Social Networks Sites Once having discerned what types of Social Media exist in the vast universe of the

World Wide Web, it is possible to appoint Social Networks Sites as the Social medium of preference in this thesis. In the following pages it is explained more deeply what networks are, what networks sites are, what kind of social interactions they empower and why this social medium is chosen here as most relevant. Social Networks With advent of new technologies and the emerging of different online places that augment social interaction, our need for connectedness in the online world has increased (Christakis, 2009; Hansen, Shneiderman, & Smith, 2010; Lampe, Wash, Velasquez, & Ozkaya, 2010). Not long ago there was an image wandering peoples walls in Facebook. The image was a simple message telling of how generations since the coming of the internet and mobile services, people not users, are experiencing the world in contrast to the previous analogue but already partly digital generation:

Though the tone of this post is rather nostalgic, it also reveals a shift of mentality in the present times, one where we are hyperconnected (Christakis, 2009) and one where the context in which this shift takes place is the result of the ever fast growing Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and how we, human beings, acknowledge the world today and interact in it. Roughly analyzing the content of this image, it can be said that the generation born in the 70s and 80s experienced the world in more local terms (Meyrowitz, 2005). Likewise, it can be said that already incipient were the impressions from the world expanding their perceptual fields through the ICTs in constant development since the nineties. And through the worldwide mass media available at the time, they were directed towards what today is so common to what Castells defines as the Digital Age. In his words, we are experiencing the network society given the technological advances and the peoples mentality shift that only an informationalism paradigm could bring about. Being part of such society has signified a noteworthy augmentation of the social experiences in online environments (Hansen, et al., 2010) and ergo of Social Media and Social Networks Sites. Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler have a broad study on social networks and how they shape our lives both at an offline level but also when being online. They define social networks as it follows: Social Networks: Are an organized set of people with two kinds of elements: people and the connections between them (Christakis, 2009, p. 13).

Social Networks in human groups have just as in nature two main properties: connection and contagion. Connection, meaning who is connected to whom, if there is no relationship between the units or nodes there is simply no network. Contagion, refers to what flows between nodes once connections are established (Christakis, 2009, p. 16). What flows in those connections when talking about social networks are interactions. Add the interactions that take place between the people and those connections, and you will get patterns of behavior that affect one another up to several degrees due to the highly level of contagion or influence these connections imply, and also due to a main value of social networks, namely the fact that the whole is more important than its parts, because being part of a network, can help achieving what otherwise individually would be impossible (2009, p. 31), It is proposed then, that another property of social networks is that they are Dynamic. Another basic property is the Topology of the social networks. This is understood as the actual pattern of connections that determines the shape [and it] remains the same regardless of how the network is visualized (Christakis, 2009, p. 14) unless of course ties are broken and then the shape of the network would be affected. Christakis and Fowler go on to explaining that Social Networks have rules in order to maintain their existence and they depend precisely on their connections and contagion. They show already how interconnected people are. Scarcely mentioned, these rules comprise: a) We shape our network: In three ways: magnitude, density and position within. b) The Network shapes us: It affects our reactions and actions. c) Our Friends affect us: Influence and Tendency to copy one another through the flows of connections. d) Our friends friends friends affect us: Through hyperdyadic spread: the tendency of effects to spread from

person to person to person (P2P2P) beyond an individuals direct social ties. e) The Network has a life of his own: It has emergent properties: New attributes of a whole that arise from the interaction and interconnection of the parts.

Furthermore, they also indicate by after several corroborated tests, that everybody in the world is interconnected by six degrees of separation, meaning your friend is one degree from you, your friends friend is two degrees and so on (Christakis, 2009, pp. 2627). And that these degrees fulfill a three degrees rule of influence, meaning that the actions of one individual might influence his/her friend (on degree), and the friends friend (second degree) and even the friends friends friends (three degrees), but that beyond this line, the influence of our actions do not have impact most probably due to two factors: the influence peters out (intrinsic-decay explanation) [or because of] an unavoidable evolution of the network that makes the links beyond three degrees unstable (network-instability explanation) (Christakis, 2009, pp. 2829).

The above only confirms how interconnected we are and how much we affect one another, just as molecules affect by their interactions. Added to this, with the introduction of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and Computer Mediated Communications environments, it has resulted in entirely new and unique forms of social exchanges that, apart from being a rich source of scholar studying, given the extraordinary amount of behavioral data that can be gathered, they integrate the universe of Social Media that is available today (Boyd & Ellison, 2007; Christakis, 2009; Hansen et al., 2010; Joinson, 2008) Summary Social networks are an organized set of people with two kinds of elements: people and connections. They have several properties: Connection and Contagion that affect the connectedness between ties. They are dynamic and

their topology (pattern of connections) determines their shape. In order to subsist, social networks have five rules: a) We shape our network b) The Network shapes us c) Our Friends affect us d) Our friends friends friends affect us e) The Network has a life of his own

Furthermore, the influences that exist between the ties are regulated by yet to more rules: we are all connected by six degrees of separation while influence on one another happens in up to three degrees of separation, the latter because of the intrinsic-decay and the network-instability explanations. When social networks are transferred to CMCs, the result is a vast, new and unique forms of social exchanges that integrate what others recognize better as Social Media.

to other online sociotechnical systems such as e-mail, forums, blogs, vlogs, wikis microblogs, photo and video sharing sites, review sites and none other than Multiplayer Gaming Communities as well.

Social Networks Sites and Facebook

Social Networks Sites support a wide range of interests and practices while supporting as well, the maintenance of preexisting social networks in some, and helping strangers to connect in others (Boyd & Ellison, 2007, p. 210), however there is typically some common offline element among individuals who friend one another, [dimension that differentiates] SNSs from earlier forms of public CMC such as newsgroups (2007, p. 221). Boyd and Ellis define SNSs as: Social Networks Sites (SNS): are services that allow users to construct a public or semi-public personal profile in a limited-access environment, display a list of other users with whom one shares a connection, and view and navigate ones own connections and the connections of others within the
(Boyd & Ellison, 2007, p. 211)

system.

It is the connections that are the core of Social Networks and they accomplish according to Joinson two functions: they are used for emotional support or as an information source, and both create social capital, which is the added value of social networks (Putnam, 2000). Furthermore, our web of connections visible to the user and to others (Christakis, 2009, p. 269) and these have never been more visible than today (Boyd & Ellison, 2007; Hansen et al., 2010). With this it is easier, with the somewhat recent development of technologies, for areas of study like Network Analysis to map and analyze networks topologies, shapes, interactions, and patterns of behavior etc. On the other hand, the feature that differentiates SNS from other forms of Online Communities is that they are organized about people and not topics, as it is the case of wikis and forums (2009, p. 269).

SNS provide as well, invaluable information that help understand better patterns of behavior such as the motivations of SNS members to participate in the vast variety of online places (Hansen et al., 2010; Joinson et al., 2008; Lampe, et al., 2008).

Characteristics According to authors like Cristakis, Hansen and Joinson, some of the main characteristics of SNSs are: SNSs primarily mirror many offline interactions. They are not based in the introduction of strangers. SNS allow users entirely new and unique ways of collaborating by actively finding, sharing, evaluating and making sense of the vast mass of information available online. Their reaches are so penetrating today, that Christakis and Fowler go so far as to actually state that slowly but surely, we are taking our real lives online (Christakis, 2009, p. 273). Just as in real life, the interactions in SNS are based on an ancient and basic human need for communicating and conglomerating (Christakis, 2009). These qualities of human behavior are crucial because they tell us of the adjacent relationship between culture and communication in human groupings, hence of the differences between them, as stated above in the definition of culture. Ultimately, with the advent of SNS coupled with the development of capable devices and services, our world and mindset have become hyperconnected. Not only was created the sense of nearness that none of our past generations experienced without SNS, it has also speeded up the pace of social activity to the point of experiencing a sense of real time in what is happening in the world, that only could be imagined to be possible within the frame of the network society that Castells so well describes. The SNS Twitter is a vivid example of this. The use of this medium between members of that network have mobilized in real time masses of people towards common goals (Saxberg & Saxberg, 2009) or to avoid shooting episodes in a given city (Meneses, 2010), or as it has been seen

recently, in mobilizing larger groups to overturn different dictatorships among some Muslim countries (Jones, 2011) which are circumstances that not even global mass media can pair up now a days. Facebook on the other hand is a better example on how social networks that have been translated in CMCs have simply swiped us off our feet and gotten a huge impact on how we deal socially. The following pages will deepen in this subject and will give answer on the reasons why there is focus on this specific SNS. Summary Social networks are an organized set of people with two kinds of elements: people and connections. They have several properties: Connection and Contagion which affect the existing connectedness between ties. They are dynamic and their topology (pattern of connections) determines their shape. In order to subsist, social networks have five rules: a) We shape our network b) The Network shapes us c) Our Friends affect us d) Our friends friends friends affect us e) The Network has a life of his own

Furthermore, the influences that exist between the ties are regulated by yet to more rules: we are all connected by six degrees of separation while influence on one another happens in up to three degrees of separation, the latter because of the intrinsic-decay and the network-instability explanations. When social networks are transferred to CMCs, the result is a vast, new and unique forms of social exchanges that integrate what others recognize better as Social Media.

On the other hand, never before has surveillance on one another been greater and yet, never before us users of Social Media have been so public. True is that most of SNS users need to friend or accept the connections that shape their networks, this according to the degrees of control of basic elements in their technical design, so that some degree of discretion or privacy is achieved, though anyway the creation of networks in SNS only reveal how networks are visible. When before tracing and mapping networks was a complicated task, by highlighting one of the main characteristics of SNS, namely public display of connections (Boyd & Ellison, 2007, p. 213), today the task is way easier to map and to show that the social interactions that take place in SNS are to a high extent, a mirror of the interactions happening in the offline world (Christakis, 2009, p. 270). When they talk about social networks, they equally refer to other online sociotechnical systems such as e-mail, forums, blogs, vlogs, wikis microblogs, photo and video sharing sites, review sites and none other than Multiplayer Gaming Communities as well.