It occasionally happens that, while talking to friends, I start using words specific to my job and our type of work. In my case, I often talk about communities and social networks, and we all know these are being used by more and more people everyday, and I am always need to be reminded that these terms do not mean the same thing to everyone. Especially if the people I am talking to come from different backgrounds with different web experiences.
For example it is like the famous web 2.0 where everyone has his own personal definition for what web 2.0 really is and some deny that it exists or others are convinced that we are already in web 4.0 without even having passed go. It is kind of like coffee around the world, every country has their own way of making it.
I am going to attempt, even if it will be incomplete, to give a universal definition to explain if possible this phenomenon.
Consulting Wikipedia:
A social network is a social structure made of nodes (which are generally individuals or organizations) that are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as values, visions, ideas, financial exchange, friendship, sexual relationships, kinship, dislike, conflict or trade.
The online management of a social network is entrusted to a series of tools that are accessible from your pc desktop such as: skype, messenger, pidgin, bonjour or directly from the browser: chat, forums and generally speaking all sites that allow users to connect and communicate between one another.
As Giovanna Cosenza (my professor for the semiotics of new media) taught me, all these tools really can be considered environments: chat environment, forum environment, the instant messaging environment and so on. Basically participating in a chat is like being in a room talking to other people. Not surprisingly, the metaphor of “rooms” was used in the early releases of these communication tools, and has now been converted from chat rooms to discussions or topics.
Now, that we are on the same page, I can now discuss the web-based environments or groups where users are able to connect and talk to each other and I will take this opportunity to use McLuhan’s famous statement “the medium is the message“, and I will define these environments as “social networks”.
A social network is a web-based environment where users can connect, communicate and share information and here I would add a note, of sharing, personal information.
Is Google reader a social network? The users have the possibility to share news with others. And here we enter in one of the many grey areas, I would say yes but no. Yes, we can share news with others but we can really communicate with them and so I would say this is really more an news feed.
Facebook, Myspace, Orkut, LinkedIn all have similar basic communications functions and they connect users and these can all be defined happily and easily as social networks.
The fact that these are social networks is not news to anyone, everyone agrees that this is the correct definition to give them. However, I think it is very important to use these examples as a basis for moving ahead and helping define other communities as social networks.
Using the criteria I have used to define a social network can anyone help me find any made and managed in Italy?
(Thanks for the english translation, Liz! Original post here!)
