OK, I have to post about a growing pet peeve. I’m a very, very small lone voice against the vast and growing trend of referring to online social networking applications / platforms (MySpace, FaceBook, white label platforms, etc.) as “social networks”. While social networking applications contain, and are a type of human social network, “social networks” predate the internet by the age of homo sapiens and include different types, scales, and structures of network relationships, interactions and exchanges than are witnessed online.
The following s a pretty crude BlogPulse trend comparison, but I think it’s pretty clear that the common usage has won out over the more accurate term! (Note - the labels don’t reflect the actual boolean search terms which were rather long; the first two trends specifically exclude sites that contain “social network analysis”)
“Social networking applications” or “social networking websites” are unwieldy terms, so it’s easy to understand the abbreviated moniker. I am grateful that this web 2.0 phenomenon has brought so much attention and prestige to the field of social network analysis but at the same time it has trivialized it.
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