There are researchers who spend an awful lot of time analyzing social networks, uncovering metrics, patterns of behaviour among users, the design and functionality of the sites involved, whether Facebook or Movember’s Mo Space. Understanding how and why people use online social networks, blogs, peer-to-peer networks, micro-blogs, social tagging systems, photo and video sharing websites, and other types of online communities is an increasingly important field in which computer studies and sociology overlap.

Computer scientists Justin Zhan and Xing Fang of North Carolina A&T State University, in Greensboro, NC, have taken a close look at the various issues surrounding social network analysis: privacy and security, social signal processing and behavior modeling, to provide a state-of-the-art perspective.

They suggest that a new social era emerged with the advent of Web 2.0 and the creation of Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn etc etc etc…today arguments rage over the benefits or otherwise of such services and whether these tools are addictive, whether they are “more” than tools and whether we have become so addicted to them that face-to-face transactions have been trivialized. Even though we learn this week that one in every six internet-seconds apparently is spent on Facebook and that is an astounding data point, to say the least, everything claimed about the downfall of civilization and the online doom-mongering is almost certainly wrong. This is mostly true because, to paraphrase Arctic Monkeys, pretty much everything you say it is, is what it’s not. Companies like Reputation.com offer different products from protection to monitoring of your web presence.

Justin Zhan, & Xing Fang (2011). Social computing: the state of the art Int. J. Social Computing and Cyber-Physical Systems, 1 (1), 1-12

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