How I see Social Networks Based Online

 Friends and Social Media?

When Mark Zuckerberg  created the social networking site, Facebook he used the term friends to describe people to who you add and like and share content to. This notion of ‘oh everyone is a friend’ however isn’t really Zuckerberg’s fault. Consider this the English language is extremely poor at describing the attributes of relationships that people have with other people. The best we can come up with is friend, colleague, best friend, (I can’t think of anymore).

However the point I am trying to conjure is that we all consider ourselves connected to one another, and perhaps the word friend is wrong, but that’s not our fault, we just haven’t established a method of description for levels of friendship.

The reason why I brought up this notion was the whole idea of social media, after some thinking one can say, it is not really about friends at the end of the day. Instead it is a goal orientated environment. So for example tumblr, instagrame, and other blogging sites are about creating information and disseminating it. Be it for intrinsic emotional rewards, or extrinsic money etc rewards. What makes blog platforms of interest is that they are places that are not all about the person such is that with the social networking sites. Instead they offer the chance of users to express thoughts or information about topics, with others giving feedback hence the social aspect. The social network is much more egotistical with the notion of this is a profile of me, and here is my ‘friend’ number. I think that peoples friends number is not a count of friends but in essence just a number that represents there social network.

It should be noted that online social networks are incredibly interesting as the user is open to so much more connections than that of offline social networks. According to  Scott L Feld  who wrote a paper titled ‘Why your friends have more friends than you do?’, one can say that the chances that their friends friends have higher amount of friends you have. Now place this into the online social context setting, and one soon realises how fast a social network grows.

These social networks should be considered to be made of actors not friends. Social networks  can be consisting of enclaves of actors who consider themselves friends, but only if the notion of friends is reciprocated between the dyadic understanding of both actors.

And so in conclusion, the internet is in nature social, but not to the extent of friendships, instead it is just a large collection of people creating a massive social online network.