Some thoughts towards social media

Thanks to the rapid development of information technology, we can enjoy social networking services anytime and anywhere in recent years. Nowadays, social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter are so popular that they have played an irreplaceable role in our daily life. Though I also use social networking services everyday now, I still cannot forget how excited I was when I met them the first time. I think this is one reason why I enrolled the social media analytics course immediately when I found it was in the course list.

Figure 1. Social media icons

I was excited when the first time I used SNS because I found that it gave us a simple and efficient way to keep in touch with our friends and make new friends at the same time. We could easily find our old friends who we have not seen for years. Moreover, we could also make friends with people who have the same interests and hobbies with us, even though we do not know each other before. As a result, we build our relationship unwittingly in this magical way. In this process, we may notice an interesting thing that the person who we just get to know is also a friend of our acquaintance. I often think the world seems small every this time, so I want to find an explanation to this amazing phenomenon.

After attending the first 3 lectures, I realize that this course is an interdisciplinary field course which not only teaches me the relevant theories and knowledge, but also lets me to review the social media industry in a broad way. Through this course, I have also learned some basic conceptions of social media and content analysis method. However, I still cannot explain the phenomenon I mentioned by using my current knowledge, so I looked for some other social media relevant theories. Finally, I find the Six Degrees of Separation. According to this theory, any two people in the world can be connected in a maximum of six steps by a friend introduction way[1].  Coincidentally, SNS is its application in the internet. This theory seems very magical and interesting, so I hope that the Six Degrees of Separation could be introduced to us in the future course.

                                               Figure 2. Six degrees of separation

Social media is quite an attractive area which is worth to be studied and analyzed. I hope that I can have a deeper understanding in this field when I finish the social media analytics course!

Reference:

[1] Wikipedia, Six degrees of separation, [Online], 
Available: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation [21 Sept 2014].