Social Networking

Social networking started out as a way to create online profiles, post updates on personal details, connect with friends and family, and make new friends. Nowadays, it’s quite common for someone to have profiles built in multiple sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and/or LinkedIn, each serving a different purpose with different audience or followers. For example, Facebook can help users share personal stories, discover new events, and stay connected with your friends. LinkedIn can help you build your professional image online and it’s frequently used by recruiters to scout potential candidates. Taken together, social networking sites receive millions of visitors each day and are among the most frequently visited sites, as people often rank social networking as one of the most interesting and intriguing activities online. For example, in the article, How Obama Tapped Into Social Networks’ Power, David Carr described how Obama ran a successful online campaign, and through the effective use of social media, and reached out to millions that help him get elected. In another use case, Heather Timmons reported in the article, In India, Using Facebook to Catch Scofflaw Drivers, that people has been using Facebook to report traffic violations to the police, helping the police capture critical evidence to issue citations against reckless drivers. Although there were concerns about authenticity of the photos as well as privacy, the most people welcomed the change that helped make a city safer.

Social networking has also been helping large corporations to learn more about their customers in ways that were seemingly impossible years ago. One of the major emerging trends in the corporate world is Big Data, using large, multi-dimensional data sets to analyze people’s behavior and predict future trends in the business. While structured data, such as personal and transactional information, has been traditionally captured and stored in relational databases, many companies are beginning to tap into unstructured data, such as Facebook and Twitter feeds, by using text analytical tools to parse the natural language and store them in non-relational databases. Many companies believe that social networking feeds contain hidden treasures that the businesses can leverage to help analyze consumer behaviors and to better align the business with the consumer needs.

While social networking has benefited us by keeping us more connected, it also has numerous “dark sides”. In Doug Gross article, Dictionary word of the year: 'Unfriend', it highlights the danger of Facebook in which the user could be a target of someone’s stalking or “sexting” attempt. Indeed, privacy has become a major concern in social networking, as it’s easy to become someone’s friend or follower, but that may bring unwanted attention. The privacy setting could be so confusing that, it may not be easy to “unfriend” somebody or disconnect from the virtual social world. 

Carr, David. “How Obama Tapped Into Social Networks’ Power.” The New York Times, 9 Nov. 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/business/media/10carr.html.

Gross, Doug. “Dictionary Word of the Year: 'Unfriend'.” CNN, 17 Nov. 2009, http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/11/17/unfriend.word/index.html.

Timmons, Heather. “In India, Using Facebook to Catch Scofflaw Drivers.” The New York Times, 1 Aug. 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/02/technology/02traffic.html?ref=business.