Social Networks

A social network is the links of your peers in society, such as your friends, family,
work or educational colleague that you interact with. Not only that, it is also the
links between ‘friends-of-friends’ that also make up the social network. Frigyes
Karinthy proposed a theory of ‘Six degrees of separation’ in which she stated
that you are, on average, only 6 people away from anyone in the world by using
your ‘friend-of-a-friend’ network. This theory has proved true on a number of
occasions, and most notably, in 2003 in the digital world in the form of e-mails
(BBC, 2003).

Social networking websites, such as Facebook and MySpace, have made these
informal networks more visible, where you can become a friend of a friend,
without the formal introduction required creating an online ‘virtual-community’,
which some say has replaced the neighbourhood community (Johnston, No Year:
1). The popularity of social networking websites has risen enormously in the
past few years, due in part, to the relaxation of the requirements of joining then,
such as Facebook allowing non-University members which now boasts more than
half of its members not University attendees or graduates.

Despite Facebook now being open to anyone and not just University attendees or
graduates, it is still highly prevalent amongst students. Selwyn (2007: 2)
declares that “Students often use Facebook in the micro-management of their
social lives, as an arena for social exploration and to develop social networks
with their peers at university and from previous institutions they have attended”.

However, it has been noted that since Facebook has opened up to all, there has
been left a void of a truly academic social network. The University of
Westminster, amongst others, created their own social network entirely for their
students and staff, which was launched in 2007. Oradini and Saunders (No Year:
6) evaluated the use of the social network and found that “students can benefit
in a variety of ways from the availability of a closed ‘university only’ social
networking system”. Although, the students were evenly split with their opinions
of the new social network, with half of the students being able to see the
positives of having something different from Facebook, and the other have could
not.

The University of Westminster’s social networking site utilises the award winning
‘open source’ social networking engine which “provides a robust framework on
which to build all kinds of social environments, ... [such as] a campus wide social
network for your university, school or college” (Elgg, 2011). ‘Open source’,
means that the software is free to use, the only cost associated would be for the
hosting of the network on a server, but you are free to choose whichever
company to host the network. This would be ideal for the SPiNE project, which
has identified lack of social networks for European students and researchers as a
barrier to retaining them within the region, and are looking to create them a
social network.

References

BBC (2003) E-mail shrinks the world. Available online

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3132023.stm Accessed: 24th January
2011.

Elgg (2011) About Elgg. Available online: http://www.elgg.org/about.php

Accessed: 24th January 2011.

Oradini and Saunders (No Year) THE USE OF SOCIAL NETWORKING BY STUDENTS
AND STAFF IN HIGHER EDUCATION By Federica Oradini, Gunter Saunders,
University of Westminster

Selwyn (2007) ‘Screw Blackboard... do it on Facebook!’: an investigation of

students’ educational use of Facebook. By Neil Selwyn. University of London,
Institute of Education, UK, November 2007.