Online Social Networking

The relevance of studying online social networking platforms in the context of creative production manifests precisely at this point: Digitally mediated forms of social interaction are credited with the capacity to make building social relationships easier. Particularly so, because connecting with others online seems to alleviate constraints associated with connecting to others socially, such as class affiliation, gender or economic status, for example (e.g. Brooks et al., 2011; Burke et al., 2010). It is assumed that digitally mediated social interaction facilitates social connections with virtually everybody with a minimal level of effort and independent of one’s social status (e.g. Rainie & Wellman, 2012; Quan-Haase et al., 2002). But why is it that connecting online is perceived to be less challenging? And how exactly should this form of social interaction change anything for individuals in creative professions? After all, competition in the creative sector continues to be fierce, and those seeking to establish themselves in the field continue to face constraints in their efforts to develop a career. I assume that, by and large, the framework conditions in the field of creative production remain unchanged in spite of the growing use of online platforms particularly in this sector. However, I argue that in certain contexts, online social networking platforms enable professionals to deal more effectively with given constraints and, therefore, assume greater agency in using the affordances of digital technology to form social connections that hitherto were considered unlikely. In this thesis, my aim is to identify these ‘windows of opportunity’, as it were, and trace under which circumstances they appear and how individuals manage to leverage the opportunities offered by online social networking platforms.

Before going any further it helps to outline what is meant by online Social Networking Services (SNSs) and why regulation of access to personal data might be significant and topical. Online SNSs are internet services based on individual members who put up profiles (containing personal information) that are available to other users or members of the service. Users are able to link to other members to build up their own personal networks. This may include concepts such as: ‘linking’; ‘connecting’; ‘following’; and ‘friending’. In some cases personal profile information may be limited to authorised members who have been specifically identified by a user as being part of their network. In other instances profiles may be available to all users of the service. At the most extreme end of this range, the information in personal profiles may be available to general internet users regardless of membership of the network service. The area of debate is around the release of personal data by the social network providers to third party external agencies (such as advertisers and recruitment agencies) so that they can target their marketing. Tracking technologies such as cookies and beacons are widely used by social network providers to pass on detailed information to commercial enterprises for behavioural advertising.

SixDegrees.com is credited by Boyd and Ellison as being the first major online social networking site when it launched in 1997 (Boyd 214). This website “promoted itself as a tool to help people connect with and send messages to others” (Boyd 214). Other individuals began to take notice of SixDegrees’ popularity and in the early 2000s the online social networking fad hit its stride as dozens of websites were operating as online social networking communities. During this stretch of social networking growth, it was not uncommon to see one website take over in terms of popularity as another website ceased to exist. Many of the social networking sites ceased to exist due to the inability to keep their users happy. One of the exceptions to the previous statement is that of Friendster which was launched in 2002 to allow individuals that were “friends-of- friends to meet” (Boyd 215). This website was largely popular due to the fact that it allowed individuals to connect with one another based on the assumption that users would have more in common since they were friends-of-friends. Nonetheless, Friendster would reach its demise to the fact that its “servers and databases were ill-equipped to handle its rapid growth” (Boyd 215). Today, Friendster continues to exist, but has lost its momentum in gaining the interest of newcomers to the online social networking

As the use of online social networking (OSN) sites by young people continues to grow in popularity, researches have been focussing mainly on the benefits and dangers of such sites on the young generation. However, due to privacy and safety concerns, online social networking sites are normally blocked in schools in Mauritius. This article presents two experiments carried out on the use of a social networking site in education. These consisted of mainly a coursework given by the teachers on an OSN platform where students had to respond to the exercises. The two experiments were conducted out in two different schools and were based on two subjects, namely, French and General Paper. Findings from this study highlight the benefits accrued to students using these online tools in an educational setting. Both students and teachers were satisfied with the new method of teaching and learning. This study shows the educational value and benefits that can be obtained from the use of online social networking in the Mauritian education system.

According to Powell, (2009) online social networking has infiltrated people’s daily life with stunning rapidity to become an important social platform for computer-mediated communication. From that, the social networking will provide leverage for entrepreneur because it can create mechanisms for attaining sustainable competitive advantage. Research revealed that the majority of the undergraduates had thought about starting a business, although most of them do not start right after graduation and rather postponed it to a more distant future (Venesaar, Kolbre, & Piliste, 2008). This shows that there is a lack of initiative among students to conduct their business through social online. Therefore, it is important to study the factors that affected the perception of cyber entrepreneurship to improve their entrepreneurial initiatives.

design comparing measures of SNS use and depression. Articles were not excluded by participant age group or gender, publication date, or country of origin, but were excluded if unavailable in Eng- lish. Search terms were identified to include the two key concepts of depression and online social networking. Different terms for online social networking were trialled during an initial scoping ex- ercise which included the names of specific SNSs of interest. The main concepts were opera- tionalised to include the following search terms: “online social network*”, “online social media”, “Facebook*”, “Twitter”, “MySpace”, and “depression”. Search terms such as Instagram, QQ, LinkedIn, and Tumblr did not yield any relevant results, therefore these were not included in searches. Unlike terms for online social networking, the term “depression” was not further opera- tionalised as related concepts such as low mood, hopelessness, or low self-esteem without a quan- tifiable measure of depression did not meet the inclusion criteria of the review. The searches for online social networking and depression were run in databases and combined to comprehensively capture the relevant literature. Searches were completed in April 2016. A flow chart of the search process is provided in Figure 1.

Social interaction and engagement does contribute to ensure the occurrence of learning activities as learning does not happen on its own all the time regardless in online or face to face instruction (Kamaruzzaman & Rouhullah, 2009). Problem-solving is a skill that can be taught with methods that practise active student-centered approach (Aka et al., 2010) thus, online discussion can be an effective platform for teachers or peers who are expert to scaffold those who needs help in completing assignments or to solve task problem given (Shahizah & Zaidatun, 2014). This is aligned with Vygotskys’ Social Constructivism Theory (Wang, 2015). Online discussion and scaffolding activities can be more interactive and lively as students are not constrained by the structure of formal education. Flexible environment provides opportunity for students to gain knowledge. Student is unaware that they themselves become part of an active learning process due to or multilateral communication online compared to the rigid structure of passive one-way communication that usually occurs in traditional classroom. Social support that goes hand in hand with the activities and interactions will reduce negative elements that interfere with learning. Criticism and argument were accepted positively and seen as part of discussion in learning process (Gillet et al., 2008).

and provide a chance to their users to express themselves. OSNs are also a new way for international relationships, whether the relationship is related to business or social interactions. It is easy for people to interact with each other using OSNs anytime and anywhere in the world. Along with these advantages, social media have disadvantages, one of which being the issue of privacy and security. In this paper, the issues that can harm OSN users are discussed, in addition to giving them recommendations on how to protect their privacy while using OSNs. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 3gives an overview of the privacy and security threats in OSNs. Section 4 gives about different privacy and security treats for youth in OSNs.

Zarghooni’s 2007 study of self-presentation in Facebook applies four of Leary’s 1996 four self-presentation tactics. The same tactics would be used to shed light on SCs’ self-presentation online. These tactics are self-descriptions, attitude statements, nonverbal behaviours and social affiliations. To further operationalize these concepts, self-descriptions are the gamut of details SCs can use to create a desired impression in their social networks (Zarghooni, 2007). These details consist of interests, occupation, accomplishments, political, and religious affiliations (Leary, 1996). The study looked at the number of details SCs put in their social networks. The second one, attitude statements, would refer to the topics SCs choose to talk about. For Leary (1996), ‚attitudes we express influence the impression other people have on us‛ (p. 19). The three subcategories of the non- verbal behaviour – self-presentation tactic, physical appearance and emotion expressions – are utilized for this study. Physical appearance covers the photographs SCs choose to present themselves in Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC). The data from the research of Walther, et al. (2001) on CMC show that physical attractiveness was negatively correlated with effective self-presentation. However, the researches of Nepomuceno (2011), Zarghooni (2007) and Toma and Hancock (2010) advocate that photographs are important vehicles for creating an idealized image. Since expression of emotions are very limited in a social network platform compared to face-to-face interaction, the expression tactics refer to means SCs resort to in expressing emotions. The subtleties of the third subcategory, gestures and movement, otherwise referred to as computer-mediated tactility in Zarghooni’s study, were no longer included since majority of the respondents do not employ this tactic when expressing ideas and emotions. The fourth self-presentation tactic, social affiliations, looks at the importance SCs allocate to publicizing connections and groups in social networks.

ABSTRACT: The ranking based recommendation plays an essential role in helping people to find important information. Although recent research has studied how to advise recommendations with social and geographical information, some of which have dealt with the problem of starting the new cold users. Because mobility records are often shared on social networks, semantic information can be used to address this challenge. There the typical method is to place them in collaborative content-based filters based on explicit comments, but require a negative design samples for a better learning performance, since the negative user preference is not observable in human mobility. However, previous studies have demonstrated empirically that sampling-based methods do not work well. To this end, we propose a system based on collaborative filtering framework to incorporate semantic content and avoid negative sampling. We then develop an efficient optimization, scaling in a linear fashion with the dimensions of the data and the dimensions of the features, and in a quadratic way with the dimension of latent space. We also establish its relationship with the factorization of the plate matrix plating. Finally, we evaluated recommendation with a large-scale location based social network data set in which users have profiles.

Williams et al (2008) in A review of online social networking profiles by adolescents states that Social networking profiles involve individuals creating and maintaining personal Internet sites allowing authors and other users to post content, thus creating a personal network.Lenhart and Madden (2007) in Adolescent social networking, said that in the past five years social networking has “rocketed from a niche activity into a phenomenon that engages tens of millions of Internet users. The study proposes that online social networking profiles posted by adolescents con- tain intimate, candid, and observable self-disclosure and peer interaction that can be analyzed creating an overall picture of adolescent behavior, highlight- ing specific areas needing additional research, and addressing implications for parental monitoring and intervention. Lehnhart and Madden state that fifty-fivepercent of teenagers use and create online social networking pro- files. They opine that with more than half of teenage Internet users interacting online, the concept of blogging is a salient research topic investigating what adolescents are blogging about, how they are socially interacting, and what potential effects this phenomena may have on other dimensions of their lives.

In [2], Twitter is one of the famous Online Social Networking service for distribution of short messages i.e., tweets amongst other users of Twitter. Its users often use URL curtailing services that provides compressed alias of long URL for sharing via tweets and public analytics of concise URLs. To maintain the privacy of specific users public click analytics has been provided in an aggregated form. Inference attacks to infer which compresses URLs clicked on by a target user has been proposed. Only public information is required in their attacks. To evaluate their attacks, they have crawled and monitored there clicked analytics of URL shortening services and Twitter data. Throughout their experiments, they have shown their attacks can infer the candidates in the most cases.

2008 Digital literacy and participation in online social networking spaces.. Knobel eds Digital Literacies: Concepts, Policies and Practices.[r]

Online Social Network Vulnerabilities Large number of users and huge amount of information being shared increases security and privacy issues in online social networking sites (OSNs). According to statistics released by Facebook 655 million user log on to this site and share 4.75 billion pieces of information with each other . Large amount of data present on these sites attract the malicious groups. These groups use autonomous programs that act like human to seal the user’s personal information, spread misinformation and propaganda. These spacial programs are called social bots. For example, someone using social engineering to hack computer network might try to gain the confidence of an official user and get them to disclose information that compromises the network’s security. Social engineers often rely on the natural helpfulness of people as well as on their weaknesses. They may call the authorised employee with some kind of urgent problem that requires immediate network access.

However, it is true that the misuse of such systems may cause distraction, loss of time and privacy, among other negative aspects, but well used can bring benefits to college students. Following an investigation through Facebook (Valerio-Urena, 2010a) it concludes that there are positive impacts of online social networking in college students. These networks help to: 1) acquire computer skills that will be useful to college students not only to learn, but perhaps to be more efficient professionals. Many of these learning the motivations can be obtained talking with a friend on the social network, or create a more sophisticated profile, but in any case it is important that they acquire skills; 2) develop social capital. A key element for sharing knowledge is trust. To greater confidence, greater knowledge transfer. The use of online social networks encourages the development of social capital and therefore confidence and knowledge transfer. Unlike traditional learning platform, online social networks allow constant interaction in an informal and relaxed atmosphere, as well as access to personal contact information and 3) manage information repositories.

Online Social networking focuses on reflecting and building of social networks or relations among people sharing same interests, activities or backgrounds. Social networking sites allow users to share ideas, pictures, posts, activities, events and interests with people in their network. Facebook, Twitter, My Space etc are the sites currently dominating the field of social networking. Social networking sites have been great boons in our lives helping people to remain connected. They allow users to share a lot of information among the people in their network. The increasing tendency of people to use online social networks has lead to collection huge amount of information being available [2]. This gives rise to the concept of information overload. As the Internet is continuously growing; it becomes increasingly difficult to sift through all the information available. To organize such a vast and distributed data generated from OSNs, appropriate techniques are required to analyze and manage such massive, complex and frequently changing social network data. Filtering is used to organize and structure the large and complex data. Information filtering can help in obtaining the most appropriate information efficiently [1].

Today’s youth are online. In fact, to many youth, their identities are not proven to exist without an online presence in the form of an online social networking profile or blog (Stern, 2008). Many researchers in the last decade have attempted to understand how teens act and behave online, what interests them, and what they like and dislike (boyd, 2008; boyd, 2004; Donath & boyd, 2004; Goodstein, 2007; Hinduja & Patchin, 2008; Itō et al., 2010; Willett, Robinson, & Marsh, 2009; O’Keeffe & Clarke-Pearson, 2011). Boyd, for exam- ple, conducted a two-year ethnographic study on teens and their motivations and behaviors on social networks (boyd, 2008). Boyd found that connectiv- ity to musicians and celebrities, public connectivity to acquaintances and friends, and finding a balance between uniqueness and conformity in public iden- tities motivated users to participate on Myspace. Clarke (2009, p. 22) posited that social network- ing sites provide “young adolescents a sense of agency and encourages them to take responsibility for shaping their own development.” Itō suggested that online social networking for teens encourages a sense of solidarity and a space for teens to get recommendations from peers about what televi-

In recent years, the function of e-commerce has been shifted to Social Networking Sites (SNSs). Nowadays, there are variety of types of SNSs like Facebook, My Space, Friendster, and etc. The enhancement of these SNSs have changed the mentality of companies and individual sellers to operate their business, and it also gives choices to consumers to purchase products (Ranganathan and Ganapathy, 2002). According to the latest report by Nielsen Global Online Survey, The Social Media Report (2011), seventy percent of active online social networking users is using SNSs as the place to shop. This shows the new application at SNSs that is performing e-commerce, traditionally meant for socializing.

This illustration raises difficult questions about how identity play should be taken up and engaged with in online art education. For example, should identity play, performance, and construction be a structured activity in online art education? What role do students’ perceptions of social relations play in confidence, participation, and engagement in the art classroom? And, why was it that some of the teacher participants mistook their students for what they equated with a professional practicing artist? Before rushing to judgment of the teacher participants and their expectations of students, we should consider more closely the tangled knot of social relations between teens, student perceptions of self, art curricula, cultural expectations of student art, teacher education, and art educational research. It is a convergence of factors that constructs an identity of what a student should think and produce. Even though we have shrugged off the notion of fixed stages of development in art (Kindler & Darras, 1998), there still remain the traces of what school art is and should be (Efland, 1976). The learning possibilities of social media are that it can become a third space (Wilson, 2008) where both teachers and students can resist these entrenched identities and the expectations that go with them, where they may perform new identities.

Adherence and engagement are essential to effective and efficient delivery of online interventions [34]. Although the population reach and cost-effectiveness of online interventions makes their use attractive, significant work remains to be done in refining and better targeting online interventions to maximize their effectiveness. As online interventions evolve, they will incorporate greater dynamism and functionality. It is possible that automated self-help interventions may lose their appeal, and the development of future interventions must consider features and treatment strategies that promote engagement. A further and necessary advancement, given potential risk issues associated with unmonitored suicidality or symptom deterioration, will likely include the use of real-time moderator input and integrated crisis support within the online environment. This was lacking in the studies identified in our review. Emerging models of online moderation are evolving, including improving the integration of clinician input into online interventions [25]. For example, the moderated online social therapy (MOST) framework [72-74] provides a methodology for promoting ongoing engagement through online therapy, social networking, and regular clinician support for relapse prevention of serious mental health problems in young people. The next generation of online interventions will include refinements and functionality not possible in previous technologies. There is significant scope for greater responsiveness and immediacy, including real-time clinician input and customized feedback. In addition, the next generation