Social+Networks+101


 * Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 and Further**

Social network sites as the key focus. Social Network Sites: They are not about networking. Teens are going there to hangout with their friends. They connect with those they know from face-to-face interactions. They are not interested in meeting people through these sites. They are interested in connecting with those they know.

Older People - Business, networking in the traditional sense.

Notes on Notes on Social media researcher danah boyd's presentation Living and Learning with Social Media - Click here to view her presentation.

Teens: The underlining culture of teens has not changed. What has changed is what the technology - the digital tools - make possible.

**Four Areas in Social Networks - Public Space to Hang Out**

 * Profile** - It is an opportunity to write yourself into being online. Creating the digital presence. Information required to give to the system and information to your friends.


 * Friends** - Connect because you like them, because it's rude to say no, because you go to school with them. Look at their list of friends. That is who they are speaking to.

Three Clusters: 1) 30, 40, 50 friends 2) A couple of hundred. 3) Collectors in the thousands. Most teens are not collectors, politicians and adults are.

Social drama in listing your friends. The birthday guest list as it plays out on the playground is listing

Teens have conversations. "How are you doing?" - "Fine."Conversations in the hall are very similar. Adults post things like "happy birthday."
 * Comments** - The Wall (or testimonials)

Constant stream of what your friends have eaten for lunch. What are you doing at that moment.
 * News Feed -**

Akin to Twitter. The average age on Twitter is 31-years-of-age. Celebrities bring younger folks to Twitter.

Why are they here? It's like what the mall used to be. Social cohort. Social world matters. Peer pressure to belong. Online is not necessasry preferred. Hang-out offline. But, often, they are not allowed to go out. So, they take to the online community. Lack of mobility. Adults have a guilt factor when spending time.
 * Social Cohort - Being where your friends are matters.**

There is a similarity between when we hung out with our friends. But, there are differences.

Persistence - What you say hangs around. A group of people are assuming that what they say is persistent. Replicability - Do we know if something is the original? Is to tweaked? Copy and paste. Store a conversation. Bullying. Ignore the fact that we altered it. You can't control it. How do you deal with an environment where you assum that hear-say takes on a whole new form. Scalability - What you say can be reached by millions - although most of us are not that. The light saber example. Scaling of heartwarming experience. Usually what scales is not positive. Searchability - Parents, college admissions officer. What does it mean that we are searchable? (de)Locatability - With mobile phones and laptops, how "findable" are we? GPS technologies will be able to assist in "findable" searches. Invisible Audiences - Video. F2F audiences we can adjust. How do I adjust for an invisible audiences? How do you contend with invisible audiences? Most of the time we don't. Or, we can convey who we believe our audience is. Collapsed Contexts - Set of rules vary. Very different talks to very different audiences. Style of speech. TV and radio - difficulty of contexts. The more they live in an environment that is aligned with all of the environments you are okay. The public profile - interpret people's participation online in their context, not ours. Public = Private - Home is not private - teens believe. Control is where you get privacy. Changing the relationship btween public and private. myspace is not dead. Scary divisions going on between these sites. Internet not an equalizer. MySpace -
 * Teens are Learning to Making Accomodations**

The descriptions of group divisions. In every single school the division was evident around class. Natural segregations. What does adopting FB mean about us? Race, social economic, immigration patterns. This division is very real.

Mobile Is Coming Carriers dictate. Collective action around a single phone - Blackberry and SideKick.

Learning 2.0 Sociology has learning implications. Norms, boundaries defined. It has to be worked through. How do you get young people to engage with adults when they come from lower socio-economic backgrounds?

Learning to learn. Social networks in the classroom - built around the notion of "friending" - when you bring it into the classroom, you have to deal with the dynamics - bringing it into the classroom environment. Social structures within the school are reflected in social networks.

Social media is relevant. Not just about the social. Search is changing. Sharing differently - bytes - copying, pasting, remixing. Young people are not using all of these tools, e.g. Delicious.

AIM, FB, MS, Word of mouth.

Need to think critically about Wikipedia.

They know to produce, but they do not know how to think critically. They are not experts. Adults have a critical thinking around it. We, as teachers, empower them and need to guide them critically.

We work through sociology, we work through information. The disruption of this social media (this technology) is that it is making us rethink what our position of power as adults. Us:Them - create general divides. We must open up dialogue and understand how they are using the tools.

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== Changing the role of power between children and parents.

Predatory adults Half of sexual solicitation is from other minors. The vast majority of sexual solicitation is from adults under the age of 25. Is it problematic? Of course.

Why Are They of Growing Importance?

Education

Work

World-wide Communication