CHRISTIAN FUCHS - ICT&S - Universität Salzburg

Christian Fuchs: Social Networking Sites and the Surveillance SocietyWeb-mediated cognition enables web-mediated communication and vice versa. Thereis no communication process without cognition. In web 3.0, a new quality emergesthat is produced by communicative actions. Certain cohesion between the involvedhumans is necessary. Web-mediated communication enables web-mediated cooperationand vice versa. There is no co-operation process without communication andcognition. The three forms of sociality (cognition, communication, co-operation) areencapsulated into each other. Each layer forms the foundation for the next one, whichhas emergent properties. By the term “web” is not only meant the World Wide Web,but any type of techno-social information network, in which humans are active with thehelp of networked information technologies.Figure 1. A model of social software and its three subtypesHow does the notion of social networking sites (SNS) fit into this model of the web?boyd and Ellison (2007) define social network sites as“web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-publicprofile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom theyshare a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and thosemade by others within the system”.boyd’s and Ellison’s definition clearly focuses on platforms such as MySpace, Facebook,Friendster, studiVZ, etc. In network analysis, a network is defined as a system ofinterconnected nodes (cp. e.g. Wasserman/Faust 1997, Barabási 2003). Therefore, basedon a strict theoretical understanding, all networked tools that allow establishingconnections between at least two humans, have to be understood as social network8