Sharing Knowledge inside Social Network Sites

AuthorGeorgeta Drulă
Pages463-473

Georgeta Drulă. Associate profesor, Ph.D., Faculty of Journalism and Mass Communication Studies, University of Bucharest (e-mail: gdrula@yahoo.com).

Page 463

Introduction

(1) – The issues covered by the paper

Issues covered by the paper refer to the model and the characteristics of the social network sites used by the Romanian users. The paper makes a comparison between social network sites (SNS) used by certain criteria, and aims to answer questions about the importance of virtual communities and social networks, identifying the characteristics and practices used by them. Research is focused on:

- Identification and analysis of social network sites used in Romania (or in Romanian);

- Identify the reasons for adherence to a social network site;

- Identifying opportunities to increase online visibility, create or strengthen an online reputation using SNS,

- Determining how to develop new relationships in the virtual environment.

- Sharing of knowledge.

(2) – The important issues.

Sites social networking (SNS) is a type of virtual community with a specific trend. Web 2.0 technologies have facilitated the development of virtual communities, even speaking community 2.0. Communities such as Flicker, Facebook, Myspace or Del.icio.us are famous today. These communities have rules and a culture of its own. They involve the participation of the members and a specific behavior to change or share information and knowledge between them. Using social networks sites for academic and research is a new way of communication. It is based on different technological conditions, different interests, diverse cultures and, own practices. Diversity provided by the technological support allows the use of information and various communicationPage 464 tools such as: blogging, video and photo sharing. These opportunities have attracted millions of users around the world.

Increased recognition by defining personal online profile and reputation is an end in itself for some members of the community participating in the virtual social networking sites. Reputation is measured by the community and is consistent with the sharing of knowledge and value-add information. Getting a sense of efficacy is another reason that urges users to participate in an online community. They can participate by adding information or use this information for future research. All these are related to several factors taken into consideration by different authors in the analysis of SNS, such as: "trust" in the SNS, "trust" in the community, privacy, motivation and barriers to participating in a virtual community, sharing information within the community, the density of activities in the community.

(3) – How to respond to these issues?

When people participate in such a site, they build a profile and make connections to other network members. Profile is a list of identification information. It may include real or imagined data, as they are provided by the author. Members connect with each other by sending messages with multimedia content. The connection is established only after the other party accepts the invitation. The connection provides access to the "friend" profile and then build the own social network. The main reasons of using the SNS are those: to communicate, to send invitations to events, pictures, to launch various social campaigns or to make you known. Finding answers to problems studied are based on observation of virtual communities from social networks sites Hi5, FaceBook, MySpace and, LinkedIn, most used in Romania, collect data through a questionnaire and analysis of data correlations. The model used for data collection and their analysis, consider the variables:

- Privacy,

- trust in the members,

- trust in the SNS,

- Density of activities in the SNS,

- Motivation to participate in the SNS, and obtaining the outputs:

- Knowledge sharing and

- Developing new relationships.

The model used in the paper shows how to link these variables with the results in the SNS, and how to measure these results.

(4) – The relation between the paper and the already existent specialized literature Issues of trust and privacy in the SNS are addressed by many papers published in specialized journals. And many interesting studies related to the SNS due to Boyd. Until now, researches conducted on sites of social networking and sharing of knowledge pursue the matters of network relations performance, the models of communication within SNS and the problems of privacy and user profile.

All these aspects are related to researches on certain social networks sites which are representative on a virtual space, and on some users who live in a real space (country, continent, geographical area). The paper pursues Romanian cyberspace and users from Romania, using specific criteria.

Literature Review

Increasing the number of sites of social networks shows some changes on virtual communities. Thus, while virtual communities are grouped together by certain interests (themes,Page 465 topics), sites of social networks are primarily organized around people and not interests. Online communities are organized more as discussion forums, well-structured after a certain theme or in accordance with a hierarchy of topics. Social networks are built from nodes (individuals or organizations) that are linked with each other in different interdependencies, such as friendship, etc. In the sites of social network, structured as a network of people, the individual is the center of the community. Figure 1 shows this relationship. The characteristics of sites social networks have introduced a new organizational framework for online communities and a new context for researches.

Community -------------------> interests (themes, topics)

Social networks sites (SNS) --------------------------> (persons, individuals)

[SEE THE FIGURE IN THE ATTACHED PDF]

Fig. 1 Virtual communities and sites of social networks

The definition reference used for studying social network sites is given by Boyd (2007). This defines the social networking sites (SNS) as Web services that have the following characteristics:

(a) - allow users (individuals) to build a profile within a system,

(b) - establish a list containing other users with whom to communicate,

(c) - view and scroll through lists of connections in the system. Nature and name of the connections may vary from system to system.

Until now, researches conducted on sites of social networks pursue some aspects, such as:

- performance of relations within the network;

- networks and structures of networks;

- online and offline connections in the social network;

- Problems related to private data and to data of user profile;

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- social searching vs. social browsing;

- creation and management of tags (social tagging) to record and classify a particular content. Tags are metadata, descriptive words (keywords) assigned to a particular content (photo, web page, article, book, email, post, theme, bookmark, etc.).

Other studies are designed to study motivations and barriers that determine participation in a virtual community. Obstacles or barriers to knowledge sharing in the SNS are...

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