Atestatului DE Competență Lingvistică LA Limba Engleză

COLEGIUL NAȚIONAL „CONSTANTIN DIACONOVICI – LOGA”

CARANSEBEȘ

LUCRARE PENTRU OBȚINEREA

ATESTATULUI DE COMPETENȚĂ LINGVISTICĂ

LA LIMBA ENGLEZĂ

SOCIAL NETWORKS

Contents

Introduction 1

Chapter 1. 2

1.1.

1.2.

1.3.

1.4.

Chapter 2.

2.1.

2.2.

2.3.

2.4.

2.5.

Chapter 3.

3.1.

3.2.

3.3.

Chapter 4.

4.1.

4.2.

4.3.

4.4.

Chapter 5.

5.1.

5.2.

5.3.

Conclusions

Appendices

Bibliography

INTRODUCTION

"A social network is an online community that allows people, through a built-up profile, to meet, communicate, keep in touch, share pictures and videos with other community members with whom a connection is shared." (ENISA 2008)

Social networking is one of the many ideas that has changed the way people interact with each other. It is an online structure made up of individuals or organizations connected through a common platform. Social networking though more frequent and popular online can be extended in to real life situations and discussions, the idea being starting a network online and then interact in the real world or vice-versa. It can be used or started by anyone irrespective of any boundaries including the geographic boundaries, any person from any part of the world can be a part of a social network. It can be used by young people to find new friends, by big organizations to expand their business, by graduates trying to find jobs, by doctors to share information or by people to simply discuss issues. The topics may be varied and can be of any kind depending on the idea that the members on the network have. Anyone who wishes to take part in a social network must first become a member of the network.

Social networking though started with the websites on a PC or a laptop have expanded into more portable devices like a palmtop or a cell phone with the help of embedded systems. The way social networking is used is large and there are many forms of it. There are tools associated with a social network that allow users to have more options as to how to interact with each other. Some of the most popular forms and tools of a social network are Online Communities, Blogs, and Personal Websites. Wikis, Bookmarks and Folksonomies, Photos and Videos. Each of the above mentioned forms and tools have their own unique way of interaction and also have some similarities in the way they are structured.

Social networking websites can be broadly categorized in six types.

1. Online Community

Online community is a virtual space which allows people from different walks of life to get together and interact with each other. It is a very powerful yet simple mode of communication and interaction. Online communities can be used by any individual or organization in order to expand their network or just have a casual discussion. The tools available make the online communities more interactive and exciting to work on. Examples of popular online communities include Amazon, Facebook and Apple.

2. Bookmarks and Folksonomies

Folksonomy dedicates to categorize the weblog articles. Folksonomies attempt in establishing a convenient medium to share/publish content, and assign keywords or tags to them for future referencing. It is a way of annotating and organizing resources with the use of tags which provides a way for its users to attribute meaning to the content of the information available. The article provides a framework for the study of folksonomy, tagging and social tagging websites. We will also see about few web services who uses Folksonomy However, with the quick increase in the amount of information being published and the number of users categorizing it, an information overload is generated, and whose quality cannot be assured. Example of social bookmarking includes Delicious.

3. Photos and videos sharing websites

These sites enable users to share photos and videos with others (privately or publicly). Some websites are dedicated to providing the services (YouTube) and some integrate these as essential features (Facebook). Advancement in technology allows users to upload images to websites directly from their mobile phone or other devices. Users can rate and add comments to the content. Most of the websites provide these services free of cost. Flickr and YouTube are example of popular websites for image and video sharing respectively.

4. Blogs

"A weblog is defined as a web page with minimum to no outside editing, providing on-line observations, cyclically modernized and existing in invalidate sequential order, with hyperlinks to other online sources. Blogs can function as personal diaries, technical advice columns, sports chat, celebrity gossip, political commentary, or all of the above." (VSMS 2010)

5. Wikis

"The term 'wiki' is derived from the Hawaiian phrase, wiki-wiki, which means quick. A wiki is a website containing a collection of web pages that can be edited by visitors to the site. It allows users to easily create and edit the web contents collaboratively. In essence, a wiki is a simplification of the process of creating HTML web pages in combination with a system that records each individual change that occurs over time, so that at any time a page can be forced to revert to any of its previous states." (VSMS 2010)

6. Personal Websites

"Personal web site or web pages are World Wide Web pages created by an individual to publish or keep content of a personal issue instead of on behalf of organizations. The usage of Personal web pages are often merely for entertainment purposes or passing information to the viewers." (VSMS 2010)

SOCIAL NETWORKS

A social network is a social structure made up of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations), sets of dyadic ties, and other social interactions between actors. The social network perspective provides a set of methods for analyzing the structure of whole social entities as well as a variety of theories explaining the patterns observed in these structures. The study of these structures uses social network analysis to identify local and global patterns, locate influential entities, and examine network dynamics.

The social network is a theoretical construct useful in the social sciences to study relationships between individuals, groups, organizations, or even entire societies (social units). The term is used to describe a social structure determined by such interactions. The ties through which any given social unit connects represent the convergence of the various social contacts of that unit. This theoretical approach is, necessarily, relational. An axiom of the social network approach to understanding social interaction is that social phenomena should be primarily conceived and investigated through the properties of relations between and within units, instead of the properties of these units themselves. Thus, one common criticism of social network theory is that individual agency is often ignored although this may not be the case in practice (see agent-based modeling). Precisely because many different types of relations, singular or in combination, form these network configurations, network analytics are useful to a broad range of research enterprises. In social science, these fields of study include, but are not limited to anthropology, biology, communication studies, economics, geography, information science, organizational studies, social psychology, sociology, and sociolinguistics.

GENERAL ISSUES

Lacks Emotional Connection

“A couple weeks ago, one of my friends and I got into a fight and she told me all of her feelings as to why she ignored me for two weeks. Assuming it would have been really hard to say it to my face, she sent me a text message. The negative side was I didn’t know if she truly felt sorry because I didn’t hear it from her. The quality of a conversation using social media is awful because you cannot sense the emotion or enthusiasm from the other person. It makes you wonder if they actually mean what they say.”

Decreases Face-to-Face Communication Skills

“Computer reliance could hurt a person’s ability to have a face to face conversation by making it awkward and unusual to hear something and respond with a thoughtful message through the spoken word because of one’s dependence on a keyboard to convey a message.”

Diminishes Understanding and Thoughtfulness

“Since the inception of social networking, the quality of conversations has dropped. I believe that people are spending so much time online that they don’t always understand the feeling, emotion and/or character of the person they are talking to. When you talk to someone through a message or even a voice, you can’t always fully understand them.”

“Social networking has ruined the thoughtfulness in basically saying hello in person. For instance, you could say hello to your friend in Germany with Facebook, chat in seconds; but what if there was no way to communicate via social networking? Well you would have to write them a letter and that is something very thoughtful.”

Reduces Family Closeness

“Texting, Facebook, Twitter, and Gmail alienate us from our families more than we actually think it does…. When my family is spending family time together and watching a movie, in reality my brother and I are on our phones rather than actually watching the movie with our parents.”

Those are just few of the issues caused by using the Social Networks.

FACEBOOK

Facebook is a corporation and an online social networking service headquartered in Menlo Park, California, in the United States. Its website was launched on February 4, 2004, by Mark Zuckerberg with his Harvard College roommates and fellow students Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. The founders had initially limited the website's membership to Harvard students, but later expanded it to colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It gradually added support for students at various other universities and later to high-school students. Since 2006, anyone in general who has attained an age of 13 years or more has been allowed to become a registered user of the website, though variations in the minimum age requirement exist depending on applicable local laws. Its name comes from the Facebook directories often given to American university students.

The website's primary color is blue as Zuckerberg is red-green colorblind, a realization that occurred after a test undertaken around 2007; he explained in 2010: "blue is the richest color for me—I can see all of blue."

TWITTER

Twitter is an online social networking service that enables users to send and read short 140-character messages called "tweets".

Registered users can read and post tweets, but those who are unregistered can only read them. Users access Twitter through the website interface, SMS or mobile device app. Twitter Inc. is based in San Francisco and has more than 25 offices around the world.

Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, Biz Stone, and Noah Glass and launched in July 2006. The service rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with more than 100 million users posting 340 million tweets a day in 2012. The service also handled 1.6 billion search queries per day. In 2013, Twitter was one of the ten most-visited websites and has been described as "the SMS of the Internet". As of May 2015, Twitter has more than 500 million users, out of which more than 332 million are active.

Twitter's origins lie in a "daylong brainstorming session" held by board members of the podcasting company Odeo. Jack Dorsey, then an undergraduate student at [anonimizat] University, introduced the idea of an individual using an SMS service to communicate with a small group. The original project code name for the service was twttr, an idea that Williams later ascribed to Noah Glass, inspired by Flickr and the five-character length of American SMS short codes. The decision was also partly due to the fact that domain twitter.com was already in use, and it was six months after the launch of twttr that the crew purchased the domain and changed the name of the service to Twitter. The developers initially considered "10958" as a short code, but later changed it to "40404" for "ease of use and memorability". Work on the project started on March 21, 2006, when Dorsey published the first Twitter message at 9:50 PM Pacific Standard Time (PST): "just setting up my twttr". Dorsey has explained the origin of the "Twitter" title:

hi5 is a social networking site based in San Francisco, California. Founded in 2003, it was reported to be the 2nd largest social network after Myspace by 2007. In 2008, comScore reported that hi5 was the third most popular social networking site in monthly unique visitors behind Facebook and MySpace. The social networking site, if(we), formerly known as Tagged, purchased hi5 in December 2011, for an undisclosed sum and operates it today.

Hi5 had many typical social networking features, such as friend networks, photo sharing, user groups, and status updates. In a 2009 redesign, hi5 added a number of features oriented toward gaming and entertainment. The site featured over 200 games in a variety of genres, and was adding games at a rate of 2-3 per week.

At hi5, users can create an online profile in order to show information such as interests, age and hometown. Users can also upload photos and create personal photo albums where other users can post comments. Users can also send friend requests via e-mail to other users. When a person receives a friend request, he may accept or decline it, or block the user altogether. If the user accepts another user as a friend, the two will be connected directly or in the 1st degree. The user will then appear on the person's friend list and vice versa.

Some users opt to make their profiles available for everyone on hi5 to view. Other users exercise the option to make their profile viewable only to those people who are in their network.

In early 2009, hi5 began to evolve from a social network into a gaming network. In order to join hi5, you must be 18 or older.

With Tagged's acquisition of hi5, their gaming platform changed from third-party developed games to games developed by Tagged's in-house team. Tagged noted that hi5's games weren't as "vibrant" as they could be. Tagged has seen better results from their own games.

ADVANTAGES

With each of these sites, individuals can make new friends, build business connections or simply extend their personal base by connecting and interacting with friends of friends – which can have a multiplying effect.

These connections can help with a variety of things such as:

Finding romance

Seeking a new job

Locating assistance

Getting and giving product and service referrals

Receiving support from like-minded individuals

Making or receiving career or personal advice

Sharing political beliefs

Accessing news in real time

In many ways, these social communities are the virtual equivalent of church socials where family and friends gather to exchange news and get updates. Even the age-old custom of connecting with pen pals has been upgraded as private messages can be sent over social media. When it comes to getting information, few methods are faster than social media.

Many social networking sites incorporate an instant messaging feature, which lets people exchange information in real-time via a chat. This is a great feature for teachers to use to facilitate classroom discussions because it lets them utilize the vast store of information available on the Web. This can be a great time saver for the teacher – since students no longer need to visit a library to conduct research- and it can be a great way to engage distracted learners.

Aids in Criminal Cases
Whether people are aware of it or not, what they post on social media can very easily be used against them if they were to get in trouble with the law. Someone who is selling drugs, and may be posting about it on their social networks, can be caught in this way. This also applies for someone who gets caught drunk driving, and was posting pictures of them at the bar moments before.

CONCLUSION

Social Networking website is a revolutionary idea with a very bright future with further scope for advancements. The opportunities provided from this medium are immense and many organizations are making use of this medium to better their practices. Organizations are no longer at the mercy of the media to advertise or convey their message. With the help of social networking they can advertise or communicate in a more efficient way. For example, Starbucks have started a very successful program in which a person from any part of the world can login to a website to write comments and discuss issues. Similarly people don’t have to rely on newspapers or TV to get their daily dose of news it can all be obtained from a social networking site. People can follow or get information from any part of the world. For example Twitter allows a user to follow anything from airline timing to the next breaking news from China. It is even used by politicians to get their message across.

Online communities and Blogs are becoming very popular and moreover since the advancement of embedded systems people can use them “on the go” with the help of handheld devices like cell phones or palmtops. They can get information which is more interactive in nature with the help of embedded photo and video. IPhone is an example of a handheld device through which people can share information. People can also take part in the social network by using many tools available to them. Users can tag particular pages of interest in an interactive manner or can just bookmark them for further interaction. The kind of interaction a user wants from these social networks depends on the type of information the user is interested in. Wikis can be used for academic purpose, it can greatly enhance the way people learn. People can watch videos to understand a topic better or look at photos which might help them to visualize a concept, after all “a picture speaks a thousand words”.

The world is getting closer every day and everyone wants to be connected. Static blogs and websites are losing popularity. World is moving more towards "information streams". The information comes to users rather than users have to make effort to get the information. The social networks can be extended to other media, for example Television now integrates Twitter feeds. In terms of personal relationships too the social networking is connecting people. Dating sites have become very popular to find partners and to be connected with each other. Social networking can also be very crucial in medical help. Illness support communities can be created from which people can get information about common diseases and also first aid tips.

After all the advantages, the problem that arises is of information overload and security. Social networks, unlike the common media, do not have a pattern as to how much information has to be conveyed and where to draw the line. Too much of information may confuse users. Security might be another area of concern where people can get illegal access to a user’s information. The future of social networking looks very promising but still it has to deal with the problems associated with it.

Appendices

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Social Network Analysis: A Handbook by John Scott (9781446209042)

It’s complicated: The social Lives of Networked Teens – Danah Boyd (Yale University Press – 9780300166316)

The Twitter Book: Second Edition – Tim O’Reilly(9781449314200)