Social Network Sites and Social Interaction

(2) A network of friends, colleagues, and other personal contacts. (3) An online community of people with a common interest who use a website or other technologies to communicate with each other and share information or resources. Social Network sites is defined 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 who they share a connections, and (3) view and navigate their list of connections and those made by others within the system. These social network sites are named as such but not limited to: Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, and

Most of today 's Internet users are active in so many different social networks just to list a few of the most common ones are Facebook Myspace and twitter and there are so many more that the list could go on. These sites specialize in connecting people, either by letting them send messages or pictures or by enabling them to play online games together and comment on each other 's walls or photos. These social networks have enormous popularity because many people are engaging in this kind of online activity on social networks, they have enormous benefits of either Facebook 's strategy of keeping in touch with old friends or Twitter 's idea of seeing what current friends are up to with a certain success, and more and more people are signing

Boyd, D, & Ellison, NB 2009, ‘Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship’, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 210-230.

A social network, as defined by Oxford Dictionaries, is “A dedicated website or other application which enables users to communicate with each other by posting information, comments, messages, images, etc.”(http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/social-network). Facebook is one of the largest social networks in the world, millions of users in Canada alone access Facebook daily. Many topics of discussion are addressed including matters of personal issues, work, relationships, and politics. As a result, Facebook has become a primary source for information;

Social networking sites are web based and applications that allows users to communicate via-web to share their content or follow with other users. For example the most well known online networking sites are Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. When you sign up to these sites it asked you to make a profile, which can be time consuming, but you can alter it for your needs as an enjoyment. Online networking has become a very significant piece of social communications inside our society. For example when you meet another person, one of the principal things you do is include them on your friends or followers list on social media. This is a form of communication. We communicate to people every day through all different forms of interpersonal communication.

Boyd, D.M., & Ellison, N.B. (2007). Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), 210-230.

Social networking has been around for years whether it’s facebook, twitter, youtube, myspace, etc. It has been studied since the beginning of the 20th century. A social network service is a web site that allows people to create a public profile for everyone to see. There are both positive and negative effects of social networking. Facebook is the most used and populated website on the web. Facebook was launched seven years ago and has already attracted over a half a billion people around the world and it still continues to grow. Three years ago facebook wasn’t as a popular as it is now with only 8 % of the U.S. population signed on to facebook. Today, more than

* What makes social network sites unique is not that they allow individuals to meet strangers, but rather that they enable users to articulate and make visible their social networks. This can result in connections between individuals that would not otherwise be made, but that is often not the goal, and these meetings are frequently between "latent ties" (Haythornthwaite, 2005) who share some offline connection. On many of the large SNSs, participants are not necessarily "networking" or looking to meet new people; instead, they are primarily communicating with people who are already a part of their extended social network. To emphasize this articulated social network as a critical organizing feature of these sites, we label them "social network sites."

Social network sites (SNSs) such as such as Friendster, CyWorld, and MySpace allow individuals to present themselves, articulate their social networks, and establish or maintain connections with others (Ellison, 2007). These sites could be used for work related situation, romance, connecting with individuals with shared interest, or creating a connection amongst college students. Facebook enables its users to present themselves in an online profile, accumulate ‘‘friends’’ who can post comments on each other’s pages, and view each other’s profiles (Ellison, 2007). Individuals can write on the wall of friends, send private message, comment on posts, as well as chat via instant messaging. Much of the early research on online communities assumed that individuals using these systems would be connecting with others outside their pre-existing social group or location, liberating them to form communities around shared interests, as opposed to shared geography (Ellison, 2007).

Self-presentation, as described by sociologists, is behavior that attempts to convey some information about oneself or some image of oneself to other people. People spend most of their time with others, making self-presentation a fundamental part of their behaviour. Everyone consciously or subconsciously wants to influence the perception of their image. This phenomenon is called impression management, a process in which people attempt to influence the perceptions of other people about a person, object or event. People practice impression management during both online and offline interactions. Impression management during online and offline interaction gives rise to the question: can online interactions be as significant as offline interactions to one’s personality? The complex nature of human interactions causes intermingling of the offline and online personalities, resulting in dependence between the online and offline identities of people. Online personalities are not only influenced by a person’s real identity, they also influence a person’s offline identity. Thus, both online and offline identities play an indispensible role in defining the personality of a person.

Impression management is an inevitable part of human life. Impression management is “a deliberate and conscious form of desirability … [that] requires cognitive effort” (Uziel 202), or thought. It “is not supposed to be associated with one’s actual behavior” (Uziel 202), but, rather, impression management is the image people portray of themselves by the “use of behaviors to intentionally regulate the impressions that observers have of oneself” (Lewis and Neighbors 470). Patricia M. Rodriguez et al. claim that people will present themselves in ways they believe will produce positive rewards and will help them accomplish their goals (403), but different goals require different self-presentations. Thus, people must alter their impression management in pursuance of achieving their social objective. Mark R. Leary and Ashley Batts Allen claim that people do not interact with others but rather make their own impressions of that person (889). In other words, people go by their mental representations and inferences they make about a person’s character instead of who the person really is.

Indeed, Social Networking Sites (herafter SNS) are one of the tools of the Web 2.0. Recent examples of SNS are Facebook, Myspace or Netlog. They are defined as “virtual places that cater to a specific population in which people of similar interest gather to communicate, share, and

Goffman devised the idea that when in case of an interaction, individuals are social actors who put up performances, projecting specific identities of themselves, usually aiming for the approval of others (Karp et. al., 2016). In the case of my interactions with fellow Bunz users, following social norms, I messaged the traders and presented my offer trying to present my best face (Karp et. al., 2016), so we could come up with a beneficial trade, these interactions corresponded with Goffman’s dramaturgical view. The dramaturgical view states that individuals systematically control the information they provide to others about themselves

Online networking can 't be comprehended without first characterizing Web 2.0: a term that portrays another path in which end clients utilize the World Wide Web, a spot where substance is constantly adjusted by all administrators in a sharing and community way (Kaplan and Haenlein 2010). "It has much more to do with what individuals are doing with the innovation than the innovation itself, for rather than just recovering data, clients are currently making and devouring it, and henceforth including quality to the sites that allow them to do as such" (Campbell et al. 2011, 87). Web 2.0 has advanced from basic data recovery to intelligence, interoperability, and cooperation (Campbell et al. 2011).

Social networking is a way for people to connect and share information with each other online.