6.18 Social Network

Social network - a platform, online service or website designed to build, display and organize social relationships, the visualization of which are social graphs.

Features

Characteristic features of a social network are:

• creation of personal profiles (public or semi-public), in which it is often required to indicate real personal data and other information about yourself (place of study and work, hobbies, life principles, etc.);
• providing almost a full range of opportunities for the exchange of information (posting photos, video recordings, posting text recordings (in the mode of blogs or microblogs), organizing subject communities, exchanging personal messages, etc.);
• the ability to set and maintain a list of other users with whom he has some relationships (for example, friendship, kinship, business and work relationships, etc.)

Therefore, it is wrong to consider such services as LiveJournal (blog site), foursquare , Twitter (microblogging sites) as social networks, as they have a rather narrow range of possibilities. ^{[ source not specified 329 days ]} .

Subspecies

In addition to the listed social networks, there are the following types of resources in the Web 2.0 format:

• Social Bookmarks (English social bookmarking ). Some websites allow users to make a list of bookmarks or popular websites available to others. Such sites can also be used to search for users with common interests. Example: Delicious.
• Social catalogs (English social catalogs ) resemble social bookmarks, but are oriented towards academic use, allowing users to work with quotations from scientific articles. Examples: Academic Search Premier, LexisNexis Academic University, CiteULike, Connotea.
• Social libraries are applications that allow visitors to leave links to their collections, books, audio recordings, etc., available to others. Support is provided for a system of recommendations, ratings, etc. Examples: discogs.com, IMDb.com.
• Social media storages are services for sharing media files. They can be classified by the type of files hosted on these servers.
• Specialized social networks. They unite people according to certain criteria (for example, age, gender, religion, certain hobbies, etc.).
  • Professional social networks are created for communication on professional topics, exchange of experience and information, search and job offers, development of business connections. Examples: LinkedIn, My Circle, Professionals.ru ^[1] .
  • Corporate social networks solve the tasks of organizing and supporting the company's activities ^[2] .
• Document Collaboration Services
• Geosocial networks allow you to build social ties based on the geographic location of the user. It uses various geolocation tools (for example, GPS or hybrid systems such as AlterGeo technology), which make it possible to determine the current location of a particular user and correlate its position in space with the location of various places and people around.

Story

Social networks began to gain popularity in the Internet in 1995, with the advent of the American portal Classmates.com (“Classmates” are its Russian counterpart). The project turned out to be very successful, which in the next few years provoked the emergence of more than a dozen similar services. But the official beginning of the social networking boom is considered to be 2003–2004, when LinkedIn, MySpace and Facebook were launched.

In Russia

The fashion on social networks came to Russia two years later - in 2006, with the advent of Odnoklassniki and VKontakte .

Advertising in social networks

Social networks are a powerful tool for marketing research, because users voluntarily publish information about themselves, their views, interests, preferences, and so on. Because of this, advertisers can very clearly determine which particular users will be interested in their ad, and send their advertisements to specific users, depending on the information in their profiles (age, gender, place of residence, etc.). This type of advertising is called targeted ( Target ).

The market volume of advertising in social networks is growing steadily. In 2007, according to analyst firm eMarketer, it reached $ 1.225 billion. In preparing the report, eMarketer experts took into account all types of advertising placed on social networks, including media, contextual and video advertising, as well as the costs of marketing projects in which marketers create profiles for their products and brands in social networks. In addition, forecasts for the first time take into account the costs of creating widgets and applications. In 2011, social media revenues from advertising exceeded $ 5 billion ^[3] .

Another way to attract customers through social networks is the creation of social networks by companies. Such communities allow you to convey new information to users who are most likely interested in the products or services of the company.

The dangers of social networks

Many people do not understand that the information posted by them on social networks can be found and used by anyone, not necessarily with good intentions. Information about the participants of social networks can be found by their employers, relatives, debt collectors, criminals, and so on. Bailiffs sometimes use social networks to find defaulters or to get information about their property. ^[four]

There is a known case of manifestation of psychosomatic disorders on the basis of dependence on communication in social networks - in Belgrade, user Snezhana Pavlović got into a psychiatric clinic after her note on the social network Facebook did not arouse interest among her friends. Doctors of the clinic called this case “Snezhana syndrome”, explaining the patient's behavior as ordinary stress from dissatisfaction with the social need of an individual in the modern world ^[5] .

Some employers prohibit the use of social networks - not only for the sake of economy, but also to prevent the leakage of information.

D. Boyd, on the basis of surveys in 16 states of the USA, concluded that there were two main “fears” caused by social networks: sexual harassment and confidentiality of information. Content analysis of the periodical press in Denmark allowed M. Larsen to compile a list of the most frequently mentioned problems in connection with social networks, which include: sexual abuse and pedophilia, intimidation and harassment, threats and violence, the dissemination of nationalist ideas. During the online survey of German and Austrian students, K. Fuchs received the following list of risks: data confidentiality, spamming, the possibility of losing personal information, creating a negative image, Internet addiction. S.V. Bondarenko, based on the study of virtual network communities in the south of Russia, concluded that the following forms of manifestation of deviant behavior are present: hacking, violation of secrecy, defamation, cyberterrorism, computer pedophilia. A survey conducted on the portal of the HSE showed that, according to respondents, the networks “tighten” and take too much time, crowd out real communication, provide “redundant communication and information.” “The issues of confidentiality,” the report mentions, “worry users of social networks to a lesser extent.” Basically, these fears are connected with the easy availability of contact information for spammers, and not with the work of special services ” ^[6] . The work Autopayesis of social networks in the Internet space illustrated how social networks distribute, integrate and set the framework of psychological recursions; they spend the psyche modeled code by transferring an increasing number of elements of private life to the universal total field of interactions .