Social Networking

Abstract

Technological advancements have contributed increasingly to young people’s adoption of social media, a term often used interchangeably with Web 2.0 to refer to online applications which promote users, their interconnections, and user-generated content. Social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn are a form of social media widely adopted among adolescents and college-age youth as a dominant technology-mediated leisure-time activity. Social networking sites are defined by the following socio-technical features: (1) uniquely identifiable profiles that consist of user-supplied content and/or system-provided data, (2) (semi)public display of connections that can be traversed by others, and (3) features that allow users to consume, produce, and/or interact with user-generated content provided by their connections on the site. Social networking sites are distinguished from other forms of social media, like wikis, by the emphasis they place on personal profiling features