“Social media” are online spaces offering social and sociable functionality encompassing spaces and tools that adhere to Web 2.0 concepts (O’Reilly 2005). These are "read write" spaces, where users may contribute their own material and creativity, as opposed to the "read only" web where users only engage passively with content. Such spaces are collaborative and include some form of user generated content, personalisation, and social interaction that can lend them creative, playful qualities (Osborne 2011b). Social media include Social Network Sites (boyd and Ellison 2007) but also extend to the wider realm of sociable online spaces pre-dating (e.g. message boards) and post-dating (e.g. Pinterest[1]) the form described by boyd and Ellison. The specific term “social media” is also preferred in professional, particularly marketing and communications, contexts (e.g. Rozen, Askalani and Senn 2012) and is therefore particularly appropriate here, since cross-domain continuing professional development processes and issues such as personal branding and professional reputation are considered.
boyd and Ellison’s definition of Social Network Sites (SNS) remains extremely useful for considering what is special about social media:
“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.”
(boyd and Ellison, 2007)
As boyd and Ellison note SNS and social media are places where networks of both strong and weak ties (Granovetter 1973) may be maintained. There are three kinds of social tie that it is useful to consider in these contexts:
Strong ties - those with strong, ongoing, and regularly maintained connections to an individual. Mutual connections often exist between strong tie connections. In social media contexts strong ties are likely to be close friends or family members, those whose social lives are shared regularly in-person and via social network sites.
Weak ties - less closely connected or less frequently maintained connections, they are also less likely to share mutual connections. In social media contexts they might be distant friends, former colleagues, or friends of friends whom we may, for example “like” a post from on Facebook[2], but may not engage with more substantially on an ongoing basis.
Latent ties - social ties that we have previously had a connection with but where a connection has lapsed or been severed. In social media contexts this might mean a rejected friend request, a person who follows but is not followed back, someone from the past who uses the same social network site but where no connection is pursued.
A comparison of Granovetter’s definition of tie strength (Granovetter 1973, cited in Jones, Ferreday and Hodgson 2008), which sits within the context and processes of networked learning, and a description of the Facebook EdgeRank algorithm, used for prioritising an individual’s “news feeds” on Facebook (McGaw 2012), reveals striking similarities:
“The strength of a tie is a (probably linear) combination of the amount of time, the emotional intensity, the intimacy (mutual confiding), and the reciprocal services which characterize the tie.”
(Granovetter 1973, p. 1361 as cited in Ferreday and Hodgson 2008, p. 91)
“You might be wondering why there are many edges made by you and your friends but why only a few of them are seen in the News Feed? In order for your post to be seen in the page, there are three components you have to remember: affinity, weight, and recency. Each of these components plays an important role in the edge rank algorithm.”
(McGaw 2012)
Although the fit is not exact there are clear mappings (see Table 1) between, for instance, McGaw’s “affinity” and Granovetter’s “emotional intimacy” and “intimacy (mutual confiding)”. Such parallels highlight the relevance of approaching contemporary social media practice through established theoretical frameworks.
Table 1: Comparison of tie strength as described by Granovetter (1973) and McGaw (2012) with explanatory comments.
[1] Pinterest enables visual bookmarking of webpages through “pinning” of images or videos onto sharable virtual pin boards: http://pinterest.com/
[2] Facebook is the largest SNS in the UK at the time of writing: http://www.facebook.com/
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