers.
From 1997 to 2001, a number of community tools began supporting various combinations
of profiles and publicly articulated Friends. AsianAvenue, BlackPlanet, and MiGente
allowed users to create personal, professional, and dating profiles—users could identify
Friends on their personal profiles without seeking approval for those connections (O.
Wasow, personal communication, August 16, 2007). Likewise, shortly after its launch in
1999, LiveJournal listed one-directional connections on user pages. LiveJournal's creator
suspects that he fashioned these Friends after instant messaging buddy lists (B. Fitzpatrick,
personal communication, June 15, 2007)—on LiveJournal, people mark others as Friends
to follow their journals and manage privacy settings. The Korean virtual worlds site
Cyworld was started in 1999 and added SNS features in 2001, independent of these other
sites (see Kim & Yun, this issue). Likewise, when the Swedish web community
LunarStorm refashioned itself as an SNS in 2000, it contained Friends lists, guestbooks,
and diary pages (D. Skog, personal communication, September 24, 2007).
The next wave of SNSs began when Ryze.com was launched in 2001 to help people
leverage their business networks. Ryze's founder reports that he first introduced the site to
his friends—primarily members of the San Francisco business and technology community,
including the entrepreneurs and investors behind many future SNSs (A. Scott, personal
communication, June 14, 2007). In particular, the people behind Ryze, Tribe.net, LinkedIn,
and Friendster were tightly entwined personally and professionally. They believed that
they could support each other without competing (Festa, 2003). In the end, Ryze never
acquired mass popularity, Tribe.net grew to attract a passionate niche user base, LinkedIn
became a powerful business service, and Friendster became the most significant, if only as
"one of the biggest disappointments in Internet history" (Chafkin, 2007, p. 1).
Figure 1. Timeline of the launch dates of many major SNSs and dates when community
sites re-launched with SNS features
Like any brief history of a major phenomenon, ours is necessarily incomplete. In the
following section we discuss Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook, three key SNSs that
shaped the business, cultural, and research landscape.
The Rise (and Fall) of Friendster
Friendster launched in 2002 as a social complement to Ryze. It was designed to compete
with Match.com, a profitable online dating site (Cohen, 2003). While most dating sites
focused on introducing people to strangers with similar interests, Friendster was designed
to help friends-of-friends meet, based on the assumption that friends-of-friends would
make better romantic partners than would strangers (J. Abrams, personal communication,
March 27, 2003). Friendster gained traction among three groups of early adopters who
shaped the site—bloggers, attendees of the Burning Man arts festival, and gay men (boyd,
2004)—and grew to 300,000 users through word of mouth before traditional press
coverage began in May 2003 (O'Shea, 2003).
As Friendster's popularity surged, the site encountered technical and social difficulties
(boyd, 2006b). Friendster's servers and databases were ill-equipped to handle its rapid
growth, and the site faltered regularly, frustrating users who replaced email with
Friendster. Because organic growth had been critical to creating a coherent community, the
onslaught of new users who learned about the site from media coverage upset the cultural
balance. Furthermore, exponential growth meant a collapse in social contexts: Users had to
face their bosses and former classmates alongside their close friends. To complicate
matters, Friendster began restricting the activities of its most passionate users.
The initial design of Friendster restricted users from viewing profiles of people who were
more than four degrees away (friends-of-friends-of-friends-of-friends). In order to view
additional profiles, users began adding acquaintances and interesting-looking strangers to
expand their reach. Some began massively collecting Friends, an activity that was
implicitly encouraged through a "most popular" feature. The ultimate collectors were fake
profiles representing iconic fictional characters: celebrities, concepts, and other such
entities. These "Fakesters" outraged the company, who banished fake profiles and
eliminated the "most popular" feature (boyd, in press-b). While few people actually created
Fakesters, many more enjoyed surfing Fakesters for entertainment or using functional
Fakesters (e.g., "Brown University") to find people they knew.
The active deletion of Fakesters (and genuine users who chose non-realistic photos)
signaled to some that the company did not share users' interests. Many early adopters left
because of the combination of technical difficulties, social collisions, and a rupture of trust
between users and the site (boyd, 2006b). However, at the same time that it was fading in
the U.S., its popularity skyrocketed in the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia
(Goldberg, 2007).
SNSs Hit the Mainstream
From 2003 onward, many new SNSs were launched, prompting social software analyst
Clay Shirky (2003) to coin the term YASNS: "Yet Another Social Networking Service."
Most took the form of profile-centric sites, trying to replicate the early success of
Friendster or target specific demographics. While socially-organized SNSs solicit broad
audiences, professional sites such as LinkedIn, Visible Path, and Xing (formerly openBC)
focus on business people. "Passion-centric" SNSs like Dogster (T. Rheingold, personal
communication, August 2, 2007) help strangers connect based on shared interests. Care2
helps activists meet, Couchsurfing connects travelers to people with couches, and
MyChurch joins Christian churches and their members. Furthermore, as the social media
and user-generated content phenomena grew, websites focused on media sharing began
implementing SNS features and becoming SNSs themselves. Examples include Flickr
(photo sharing), Last.FM (music listening habits), and YouTube (video sharing).
With the plethora of venture-backed startups launching in Silicon Valley, few people paid
attention to SNSs that gained popularity elsewhere, even those built by major corporations.
For example, Google's Orkut failed to build a sustainable U.S. user base, but a "Brazilian
invasion" (Fragoso, 2006) made Orkut the national SNS of Brazil. Microsoft's Windows
Live Spaces (a.k.a. MSN Spaces) also launched to lukewarm U.S. reception but became
extremely popular elsewhere.
Few analysts or journalists noticed when MySpace launched in Santa Monica, California,
hundreds of miles from Silicon Valley. MySpace was begun in 2003 to compete with sites
like Friendster, Xanga, and AsianAvenue, according to co-founder Tom Anderson
(personal communication, August 2, 2007); the founders wanted to attract estranged
Friendster users (T. Anderson, personal communication, February 2, 2006). After rumors
emerged that Friendster would adopt a fee-based system, users posted Friendster messages
encouraging people to join alternate SNSs, including Tribe.net and MySpace (T. Anderson,
personal communication, August 2, 2007). Because of this, MySpace was able to grow
rapidly by capitalizing on Friendster's alienation of its early adopters. One particularly
notable group that encouraged others to switch were indie-rock bands who were expelled
from Friendster for failing to comply with profile regulations.
While MySpace was not launched with bands in mind, they were welcomed. Indie-rock
bands from the Los Angeles region began creating profiles, and local promoters used
MySpace to advertise VIP passes for popular clubs. Intrigued, MySpace contacted local
musicians to see how they could support them (T. Anderson, personal communication,
September 28, 2006). Bands were not the sole source of MySpace growth, but the
symbiotic relationship between bands and fans helped MySpace expand beyond former
Friendster users. The bands-and-fans dynamic was mutually beneficial: Bands wanted to
be able to contact fans, while fans desired attention from their favorite bands and used
Friend connections to signal identity and affiliation.
Futhermore, MySpace differentiated itself by regularly adding features based on user
demand (boyd, 2006b) and by allowing users to personalize their pages. This "feature"
emerged because MySpace did not restrict users from adding HTML into the forms that
framed their profiles; a copy/paste code culture emerged on the web to support users in
generating unique MySpace backgrounds and layouts (Perkel, in press).
Teenagers began joining MySpace en masse in 2004. Unlike older users, most teens were
never on Friendster—some joined because they wanted to connect with their favorite
bands; others were introduced to the site through older family members. As teens began
signing up, they encouraged their friends to join. Rather than rejecting underage users,
MySpace changed its user policy to allow minors. As the site grew, three distinct
populations began to form: musicians/artists, teenagers, and the post-college urban social
crowd. By and large, the latter two groups did not interact with one another except through
bands. Because of the lack of mainstream press coverage during 2004, few others noticed
the site's growing popularity.
Then, in July 2005, News Corporation purchased MySpace for $580 million (BBC, 2005),
attracting massive media attention. Afterwards, safety issues plagued MySpace. The site
was implicated in a series of sexual interactions between adults and minors, prompting
legal action (Consumer Affairs, 2006). A moral panic concerning sexual predators quickly
spread (Bahney, 2006), although research suggests that the concerns were exaggerated.
2
A Global Phenomenon
While MySpace attracted the majority of media attention in the U.S. and abroad, SNSs
were proliferating and growing in popularity worldwide. Friendster gained traction in the
Pacific Islands, Orkut became the premier SNS in Brazil before growing rapidly in India
(Madhavan, 2007), Mixi attained widespread adoption in Japan, LunarStorm took off in
Sweden, Dutch users embraced Hyves, Grono captured Poland, Hi5 was adopted in smaller
countries in Latin America, South America, and Europe, and Bebo became very popular in
the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia. Additionally, previously popular
communication and community services began implementing SNS features. The Chinese
QQ instant messaging service instantly became the largest SNS worldwide when it added
profiles and made friends visible (McLeod, 2006), while the forum tool Cyworld cornered
the Korean market by introducing homepages and buddies (Ewers, 2006).
Blogging services with complete SNS features also became popular. In the U.S., blogging
tools with SNS features, such as Xanga, LiveJournal, and Vox, attracted broad audiences.
Skyrock reigns in France, and Windows Live Spaces dominates numerous markets
worldwide, including in Mexico, Italy, and Spain. Although SNSs like QQ, Orkut, and
Live Spaces are just as large as, if not larger than, MySpace, they receive little coverage in
U.S. and English-speaking media, making it difficult to track their trajectories.
Expanding Niche Communities
Alongside these open services, other SNSs launched to support niche demographics before
expanding to a broader audience. Unlike previous SNSs, Facebook was designed to
support distinct college networks only. Facebook began in early 2004 as a Harvard-only
SNS (Cassidy, 2006). To join, a user had to have a harvard.edu email address. As
Facebook began supporting other schools, those users were also required to have university
email addresses associated with those institutions, a requirement that kept the site
relatively closed and contributed to users' perceptions of the site as an intimate, private
community.
Beginning in September 2005, Facebook expanded to include high school students,
professionals inside corporate networks, and, eventually, everyone. The change to open
signup did not mean that new users could easily access users in closed networks—gaining
access to corporate networks still required the appropriate .com address, while gaining
access to high school networks required administrator approval. (As of this writing, only
membership in regional networks requires no permission.) Unlike other SNSs, Facebook
users are unable to make their full profiles public to all users. Another feature that
differentiates Facebook is the ability for outside developers to build "Applications" which
allow users to personalize their profiles and perform other tasks, such as compare movie
preferences and chart travel histories.
While most SNSs focus on growing broadly and exponentially, others explicitly seek
narrower audiences. Some, like aSmallWorld and BeautifulPeople, intentionally restrict
access to appear selective and elite. Others—activity-centered sites like Couchsurfing,
identity-driven sites like BlackPlanet, and affiliation-focused sites like MyChurch—are
limited by their target demographic and thus tend to be smaller. Finally, anyone who
wishes to create a niche social network site can do so on Ning, a platform and hosting
service that encourages users to create their own SNSs.
Currently, there are no reliable data regarding how many people use SNSs, although
marketing research indicates that SNSs are growing in popularity worldwide (comScore,
2007). This growth has prompted many corporations to invest time and money in creating,
purchasing, promoting, and advertising SNSs. At the same time, other companies are
blocking their employees from accessing the sites. Additionally, the U.S. military banned
soldiers from accessing MySpace (Frosch, 2007) and the Canadian government prohibited
employees from Facebook (Benzie, 2007), while the U.S. Congress has proposed
legislation to ban youth from accessing SNSs in schools and libraries (H.R. 5319, 2006; S.
49, 2007).
The rise of SNSs indicates a shift in the organization of online communities. While
websites dedicated to communities of interest still exist and prosper, SNSs are primarily
organized around people, not interests. Early public online communities such as Usenet
and public discussion forums were structured by topics or according to topical hierarchies,
but social network sites are structured as personal (or "egocentric") networks, with the
individual at the center of their own community. This more accurately mirrors unmediated
social structures, where "the world is composed of networks, not groups" (Wellman, 1988,
p. 37). The introduction of SNS features has introduced a new organizational framework
for online communities, and with it, a vibrant new research context.
Previous Scholarship
Scholarship concerning SNSs is emerging from diverse disciplinary and methodological
traditions, addresses a range of topics, and builds on a large body of CMC research. The
goal of this section is to survey research that is directly concerned with social network
sites, and in so doing, to set the stage for the articles in this special issue. To date, the bulk
of SNS research has focused on impression management and friendship performance,
networks and network structure, online/offline connections, and privacy issues.
Impression Management and Friendship Performance
Like other online contexts in which individuals are consciously able to construct an online
representation of self—such as online dating profiles and MUDS—SNSs constitute an
important research context for scholars investigating processes of impression management,
self-presentation, and friendship performance. In one of the earliest academic articles on
SNSs, boyd (2004) examined Friendster as a locus of publicly articulated social networks
that allowed users to negotiate presentations of self and connect with others. Donath and
boyd (2004) extended this to suggest that "public displays of connection" serve as
important identity signals that help people navigate the networked social world, in that an
extended network may serve to validate identity information presented in profiles.
While most sites encourage users to construct accurate representations of themselves,
participants do this to varying degrees. Marwick (2005) found that users on three different
SNSs had complex strategies for negotiating the rigidity of a prescribed "authentic" profile,
while boyd (in press-b) examined the phenomenon of "Fakesters" and the ways in which
profiles could never be "real." The extent to which portraits are authentic or playful varies
across sites; both social and technological forces shape user practices. Skog (2005) found
that the status feature on LunarStorm strongly influenced how people behaved and what
they choose to reveal—profiles there indicate one's status as measured by activity (e.g.,
sending messages) and indicators of authenticity (e.g., using a "real" photo instead of a
drawing).
Another aspect of self-presentation is the articulation of friendship links, which serve as
identity markers for the profile owner. Impression management is one of the reasons given
by Friendster users for choosing particular friends (Donath & boyd, 2004). Recognizing
this, Zinman and Donath (2007) noted that MySpace spammers leverage people's
willingness to connect to interesting people to find targets for their spam.
In their examination of LiveJournal "friendship," Fono and Raynes-Goldie (2006)
described users' understandings regarding public displays of connections and how the
Friending function can operate as a catalyst for social drama. In listing user motivations for
Friending, boyd (2006a) points out that "Friends" on SNSs are not the same as "friends" in
the everyday sense; instead, Friends provide context by offering users an imagined
audience to guide behavioral norms. Other work in this area has examined the use of
Friendster Testimonials as self-presentational devices (boyd & Heer, 2006) and the extent
to which the attractiveness of one's Friends (as indicated by Facebook's "Wall" feature)
impacts impression formation (Walther, Van Der Heide, Kim, & Westerman, in press).
Networks and Network Structure
Social network sites also provide rich sources of naturalistic behavioral data. Profile and
linkage data from SNSs can be gathered either through the use of automated collection
techniques or through datasets provided directly from the company, enabling network
analysis researchers to explore large-scale patterns of friending, usage, and other visible
indicators (Hogan, in press), and continuing an analysis trend that started with
examinations of blogs and other websites. For instance, Golder, Wilkinson, and Huberman
(2007) examined an anonymized dataset consisting of 362 million messages exchanged by
over four million Facebook users for insight into Friending and messaging activities.
Lampe, Ellison, and Steinfield (2007) explored the relationship between profile elements
and number of Facebook friends, finding that profile fields that reduce transaction costs
and are harder to falsify are most likely to be associated with larger number of friendship
links. These kinds of data also lend themselves well to analysis through network
visualization (Adamic, Buyukkokten, & Adar, 2003; Heer & boyd, 2005; Paolillo &
Wright, 2005).
SNS researchers have also studied the network structure of Friendship. Analyzing the roles
people played in the growth of Flickr and Yahoo! 360's networks, Kumar, Novak, and
Tomkins (2006) argued that there are passive members, inviters, and linkers "who fully
participate in the social evolution of the network" (p. 1). Scholarship concerning
LiveJournal's network has included a Friendship classification scheme (Hsu, Lancaster,
Paradesi, & Weniger, 2007), an analysis of the role of language in the topology of
Friendship (Herring et al., 2007), research into the importance of geography in Friending
(Liben-Nowell, Novak, Kumar, Raghavan, and Tomkins, 2005), and studies on what
motivates people to join particular communities (Backstrom, Huttenlocher, Kleinberg, &
Lan, 2006). Based on Orkut data, Spertus, Sahami, and Buyukkokten (2005) identified a
topology of users through their membership in certain communities; they suggest that sites
can use this to recommend additional communities of interest to users. Finally, Liu, Maes,
and Davenport (2006) argued that Friend connections are not the only network structure
worth investigating. They examined the ways in which the performance of tastes (favorite
music, books, film, etc.) constitutes an alternate network structure, which they call a "taste
fabric."
Bridging Online and Offline Social Networks
Although exceptions exist, the available research suggests that most SNSs primarily
support pre-existing social relations. Ellison, Steinfield, and Lampe (2007) suggest that
Facebook is used to maintain existing offline relationships or solidify offline connections,
as opposed to meeting new people. These relationships may be weak ties, but typically
there is some common offline element among individuals who friend one another, such as
a shared class at school. This is one of the chief dimensions that differentiate SNSs from
earlier forms of public CMC such as newsgroups (Ellison et al., 2007). Research in this
vein has investigated how online interactions interface with offline ones. For instance,
Lampe, Ellison, and Steinfield (2006) found that Facebook users engage in "searching" for
people with whom they have an offline connection more than they "browse" for complete
strangers to meet. Likewise, Pew research found that 91% of U.S. teens who use SNSs do
so to connect with friends (Lenhart & Madden, 2007).
Given that SNSs enable individuals to connect with one another, it is not surprising that
they have become deeply embedded in user's lives. In Korea, Cyworld has become an
integral part of everyday life—Choi (2006) found that 85% of that study's respondents
"listed the maintenance and reinforcement of pre-existing social networks as their main
motive for Cyworld use" (p. 181). Likewise, boyd (2008) argues that MySpace and
Facebook enable U.S. youth to socialize with their friends even when they are unable to
gather in unmediated situations; she argues that SNSs are "networked publics" that support
sociability, just as unmediated public spaces do.
Privacy
Popular press coverage of SNSs has emphasized potential privacy concerns, primarily
concerning the safety of younger users (George, 2006; Kornblum & Marklein, 2006).
Researchers have investigated the potential threats to privacy associated with SNSs. In one
of the first academic studies of privacy and SNSs, Gross and Acquisti (2005) analyzed
4,000 Carnegie Mellon University Facebook profiles and outlined the potential threats to
privacy contained in the personal information included on the site by students, such as the
potential ability to reconstruct users’ social security numbers using information often
found in profiles, such as hometown and date of birth.
Acquisti and Gross (2006) argue that there is often a disconnect between students' desire to
protect privacy and their behaviors, a theme that is also explored in Stutzman's (2006)
survey of Facebook users and Barnes's (2006) description of the "privacy paradox" that
occurs when teens are not aware of the public nature of the Internet. In analyzing trust on
social network sites, Dwyer, Hiltz, and Passerini (2007) argued that trust and usage goals
may affect what people are willing to share—Facebook users expressed greater trust in
Facebook than MySpace users did in MySpace and thus were more willing to share
information on the site.
In another study examining security issues and SNSs, Jagatic, Johnson, Jakobsson, and
Menczer (2007) used freely accessible profile data from SNSs to craft a "phishing" scheme
that appeared to originate from a friend on the network; their targets were much more
likely to give away information to this "friend" than to a perceived stranger. Survey data
offer a more optimistic perspective on the issue, suggesting that teens are aware of
potential privacy threats online and that many are proactive about taking steps to minimize
certain potential risks. Pew found that 55% of online teens have profiles, 66% of whom
report that their profile is not visible to all Internet users (Lenhart & Madden, 2007). Of the
teens with completely open profiles, 46% reported including at least some false
information.
Privacy is also implicated in users' ability to control impressions and manage social
contexts. Boyd (in press-a) asserted that Facebook's introduction of the "News Feed"
feature disrupted students' sense of control, even though data exposed through the feed
were previously accessible. Preibusch, Hoser, Gürses, and Berendt (2007) argued that the
privacy options offered by SNSs do not provide users with the flexibility they need to
handle conflicts with Friends who have different conceptions of privacy; they suggest a
framework for privacy in SNSs that they believe would help resolve these conflicts.
SNSs are also challenging legal conceptions of privacy. Hodge (2006) argued that the
fourth amendment to the U.S. Constitution and legal decisions concerning privacy are not
equipped to address social network sites. For example, do police officers have the right to
access content posted to Facebook without a warrant? The legality of this hinges on users'
expectation of privacy and whether or not Facebook profiles are considered public or
private.
Other Research
In addition to the themes identified above, a growing body of scholarship addresses other
aspects of SNSs, their users, and the practices they enable. For example, scholarship on the
ways in which race and ethnicity (Byrne, in press; Gajjala, 2007), religion (Nyland &
Near, 2007), gender (Geidner, Flook, & Bell, 2007; Hjorth & Kim, 2005), and sexuality
connect to, are affected by, and are enacted in social network sites raise interesting
questions about how identity is shaped within these sites. Fragoso (2006) examined the
role of national identity in SNS use through an investigation into the "Brazilian invasion"
of Orkut and the resulting culture clash between Brazilians and Americans on the site.
Other scholars are beginning to do cross-cultural comparisons of SNS use—Hjorth and
Yuji (in press) compare Japanese usage of Mixi and Korean usage of Cyworld, while
Herring et al. (2007) examine the practices of users who bridge different languages on
LiveJournal—but more work in this area is needed.
Scholars are documenting the implications of SNS use with respect to schools, universities,
and libraries. For example, scholarship has examined how students feel about having
professors on Facebook (Hewitt & Forte, 2006) and how faculty participation affects
student-professor relations (Mazer, Murphy, & Simonds, 2007). Charnigo and Barnett-Ellis (2007) found that librarians are overwhelmingly aware of Facebook and are against
proposed U.S. legislation that would ban minors from accessing SNSs at libraries, but that
most see SNSs as outside the purview of librarianship. Finally, challenging the view that
there is nothing educational about SNSs, Perkel (in press) analyzed copy/paste practices on
MySpace as a form of literacy involving social and technical skills.
This overview is not comprehensive due to space limitations and because much work on
SNSs is still in the process of being published. Additionally, we have not included
literature in languages other than English (e.g., Recuero, 2005 on social capital and Orkut),
due to our own linguistic limitations.
Overview of This Special Theme Section
The articles in this section address a variety of social network sites—BlackPlanet,
Cyworld, Dodgeball, Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube—from multiple theoretical and
methodological angles, building on previous studies of SNSs and broader theoretical
traditions within CMC research, including relationship maintenance and issues of identity,
performance, privacy, self-presentation, and civic engagement.
These pieces collectively provide insight into some of the ways in which online and offline
experiences are deeply entwined. Using a relational dialectics approach, Kyung-Hee Kim
and Haejin Yun analyze how Cyworld supports both interpersonal relations and self-relation for Korean users. They trace the subtle ways in which deeply engrained cultural
beliefs and activities are integrated into online communication and behaviors on
Cyworld—the online context reinforces certain aspects of users' cultural expectations
about relationship maintenance (e.g., the concept of reciprocity), while the unique
affordances of Cyworld enable participants to overcome offline constraints. Dara Byrne
uses content analysis to examine civic engagement in forums on BlackPlanet and finds that
online discussions are still plagued with the problems offline activists have long
encountered. Drawing on interview and observation data, Lee Humphreys investigates
early adopters' practices involving Dodgeball, a mobile social network service. She looks
at the ways in which networked communication is reshaping offline social geography.
Other articles in this collection illustrate how innovative research methods can elucidate
patterns of behavior that would be indistinguishable otherwise. For instance, Hugo Liu
examines participants' performance of tastes and interests by analyzing and modeling the
preferences listed on over 127,000 MySpace profiles, resulting in unique "taste maps."
Likewise, through survey data collected at a college with diverse students in the U.S.,
Eszter Hargittai illuminates usage patterns that would otherwise be masked. She finds
that adoption of particular services correlates with individuals' race and parental education
level.
Existing theory is deployed, challenged, and extended by the approaches adopted in the
articles in this section. Judith Donath extends signaling theory to explain different tactics
SNS users adopt to reduce social costs while managing trust and identity. She argues that
the construction and maintenance of relations on SNSs is akin to "social grooming."
Patricia Lange complicates traditional dichotomies between "public" and "private" by
analyzing how YouTube participants blur these lines in their video-sharing practices.
The articles in this collection highlight the significance of social network sites in the lives
of users and as a topic of research. Collectively, they show how networked practices
mirror, support, and alter known everyday practices, especially with respect to how people
present (and hide) aspects of themselves and connect with others. The fact that
participation on social network sites leaves online traces offers unprecedented
opportunities for researchers. The scholarship in this special theme section takes advantage
of this affordance, resulting in work that helps explain practices online and offline, as well
as those that blend the two environments.
Future Research
The work described above and included in this special theme section contributes to an on-going dialogue about the importance of social network sites, both for practitioners and
researchers. Vast, uncharted waters still remain to be explored. Methodologically, SNS
researchers' ability to make causal claims is limited by a lack of experimental or
longitudinal studies. Although the situation is rapidly changing, scholars still have a
limited understanding of who is and who is not using these sites, why, and for what
purposes, especially outside the U.S. Such questions will require large-scale quantitative
and qualitative research. Richer, ethnographic research on populations more difficult to
access (including non-users) would further aid scholars' ability to understand the long-term
implications of these tools. We hope that the work described here and included in this
collection will help build a foundation for future investigations of these and other
important issues surrounding social network sites.
Acknowledgments
We are grateful to the external reviewers who volunteered their time and expertise to
review papers and contribute valuable feedback and to those practitioners and analysts who
provided information to help shape the history section. Thank you also to Susan Herring,
whose patience and support appeared infinite.
Notes
1.  To differentiate the articulated list of Friends on SNSs from the colloquial term
"friends," we capitalize the former.
2.  Although one out of seven teenagers received unwanted sexual solicitations online,
only 9% came from people over the age of 25 (Wolak, Mitchell, & Finkelhor,
2006). Research suggests that popular narratives around sexual predators on SNSs
are misleading—cases of unsuspecting teens being lured by sexual predators are
rare (Finkelhor, Ybarra, Lenhart, boyd, & Lordan, 2007). Furthermore, only .08%
of students surveyed by the National School Boards Association (2007) met
someone in person from an online encounter without permission from a parent.
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About the Authors
danah boyd is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Information at the University of
California-Berkeley and a Fellow at the Harvard University Berkman Center for Internet
and Society. Her research focuses on how people negotiate mediated contexts like social
network sites for sociable purposes.
Address: 102 South Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720-4600, USA
Nicole B. Ellison is an assistant professor in the Department of Telecommunication,
Information Studies, and Media at Michigan State University. Her research explores issues
of self-presentation, relationship development, and identity in online environments such as
weblogs, online dating sites, and social network sites.
Address: 403 Communication Arts and Sciences, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA