Which of the following sites allows users to connect with the same interests and background information with people?

Abstract

This article considers the applied ethical dimensions of social networking sites (SNS) as spaces of global, instantaneous, and continuous social connectivity and interaction. It discusses the ways with which users generate an SNS identity and how the performance of these SNSers in ‘online’ contexts may cause to extend, emancipate or jeopardize ‘offline’ subjectivity. The article focuses on issues of what is public and private at the online/offline nexus; the diverse and sometimes deleterious online behavior displayed by SNSers; latent dangers such as cyberterrorism and cyberbullying; and SNS as a vehicle for global consumer marketing and saturation.

Relationships

Contrary to fears, teens connect online mostly with people who are already in their offline lives and report that these online interactions do not affect the extent of their face-to-face ones. In addition, the relatively new electronic means of communication, such as cell phones, texting, and social networking sites, actually facilitate peer interactions.

Purely online relationships are not the norm among youth in the United States and other Western countries. When they do occur, they are qualitatively different from offline ones and rarely move to the offline realm. At the same time, experimental evidence suggests that interaction with an unknown peer might help to reduce the negative affect that accompanies social rejection, a common occurrence during adolescence. As we noted earlier, adolescents seem to use online tools to interact with offline peers, and the evidence suggests that their online communication with their offline friends may actually have positive effects on these offline friendships. However, there may be some costs, as youth participants in one study reported online communication to be less enjoyable than face-to-face interaction and also reported feeling psychologically less close to their online partners.

These are not surprising findings, given that the friendship networks in teen online social networks typically number in the hundreds, including both close friends and utilitarian relationships. An important question is whether having a large number of ‘friends’ transforms the meaning of adolescent friendship. Some hint as to the psychological function of extremely large networks is provided by the finding that the adolescent children of neglectful parents (low on warmth, low on strictness) appear to have the largest online friendship networks, while the adolescent children of authoritative parents (high on warmth, high on strictness) have smaller networks. This pattern indicates that large online friendship networks may be used by adolescents to compensate for low parental involvement with their lives.

A number of questions do remain. As many adolescent peer interactions now occur in the more public space of a social network site, does the public nature of these conversations create different levels of intimacy and support from face-to-face versus digital interactions? Moreover, could these networks actually hurt face-to-face relationships? For example, are adolescents today more interested in being online with friends than face-to-face and if so, how does this affect the quality of their offline relationships? One possibility is that the self-disclosure afforded by the Internet enhances adolescent's relationships with close friends, while at the same time making it possible for them to interact with a wider circle of friends; the latter interactions may help youth learn about themselves and their social world. Another possibility is that friendships become more distant because so much interaction is technologically mediated rather than face-to-face.

With regard to family relationships, teens report that the Internet has not changed the quantity of interactions with their family, but today's adolescents have grown up with interactive media tools and may not therefore have a real baseline for comparison. More pertinent data would come from cross-generational comparisons. Indeed, Ling's data from Norway indicate that cell phones reduce both the quality and quantity of family communication when teens simultaneously are interacting with parents and texting with friends. Teens also use their cell phones to shut parents out of the adolescent world by means of call screening.

On the other side of the coin, tools such as cell phones and social networking sites are used by adolescent college students to keep in touch with relatives and high-school friends with whom they otherwise would not interact. However, before college, these tools may also speed up teens’ autonomy from their family and could even be a source of conflict within the home. For example, the digital natives are more knowledgeable about technology than their digital immigrant parents, a situation that leads to difficulty in monitoring and guiding their adolescent children's interaction with digital media, as well as a reversal of traditional family roles.

The effect of the Internet in weakening parental authority is even greater in cultures where parents and other adults do not approve of dating or romantic relationships in adolescence. In this situation, the Internet becomes a new environment where adolescents experience dating in secret, thus breaking with traditional cultural norms. Nonetheless, in the United States, authoritative parents are the most successful in monitoring their adolescent children's use of MySpace, and their children spend the least time on a social network site.

Social networking sites and cell phones are changing the ways that young people interact with one another. In the process, these interactive media may intensify several developmental tasks important in individualistic cultures stressing formal education: autonomy from parents and increasing importance of groups of unrelated peers. This latter result emerges for two reasons:

The ubiquity and privacy of cell phone and Internet use with peers puts these relations beyond parental monitoring and influence.

Adolescents utilize the Internet to diversify their peer network to peers beyond the constraints of their immediate life circumstances. In doing so, they gain independence from their families while garnering the social capital so crucial in an information society.

Introduction

A social networking site is an online place where a user can create a profile and build a personal network that connects him/her to other users. The social networking phenomenon has spread rapidly all over the world. Many Internet users have set up their own profile on social networking sites (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, or MySpace). Facebook, one of the main social networking sites, has over 500 million active users, with an additional 200 000 signing up each day. Facebook users visit the site on average two times a day and spend an average of 20 min per visit on the site. People online form relationships and social groups that provide emotional support and a sense of belonging. These groups can form intricate methods of communication, requirements for membership, and sets of standards and codes of conduct for their members.

One-third (35%) of American adult Internet users have a profile on an online social network site, 4 times more than 3 years ago, but still much lower than the 65% of online American teens who use social networks. Still, younger online adults are much more likely than their older counterparts to use social networks, with 75% of adults aged 18–24 using these networks, compared to just 7% of adults aged 65 and older. Overall, adults tend to use social networks for personal reasons rather than professional. Despite comparatively lower levels of social network use, usage of social network sites by adults has increased markedly over the past 5 years. Demographics of social network users are shown in Table 92.1.

TABLE 92.1. Demographics of Social Network Users

Source: Pew Internet & American Life Project Survey December 2008 Survey, n = 2253, with an n of 1650 Internet users. For Internet users the margin of error is ±3%.

For girls, social networking sites are primarily places to reinforce pre-existing friendships; for boys, the networks also provide opportunities for flirting and making new friends. The question is if they are simply an easy way to be in close contact with acquaintances and friends or they are potentially addictive.

Despite the fact that the minimum age for most major social networking sites is usually 14 years, it is estimated that over a quarter of underage children have a profile on a social networking site because younger users often lie about their age when signing up for the website. However, content-generated risks from this new leisure activity have not been investigated in any detail.

Social networking websites allow teenagers to socialize and make friends with people they ordinarily would not approach and help shy people have an outlet for self-expression. They can write down their thoughts, add pictures of themselves, post messages for other people to read, and compile lists of their favorite interests. Users can design their personal homepages, adding different photographs, songs and even videos that can be played on the website alongside their personal information. Members can also link their profiles to those of other members and accumulate hundreds, even thousands, of online “friends,” some of them from school or another social setting and some others whom they have never actually spoken to or met face-to-face.

All pleasurable behaviors can change our mood and consciousness and modify the brain chemistry. If they are used on a regular basis, they can negatively impact aspects of life functioning. The possibility of the user becoming addicted to the Internet increases tremendously due to the rewards given by accessing these networking sites. Socializing and dating on the net has become very popular recently.

That is, all addictive behaviors begin simply as pleasurable activities, which also serve to distract, connect to other friends and numb people from emotional discomfort. The problem is that what begins as a solution to social inhibition or to emotional trouble often produces secondary alterations in life functioning.

In sum, digital technologies are psychoactive and can alter mood states. Addictions of any type can be an exit or coping symptom of other ongoing wounds in the family or intrapersonal situation, so they may be amplifiers and sensitizers of previous problems.

Solutions

SNSs are increasingly affecting mental and physical health of teenagers and young adults. Researchers and practitioners have proposed a number of strategies to combat the problem. Deep (2015) proposed three solutions: (1) education and awareness, (2) engagement in extracurricular activities, and (3) restrictions and limitations. The most important solution according to Deep (2015) is education. Schools can provide parents with education on the harmful effects of social media exposure while also opening up a dialogue between educators and students. Teachers can encourage creative person-to-person interaction between students instead of allowing them to look at computer screens for long hours. Extracurricular activities could also help young people with expressing their creativity outside of social media (Deep, 2015). In extreme cases, restrictions should be placed on teens who overuse the Internet. Burke (2016) suggests parents to establish a sleep hygiene routine that structures a set of guidelines for social media interactions. For example, devices could be turned off an hour or two before an appropriate bedtime, so to reduce negative effect of social media on sleep in adolescents.

Social networking sites

Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter have a place in library services because they are familiar to many patrons. Twitter can be effective in promoting activities and programs that are occurring in the library (Krabill, 2009) and Facebook has been used by libraries and librarians alike as a means to connect with users.

Individuals create a Facebook profile, which is different to the Facebook pages used by libraries and other organizations. Profiles allow individuals to request and manage friends but are not intended to be used for professional advertising. Librarians should not “sell” products or use a profile for commercial purposes. This does not preclude librarians using Facebook to communicate with patrons, but it is important that personal posts from friends and family are kept off any profile being used to communicate with patrons.

Libraries which create pages are easier to manage because friend requests are automatically accepted. A Facebook page for a library is owned by a legitimate representative of the library for the purpose of communicating with fans. There is no access to fan profiles, but page updates are sent automatically to all fans. Pages allow libraries to establish roles for managing the site, which include: the administrator, content creators, a monitor (who manages the daily routine of watching for comments and responding), and someone to create advertisements and manage the insight analytics that provide metrics on pages. The ability to create polls is another feature available for pages, and libraries can use these to engage users.

Facebook also supports the creation of groups for communication between people who share common interests. These are being used to organize people into groups, and to share information, photos or event information. They can be public or private, and updates are transmitted automatically to members.

The ability to interconnect social media also makes it easier to coordinate communication. Social media dashboards provide management services for connecting multiple networking sites, and provide analytics on use. HootSuite (http://hootsuite.com/) has a basic plan at no cost. These services provide a way to keep sites organized, which is important because librarians will have separate personal and professional sites. It is also possible to connect sites in such a way that an addition to one site is automatically added to other sites. For example, a video can be posted to YouTube, and automatically added to Facebook, and is then distributed to all followers. Other useful tools include the URL shortening websites that shorten long URLs. Tiny (http://tiny.cc/), bitly (https://bitly.com/) and Ow.ly (http://ow.ly/url/shorten-url) are services which shorten URLs to more user-friendly sizes, which is helpful for tweets and posting to social media sites.

Virtual Interest Groups (VIGs) use social media to create groups based on interests for the purpose of collaboration. LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/) is an example of a social media site that facilitates the development of interest groups. There are other ways to create groups including using blogs, which is what two hospitals in Calgary, Canada, did to provide training, information consultation and consultations between researchers and librarians (Lin and Kathryn, 2012). In addition to blogs, the librarians used chat and Delicious (http://www.delicious.com) to answer questions and share information. Participants reported less fear about using social media tools, and noted that they found blog posts to be most helpful.

HASTAC (http://hastac.org/) is another network for individuals and institutions to provide learning and collaboration through networked research that bridges the disciplines of humanism and technology. This group is particularly useful for academic librarians working to create new digital information.

Diaspora (https://joindiaspora.com/) is a private, open source social network. Diaspora was developed to address privacy concerns related to social networks like Facebook. Users establish their own server to host content, and these servers or pods can then interact with each other to share social information. By creating a private network of sites, people have more control over access to their information than on other social sites that frequently have defaults for more open access.

Social media must be updated on a regular schedule, and the information should be interesting and worth reading, otherwise patrons will not sign up. A 2011 survey of the ARL provides some discouraging results (Wan, 2011). While over 90 percent of the libraries had Facebook pages, 35.8 percent had fewer than 200 fans, and 19.5 percent hadn’t updated the page in the month of the study. These statistics imply that ARL libraries do not have a clear direction, or much enthusiasm for their pages, which may explain why they have so few fans.

What are the main issues or problems with social networking?

Whereas joining a social networking site may seem like an innocuous activity to some, as professionals we need to think hard about the implications of putting ourselves online. The first question to ask is: is it necessary to start networking socially? My answer is yes; as I have stated above, I think it is important to join in the conversation. And if you are reading this book you already have some interest in the topic. I will endeavour to convince you that it is worth it for your own career.

When using any of the social networks one of the important issues to keep in mind is context. Ask yourself why you are using the particular network. The common mistake users of social networking sites make is to not align their activities on the site with the purpose for which the network was set up. So firstly, ascertain what the parameters of the network are; and secondly, decide how you wish to use the network to advance your career. Then, aim to keep your interactions within these parameters. Each social networking site is different, with some more aligned to professional networking than others. For example, LinkedIn is first and foremost a professional network, so you should keep all your interactions on this network professional in nature. On the other hand, Facebook and MySpace are networks that provide a more personal, friendly, family context. However, this is changing now that Facebook provides the facility for group pages, which may be linked to a group or business.

One impact of Web 2.0 is that it is constantly pushing the boundaries. In our desire to participate we may just go with the flow without thinking of how particular softwares may sit with career goals. In terms of keeping to the context,

I find it unhelpful, for example, to have all my Twitter feed going into my LinkedIn profile. I choose some to go into LinkedIn and some not because I use these two social networks for quite different purposes. I do not necessarily want my professional connections to receive my social ‘tweets’, such as where the best coffee can be had in my neighbourhood. In older style online forums and discussion boards, some of this type of online communication may have been described as OT or ‘off-topic’ and would therefore have been discouraged or kept to a minimum. In other words, the users or members of the forum were drifting outside the purpose for which the site was set up. Web 2.0 challenges us and moves us outside such strictures. However, as professionals operating in the open social networking environment, we must keep the audience in the back of our minds. That audience may be just friends and colleagues, or it may include employers. Remember that information put online could be there forever.

In this chapter we have looked at the phenomenal growth in social media. In future chapters we will be looking at particular applications, such as for marketing, professional networking and professional development. I now briefly introduce three social networks: LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

11.3 Why Does Online Reputation Management Matter?

Anyone who uses social networking sites is inescapably a participant in the “attention economy,” with successful participation dependent on being able to manage information about oneself, to effectively engage in self-promotion, and to figure out how to protect one’s privacy when necessary.

Jones and Hafner (2012, p. 153)

As the above examples show, the management of your online image has possible consequences far beyond the impact it has on your social life alone. The importance of online reputation management has grown to such an extent in recent years that a dedicated industry has been established, consisting of companies that “can be hired to help individuals locate and remove problematic content from the Internet” (Magnuson, 2011), as well as to build effective social media strategies from scratch to promote and market products and services. Companies with names such as reputation.com, Webimax, Reputation Management Consultants, Brand Resurrection, and Reputation Rhino all compete to deliver services including brand management and reputation repair. During the past decade, the job of social media consultant also has emerged; this is defined as “someone who works with businesses of all sizes creating and managing social media marketing campaigns [and] stays up on all of the latest news and changes as it applies to the industry” (Edwards, 2014).

Research also has shown that people’s information behavior is affected by their perceptions of how they appear or wish to appear on social media. A recent study by the Pew Research Center supports the theory that people tend “not to speak up about policy issues in public—or among their family, friends, and work colleagues—when they believe their own point of view is not widely shared” (Hampton et al., 2014). The survey of more than 1800 adults sought opinions on Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013 about National Security Agency surveillance in the United States. The survey found that, “in both personal settings and online settings, people were more willing to share their views if they thought their audience agreed with them” and that “if people thought their friends and followers in social media disagreed with them, they were less likely to say they would state their views on the Snowden-NSA story online and in other contexts, such as gatherings of friends, neighbors, or co-workers.” The researchers termed this phenomenon a spiral of silence, which illustrates people’s reluctance to stand out from the crowd, especially when it comes to disagreeing with the perceived majority viewpoint.

Kaplan and Haenlein (2010, pp. 62–64) identified six different types of social media that support greater or lesser levels of self-disclosure and self-presentation by participants, combined with social presence and media richness. Communication and the forging and maintaining of online relationships are determined by the combination of these factors:

Collaborative projects, such as wikis and social bookmarking sites.

Blogs.

Content communities, such as Flickr and YouTube, that facilitate the sharing of media content between users.

Social networking sites, such as Facebook and MySpace.

Virtual game worlds, which are “platforms that replicate a three-dimensional environment in which users can appear in the form of personalized avatars and interact with each other as they would in real life” (p. 64). World of Warcraft is a popular example of a virtual game world.

Virtual social worlds, such as Linden Lab’s Second Life.

Some of these media provide extensive opportunities for creative self-presentation and disclosure online; for example, virtual social worlds enable users literally to inhabit a virtual world that mimics the real world. With a few restrictions, the virtual world also allows them to create and customize a persona and an environment that are unique. Social networking sites also enable the projection of an individually crafted image, from the careful selection of images to display through the various likes, shares, and searches that characterize your interaction with content, to the status updates and check-ins that map your daily activities. Other media, such as content communities, offer more limited scope for self-expression since they often require just a basic profile from users. All of them, however, have a role to play in the creation, development, maintenance, and protection of your online reputation:

Reputation management has now become a defining feature of online life for many Internet users, especially the young … Search engines and social media play a central role in building one’s reputation online, and many users are learning and refining their approach as they go.

Madden and Smith (2010)

Take a moment to reflect on your online behavior. Have you ever done any of the following?

Uploaded a video of yourself to a public website?

Tagged your friends in photographs from a night out?

Become involved in a heated discussion with someone on a message board?

Registered for a website account without reading the site’s privacy policy?

Accepted a friend request on Facebook or a connection on LinkedIn from someone you have never met in person?

Uploaded your résumé to a public website?

Started and maintained a personal blog?

Shared personal photographs on a public site, including the geographic location of the pictures?

Entered a competition on Facebook?

Posted online a critical review of a restaurant, hotel, or other service?

Cleared your search history on a Web browser?

Clicked on an advertisement that popped up on a website you were browsing?

Clicked the box stating “I agree to the Terms and Conditions” on a website, without actually reading them?

All of these actions carry consequences for your online image and contribute to how you are perceived in the online world. Almost anything you do online leaves a trace of your presence that may become a permanent record, even if you believe you have deleted this information. In truth, there is nothing on the Web that is completely private. Even simply visiting a Web site once begins the process of information collection. Let us explore the concept of a digital footprint and see how information about you is collected online.

Abstract

Sexual abuse through social networking sites has become increasingly concerning in recent years, with the Internet offering opportunities for sex offenders to engage in online grooming behaviour. The aim of this chapter is to offer a critical overview of the nature of online sexual abuse: it explores some of the online risks children face online including the problem of sexual solicitation. It also presents the types of online groomers that have been identified in the latest studies and the classification of child abuse images, seen as part of the abuse process. It suggests that on the one hand, more needs to be done in ensuring that children are fully aware of the online risks; on the other hand, governments worldwide need to direct more resources to ensure that high-quality training and support is available to frontline police officers to help tackle child sex offences, especially online.

Gaming and virtual worlds

As well as social networking sites, Internet users have also been found to use gaming sites and virtual worlds very widely. There is ample evidence in modern societies that playing electronic (computer or video) games, whether online or offline, is an increasingly popular activity. It is especially popular among teenagers who represent the adult media consumers of the future.

Research carried out by the Pew Internet and American Life Project has reported for the United States that virtually all young people aged 12 to 17 years (97%) claim to play games on computers, the web, or a console or other portable devices. Half of all American teenagers (50%) claimed, when interviewed, to have played with such games on the day before the interview (Lenhart et al., 2008a).

There is a diverse range of video game products in the marketplace representing a number of genres. The most popular genres among teenage players in the United States were found to be ‘racing games’ (played by 74% of all gamers), ‘puzzle games’ (72%), sports games (68%), ‘action games’ (67%), ‘adventure games’ (66%), ‘rhythm games’ (61%), and ‘strategy games’ (59%), which at least half of all game players claimed to play (Lenhart et al., 2008a). A range of other genres (simulation, fighting, first-person shooter, role-playing, survival, horror, massively multi-player, and virtual world games) were also endorsed by smaller proportions of American teen game players. Those teens that reportedly played these games every day were especially likely to prefer action, adventure, fighting, first-person shooter, role-playing, horror, massively multi-player, and virtual worlds. Half (50%) of all daily game players claimed to have played with games from between five and eight different genres. A further four in ten (39%) claimed to have played with an even larger number of genres than this.

Well over one in three (37%) of these teen game players claimed to spend up to two hours a day playing ‘yesterday’, while nearly one in seven (13%) said they played at least three hours. On average, around three in ten (31%) of American teen game players said they played at least once a day, while over four in ten (45%) said they played at least once a week. Thus, video game playing for young Americans can occupy significant amounts of their time. Players tend to seek a variety of forms of interactive entertainment from a number of different themes (Lenhart et al., 2008a). This opens up the possibility that a range of different gratifications may be catered to by this type of entertainment. What we do not know is whether there is any correlation here between video game genre preferences and television programme genre preferences.

Again using Nielsen NetRatings data for the UK, Changing Media (2007) reported that users of the 20 most used of these sites spent an average of 18 hours 43 minutes per month with them. The most popular of these sites was Second Life. Between 2006 and 2007, this site saw its UK user base grow from 79,000 to 211,000 and its users increase the average amount of time spent on the site each month from 9 minutes to 28 hours and 43 minutes.

Average usage levels for online game playing far outstripped times reportedly spent with social networking sites by their average users. Time commitments to online games and virtual worlds seemed to be substantial enough to compete with time devoted to watching television.