Aspects of Social Network Sites
Tuesday, September 1, 2009 by chosen
Social Network Sites have made the line of being a ‘friend’ vague through sites such as My Space and Facebook and others.
Social Network Sites encourage it’s users to interact with other ‘friends’ column could be considered a real friend of the user. The mention of strong and weak ties in the reading shows how vague the definition ‘friend’ is on Social Network Sites. The definition ‘friend’ in the offline world refers to “a person whom one knows well and likes” (Collins dictionary, 2003). The emphasis should be on ‘knows well’ as friends are people who can be trusted upon. This can hardly apply for some of the people in the friends list of Social Network Sites.
But the weak ties on Social Network Sites can be used for expanding one’s opportunity or knowledge. Just as Luke mentioned weak ties can be useful when needing things done and you have met previously. Social Network Sites allow users the opportunity to maintain these weak ties. Social Network Sites however do have a weakness from preventing anonymity and keeping private things private. This problem of anonymity and privacy has been portrayed clearly in the show “Gossip Girl”. The show is named after a Social Network Site that everyone contributes secrets about others, to an anonymous user who puts these private issues on the site, causing problems for the offline lives of the characters.
The most popular Korean Social Network Site “Cyworld” has however taken advantage of a ‘resident registration number’ given to all Koreans who hold a Korean passport. This number is a code that allows the government to identify the person. This number is needed to become a member of Cyworld, which eliminates the possibility of fraud to a certain degree in this Social Network site. This site like others is a self representation of the user, with a little more control over privacy. The site allows it’s users to make anything private, public from just one photo to multiple to diaries.
e.g this is an image of someone's cyworld page i got off google
Social Network Sites encourage it’s users to interact with other ‘friends’ column could be considered a real friend of the user. The mention of strong and weak ties in the reading shows how vague the definition ‘friend’ is on Social Network Sites. The definition ‘friend’ in the offline world refers to “a person whom one knows well and likes” (Collins dictionary, 2003). The emphasis should be on ‘knows well’ as friends are people who can be trusted upon. This can hardly apply for some of the people in the friends list of Social Network Sites.
But the weak ties on Social Network Sites can be used for expanding one’s opportunity or knowledge. Just as Luke mentioned weak ties can be useful when needing things done and you have met previously. Social Network Sites allow users the opportunity to maintain these weak ties. Social Network Sites however do have a weakness from preventing anonymity and keeping private things private. This problem of anonymity and privacy has been portrayed clearly in the show “Gossip Girl”. The show is named after a Social Network Site that everyone contributes secrets about others, to an anonymous user who puts these private issues on the site, causing problems for the offline lives of the characters.
The most popular Korean Social Network Site “Cyworld” has however taken advantage of a ‘resident registration number’ given to all Koreans who hold a Korean passport. This number is a code that allows the government to identify the person. This number is needed to become a member of Cyworld, which eliminates the possibility of fraud to a certain degree in this Social Network site. This site like others is a self representation of the user, with a little more control over privacy. The site allows it’s users to make anything private, public from just one photo to multiple to diaries.
e.g this is an image of someone's cyworld page i got off google