July 7, 2009

Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship

Annotation

In this article danah boyd and Nicole Ellison, both leading social media researchers, describe the origins and implications of what they call “social network sites.” From their perspective, SNSs are fundamentally distinct from other forms of online community in that they tend to be organized around personalities rather than topics, like usenet groups might have been. Additionally, they recognize that SNSs generally support the maintenance of extended offline social networks rather than the formation of strong, new relationships. They see the foundation of these sites as a profile page with a display of “an articulated list of ‘Friends.’” SNSs also often include a common set of features that help create community, including messaging, media sharing, blogging, and calendars but one way sites differentiate themselves is through different levels of privacy of ones profile. The notion of community became so popular that some services integrated “social networking” into themselves rather than the other way around (e.g., YouTube, Flickr.)

Boyd and Ellison see four primary areas of current research on SNSs including, impression management, network structure, online/offline connections, and privacy issues. They then mention other areas of potential research around SNSs, finally including the area which is of particular interest to me, the educational their explicit educational potential. They cite Dan Perkel’s “Copy and Paste Literacy: Literacy Practices in the Production of a MySpace Profile - An Overview” as “challenging the view that there is nothing educational about SNSs.”

While this work does not directly bear on the educational value of SNSs, it sets the groundwork for understanding how SNSs came about and what current research (i.e., 2007) is focused on them.

boyd, D. M., & Nicole B. Ellison. (2008). Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), 210-230. Retrieved June 26, 2009, from http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html.

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