Her name is Khai. According to her profile, she is nineteen years old and a junior accounting major at a private college in Quezon City. Despite never having met her and having no idea who she is, Khai is now one of my “friends.” On the World Wide Web, that is.
While a few years ago the idea of calling a complete stranger a “friend” might have been met by many people with a certain amount of disquiet—even a frightening thought or two—nowadays, thanks to social networking sites (SNS), it isn’t only plausible, it is fast becoming commonplace.
In the Philippines, for example, the website most visited by its estimated fifteen million Internet users is Friendster, a social networking site based in the United States but popular among users in Southeast Asia, particularly, Malaysia, Indonesia, and yes, the Philippines. In fact, as of April 8, Alexa.com, a website which monitors web traffic, shows that the lion’s share of people who visited Friendster are from the Philippines: 33.6 percent, to be exact.
But what exactly are social networking sites, and how are they any different from other websites and services around?
Defining social networking sites
In “Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship,” danah m. boyd and Nicole B. Ellison define social network sites as “web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system” (http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html).
It should be noted that boyd and Ellison use the term social network sites rather than social networking sites, clarifying that the latter popularly refers to websites that “emphasize relationship initiation,” such as Friendster and Facebook, and not the recent phenomenon of websites that “enable users to articulate and make visible their social networks.”
Their definition, in fact, encompasses a range of websites that have visible social networks—photo and video sharing services like Flickr and Youtube, for example, as well as blogging applications like Livejournal—to be listed as SNS.
That said, boyd and Ellison’s definition is useful in understanding the appeal of the likes of Facebook and Friendster, where the three characteristic functions/features they listed are more readily apparent than in Flickr or Livejournal, web services that emphasize content more than their actual users and their social network.
Social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace trace their roots to SixDegrees, a web service launched in the late 90s which, like today’s most popular social networking sites, allowed registered users to create and maintain profiles, and keep a clickable list of “Friends” which enabled users to view their “Friends” profiles. According to boyd and Ellison, although SixDegrees did not pioneer such features, it was the first to combine all three of them in a single service.
The resulting combination allowed users to not only view their “Friends” and the “Friends” of their “Friends,” but the option to add them as one’s own “Friends,” ad infinitum. This gave its users the opportunity to find long-lost friends and classmates through people they know.
The same infrastructure holds true for today’s social networking sites, only more refined, thanks to better micro-processors and faster Internet connections.
My “Friends” are your “Friends”
The networking in social networking sites lies precisely in this ability to add almost any one as a “friend.” At the outset, most—if not all— social networking sites users invite their real-world friends (if they’re not already registered users) to sign up. This way, the user is able to recreate his or her real-world social connections online, giving him or her not only a reason to frequent the site, but social capital in the form of a base network of “Friends.”
Some sites have integrated networks within their network of users to help new users meet or reconnect with others in the site, in the hope that they become “friends” and widen each other’s online social network. On the local social networking site Eskwela.com, for example, registered users are automatically included in networks based on their major, the college or university they attended, and even the year they graduated. In other sites, these integrated networks are based on a number of different factors including geographical location, gender preference, or taste in music, books, and film.
The emphasis on “Friends” might give the idea that socializing on the World Wide Web was nonexistent before the advent of social networking sites. The truth is such sites are only the most recent reincarnation of online communities.
Mailing lists, fora, and MMORPGs
The earliest online communities, in fact, predate any social networking sites and were built around simple text-based applications of the early Internet: e-mail and chatting. These online communities usually existed in the form of mailing lists and, later on, discussion boards and fora, and quite often revolved around topics or subjects of interest like technology, entertainment, celebrities, etc. These pioneer communities usually involved a core group of users whose frequent posts, comments, and news helped keep the community alive.
Among the core group of users, a few also acted as moderators to police their ranks, especially if the community had a lot of members. In fact, netiquette, or Internet etiquette, was borne out of these early online communities as a way to keep the peace. Members had to observe the rules and regulations set by the moderators; otherwise they were reprimanded, or even removed.
The sense of community in many of these online communities was so strong that they eventually developed their own shorthand, in the form of, say, emotional icons—better known as emoticons—of which :) is the most typical example. They also developed their own jargon. For example, community members who read post and discussions but do not add to the conversation were referred to as “lurkers”; an incendiary comment became known as a “flame”; and someone who went around inciting argument between members, usually with a flaming comment, was said to be “trolling.”
Today, despite the popularity of social networking sites, these forms of online communities still flourish on the Web, primarily because unlike social networking sites, they are structured around exploring interests, not making friends or expanding one’s online social network. (It must be said, though, that certain social networking sites revolve around interests like Flixster, for cinephiles, and Goodreads, for literature buffs).
There are also online communities that have emerged around Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs) such as World of Warcraft, Granado Espada, and Ragnarok Online. Unlike conventional video games which can be played individually on consoles or even personal computers, MMORPGs are played in conjunction with a host of other players who are online. More often than not, these players will have to interact with each other during the duration of the game; sometimes players have to cooperate to achieve tasks. Some games even integrate this social aspect in the game play by enabling users to create formal “guilds” or “clans” within the game.
Open and unmediated space
A common interest influences not only the formation and composition of an online community but also mediates interaction between members. For example, a web forum dedicated to a particular TV series will only attract fans of that show. Granted, it is not uncommon for real-life friendships to grow out of these communities, but as members, they will most likely only discuss things related to the television program.
On the other hand, today’s social networking site is a relatively open space, both in terms of membership and interaction, and is limited only by the nature of the service it seeks to provide, and often the user’s own preferences. One doesn’t have to be interested in anything in particular to join a social networking site; one can simply open an account, add one’s real-life friends, add other interesting-looking users as “Friends,” and pretty much do nothing else.
Not that there is nothing else to do in social networking sites aside from “friending” other users.
Functionality
According to Prof. Danilo Arao of the College of Mass Communication, an active user of the social networking site Friendster since 2003, social networking sites have “evolved into something that integrates the various aspects of online life.”
He points out that registered users on Friendster, for example, can send each other messages, upload photographs and videos, and maintain a blog, almost cutting away the need for accounts on other web services. And with a built-in audience, social networking sites have become, for most Filipino users anyway, a primary tool for communicating with a large group of people all at once.
“Since my network has grown to include not only friends and colleagues, but most of my students as well, it has become an effective way to disseminate information,” Arao says, adding that he uses his Friendster account to circulate electronic copies of his newspaper columns and other bits of information he believes his “friends” should know about, such as announcements from the University or his college.
But aside from these features that make it easy for users to communicate with each other, most if not all social networking sites are looking for ways to expand how their users can use their services. Most recently this has come in the form of applications or “apps” from third-party developers that users can install on their profiles. These “apps” range from the functional, like a calculator or a window to display news and weather reports, to the whimsical like a virtual fish tank.
Online presence for dummies
The introduction of SNS has undoubtedly led to the democratization of online presence. It has allowed people, even those who would not be otherwise that way, to be constantly online, maintaining personal websites and turning their SNS accounts into their virtual homes.
Arao, who teaches online journalism and web authoring, layout and design, attributes this to the ease of setting up an SNS account. “You just sign in and then, as they say, you just follow the dotted line,” he points out.
In the early years of the World Wide Web, having an online presence came with a list of demands. One needed to pay for a hosting service, buy a domain name, and know “hand-coding,” as Arao puts it, using web programming language like HTML and CSS (or pay someone who knows “hand-coding”). Today, having a web page of one’s own takes just a few clicks. Users can even customize the look of their profile or web page, changing everything from the colors and font used to the layout of the page. Best of all, it’s free.
And people seem to like the idea of having a place on the Web to call their own. Just consider the estimated one hundred million user accounts on MySpace, the number one social networking site in the world.
Real or imaginary connections
Prof. Paolo Manalo of the College of Arts and Letters, believes the appeal of social networking sites for many users remains “the connection (whether real or imaginary) that it creates by bringing people together.”
Manalo, who has taught a course on online creative writing, says such sites have become a venue for many users to “pool portions of their lives through useful/less knowledge (photos, videos, music, quizzes, announcements, shoutouts, etc).” Not all of them may use the many functions made available by SNS; nevertheless, the basic purpose for the online presence is fulfilled: “‘friending’ (or letting themselves get ‘friended’) by as many people as they can online, never mind if they really know them in real life.”
Web 2.0 and user-generated content
To better understand SNS, one has to look at its place in the Internet zeitgeist, particularly, in terms of Web 2.0, an umbrella term coined by Internet and computer entre-preneur Tim O’Reilly to describe a more open, collaborative, and cooperative World Wide Web. Web 2.0 is not a new version of the Web, but a new way in which it is utilized. Where before the average Internet user could only read information off the Internet, nowadays he or she can add and edit information on it.
This is most apparent on websites called “wikis,” like the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia. These sites run on a program called Wiki that enables its visitors and users, depending on the site administrator’s discretion, to create and/or change any of the content on the website.
This is also the driving force behind sites like Youtube and Flickr, where registered users can upload media for other users to view, and tagging sites or “folksonomies” (a portmanteau derived from folk and taxonomy) like Digg and Del.icio.us that allow users to tag every imaginable content on the Web, from sites, to pictures, to videos.
Similarly, blog services like Livejournal and Blogger, micro-blogging services like Tumblr, and “presence applications” such as Twitter also operate on collaboration and cooperation among their users.
SNS and all these other web services fall under Web 2.0 because they all rely on user-generated content. All these services provide little to no content of their own on their sites and instead supply users with a ready infrastructure to share their own content through feeds, e-mail notifications, and, finally, a personal web page or website.
Even websites that distinguish between users/readers and producers/authors, like news sites, still allow users to be producers of content by giving them the ability to post their own comments on articles.
This push toward a more collaborative media space has even led to the democratization of more traditional forms of media like television. The international cable news network CNN, for example, recently launched iReport, a service that allows their viewers to submit photo and video content through their website.
Furthermore, in 2006, Time named “You” their Person/s of the Year because of the ways in which Web 2.0 has given everybody the ability to be heard, seen, or read.
“Culture of overexposure”
The multi-functionality and networking functions of SNS have become the focal point of many discussions on the way Web 2.0 is changing the way people interact with each other.
In March, for example, a Canadian university had to reconsider its policies on academic misconduct after it threatened to expel a freshman student for creating a mathematics study group on Facebook. University officials were swarmed with complaints, not only from its students but from people all over the web, who questioned their seemingly antiquated policy.
Late last year, MySpace, another popular social networking site made headlines after a thirteen-year-old girl committed suicide because a “friend” she had made through the site began taunting and posting indecent messages about her. It was later discovered that the “friend” was fictitious, and was in fact maintained by a mother who lived on the same street as the girl.
This case and other reports of young people in Canada and England making suicide pacts through these sites have raised concerns in governments around the world about how to police these services and keep them from becoming a venue of illicit transactions and other illegal activities.
In a recent article in Newsweek titled “Here’s Looking at You, Kids,” (March 24, 2006), Jennie Yabroff describes the current situation as having bred a “culture of overexposure,” particularly among the young, many of whom have accounts across a number of different SNS and web services, and whose lives have become fodder for content.
Yabroff’s article raises the question of privacy, asking whether or not the “Look at Me Generation” can “form durable personalities, off camera” and if they can “form intimate relationships” when they have become so used to presenting their lives for everyone to consume.
Barangay Friendster
On the local front, discussions about the ways SNS, or even the Internet in general, is changing the ways in which people interact are almost non-existent. After all, Internet access in this country remains, even with the popularity of the neighborhood Internet cafe, a luxury for many Filipinos. In fact, it has only been in recent weeks, with a string of celebrity-related scandals, that local popular media have turned their eyes on the Web.
That said there have been attempts to assess Filipino SNS use. For example, Janette Toral, who runs DigitalFilipino.com, has been surveying Internet use by Filipinos age 25 and below since 2002.
In her most recent survey (2007), she claimed that the use of social networking sites, particularly Friendster, has become one of the top reasons for Internet use among her demographic, along with online gaming and research.
One of the curiosities of the entire SNS phenomena has been the way in which particular social networking sites have become popular among particular groups of people and/or nationalities, as in the case of Orkut’s popularity among Brazilian Internet users and Friendster’s steady lead in the Philippines.
Many have credited this kind of brand loyalty to the fact that many of the sites’ early adopters are of that particular nationality, though Friendster became popular among American users first, not Filipinos.
Friendster, in fact was a pioneer in social networking, but fell out of favor among its early adopters because of technical problems experienced by site users early on. Filipino users, however, were undeterred by these glitches and remained loyal because it was fast becoming their virtual barangay. Everyone they knew was on it.
As mentioned before, Friendster remains popular among Filipinos today, particularly among the young. In fact, it isn’t uncommon to hear Filipino teens requesting someone they’ve just met to add them as a Friendster “Friend.”
All this free and open “friending” has raised concerns that those growing up online might lack even the most basic social skills like deference to authority and courtesy, because these things are not part of the framework of social networking sites.
The business of social networking
But all of these incidents and the concerns raised by the likes of Yabroff have done nothing to stop people from joining social networking sites. They have also not stopped the money from coming in. SNS, after all, is a business. And it’s a big one, at that. Last year alone, Facebook, which has been operational for only three years, posted annual earnings of close to USD 30 million, while the company is reportedly valued at around USD 15 billion.
With the promise of earnings like that, and a probable user base that could number in the billions, you can be sure that such sites aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.
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