The Social Web Essay

The Social Web
Whether you love it or hate it there is no denying that technology is now a permanent fixture in our lives.   I do not personally know anyone who doesn’t use a mobile phone, and I personally don’t even go to another room in my house without my Android phone in hand, and in fact I do not even bother having a land line phone anymore because it wasn’t portable enough to still be worth the cost considering how little I used it. The truth is that we have come to a point in history where technology and the use of the devices that connect us to each other through social websites are crucial to our socialization. In this paper I will define the social web as I see it, discuss types of social networking sites, discuss the differences in how we used to communicate versus how we communicate now, and finally give my ideas of the future of the social web. Social networking is the present and future of how we communicate on both personal and professional levels, and I believe something that will not be a passing fad as many people hope.
What is the social web? I think a lot of people consider it to just be sites specifically designed to allow people to connect with each other like MySpace or Facebook, however I consider it to be much broader. Anything we do online that allows us to communicate something about ourselves is part of this intricate web of commutations networks we have built online. Danah Boyd and Nicole Eddison (2007) define, “Social network sites as web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system. The nature and nomenclature of these connections may vary from site to site” (para 3.3). This is exactly what sites like Facebook give us. According to Vala Ali Rohani and Ow Siew Hock (2010), “Social networking services...