Social networks users or slaves

COULD WE SURVIVE WITHOUT SOCIAL NETWORKS? USERS OR SLAVES?

“Spontaneous movement of people using online tools to connect, take charge of their own experience, and get what they need- information, support, ideas, products, and bargaining power-from each other”
Charlene Li
We, as individuals, depend on social networks. We use them for everything. If you look at them closely you willrecognise that they try to solve all our needs. There is a different social network for every single need you may have. There are social networks for mothers and mothers to be such us the “CafeMom”; others about books, reviews, recommendations and authors like “Books iRead”; other ones, such as “Last fm” or “MySpace” enable you to listen to music, even “Spotify” now allows you to listen to other peopleplaylists. We have got “Avatars United” for online games; “deviantART” for the art community; “FilmAffinity for movies and TV series, and among the large number of social networks that exist we have to highlight the world famous Facebook with 350 million of users, the most popular social networking site in lots of English-speaking countries, including Canada, the UK and USA. This is the reason wechoose this theme, we chose social networking with the purpose of analysing the huge impact it has in our society and how the usage of different social networks affects our day a day life as consumers.
As a group we developed a questionnaire that we asked people from different countries to answer it in order to get some primary data to make this essay more valuable. We will mention this data allalong the essay which will be divided the work in the following parts.
First we are going to look into the concept of social networking and into the different kinds of networks that exist nowadays, here we will highlight the importance of MySpace, Twitter and Facebook, and we will back it up with some primary data we got from our questionnaire. After that we will talk about the social impact thatsocial networks have had in the consumers lives, we will also mention the different effects in politics and in the business model stressing its importance in marketing and advertising. In the third part we will talk about the different advantages and disadvantages of social networking. And finally, as a conclusion, we will talk about the Facebook effect around the world.
Although the socializingeffect occurs naturally everyday in the workplace, university, or wherever we live, it seems to be gaining importance online as a consequence of the millions of people that come together effortlessly on the internet. So, what is a social network? It is a website where one connects with other people online. This is the service that Facebook, MySpace and Twitter provides.
Anyone can become aFacebook user, you only need to have an email address to be able to chat with your friends, create profiles, upload pictures, videos or join networks organized by interests, pubs or even events drove by companies that use Facebook as it was advertising.
However, before the birth of Mark Zuckerberg’s company another social networking was the one with the biggest influence: MySpace. Company that has hadone of the biggest impacts in the music industry and that made known artists such as Russian Red or Lilly Allen. Furthermore, MySpace is an excellent example of the use of behavioral targeting advertising.
However if Facebook won MySpace’s fields in 2008, it looks like another social network is getting more important nowadays: Twitter. A social network and microblog website through which userspost and read messages known as tweets, whose content can vary from conversation and self promotion to world’s news and events.
So, just ask yourself about the high trend nowadays. What is the answer? Easy: Social Networks. They have become a key factor for “social survival”. This is the new way that people use to catch up on news, know about different people or events. But, is this the real...