BiblioEteca

Social network . If it is based on the fact that man is born into society and in his development he is integrated into groups with similar interests and is forming a network of social relationships with his peers, then it is correct to affirm that social networks are not born with the Internet.

A user of the network when connecting to a social network, hopes to satisfy communication needs, with like-minded people. These social networks make it possible for a community with a plurality of criteria to exist, and this characteristic is what provides all the energy that gives life to the human groups that make up these networks.

Summary

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1 Concept
2 History
3 Services offered
4 Most popular social networks
5 Risks in social networks
6 Opportunities
- 1 Positive
  - 1.1 Agile and efficient intercommunication… and also free
  - 1.2 Greater dissemination of ideas and debate
  - 1.3 Friendship
  - 1.4 Educational
- 2 Negatives
  - 2.1 Pornography
  - 2.2 Friendship
  - 2.3 Privacy and free?
  - 2.4 The pedagogical factor and the time factor
  - 2.5 Copyright (image or video traffic)
  - 2.6 Virtual world is not real world… individualism isolation
- 7 References
- 8 External links
- 9 Sources

Concept

Social networks on the Internet are virtual communities where users interact with people from all over the world with whom they find common interests or tastes. They function as a communications platform that allows people to connect who know each other or who want to meet, and that allows them to centralize resources, such as photos and videos, in a place that is easy to access and managed by the users themselves.

People were uniting in spheres of knowledge, for this they used the mailing lists , which were organized by subject, after the lists began to emerge the websites of specific subjects, where users could search for information or ask questions about the site theme. At present, all these variants have been integrated, resulting in a more comprehensive service, known as the Social Network.

“Networks are forms of social interaction, defined as a dynamic exchange between people, groups and institutions. A social network is an open system under permanent construction involving groups of people who identify with the same needs and problems and who organize themselves to enhance their resources. ” ^[1]

Social networks on the internet give the possibility of relating to other people even if they do not know each other physically. Each participant in the network contributes criteria, knowledge, with which the network is built, this characteristic of accepting the contributions of each subscriber is what defines the openness of the system. With the entry of a new member, there is a transformation of the existing group, as with the departure of a group member, which implies that a social network is not static but dynamic. By connecting to a social network, it is expected to satisfy communication needs with like-minded people. These social networks make it possible for a community with a plurality of criteria to exist; it is this characteristic that contributes all the energy that gives life to the human groups that make up these networks.

The basic operation of a social network is as follows; all the technical scaffolding that will support it is mounted, a subscriber invites several friends to subscribe and these others, so that each member can invite many more friends, in this way the growth of the network is a geometric growth. ..

History

Since the emergence of ARPANET and the invention of electronic mail , in the Department of Defense of the United States of America in 1971, users of computer networks have begun to organize email addresses by groups, according to the interests of each member, then begins the mailing lists related to a topic, where people interested in the proposed topic subscribed. At the beginning of 1990 Tim Berners-Lee created the web and since its invention it was conceived as a social tool. Around these years David Bohnett , creator of Geocities also incubated the idea of creating a web- based community, in which people share their tastes and feelings.

In the years 2001 and 2002, sites that promoted the networks of friends began to emerge. In 2003, the sites, Friendster , Tribe and Myspace appeared , with the aforementioned objective. In 2004 Orkut was launched by Google , this project is an experiment that one of his employees carried out in his spare time. In February 2004 Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook . In 2005, Yahoo joined Yahoo 360º .

Services offered

Most social networks have the following services in common:

Friends list: Allows the subscriber to add friends, upon acceptance by them of belonging to this friends list. The person must be registered.
Groups and Pages: The goal is to bring together people with like interests. Groups allow you to add messages, video files, photos, etc. The pages are created for specific purposes and are aimed mainly at specific brands or characters and not at any type of convocation. One of the characteristics of social networks is that they do not allow the existence of groups with a discriminatory nature or that incite hatred, disrespect and dishonor of other people, in social networks there is the option to denounce and report them groups.
Wall: The wall ( wallin English ) is a space in each user profile that allows friends to write messages for the user to see.
Photos: Create a photo gallery.
Gifts: Gifts are small icons with a message. Gifts given to a user appear on the wall with the donor’s message, unless the donor decides to give the gift privately, in which case the donor’s name and message are not displayed to other users.
Applications: They are small applications with which you can find out who your best friend is, discover things about your personality, etc.
Games: Most of the applications found on social networks are related to games, for example geography, or skills tests of different types.

Risks in social networks

There are certain risks that go hand in hand with the use of social networks. Some of these are listed below:

Minors. Despite the fact that several social networks have a minimum age for users, it is relatively easy to falsify information. It is important that parental control is done to prevent minors from being victims of predators who are lurking on social networks.
Phishing. There are a large number of scams, most of them aimed at obtaining your personal information. For example, on Facebook there is the “are you in this video?” Deception.
Privacy. The information you post on a social network should be treated with the importance of it. Private information such as phone numbers, addresses, emails, could be used to harm you if they fall into the wrong hands. It is important that you make the necessary privacy settings so that the information you post is visible only to the people you really trust. For Facebook you can define friend lists, plus you can follow these seven practices to protect your privacy on Facebook.
Fake profiles. Social media profiles of alter-egos are more common than you can imagine. There are various motivations for this, being the ill-intentioned ones that you should take care of, such as identity theft, pedophiles, kidnappers, blackmailers, among others. You should pay attention to who you add as friends on your social networks, especially people you do not know and who have a profile photo that is too attractive to be true. In any case, if you are interested in meeting new people and the profile picture is too attractive to resist, you can use privacy filters (such as lists on Facebook or Google+ circles) to separate people you know from those you don’t know well.
Work. Be discreet with what you post, especially if people you interact with in the workplace are part of your contacts on your social network. Social media is the paparazzi of normal people, as sometimes there is more information about your activities than you would like.

Opportunities

In his message for the XLIII World Communications Day , Benedict XVI positively pondered “the potential of new technologies, when they are used to promote solidarity and understanding.”

Positive

It is clear that social media provides opportunities for good. In fact, the Pope himself outlined some positive benefits in the aforementioned message, namely: they facilitate communication and understanding between people, they allow finding new friends, creating communities and networks; search for information and news; families can be in contact more easily, researchers and students have better access to sources of knowledge, learning is encouraged and social development is contributed.

Let’s stop at some characteristic points, more or less general, in which we can synthesize these and other benefits:

Agile and efficient intercommunication… and also free

Being able to be communicated, and also in an immediate, effective and free way, is not only an added value but the definitive guarantee seal for a success that we are in fact verifying.

Greater dissemination of ideas and debate

Now citizens have at their disposal the opportunity to take an active participation generating content and ideas and not just receiving them; Now the citizen can enter into a fruitful debate to enrich and allow himself to be enriched, to express discrepancies and to join initiatives.

Friendship

Benedict XVI said in the message for the 2009 World Communications Day that “the concept of friendship has had a new boom in the vocabulary of digital social networks that have emerged in recent years.”

This reality means prolonging the encounter of real friendship, being able to regain childhood friendships and also effectively establishing new relationships. Even despite the distances. Accepting a new “friend” in a social network implies being willing to share your life with him, which in turn makes mutual knowledge possible. There are many cases of introverted men and women who in social networks have found a means to get out of their self-absorption and thus be able to relate to other human beings based on multiple affinities.

Along these lines, every time a user “uploads” new photos, music, videos, etc., he does so so that other people can see or read it and, in that way, be able to keep them abreast of his own life and, at his time, be aware of the lives of others: what they do, like and think. In social networks like Facebook, the ability to relate to people has been their key to success.

In an interview, Professor Sister María Antonia Chinello , a teacher at the Auxilium University in Rome , declared: “It has been proven that online it is a little easier to share difficulties, hopes, fears, talk about topics that might be embarrassing. face to face, because immediate reactions are feared in the other ”.

Educational

From an educational point of view, a social network has a lot to offer the digital generation. If today’s children, adolescents and young people learn with sound wedges of a few seconds, if their attention is brief, they think more with images than with words and are more given to processing electronic data, why not take advantage of this new medium for learning. Along these lines, social networks also give the opportunity to know, value and learn the good that exists in other cultures, opening paths for dialogue between people from different countries and religions: “The new digital space, called cyberspace, allows one to meet and learn about the values and traditions of others. However, for these encounters to bear fruit, honest and correct forms of expression are required, as well as attentive and respectful listening.

Aware of the educational potential of social networks, there are those who have launched proposals that seek to better exploit this possibility. This is the case of Imbee.com , aimed at boys and girls between 8 and 15 years old, which even has areas for teachers.

Social networks give teachers an opportunity to continue contact with students, to dialogue with them even outside the academic meeting of school institutions.

Negative

An article published by the Argentine newspaper La Nación echoed a study by the Telefónica brand entitled “Interactive Generations in Latin America . Children and adolescents before the screens ”, in collaboration with the University of Navarra. The study analyzes “digital” habits in seven Latin American countries ( Argentina , Brazil , Chile , Colombia , Mexico , Peru and Venezuela ). According to this report, 95% of boys between 10 and 18 years old use the Internet – one of the modern means of communication – on a regular basis, while 83% use a mobile phone and 67% use video games.

The question that comes almost as a corollary is: what do they do on the Internet? “Their usage preferences appear polarized: 70% use it to communicate (Messenger, chat, text messages); 59% to know and be informed; 43% to share photos and videos; the same amount to have fun, and only 6% to buy online “, included the article from La Nación.

More recently, the newspaper Il Corriere della Sera (cf. 09.09.2009) included in an article the aspects of daily life that the web has changed in the existence of so many people, according to an analysis initially published in The Telegraph: from objects ( photo albums, telephone directories, letters, etc.), passing through habits (going to the record store, shopping, etc.), the way of informing ourselves (reflected in the increasingly low sale of printed newspapers), to the privacy (social networks now have information on thousands of citizens provided by themselves).

And is all that something positive or negative? A study by the Vanier Institute for the family in Otawwa, Canada ( Good servant , Bad master : electronic media and the family ), dated October 15 , 2007, revealed the positive contribution of the media as a source of education and entertainment , but it also warned about negative consequences. Which?

Pornography

1) Whoever uses them more interacts less with their partner, children and friends.

2) Those who use them more have a greater risk of falling into aggressive behaviors and poor cognitive development.

3) Health problems related to the eating habits of those who are exposed to food advertisements that circulate in the media.

A study by Optenet indicates that 35% of the existing web pages, at least until December 2008, are pornographic. An article published in the digital version of Diario Uno, Argentina, reported 95.6 million web pages dedicated to pornography.

Even before the Internet, pornography was more difficult to enter homes. It also cost. Now a connection to the network is enough. In the specific case of some social networks, the technical facilities to form groups have led not a few people to enter some specifically pornographic networks [53]. And without having to enter such portals. Others fall into the hands of groups that promote racism, violence or terrorism.

According to a 2007 study by the University of New Hampshire , in the United States each month there are more than 35 million visits to pornographic sites.

In early December 2008, Libertad Digital.com reported that the word “sex” in Yahoo.com search engines had been one of the three most searched terms during that year.

The ease of accessing portals with these contents goes beyond the mere theoretical consideration of ethical issues; When noting the emotional, psychological, physical and relational consequences of those who fall into the networks of pornography, one cannot remain indifferent. This is accentuated even more in the specific case of the family environment, and everything that that environment supposes and represents.

In September 2009, Morality in Media , of Robert Peters , published a study entitled How Adult Pornography Contributes To Sexual Exploitation of Children (How to adult pornography contributes to sexual exploitation of children). The report highlighted the threat that pornography posed to children. Why specifically?

John Flynn, LC ., Summed up the points in an article published by the zenit agency :

Criminals use adult pornography to groom their victims.
For many offenders there is a progression from viewing adult pornography to viewing child pornography.
Men perform with girl prostitutes as they see in adult pornography, and pimps use adult pornography to instruct girl prostitutes.
Children imitate with other children the behavior they see in adult pornography.
Addiction to adult pornography destroys marriages, and children in single-parent households are at higher risk of sexual exploitation.

One of the phenomena that are negatively impacting young people and, especially, adolescents is the so-called sexting. Sexting consists of sending images or videos with sexual content through the mobile phone or publishing them in profiles or groups of social networks. The content could be produced by the protagonist, even in a consensual way. The degree of immorality is more painful when the content was stolen, obtained and made known without the consent of the person concerned.

Friendship

The issue of digital “friendship” is another pending issue. Initially, social networks implied a friendship based on real life relationships, specifically in an academic university environment. However, with social networks, face-to-face relationships decrease and it is possible to fall into the pitfall of replacing them with relationships only in that medium. Or what is the same: having many “friends” on the Internet and forgetting those who are next to us. It is true, used as an opportunity to consolidate or regain those friendships that due to distance or time had been lost, cannot be unvalued.

“Digital friendship” invites us to consider the serious risk that computers, cell phones and other devices isolate from interpersonal relationships supported by real encounters and even confuse a simple relationship with an authentic friendship. In addition, a social-digital link can create an excess of dependence on others or, simply, make “friendship” pass as a commodity. On many occasions “friendship” is reduced to “having” someone else on the list of one’s profile.

Not without reason does Boyd affirm: “the term ‘friends’ can be misleading, because relationship does not necessarily mean Friendship in the everyday vernacular sense, and the reasons for people connecting are diverse.” In this same sense, Benedict contributes an original and profound reflection in the multi-quoted message for the XLIII Conference of Social Communications: “This concept is one of the noblest conquests of human culture. In our friendships, and through them, we grow and develop as human beings. Precisely for this reason, friendship has always been considered one of the greatest riches that human beings can have. Therefore, care must be taken not to trivialize the concept and experience of friendship.

In an interview with the Sunday Telegraph , the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Monsignor Vicent Nichols, warned about the dehumanizing effects of the Internet in the following terms: “We are losing capacities, human interaction skills, how to read a person’s mind, see their body language, how to be patient until the moment of specifying something or exerting pressure ”.

More or less along the same lines was an article entitled How Facebook Can Ruin Friendships, published in The Wall Street Journal in August 2009. In a testimony collected in the article it was said: “I am tired of friends who say they are too busy to make a phone call, or even to write an acceptable e-mail, yet they spend hours on social media, posting photos of their children or their parties, forwarding stupid riddles, posting extravagant and absurd sayings, or using Twitter to communicate their last adventures ”. As Archbishop Nichols stated, written communication is imperfect. Or in the words of the Wall Street Journal, “the nuances that can be expressed in body language and voice inflections are lost.”

Privacy and free?

Today, young people and adolescents are used to saying, writing and presenting themselves through texts, messages, photos and videos. In most cases they do not seem aware of what they write or upload to the network. Once published it is visible to all and you can even lose control of where the information can end up.

The specific issue of privacy is one of those that in a most suggestive way raises many cons in many environments. An academic study on privacy and the social network by scholars Gross and Acquisti revealed that the potential risk is high for cybercriminals to reconstruct social security numbers from the data included in the profiles. And it is that on many occasions there is an oversight caused, in part, by the unconsciousness about the public nature that the Internet supposes.

Social media apps get people to make detailed chronicles of their life experiences. In a certain way, it is a waiver of privacy placed in the hands of for-profit companies whose profits depend, in a certain way, on the trust of users who put in their hands the “part” of life that they “carry” in the voluntarily in the social network. Never before have so many people made such a quantity of personal data available to anyone. There is no need to remember that “One must not be fooled by those who –both in terms of“ friendship ”and privacy, ndr– only go in search of consumers in a market of undifferentiated possibilities, where the choice itself is presented as good, novelty is confused with beauty and subjective experience supplants truth ”.

All of the above raises more ethical questions and is the reason for a greater alert if we consider that at least a quarter of the users of social networks are minors.

Advertising on our monitor screens reminds us that social networks are not philanthropic groups but companies seeking financial gain. The owners of social networks do not make friends, but customers.

Thus, it is not trivial to remember that the most used platforms are becoming the property of companies whose mission is to increase their income. Although they offer a service, who is the ultimate owner of the information that the user freely uploads and what availability can they have and do with it? “Once an information or message is introduced on the Internet, it is highly difficult to retain the title of ownership by the issuer. The messages can be easily taken and transformed so that the original authorship trail is lost. Legislators attach paramount importance to this issue. There are computer hackers who steal data and information on the Internet as bank robbers. Who is custodian of the data banks? Who has normal access to them without violating the corresponding professional secrecy? How to avoid bribery or treacherous assault on them?

Here, as in other issues related to the Internet, international legislation is required in this regard so that no business takes advantage of the trust of people, regardless of who they are.

The pedagogical factor and the time factor

But the trivialization of interpersonal relationships is not the only aspect. There is also the seldom valued “time use” factor that, in the best of cases, only affects grades, studies and job performance.

An education is necessary to discern not only who is admitted as a friend, but in everything that is made available to others in one’s own profile and the time invested in it. A modern opportunity cannot become slavery. And the thing is that a social network demands high user attention: “… Any message, photo or video that any of the friends present on the network introduces supposes a call that is frequently answered with an exchange of messages, photos or videos . Uploading photos and videos already takes a certain amount of time… and the clock is ticking ”.

Considering this, a question arises spontaneously: does a student have time for it? At what point does a worker update their profile?

As part of the “education” factor, it is painful to find a really poor command of language that, in some way, is a reflection of the mental laziness that these media can promote due to the speed and immediacy that they imply. On the other hand, going aimlessly sailing can lead to more than one sad shipwreck.

Copyright (image or video traffic)

Through social networks, due to their very relational dynamics between people, it is possible to share content many times outside of those who legally produce or distribute it. Considering the above, we perceive two things:

1) On the one hand, we have what we could call “copyright” over the content that the user himself produces (his photos, videos, texts, etc.) and, on the other,

2) those foreign content that many times the same user circulates or receives. It is clear that what is produced can be disposed of, as long as it does not threaten anyone else and is good, but it cannot be disposed of without more than something else.

The fact that de facto there is a massive theft of intellectual property (let’s think about music or videos that are distributed or shared), a democratization of crime, is not synonymous with the fact that it should not be punished, much less that it is good. “Criminal behavior in other contexts is also criminal behavior in cyberspace.”

Virtual world is not real world … individualism isolation

By reflecting identity, the possibility of creating an artificial representation of oneself remains latent, so that it can appear more “attractive” for all those who are on the hunt for “friends” with special physical gifts. A profile can also be an occasion for narcissism, exhibitionism and superficiality because, for many, the desire to appear as a socially attractive person, having many “friends” on social networks, is still symptomatic. Nor is it strange to find retouched photos that improve the articulation of the user’s identity ad extra.

In any case, the temptation remains open to make a social network an occasion for the construction of a parallel world that, in addition to alienating, could lead weak or weak temperaments into self-consciousness and increasingly radical isolation from real social interaction. rather poor in resources to live and socialize.

All this development of social networks in general, and of singular cases, offers a wide range of opportunities to do good and grow in it. But social media also presents ethical challenges that cannot go unnoticed. Which ones are we referring to?

Summary

Concept

History

Services offered

Most popular social networks

Risks in social networks

Opportunities

Positive

Agile and efficient intercommunication… and also free

Greater dissemination of ideas and debate

Friendship

Educational

Negative

Pornography

Friendship

Privacy and free?

The pedagogical factor and the time factor

Copyright (image or video traffic)

Virtual world is not real world … individualism isolation

by Abdullah Sam

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