technoculture314-09

Social Networks Sites focus on building online communities of people who share interests or activities. The statistic data collected from facebook user history suggests a significant increasing trend of people who interacting with those social networks. You may not deny the fact of those enormous amount of users those sites have created, however, the only reason such site has considered a boon for its personal users is because people are able to get in touch with old friends and family, the major benefit of using it is to gain or reinforce relationships. Second, those web-base sites provide a variety of ways for users to interact, such as e-mail and instant messaging services, the huge user network allows people to easily get in touch with others even overseas. Once one of my friends was trying to contact me and he did not bring his cell phone with him that day, MSN is the first place he was looking for me, the second place where he found me is facebook. The alternative functions of SNSs suggest the potential power it owns as a new transmission medium, like the arrival of electronic mailing has largely replaced its older traditional form of handwriting letters. The very high frequency and regularity of SNSs are being used everyday and its immense participators allow SNSs able to substitute for many other communication medium. More, the strong and weak ties of relationship SNSs helps to build makes social supernets viable, it expands the scale and scope of the network, and this kind of communication medium appears to be more suitable or could be as a recover due to the individuality of modern society.

On the other hand, the bane side of SNSs includes low privacy such as everything you write is clearly visible for the world to see. And the authenticity like whether we could trust the identity of strangers we meet on SNSs or not.