Social networks like Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter are immensely popular; they are a phenomenon of the digital age. Previous to Facebook, prestigious universities, mainly Ivy League, distributed paper “face books” that contained photographs and information on classmates to incoming freshmen [2]. A common known name, Marc Zuckerberg, created Facebook out of his Harvard university dorm room. The story of his creation is seen in the film “The Social Network”. Social Networks work by representing social interactions and the ways people connect. They are a very old mechanism for distant interactions among people. People who partake in social networking have the ability to follow the lives of friends, acquaintances, and families [1]. Some people refer to certain social networks like Facebook and Myspace as “new societies”. People sit at their computers for hours upon hours searching for people they know over the web to “friend”. The social networking society is one that people of all ages are part of. Social networking is still spreading rapidly as new ones are created and new features added.
[1] Huberman, Bernardo A./Romero, Daniel M./Wu, Fang: Social networks that matter: Twitter under the microscope. First Monday, Volume 14, Number 1-5, January 2009. http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/rt/printerFriendly/2317/2063.
[2] Westlake E. J.: Facebook: Friend Me if You Facebook. Generation Y and Performative Surveillance. TDR, Winter 2008, Vol. 52, No. 4 (T200), pp. 21-40.
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