In the Burke and Kraut authored piece, we discuss the different users and usages of Facebook. If there are in deed three kinds of social activities that take place on Facebook – directed communication with individual friends, passive consumption of social news, and broadcasting, then I have used Facebook to meet all three of these purposes. I initially joined Facebook for the communication with individual friends and classmates. However, as time passed and I saw how valuable of a networking too Facebook could be, I began to use it more for the other two purposes. It certainly allowed me to consume social news, and broadcast, or better stated advertise my basketball program. As stated in the article, social network sites foster many types of relationships. It allowed me to reconnect with the high school classmate that I haven’t seen since graduation, but also connect with the high school or AAU coach in Texas who has access to an extremely talented pool of high school players, or meet and have conversation with a person who lives in California but is also a diehard Chicago Bulls fan. My networking in Facebook has expanded way past the typical geographic region or educational circle that it would seem like I should be limited to.
In the Vitak and Ellison piece, an interesting point was made about how “network composition”, basically the people and networks reprenented in your friends list, can be a barrier to a person’s interraction. As a result, some persons may not to interact with a particular network. I have faced this dilema a few times, and know people who 1. will not add persons from their employer to their friends list or 2. have a seperate personal and professional page, and will only invite their co-workers to the professional page. This is a solid strategy to maintain privacy, and one that I do not knock anyone for practicing. Of course as stated, the easiest way to avoid this problem is to not post any content that could be deemed as inappropriate for anyone in the network. Of course, there are so many freedom of expression type issues that go along with this train of though…
Surely communication with others is associated with cost (time and energy) and commitment (I need to free up my schedule). I believe that, thanks to SNS, we can actually communicate with someones who I might have lost the touch along (high school classmates are the awesome example) with people who I want to communicate as frequent as possible (my best friends and families). SNS is the tool that allows us to communicate with lower cost and higher efficiency.