Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship Journal of Computer Mediated Communication Oxford Academic

Social network sites SNSs are increasingly attracting the attention of tutorial and industry researchers intrigued by their affordances and reach. This particular theme part of the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication brings together scholarship on these emergent phenomena. In this introductory article, we describe characteristics of SNSs and suggest a complete definition. We then present one perspective on the historical past of such sites, discussing key changes and developments.

After in short summarizing current scholarship regarding SNSs, we talk about the articles in this particular section and finish with concerns for future research. Since their creation, social community sites SNSs similar to MySpace, Facebook, Cyworld, and Bebo have attracted hundreds of thousands of users, many of whom have built-in these sites into their daily practices. As of this writing, there are a whole bunch of SNSs, with a whole lot of technological affordances, helping a wide array of pursuits and practices. While their key technological qualities are fairly constant, the cultures that emerge around SNSs are varied. Most sites aid the upkeep of pre existing social networks, but others help strangers connect based on shared interests, political opinions, or events.

Some sites cater to diverse audiences, while others attract people based on common language or shared racial, sexual, religious, or nationality based identities. Sites also vary in the level to which they incorporate new suggestions and communique tools, akin to mobile connectivity, blogging, and photo/video sharing. What makes social community 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 bring about connections among persons that might not differently be made, but that is often not the goal, and these meetings are frequently among “latent ties” Haythornthwaite, 2005 who share some offline connection. On most of the large SNSs, individuals are not always “networking” or hunting to fulfill new people; instead, they’re basically speaking with those who find themselves already part of their prolonged social community. To emphasize this articulated social network as a important preparing feature of those sites, we label them “social network sites.

”While SNSs have implemented a wide selection of technical qualities, their spine includes seen profiles that reveal an articulated list of Friends1 who also are users of the system. Profiles are unique pages where you may “type oneself into being” Sundén, 2003, p. 3. After becoming a member of an SNS, someone is asked to fill out forms containing a series of questions. The profile is generated using the answers to those questions, which customarily include descriptors comparable to age, place, pursuits, and an “about me” section.

Most sites also inspire users to upload a profile photo. Some sites allow users to enhance their profiles by adding multimedia content or modifying their profile’s feel and appear. Others, similar to Facebook, allow users to add modules “Applications” that increase their profile. The visibility of a profile varies by site and in accordance with user discretion. By default, profiles on Friendster and Tribe.

net are crawled by search engines, making them visible to anyone, despite whether or not the viewer has an account. Alternatively, LinkedIn controls what a viewer may even see based on even if she or he has a paid account. Sites like MySpace allow users to decide on no matter if they want their profile to be public or “Friends only. ” Facebook takes a distinct frame of mind—by default, users who are portion of an identical “community” can view each other’s profiles, unless a profile owner has decided to disclaim permission to those of their community. Structural diversifications around visibility and access are one of the primary ways that SNSs differentiate themselves from each other.

After joining a social community site, users are triggered to name others in the system with whom they have a courting. The label for these relationships differs depending on the positioning—familiar terms encompass “Friends,” “Contacts,” and “Fans. ” Most SNSs require bi directional affirmation for Friendship, but some do not. These one directional ties are sometimes classified as “Fans” or “Followers,” but many sites call these Friends as well. The term “Friends” can be misleading, simply because the connection doesn’t necessarily mean friendship in the everyday vernacular sense, and the reasons people attach are varied boyd, 2006a.

Beyond profiles, Friends, comments, and personal messaging, SNSs vary vastly in their features and user base. Some have photo sharing or video sharing features; others have in-built running a blog and immediate messaging era. There are mobile true SNSs e. g. , Dodgeball, but some web based SNSs also aid limited mobile interactions e. g.

, Facebook, MySpace, and Cyworld. Many SNSs target people from exact realms or linguistic groups, however this doesn’t always decide the site’s constituency. Orkut, for example, was introduced in america with an English only interface, but Portuguese speaking Brazilians quickly became the dominant user group Kopytoff, 2004. Some sites are designed with real ethnic, devout, sexual orientation, political, or other identity driven classes in mind. There are even SNSs for dogs Dogster and cats Catster, however their owners must manage their profiles. According to the definition above, the 1st recognizable social community site introduced in 1997.

SixDegrees. com allowed users to create profiles, list their Friends and, beginning in 1998, surf the Friends lists. Each of those traits existed in some form before SixDegrees, for sure. Profiles existed on most major dating sites and many group sites. AIM and ICQ buddy lists supported lists of Friends, even though those Friends were not visible to others. Classmates.

com allowed people to affiliate with their high school or college and surf the community for others who were also affiliated, but users couldn’t create profiles or list Friends until years later. SixDegrees was the first to combine these qualities. SixDegrees promoted itself as a tool to help people connect with and send messages to others. While SixDegrees attracted millions of users, it didn’t become a sustainable enterprise and, in 2000, the provider closed. Looking back, its founder believes that SixDegrees was simply earlier than its time A.

Weinreich, personal verbal exchange, July 11, 2007. While people were already flocking to the Internet, most did not have prolonged networks of friends who were online. Early adopters complained that there was little to do after accepting Friend requests, and most users weren’t attracted to assembly strangers. From 1997 to 2001, a number of neighborhood tools began assisting a whole lot of combinations of profiles and publicly articulated Friends. AsianAvenue, BlackPlanet, and MiGente allowed users to create personal, professional, and dating profiles—users could identify Friends on their own profiles without seeking acclaim for those connections O. Wasow, own verbal exchange, August 16, 2007.

Likewise, presently after its launch in 1999, LiveJournal listed one directional connections on user pages. LiveJournal’s writer suspects that he normal these Friends after immediate messaging buddy lists B. Fitzpatrick, personal communique, June 15, 2007—on LiveJournal, people mark others as Friends to follow their journals and manage privacy settings. The Korean virtual worlds site Cyworld was started in 1999 and added SNS features in 2001, unbiased of those other sites see Kim and Yun, this issue. Likewise, when the Swedish web neighborhood LunarStorm refashioned itself as an SNS in 2000, it contained Friends lists, guestbooks, and diary pages D.

Skog, personal communication, September 24, 2007. The next wave of SNSs began when Ryze. com was launched in 2001 to help people leverage their enterprise networks. Ryze’s founder reports that he first delivered the site to his chums—basically members of the San Francisco enterprise and era neighborhood, adding the entrepreneurs and buyers behind many future SNSs A. Scott, own communication, June 14, 2007.

In particular, the folks behind Ryze, Tribe. net, LinkedIn, and Friendster were tightly entwined for my part and professionally. They believed that they can aid one another with out competing Festa, 2003. In the end, Ryze never bought mass popularity, Tribe. net grew to attract a passionate niche user base, LinkedIn became a powerful company provider, and Friendster became probably the most substantial, if only as “one of the largest disappointments in Internet history” Chafkin, 2007, p. 1.

Friendster launched in 2002 as a social complement to Ryze. It was designed to compete with Match. com, a ecocnomic online dating site Cohen, 2003. While most dating sites focused on introducing people to strangers with identical pursuits, Friendster was designed to aid chums of chums meet, based on the belief that pals of chums would make better romantic companions than would strangers J. Abrams, personal verbal exchange, March 27, 2003. Friendster gained traction among three groups of early adopters who shaped the site—bloggers, attendees of the Burning Man arts festival, and gay men boyd, 2004—and grew to 300,000 users via word of mouth before classic press coverage began in May 2003 O’Shea, 2003.

As Friendster’s recognition surged, the site encountered technical and social difficulties boyd, 2006b. Friendster’s servers and databases were ill equipped to handle its rapid growth, and the positioning faltered continually, irritating users who replaced email with Friendster. Because biological growth had been critical to making a coherent community, the onslaught of new users who found out concerning the site from media coverage upset the cultural stability. Furthermore, exponential growth meant a cave in in social contexts: Users had to face their bosses and previous classmates alongside their close friends. To complicate matters, Friendster began restricting the hobbies of its most passionate users.

The initial design of Friendster constrained users from viewing profiles of people who were more than four degrees away friends of pals of chums of friends. In order to view extra profiles, users began adding acquaintances and fascinating searching strangers to expand their reach. Some began hugely collecting Friends, an activity that was implicitly encouraged via a “most ordinary” characteristic. The most fulfilling collectors were fake profiles representing iconic fictional characters: celebrities, concepts, and other such entities. These “Fakesters” outraged the agency, who banished fake profiles and eliminated the “most frequent” characteristic boyd, in press b.

While few people in reality created Fakesters, many more enjoyed surfing Fakesters for enjoyment or using useful Fakesters e. g. , “Brown University” find people they knew. From 2003 onward, many new SNSs were launched, prompting social program analyst Clay Shirky 2003 to coin the term YASNS: “Yet Another Social Networking Service. ” Most took the kind of profile centric sites, seeking to reflect the early success of Friendster or target true demographics. While socially arranged SNSs solicit broad audiences, expert sites such as LinkedIn, Visible Path, and Xing previously openBC focus on enterprise people.

“Passion centric” SNSs like Dogster T. Rheingold, personal verbal exchange, August 2, 2007 help strangers connect based on shared pursuits. Care2 helps activists meet, Couchsurfing connects tourists to individuals with couches, and MyChurch joins Christian church buildings and their members. Furthermore, as the social media and user generated content phenomena grew, internet sites concentrated on media sharing began imposing SNS traits and fitting SNSs themselves. Examples include Flickr photo sharing, Last.

FM music listening habits, and YouTube video sharing. Few analysts or journalists observed when MySpace launched in Santa Monica, California, a whole bunch of miles from Silicon Valley. MySpace was begun in 2003 to compete with sites like Friendster, Xanga, and AsianAvenue, in line with co founder Tom Anderson own communication, August 2, 2007; the founders desired to attract estranged Friendster users T. Anderson, personal verbal exchange, February 2, 2006. After rumors emerged that Friendster would adopt a fee based system, users posted Friendster messages encouraging people to sign up for alternate SNSs, including Tribe. net and MySpace T.

Anderson, personal communique, August 2, 2007. Because of this, MySpace was capable of grow all of a sudden by capitalizing on Friendster’s alienation of its early adopters. One enormously striking group that inspired others to switch were indie rock bands who were expelled from Friendster for failing to comply with profile policies. While MySpace was not introduced with bands in mind, they were welcomed. Indie rock bands from the Los Angeles region began creating profiles, and local promoters used MySpace to advertise VIP passes for standard clubs. Intrigued, MySpace contacted local musicians to see how they could aid them T.

Anderson, personal communication, September 28, 2006. Bands were not the sole source of MySpace growth, but the symbiotic courting between bands and fans helped MySpace expand beyond former Friendster users. The bands and fans dynamic was mutually really useful: Bands wanted to be capable of touch fans, while fans favored attention from their favorite bands and used Friend connections to signal identification and affiliation. Teenagers began becoming a member of MySpace en masse in 2004. Unlike older users, most teens were never on Friendster—some joined because they desired to connect with their favourite bands; others were brought to the site through older members of the family. As teens began signing up, they encouraged their pals to join.

Rather than rejecting underage users, MySpace changed its user policy to allow minors. As the positioning grew, three assorted populations started to form: musicians/artists, little ones, and the post faculty urban social crowd. By and huge, the latter two groups did not interact with one one more except through bands. Because of the shortcoming of mainstream press coverage during 2004, few others noticed the site’s growing recognition. While MySpace attracted most people of media interest in the U.

S. and abroad, SNSs were proliferating and turning out to be in recognition around the globe. Friendster gained traction in the Pacific Islands, Orkut became the premier SNS in Brazil before turning out to be swiftly in India Madhavan, 2007, Mixi attained common adoption in Japan, LunarStorm took off in Sweden, Dutch users embraced Hyves, Grono captured Poland, Hi5 was followed in smaller nations in Latin America, South America, and Europe, and Bebo became very typical in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia. Additionally, prior to now popular communique and community amenities began imposing SNS traits. The Chinese QQ immediate messaging service instantly became the biggest SNS everywhere when it added profiles and made chums seen McLeod, 2006, while the forum tool Cyworld cornered the Korean market by introducing homepages and buddies Ewers, 2006.

Alongside these open amenities, other SNSs launched to aid niche demographics before expanding to a broader viewers. Unlike previous SNSs, Facebook was designed to support distinctive faculty networks only. Facebook began in early 2004 as a Harvard only SNS Cassidy, 2006. To join, a user had to have a harvard. edu email address. As Facebook began helping other schools, those users were also required to have college email addresses associated with those institutions, a requirement that kept the site pretty closed and contributed to users’ perceptions of the positioning as an intimate, private group.

Beginning in September 2005, Facebook improved to include highschool college students, professionals inside company networks, and, ultimately, everybody. The change to open signup didn’t mean that new users could easily access users in closed networks—gaining access to company networks still required the acceptable . com tackle, while having access to high school networks required administrator approval. As of this writing, only club in nearby networks requires no permission. Unlike other SNSs, Facebook users are unable to make their full profiles public to all users. Another feature that differentiates Facebook is the ability for outside developers to build “Applications” which permit users to personalize their profiles and perform other tasks, similar to compare movie preferences and chart travel histories.

Currently, there are no reliable data concerning what number of people use SNSs, even though advertising and marketing analysis indicates that SNSs are starting to be in popularity around the world comScore, 2007. This growth has triggered many agencies to take a position time and money in growing, buying, promoting, and advertising SNSs. At the same time, other agencies are blockading their personnel from gaining access to the sites. Additionally, the U. S. military banned squaddies from accessing MySpace Frosch, 2007 and the Canadian government prohibited employees from Facebook Benzie, 2007, while the U.

S. Congress has proposed laws to ban youth from having access to SNSs in colleges and libraries H. R. 5319, 2006; S. 49, 2007.

The rise of SNSs indicates a shift in the organization of online groups. While websites dedicated to communities of hobby still exist and prosper, SNSs are primarily arranged around people, not interests. Early public online communities reminiscent of Usenet and public dialogue forums were structured by topics or in response to topical hierarchies, but social network sites are structured as personal or “egocentric” networks, with the particular person at the center of their own neighborhood. This more correctly mirrors unmediated social systems, where “the realm consists of networks, not groups” Wellman, 1988, p. 37. The introduction of SNS qualities has delivered a new organizational framework for online communities, and with it, a colourful new research context.

Like other online contexts in which individuals are consciously in a position to build an online illustration of self—reminiscent of online dating profiles and MUDS—SNSs constitute an important analysis context for scholars investigating methods of impression management, self presentation, and friendship functionality. In one of the earliest academic articles on SNSs, boyd 2004 examined Friendster as a locus of publicly articulated social networks that allowed users to negotiate shows of self and connect with others. Donath and boyd 2004 prolonged this to indicate that “public shows of connection” serve as vital identification alerts that help people navigate the networked social world, in that a longer community may serve to validate identity information offered in profiles. While most sites inspire users to build correct representations of themselves, members try this to various levels. Marwick 2005 found that users on three diverse SNSs had complicated thoughts for negotiating the rigidity of a prescribed “genuine” profile, while boyd in press b examined the phenomenon of “Fakesters” and argued that profiles could never be “real. ” The extent to which pictures are authentic or playful varies across sites; both social and technological forces shape user practices.

Skog 2005 found that the status characteristic on LunarStorm strongly encouraged how people behaved and what they choose to reveal—profiles there point out one’s status as measured by pastime e. g. , sending messages and signs of authenticity e. g. , using a “real” photo instead of a drawing.

In their exam of LiveJournal “friendship,”Fono and Raynes Goldie 2006 defined users’ understandings regarding public shows of connections and how the Friending functionality can operate as a catalyst for social drama. In listing user motivations for Friending, boyd 2006a points out that “Friends” on SNSs are not an identical as “pals” in the everyday sense; as a substitute, Friends supply context by providing users an imagined audience to steer behavioral norms. Other work in this area has examined the use of Friendster Testimonials as self presentational devices boyd and Heer, 2006 and the level to which the attractiveness of one’s Friends as indicated by Facebook’s “Wall” function impacts impression formation Walther, Van Der Heide, Kim, and Westerman, in press. Social community sites also supply rich assets of naturalistic behavioral data. Profile and linkage data from SNSs can be gathered either through the use of automated collection techniques or through datasets supplied without delay from the company, allowing network analysis researchers to explore large scale patterns of friending, usage, and other seen indicators Hogan, in press, and continuing an analysis trend that started with examinations of blogs and other websites.

For occasion, Golder, Wilkinson, and Huberman 2007 tested an anonymized dataset which includes 362 million messages exchanged by over four million Facebook users for insight into Friending and messaging activities. Lampe, Ellison, and Steinfield 2007 explored the courting between profile parts and number of Facebook pals, discovering that profile fields that reduce transaction costs and are harder to falsify are without doubt to be associated with larger number of friendship links. These kinds of knowledge also lend themselves well to analysis through network visualization Adamic, Buyukkokten, and Adar, 2003; Heer and boyd, 2005; Paolillo and Wright, 2005. SNS researchers have also studied the network structure of Friendship. Analyzing the jobs people played in the growth of Flickr and Yahoo!360’s networks, Kumar, Novak, and Tomkins 2006 argued that there are passive members, inviters, and linkers “who fully take part in the social evolution of the network” p. 1.

Scholarship regarding LiveJournal’s network has protected a Friendship category scheme Hsu, Lancaster, Paradesi, and Weniger, 2007, an analysis of the role of language in the topology of Friendship Herring et al. , 2007, research into the importance of geography in Friending Liben Nowell, Novak, Kumar, Raghavan, and Tomkins, 2005, and studies on what motivates people to join specific communities Backstrom, Huttenlocher, Kleinberg, and Lan, 2006. Based on Orkut data, Spertus, Sahami, and Buyukkokten 2005 diagnosed a topology of users via their club in bound groups; they suggest that sites can use this to suggest extra communities of hobby to users. Finally, Liu, Maes, and Davenport 2006 argued that Friend connections are not the simplest network architecture worth investigating. They tested the ways by which the performance of tastes favourite music, books, film, etc.

constitutes another community structure, which they call a “taste fabric. ”Although exceptions exist, the available research indicates that almost all SNSs essentially assist pre present social relations. Ellison, Steinfield, and Lampe 2007 indicate that Facebook is used to hold present offline relationships or solidify offline connections, instead of meeting new people. These relationships may be weak ties, but usually there is a few common offline aspect among individuals who friend one another, corresponding to a shared class at college. This is one of the chief dimensions that differentiate SNSs from previously styles of public CMC akin to newsgroups Ellison et al. , 2007.

Research in this vein has investigated how online interactions interface with offline ones. For occasion, Lampe, Ellison, and Steinfield 2006 found that Facebook users engage in “searching” for folks with whom they’ve got an offline connection more than they “browse” for comprehensive strangers to fulfill. Likewise, Pew research found that 91% of U. S. teens who use SNSs do so to attach with chums Lenhart and Madden, 2007. Given that SNSs enable persons to attach with one an additional, it isn’t unbelievable that they are getting deeply embedded in user’s lives.

In Korea, Cyworld has become an essential component of daily life—Choi 2006 found that 85% of that study’s respondents “listed the upkeep and reinforcement of pre current social networks as their main motive for Cyworld use” p. 181. Likewise, boyd 2008 argues that MySpace and Facebook enable U. S. youth to socialize with their friends even if they’re unable to gather in unmediated situations; she argues that SNSs are “networked publics” that support sociability, just as unmediated public spaces do.

Popular press coverage of SNSs has emphasised capability privacy issues, essentially in regards to the safety of younger users George, 2006; Kornblum and Marklein, 2006. Researchers have investigated the ability threats to privacy linked to SNSs. In one of the first academic studies of privacy and SNSs, Gross and Acquisti 2005 analyzed 4,000 Carnegie Mellon University Facebook profiles and outlined the potential threats to privacy inside the personal counsel protected on the site by college students, corresponding to the potential means to reconstruct users’ social security numbers using tips often found in profiles, akin to place of origin and date of birth. Acquisti and Gross 2006 argue that there is normally a disconnect among students’ wish to safeguard privacy and their behaviors, a theme that is also explored in Stutzman’s 2006 survey of Facebook users and Barnes’s 2006 description of the “privacy paradox” that occurs when teens are not conscious about the general public nature of the Internet. In reading trust on social community sites, Dwyer, Hiltz, and Passerini 2007 argued that trust and usage goals may affect what individuals are inclined to share—Facebook users expressed greater trust in Facebook than MySpace users did in MySpace and thus were more willing to share guidance on the positioning.

In an extra study inspecting security issues and SNSs, Jagatic, Johnson, Jakobsson, and Menczer 2007 used freely accessible profile data from SNSs to craft a “phishing” scheme that perceived to originate from a pal on the network; their objectives were much more more likely to give away suggestions to this “friend” than to a perceived stranger. Survey data offer a more optimistic attitude on the difficulty, suggesting that teens are aware of potential privacy threats online and that many are proactive about taking steps to reduce certain capability risks. Pew found that 55% of online teens have profiles, 66% of whom report that their profile is not visible to all Internet users Lenhart and Madden, 2007. Of the kids with absolutely open profiles, 46% said adding not less than some false suggestions. Privacy is also implicated in users’ means to handle impressions and manage social contexts.

Boyd in press a asserted that Facebook’s advent of the “News Feed” characteristic disrupted students’ sense of handle, even though data exposed during the feed were prior to now obtainable. Preibusch, Hoser, Gürses, and Berendt 2007 argued that the privacy alternatives provided by SNSs do not deliver users with the flexibility they want to handle conflicts with Friends who have varied conceptions of privacy; they suggest a framework for privacy in SNSs that they agree with would help unravel these conflicts. In addition to the themes diagnosed above, a becoming body of scholarship addresses other elements of SNSs, their users, and the practices they permit. For instance, scholarship on the ways in which race and ethnicity Byrne, in press; Gajjala, 2007, faith Nyland and Near, 2007, gender Geidner, Flook, and Bell, 2007; Hjorth and Kim, 2005, and sexuality connect to, are plagued by, and are enacted in social community sites raise interesting questions about how identity is shaped within these sites. Fragoso 2006 tested the role of countrywide identification in SNS use via an investigation into the “Brazilian invasion” of Orkut and the resulting tradition clash among Brazilians and Americans on the positioning. Other students are beginning to do cross cultural comparisons of SNS use—Hjorth and Yuji in press examine Japanese usage of Mixi and Korean usage of Cyworld, while Herring et al.

2007 investigate the practices of users who bridge various languages on LiveJournal—but more work in this area is required. Scholars are documenting the implications of SNS use with appreciate to colleges, universities, and libraries. For instance, scholarship has examined how college students feel about having professors on Facebook Hewitt and Forte, 2006 and the way faculty participation influences scholar professor relations Mazer, Murphy, and Simonds, 2007. Charnigo and Barnett Ellis 2007 found that librarians are overwhelmingly acutely aware of Facebook and are towards proposed U. S.

legislation that would ban minors from accessing SNSs at libraries, but that most see SNSs as external the purview of librarianship. Finally, difficult the view that there’s nothing academic about SNSs, Perkel in press analyzed copy/paste practices on MySpace as a type of literacy regarding social and technical skills. These pieces jointly provide insight into one of the most ways wherein online and offline experiences are deeply entwined. Using a relational dialectics frame of mind, Kyung Hee Kim and Haejin Yun analyze how Cyworld helps both interpersonal family members and self relation for Korean users. They trace the delicate ways wherein deeply engrained cultural beliefs and activities are built-in into online communication and behaviors on Cyworld—the web context reinforces sure points of users’ cultural expectancies about courting upkeep e. g.

, the concept of reciprocity, while the unique affordances of Cyworld enable members to beat offline constraints. Dara Byrne uses content material analysis to check civic engagement in forums on BlackPlanet and finds that online discussions are still plagued with the disorders offline activists have long encountered. Drawing on interview and remark data, Lee Humphreys investigates early adopters’ practices concerning Dodgeball, a mobile social network provider. She looks at the ways wherein networked communication is reshaping offline social geography. Other articles during this collection illustrate how creative analysis methods can elucidate styles of behavior that could be indistinguishable in a different way.

For instance, Hugo Liu examines individuals’ functionality of tastes and pursuits by analyzing and modeling the preferences listed on over 127,000 MySpace profiles, resulting in unique “taste maps. ” Likewise, via survey data accrued at a college with diverse students in the U. S. , Eszter Hargittai illuminates usage styles that would in another way be masked. She finds that adoption of particular services correlates with persons’ race and parental education level. The articles in this assortment spotlight the importance of social network sites in the lives of users and as a subject of analysis.

Collectively, they show how networked practices mirror, aid, and change known daily practices, especially with respect to how people gift and conceal points of themselves and fasten with others. The proven fact that participation on social network sites leaves online traces offers remarkable opportunities for researchers. The scholarship in this special theme section takes advantage of this affordance, resulting in work that helps clarify practices online and offline, as well as folks that blend the two environments. The work defined above and blanketed during this particular theme section contributes to an on going dialogue concerning the significance of social network sites, both for practitioners and researchers. Vast, uncharted waters still remain to be explored.

Methodologically, SNS researchers’ ability to make causal claims is limited by a lack of experimental or longitudinal research. Although the situation is swiftly changing, students still have a restricted knowing of who is and who is not using these sites, why, and for what functions, especially external the U. S. Such questions will require large scale quantitative and qualitative analysis. Richer, ethnographic research on populations more complicated to access including non users would added aid scholars’ capability to remember the long term implications of those tools. We hope that the work described here and covered in this collection might be useful build a basis for future investigations of those and other essential issues surrounding social network sites.