Online social networking is one of those funny things that has either divided us or brought us closer together. With social networking being tagged onto any mobile device its hard not to have come across it some capasity. It is definitely the place to be, to quote one avid Myspace user “If you’re not on Myspace you don’t exist”. There a social network for every imaginable interest from over 50’s singles to fans of vampires.
Before the rise of Web 2.0 and social networking online, communities strictly referred to groups of people living or working close together. The best you could have hoped for was a group of like minded people with a possible chance of finding people compatable to your interests and goals. The internet has totally transformed this as communities are no longer bound by physical location. Before people with obscure hobbies and interests would have little contact with each other and would feed their obsessions through one way mediums such as books and television. Social Networking sites have been able to create a massive global village bring together people on opposing sides of the planet together.
Many have been cynical about what this kind of global village has brought upon us – a generation that lacks face to face social skills and motivation to communicate out side of the internet. Many experts believed that young people are spending more and more time online talking to strangers than their own family and friends,. This may actually be incorrect as new studies are starting to show that the largest networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook are mostly made up of young people connecting with family and old friends. These sites are now just a remediation of how we contact people, like emailing was the new form of writing a letter, ’status updating’ is the new texting. There are worries that will never go away when using online networks such as constant trolling from other users, identity theft or child safety but these are worries that are faced in our daily lives when we leave the house.
The global online village is only really just starting to show its real potential especially for business. A small business once stood no chance of being able to compete with large corporations but now are able to stand strong online providing services where they can be easily found. A business of one person based in the middle of the desert is able to flourish and contact a massive quantity of customers with nothing more than an internet connection and networking know how. There’s also the added bonus for companies being able to target their clientel more easily through social networks, with social sites being so niche there’s very little effort to be put into finding potential customers.
The new step of online social networking has been the move to access on mobile phones. The technology in mobile internet has only just started to catch up with the demand of actual web pages being displayed on mobile screens instead of ‘watered down’ web pages. So the question is where can social networking go from here? Will the internet carry one latching it’s self onto other mediums or break out into a whole new form its self?
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