Over the last few months, the strike of the Writers Guild of America has led to a significant shift in viewership from TV to online media, as more and more people got fed up with re-runs of old series. Blogs, podcasts and video sharing sites are among the online media outlets benefitting from the TV exodus.
Archive for Social Networking
What is Social Networking?
Many of our students are members of MySpace. MySpace is a social networking site that offers users a personalized page that can contain photos, videos and personal information about themselves. Students can connect with peers and set up their own online networks of friends. The site has privacy settings that allow users to moderate who can access their site. The minimum age requirement to sign up for a MySpace site is 14, although it is possible that a younger student could sign up and enter a false age.
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On Tuesday morning, Mark and I did a presentation for K-12 parents on the topic “The Internet, you, your child: why can’t we all just get along?”, where we shared survey data from Mark’s MS classes on Internet usage, responded to questions from the audience and also shared a good video explaining Social Networking. It was a good talk, with lots of interesting questions. A lot of the questions centered around Facebook, which the vast majority of the HS students are using. Many parents were concerned about their students not using the privacy settings in Facebook.
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Mark Granovetter introduced more than thirty years ago the notion of “the strength of weak ties” - the idea that for many purposes, a large network of loose connections can be more useful for meeting many of your needs than a small network of close connections, e.g. for finding a job. This may seem counter-intuitive, but just think about it: there is typically a relatively large overlap between your network of connections and those of your close friends or family members. You already know or regularly interact with many of the same people, and it’s probably unlikely they’ll be able to pull out of a hat a connection to a person you don’t know, who possesses just the skills or resources you’re looking for. A former colleague who’s since moved on to a new occupation, however, is probably more likely to know new people and be able to put you in touch with what (or who) you need.
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