What are we talking about when we talk about social networking sites?
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This is the "Guide to the Core Literature of Social Media Research"
001 articles
Starting today, we hope to do an interesting and important thing: to sort out the core literature of social media research and try to draw an academic map for this field.
Today, the 001st paper of this project is pushed, and it is also the most cited paper in social media research: Social Website: Definition, History and Academic Map.
Boyd, D.M., & Ellison, N.B. (2007). Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship. Journal of Computer ‐ Mediated Communication, 13 (1), 210-230. (Cited: 18601)
The question we want to answer is:
★ In this paper, how do Boyd and Ellision define social networking sites?
★ What does this definition inspire the research of social networking sites?
★ What amendments have been made to this definition in the follow-up study?
Of course, in addition to reading, if you are interested in this plan and want to "blend in" together, please read the project plan at the end of the push and contact us.

In the history of social networking sites, 2007 is worth remembering. At the end of this year, Read/WriteWeb, a well-known Internet technology review blog, decided to award the IT company of the year award to Facebook, not Google. The reason is that Facebook broke the closed system of traditional social networking sites and allowed users to obtain plug-ins from third-party companies in the site. In other words, since then, Facebook has raised its "connection" potential to a new level and become an open co-writing space.

In 2007, beyond the commercial horizon, social networking sites, as academic research objects, also ushered in its landmark works, and the key word was still "connection". If we look back in 2007, a lot of academic research on social networking sites has been accumulated in the field of humanities and social sciences, but the dialogue between them is still incomplete and needs to be integrated urgently. Therefore, the Journal of Computer Aided Communication (JCMC) published a special issue on social networking sites in 2007, and invited two scholars, danah boyd and Nicole Ellison, to write an opening article. In this opening article, two scholars discussed the definition, history and academic map of social networking sites. Among them, their definition of social networking sites has been widely cited by subsequent studies and has become a classic work in the field of social networking sites.
Here we need to briefly explain from three levels why "definition" is important for social networking sites. First, the definition represents the boundary of research. Tampering with raymond carver’s words means what we are talking about when we are talking about social networking sites. Second, the definition focuses on the research field of vision. In our definition, we distinguish social networking sites from other types of websites, and the difference is likely to be the focus of follow-up research. Third, the evolution of definition also reflects the changes of technology. Social networking sites are essentially evolving with technological updates. In the following, we will focus on the definition of social networking sites in this paper and the revision of this definition in subsequent research.

In boyd and Ellison’s review, as of 2007, social networking sites have experienced three stages of development. Sixdegree.com, established in 1997, is regarded as the starting point of social networking site. However, perhaps because it was too ahead of the times, the site announced that it would stop operating in 2001. 2003 witnessed the second stage of the development of social networking sites. Many social networking sites have mushroomed and gradually become mainstream. One of the representative websites is MySpace, which we are familiar with. Then, in the third stage, the appearance of Facebook expanded the influence of social networking sites to a global scale. So, can we sort out a common clue for these different social networking sites? What are the similarities between them, which can be summarized under the same noun?

In this paper, the two authors define social networking sites as follows:
"We define social networking sites as an Internet-based service. It allows individuals (1) to establish a public or semi-public personal homepage in a closed system; (2) establish a connection with other users and present a list of contacts on the personal homepage; And (3) viewing and shuttling through the list of connections established by oneself and others in the system. The nature and naming of these links may vary from website to website. "
Next, we will briefly interpret these three characteristics:

1. Home page
The first keyword in the definition of social networking sites is the home page. Personal homepage is the pillar of social media and the basic unit and node of social networking sites, which is one of the most important differences between social networking sites, instant messaging tools and BBS. According to boyd and Ellison, the magic of personal homepage is that it allows users to "type themselves into being". For example, users need to fill in a series of questions on their personal homepage, such as head portrait, age, residence, interests, and a series of "about me" information. This process is self-sketching. Therefore, it is not difficult to understand why the research on self-construction and impression management in social networking sites has been launched since the 1990s and has become one of the core concepts of the research.

Step 2 connect
The second keyword in the definition of social networking sites is connection. The author thinks that the uniqueness of social networking sites is not that they allow individuals to meet strangers, but that they allow users to show their social networks. This is another important difference between social networking sites and instant messaging tools. What excites researchers is that this relationship has different names in different social media-Weibo calls it "fans", Twitter calls it "followers" and Facebook calls it "friends". So, what is the relationship between people in social networking sites? More interestingly, when social networking sites use the title "friend", how will the meaning of the word "friend" change quietly?

Step 3 shuttle
The third keyword in the definition of social networking sites is traverse. This word has at least two dimensions. First, people can shuttle through their friends lists and check their friends’ messages at any time, so they can establish their own relationship network; Secondly, people can often check who their friends have. Recall that when Sixdegree.com used the metaphor of "six dimensions" in naming, he actually expressed the value of the second layer of shuttle. Similarly, one of the visions of Tinder, a dating software, is to firmly believe that people with common friends are more likely to become friends. If we continue along this line of thought, we will surely meet Caroline Haythornthwaite’s classic research on "latent ties" in 2005. Of course, from another perspective, when you are shuttling with other people’s homepages, you are also being shuttled by others. This also explains why privacy and visibility will become an important clue in the research of social networking sites.
Since its publication, the paper I introduced to you has been cited by tens of thousands of follow-up studies, most of which focus on its definition of social networking sites. However, if we stand in today’s coordinates and look back at this definition more than ten years ago, we may feel some old traces of the times. With the evolution of technology, have these three keywords changed? After all, definition can only be responsible for defining "being", but not for predicting "becoming".

In 2013, boyd and Ellison joined forces again to update the three characteristics of this definition, which are briefly described as follows for your reference:
(1) The importance of personal homepage has been greatly reduced, and social networking sites have changed from homepage-oriented socialization to behavior-oriented socialization. Even if the homepage still exists, it is no longer a static self-description, but a dynamic combination of different types of status updates.
(2) Friend list no longer only describes the circle of friends of users, but more importantly, it shows a social graph of users through algorithms.
(3) Social networking sites provide more possibilities for shuttle. Users used to only use social networking sites to establish and maintain their own relationship circle, so shuttle is closed in nature. With the continuous introduction of new functions, this closeness has been constantly broken. For example, hashtags allow people to jump out of their circle of friends and meet strangers at a more public level.

Accordingly, boyd and Ellison also gave a new definition of social networking site:
Social networking site is a networked communication platform, in which participants (1) have a unique and identifiable personal homepage, which includes the content provided by users themselves, the content provided by other users, and the data content at the system level (2) can publicly display their social relationships and be browsed and shuttled by others (3) can consume, produce and/or interact with the content stream provided by contacts in the site.
This change in technology and culture can also be reflected in the purport of researchers, such as algorithms and privacy, tag community and other research topics have gradually emerged and highlighted. Of course, even if the definitions provided by boyd and Ellison are updated, it has been seven years since this article was written. What changes have taken place in the characteristics of social networking sites? What surprises can these changes provide for our research and thinking?
From this point of view, American scholar Jeff Pooley is right, and communication research is destined to be a humble undertaking, because the continuous updating and iteration of technology will make us push a stone up the mountain like Sisyphus in Greek mythology, and then see it roll back again and again until forever.

Note: It should be noted that the two authors used "Social Network Site" instead of Social Media. If we make a diachronic analysis of the researcher’s choice of "wording", we will find the characteristics of the times. Between 2003 and 2008, the word "social networking site" was used twice as much as "social media" in research papers. However, from 2009 to 2014, this relationship was reversed, and social media has largely replaced the term "social networking site". Social media is the result of the continuous expansion of technology developers. Compared with social networking sites, it has a wider extension, or social networking sites have now condescended to become a subset of social media. See McCay-Peet & Quan-Haase, 2017.
Next, it is an advertisement. ……
Our Social Media Research Core Literature Reading Guide Program
Officially began to recruit participants.
1. What do we hope to do: We hope to systematically sort out the English core papers and latest research on social media research and draw an "academic map" in this research field.
Second, how do we want to do this? We will connect a clue for these studies on the basis of understanding them through reading guidance and discussion.
Third, what principles will we choose the literature according to:
(1) The most frequently discussed questions and keywords in the top English journals.
(2) The core topics contained in the Handbook published by 2)Sage, Oxford and other institutions in the fields of Internet and social media.
(3) Based on the categories of the first two, the core original works that are most worth reading are selected.
4. What is the value of this matter? We will jointly understand the approach of social media research and introduce the latest international research progress in a crowdsourcing form.
5. How do we accomplish this? We will recruit master students and doctoral students who are interested in social media and have a good English level to read and discuss together, and in the process, we will gain an academic map of our own.
6. What documents will we read specifically: In addition to the classic papers pushed in this issue, the following examples give ten examples, hoping to give you a general idea of what research we are paying attention to.
1. The Extended Self of the Digital World
Belk, R. W. (2013). Extended self in adigital world. Journal of Consumer Research, 40(3), 477-500.
2. The Benefits of Facebook Friends: Social Capital and the Use of Social Networking Sites for College Students.
Ellison, N. B., Steinfield, C., & Lampe, C. (2007). The benefits of Facebook “friends:” Social capital and collegestudents’ use of online social network sites. Journal of computer-mediatedcommunication, 12(4), 1143-1168.
3. "Everyone knows your (online) name: online games as a" third place ""
Steinkuehler, C. A., & Williams, D.(2006). Where everybody knows your (screen) name: Online games as “thirdplaces”. Journal of computer-mediated communication, 11(4), 885-909.
4. "Digital Native (Young) Residents (Young) People (Children): the Difference of Internet Skills and Use of the Internet Generation"
Hargittai, E. (2010). Digital na (t) ives? Variation in internet skills and uses among members of the “netgeneration”. Sociological inquiry, 80(1), 92-113.
5. "Want to be at the top? The pow of algorithms and that threat of invisibility in face book.
Bucher, T. (2012). Want to be on the top? Algorithmic power and the threat of invisibility on Facebook. New media& society, 14(7), 1164-1180.
6. "What’s in the smile? How do people with disabilities participate in politics through selfies and emotions?
Yadlin-Segal, A. (2019). What’s in a smile? Politicizing disability through selfies and affect. Journal ofComputer-Mediated Communication, 24(1), 36-50.
7. "You Never Know Who’s Watching": Imaginary Monitoring in Social Media Platform.
Duffy, B. E., & Chan, N. K. (2019). “Younever really know who’s looking”: Imagined surveillance across social mediaplatforms. New Media & Society, 21(1), 119-138.
8. The Echo Room is Overrated: Political Interest and the Moderating Effect of Multi-media.
Dubois, E., & Blank, G. (2018). The echochamber is overstated: the moderating effect of political interest and diversemedia. Information, Communication & Society, 21(5), 729-745.
9. From Participatory Culture to Participatory Fatigue: Public Issues.
Porlezza C. From participatory culture toparticipatory fatigue: The problem with the public. Social Media + Society,2019, 5(3): 2056305119856684.
10. "Roaming Method: A Path to Research APP"
Light, B., Burgess, J.,& Duguay, S. (2018). The walkthrough method: An approach to the study ofapps. New media & society, 20(3), 881-900.
Original title: "What are we talking about when we talk about social networking sites? 》
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