Away from Facebook: Discriminating Sub-Networks
We are all familiar with the myriad social networking options available to internet users today. While Facebook remains the social networking giant, the apps that tend to gain the most popularity these days are those designed for a much smaller group of friends. Users seem to move away from the platform where their activity can be viewed more or less uniformly throughout a large network of family, friends, acquaintances, and near strangers; instead, they gravitate toward smaller networks. In these more intimate circles, one need not worry about unwanted eyes viewing posts, allowing a more relaxed, less filtered approach to social networking.
The CNN article linked below offers several possible explanations for this trend. These days, Facebook is populated not only by the youngest generation, but also by their parents and grandparents. It seems younger users are simply trying to keep ahead of family members with whom they prefer not to share certain details of their lives. Another concern is the image one projects of oneself through social media. In addition to the family members and potential employers who could access nearly anything posted on Facebook, a user need also worry about the way his or her less familiar peers perceive certain Facebook activity. To solve this, one could either shrink the audience of one’s social networking activity to more intimate friends, or alternatively one could transition to a platform such as Snapchat, where the transience of posts minimizes their impact yet still fulfills their intended social purpose.
Focusing on the first explanation, we might find that Facebook has a major flaw: it is designed for one to accumulate a large network of friends, in which each friendship is meant to be viewed as equal. It seems like the typical young user prefers a network which easily discriminates between different types of relationships: close friends, classmates, peers, family, etc. However, users have apparently started using different social networks to discriminate between these various types of relationships. For example, one might use Path to share between a medium-sized group of peers, but also use Snapchat to share on an informal, individual basis.
In class, we saw social networks where not all friendships were created equal — links were strong/weak or friend/enemy. I suggest modeling the phenomenon described above using a single super-network which includes all of an individual’s friends (somewhat similar to Facebook in its universality of relationships), but that furthermore labels friendships based on various common classifications one uses in social networking. One obvious approach would be to simply label friendships by the existing social networking sites which provide existing means of sharing. Alternatively, labels could be more abstract, and one could imagine a social network being created to provide social interaction of the kind demanded by a particular classification of relationship.
Source: http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/25/tech/social-media/smaller-social-networks/