Social Networking from an IE perspective

    Everyone knows that today is an information age. Basically, social networking is also an integrated information platform. Compared with other information products or service, the feature of social networking is that it has an obvious correspondence between the information and real users, which makes it become more regular and analyzable. This is the first thing I learnt from this course.

    Before the class, I had  an opinion that social networking is just a kind of products like 'renren' or 'QQ', which is used for communication or entertainment, and its content is quite simple. However, now I found there are lots of profound knowledge inside. The relationship between users, the motivation of users' action, the influence of the media, all of them are not generated by accident or random. All the information we see on a social networking product is based on the regularity of anthropology, psychology, mathematics, sociology and so on.

    Now, inland researchers pay less attention about this subject and very few college in mainland China has this course. Personally, I think this is a deficiency…

    The second thing I learnt from this course is the influence of the social networking. In the past, I thought social networking is only a tool like toothbrush -- we buy it and use it, and drop it when we don't need it. But later on I found the power of social networking is much stronger than I thought. The users think they control the products when they are using Facebook or twitter but the fact is that the network also 'control' the users at the same time. Our thought and action are influenced by the social media unconsciously. What's more, the influence not only works on the individuals but also the society as a whole. 

    Of course, this is not means the social networking is horrible thing. What I want to explain is the great influence of it. It just like a cellphone: the original purpose of it is letting one person talk to another, however, no one predicted it can change the world in so much. Similarly, the effect of social networking now is much greater than its beginning and it is a hard thing for us to image what it will looks like in the future.  

    However, isn't the unknown thing that makes future attractive and beautiful? 

Two kinds of Social media : BLOG VS Micro-BLOG

I don't know how many people remember this happened in China : 10 years ago, in about 2003, the most popular internet products was the portal web: 163, sohu, etc. Then, 4 years later, the blog appeared and quickly become very hot in every internet users group. However, now, it is the time of micro-blog. SInce the beginning of 2013, there are 500,000,000 users in sina micro-blog, and the number of daily active users was 46,200,000. How does the micro-blog replace the status of the Blog?

we can find something interesting about the content. The blog's maximum words of the article is 10000 (Chinese) while the micro-blog is only 140. That means, no matter how communicative you are or how much you know, you can say only 140 words in the micro-blog. It seems making a limitation for those who want to write more. But the fact is that it is easier to play for everyone!

For example, you see a friend's blog talking about food. He wrote lots of words and looks like very professional. Although you feel interesting but you are neither good at writing nor cooking, so you can just give a short comment for his article. However, if it is happened in micro-blog. What you do is -- taking a picture of your dinner (whatever it is ), add a short sentence (like: it is f**king good!), done! In a popular Chinese slang is '140字你写了不吃亏，140字你写了不上当，真正的物超所值，写啥啥实惠!'

The attractiveness of the micro-blog is easy, fast and convenient.

The form of the content largely influence the form of the users' relationship. In the blog, the author is in the middle of the relationship. All the comments are for him and he gets most of the attention. Even there are some discussion among the commenters, the relationship is weak.

In the micro-blog, the action of forwarding is combing comments and publishing. The easier the publishing way is, the more people take participate  in the communication. The importance of the first author weaken and every user tend to plays an equal role. In this form, the communication is reticular and the value of single user strengthen.

Here is an example.

This is one of Hanhan's blog which has 445338 times reading and 17129 comments. But in these comments, seldom is replied. Users' relationship shows in this picture:

Compared with that, a micro-blog activity called 'plays ugly' attractive many users. 

The  users post their photo and the photo attractive more users. The form of users' relationship shows in this:

But what I want to say is not 'micro-blog is better than blog'. Although now the micro-blog has more users, the weakness is obvious.

Blog focus on the original author. it makes the professional, technical or what we called 'good' one can stand out from all the users. In other words, the valuable information can be took care. However, in the micro-blog, it has a tend to make everything equal. Words lost its characters when it has to reduce to 140. Aslo, 140 words is not enough for logic, academic, technology or any careful thought. A good example for this is now we using the blog to finish the homework instead of twitter.