How Do Social Networks "work"

Love them or hate them, online social networks are one of the most popular ways in which people interact, and one of the most powerful networking tools available today. In their paper "Social Networks That Matter: Twitter Under The Microscope", Bernardo A. Huberman, Daniel M. Romero, and Fang Wu state that a social network is a network "of all the people with whom one shares a social relationship (Huberman, Romero and Wu, Page 2). Taking into account that having a social relationship with someone doesn't necessarily mean constant interaction with them, this is a very accurate, but still very basic idea of what social networks have become.

Facebook is arguably the largest and best known social network in the world today, and has remained so due to its constant innovation and ability to connect people to other people both within their specific community and the world in general. Going beyond the basic communication available with blogs, Facebook added features like "messaging, poking and News Feed" (Westlake, Page 26) to provide a larger array of methods with which people can interact with each other. This innovation provides a way of keeping existing users satisfied while at the same time bringing in new and younger users, thus keeping the network ever growing.

With so many people interacting in so many ways all the time, social networks of today have become more than a simple forum where people can exchange thoughts, evolving into an actual community. Like all physical communities, online social networks require "a set of rules or a social contract" so that order can be maintained (Snyder, Carpenter and Slauson, Page 4). With so many people committed to coexisting peacefully, social networks are able to achieve a certain degree of sustainability, as it is the users themselves who stop the community from descending into chaos and anarchy.

As the defining medium of the 21st century, social networks help people reconnect with old friends, stay connected to current ones, and most of all, interact with billions of people, all without leaving the comfort of their own homes. The innovation of the social networking sites themselves, combined with online codes of conduct and a seemingly endless supply of new users allows sites like Facebook, Myspace and Twitter to constantly evolve and remain current.




Huberman, B. A., Romero, D. M., & Wu, F. (2008, December 5). Social networks that matter: Twitter under the microscope. Social Computing Laboratory, 1-9. Retrieved from http://www.hpl.hp.com/ research/scl/papers/twitter/twitter.pdf

Snyder, J., Carpenter, D., & Slauson, G. J. (2007, January 2). MySpace.com - A social networking site and social contract theory. Information Systems Education Journal, 5(2), 1-11. Retrieved from http://isedj.org/5/2/

Westlake, E. J. (2008, Winter). Friend me if you Facebook. The Drama Review, 52(4), 21-40.