As mentioned, I am a new student but not a professor in this field so that I don't intend to talk about definitions and concepts which we have known from lectures. It seems to have slight significance to repeat them because all of us can get better answers through Google or lecture notes. What I want to share is my own cognition of this topic : what is social networking ?
I regard social networking as an input and output procedure among a specific but sometimes random society.
From the 'output' side, I consider that social network is a platform on which people could make their speech conveniently and social networking is procedure of using social network to share. What I mean by 'make a speech' is that we can always use social network to make our output more influential than traditional ways. For example, when you share something with one of your friends by a letter, you can only make one person known what you what to express. However, if you post your opinion on a website, you can attract more individuals to communicate with you and this is just like you have made a speech . Nowadays, people are always busy enough to have little chance to communicate with others so that perhaps we need shall our experience or express our opinions in a prompt way. Social network sites such as Facebook provides such platform to their users. What the 'Facebook s' provide us are not just servers which can afford online storage space but also a willing to share. Therefore, I think social networking is also a willing to share ,whatever knowledge,opinions,life experiences or something else.
From the 'input' side, I consider that social networking originate in such a willing that people want to meet by chance through the social network. Not only meet other individuals ,but also whatever they want to meet such as the key of their specific problems. What I mean 'by chance' is that ,through social network, we always find something out of our exception and sometimes unfortunately ,can't find our target objects . You can't find the answer every time when you are searching on Google but sometimes you get the answers when you just want to browse one of your friend's homepage on the Facebook because of his sharing or blog!
What's more, I want to explain that why I consider that a society which is constructed through a social network is specific but sometimes random. We usually communicate with our friends or at least people that we have known in the real world even when we use a social network, that's why I consider the society is 'specific'. However, sometimes when we write a post, our friends share it and then friends'friends that we may not know can see our post as well,that's why I consider the society is sometimes'random'. Such property of 'random',in my humble opinion, occasionally have negative impact from the security perspective.
I want to know most about social networking is that how to analyse individuals' behavior on the social network both in psychology and mathematics perspectives and how to demonstrate the validity of our analysis .Furthermore, how can we use kinds of theories and analysis methods to help some of the existing online social websites to be more attractive and helpful in turn is also interesting .
