boyd and Ellison discuss social media scholarship and also define social networks as "web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their their lists of connections and those made by others within the system" (p. 211 and Baym, 2010, p. 90). Although often used interchangeably, a social network site differs from social networking sites in that a networking site emphasizes relationship initiation rather than relationship maintenance. Research suggests that people mostly use SNSs for maintaining already established relationships (p. 221), but the bulk of previous scholarship has "focused on impression management and friendship performance, networks and network structure, online/offline connections, and privacy issues" (p. 219). According to Boyd and Ellison, components are profile data like age, city, hobbies, information about the user, profile photos, and ways to leave messages (p. 213). Underscoring social network sites (where profiles are typed into being (as per Sunden, 2003) (p.211)) is the visible profile with lists of friends, and this "public display of connections is a crucial component of SNSs (p.213). According to boyd and Ellison, "Friends provide context by offering users and imagined audience to guide behavioral norms" (p. 220). The actions people make on these sites can be turned into data and gathered for consumption (p. 220). A potential concern for the information divulged on SNSs are privacy issues and the ability to reconstruct a user's profile information for means other than those intended for things such as police (p.222) and identity theft.
"At the heart of social networking is an exchange of information" (Bauman & Lyon, 2013, p. 28). It has become a take-it-or-leave-it necessity for some, and it is a public display of the inner self (p. 29)....It is absurd to think of those tools as enabling individual choice of purpose' (p. 34). "Facebook not only draws usable data from people,it also, brilliantly, permits them to do the initial classifications by identifying themselves as "friend" (p. 44).
According to Rheingold (2012), Barry Wellman describes community as"networks of interpersonal ties that provide sociability, support, information, as sense of belonging and social identity" (p. 163). Somethings computer-mediated relationships can be called virtual communities. For Rheingold, "the difference between an online social network and a community has to do with the quality, continuity, and degree of commitment in the relationships between members" (p. 163).
According to Rainie & Wellman (2012), "Facebook's profiles are set up to default to the assumptions that all people want to make all of their information available to all of their Facebook friends" (p. 141). This is opposed to an email list of contacts like in Google. One may not want all their email contacts broadcast to all other contacts. Although Facebook is called a network site though, it functions more like a group because it shares information with others in the network (p. 141). "Facebook is both the epitome of networked individualism- each person is an individual participant-and of the networked operating system as a whole" (p. 144).
Portals
Social networking sites [seemingly used interchangeably by Rainie and Wellman with social 'network' site] are becoming portals or "points of access to information all over the web" (p. 285).
References:
Bauman, Z. & Lyon, D. (2013). Liquid surveillance. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Baym, N.K. (2010). Personal Connections in the Digital Age. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
boyd, d., & Ellison, N. (2008). Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13, 210-230.
Rainie, H. & Wellman, B. (2012). Networked: The New Social Operating System. Cambridge: MIT.
Rheingold, H. (2012). Net Smart : How to Thrive Online. Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press.