Social Connectedness

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Contents

Introduction

Generally speaking one's social circle, or more specifically one's social network, includes ones friends, family, colleagues and acquaintances. Social connectedness is a psychological term which describes the duration, frequency, familiarity and reciprocal nature of the relationships people have with others in this circle or network.

Social Connectedness is widely delieved to play an important role in a person overall health and wellbeing. Many Gerontology studies have found that a strong Social Network (in terms of the strength of relationships an individual has with other individuals in his/her community) plays an important role in helping prevent and slow down the onset of cognitive and physical disorders associated with aging [1].

Social Network Services offer interactive web based environments for enabling people to connect and maintain social connectons, thus supporting the mirroring of real communities into virtual ones. Initially, online social networks were the playgrounds of young people, from early teens to mid-twenties but changed rapidly. With the ongoing niche stratification of the social network space there are many social network services targeting specific audiences, e.g. Eons for those aged 50+, LinkedIn for maintaining and creating professional ties. It is therefore possible to envision a spread of social network services targeted at ageing people, who are more likely to suffer from emotional isolation.

Social networks services is therefore a phenomena which is moving faster from its initial realtively small market segment to potentially involving users from the early education age until the rend of life.

In recent years social networks have exploded in popularity and diversity, with rough estimates indicating online social networks are a regular part of hundredths of millions of people's online lives.

Online Social Networks

Co-located Social Connectedness
Distributed Social Connectedness

Initially online social networks were the playgrounds of young people [2] from early teens to mid-twenties. To an extent online social networks are still associated with a younger audience but that is rapidly changing. With the ongoing niche stratification of the social network space there are many social networks targeting specific audiences, e.g. Eons [3] for those aged 50+, LinkedIn [4] for maintaining and creating professional ties.

Online social networks enable people to:

  • Create online personal profiles
  • Form connections with friends with have also created personal profiles, i.e. have a large circle of friends on a social network
  • Easily update their profiles to share what is happening in their lives with their friends, i.e. profile updates and blog updates
  • Share content, such as photographs and videos
  • Engage in shared conversations between multiple groups of friends, e.g. share comments about shared photographs
  • Communicate privately
  • Create and engage in online interest groups
  • Play games together and playfully interact, e.g. throw a (virtual) Frisbee to a friend

In "Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship" Boyd and Ellision [5] defined social network sites (SNS) as web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system. The nature and nomenclature of these connections may vary from site to site.

What differentiates SNS from previous social technologies, such as newsgroups and bulletin boards, is that SNS help members make their social ties visible.

Offline Social Networks

Over the decades many gerontology studies have found that strong social networks play an important role in helping prevent and slow down the onset of cognitive and physical disorders associated with aging [6] [7].

When designing gerontechnologies there is a danger of assuming overly simplistic models of what it means to be old, and what the needs of older people are [8]. Therefore a deep understanding of why offline social networks are beneficial, and what are the important properties of them is required when designing online social networks for elders.

Online & Offline Social Network Fusion

Social network sites are commonly used to reinforce existing relationships, rather than building new friendships. Though sometimes interest groups can organize meet ups where members meet in the cafe or bar for offline socialisation.

When considering SNS in terms of elders there are opportunities to investigate and build SNS that strongly intersect with the physical world. Such as enabling an elder to purse independent living while enabling their extended network to act as a loosely bound social group remotely interacting with and monitoring the elder. The elder's status could be automatically updated via passive health monitoring technologies, etc.

Elder Social Networks

Noteworthy elder social networks that are mentioned in this document include Eons and Boomj, which are US based elder networks, while Platinnetz is based in Germany and is apparently going strong. Then there's Saga Zone, which came out of the UK Saga Publishing Group that has been published magazines aimed at the elder market for many years.

Statistics and Data

Social networks are rapidly evolving with new competitors, initiatives and opportunities regularly emerging, therefore Pipl Statistics [9] and "World Map showing popularity of social networks based on web traffic" [10] are useful for staying up-to-date with fluctuating statistics about SNS popularity, membership growth and web visitor traffic.

For a regularly updated list of recent publications concerning social networks see the online bibliography maintained by danah boyd at [11].

Social Network Growth: Worldwide

According to a comscore survey "Social Networking Explodes Worldwide as Sites Increase their Focus on Cultural Relevance" [12], During the past year, the total North American audience of social networkers has grown 9 percent compared to a much larger 25 percent growth for the world at large. The Middle East-Africa region (up 66 percent), Europe (up 35 percent), and Latin America (up 33 percent) have each grown at well-above average rates.

S=ocial Network Penetration: Europe=

Another comScore survey released in October 2007 indicated that Europeans are rapidly embracing social networks, a quote from comscore [13] tells us that The European social networking community stood at 127.3 million unique visitors in August reaching 56 percent of the European online population. U.K. participation in social networking usage proved to be the highest in Europe, with 24.9 million unique visitors 78 percent of the total U.K. online population now belonging to the country's social networking community.

Popularity Of Different Social Networks Worldwide

Website visitor traffic was used to measure SNS popularity. Map from ARGNet [14] for November, 2008. Visitor traffic measured via Alexa. Other useful visualizations of social networks could be explored with techniques mentioned in [15].

Website visitor traffic to social networks worldwide

Use Case

The proposed user of a online social network is an elder, who wishes to connect with new people who share common interests, and continue connecting with people in their established social network.

Below's Use Case's are usefully considered in the context of European Ageing Well Action Plan, especially concerning the following e-Inclusion goals [16]

  • Ageing well at work or active ageing at work: staying active and productive for longer, with better quality of work and work-life balance with the help of easy-to-access ICT, innovative practices for adaptable, flexible workplaces, ICT skills and competencies and IT enhanced learning (resp. e-skills and e-learning).
  • Ageing well in the community: staying socially active and creative, through ICT solutions for social networking, as well as access to public and commercial services, thus improving quality of life and reducing social isolation.
  • Ageing well at home: enjoying a healthier and higher quality of daily life for longer, assisted by technology, while maintaining a high degree of independence, autonomy and dignity.

Friending

Friending is a core property of SNS. The act of friending makes explicit the social connectedness between individuals. Friend's share profile information and access to each other's virtual private online spaces. Friending creates a two-way connection between individuals. The level of granularity of that connection is currently very simple, i.e. a person is either a complete friend with access to all your profile information and updates or they are a stranger, though there is increasing granularity around Friends of Friends.

An interesting possibility with SNS for elders is to give elders greater control over what information they share with their social network. Ambient health monitoring devices could become part of an elder's profile, then the elder can choose to let different people and groups in their social networks become 'friends' with the ambient health monitoring devices. In this way health monitoring devices, and related tools, become an extension of the elder's personal identity that they are empowered to have control over. Other possibilities include enabling the elder to share nursing and staff activities in assisted living facilities [1], where the nursing and staff activities concern the elder.

Photo, Video & Media Sharing

Photo and media sharing is an important aspect of sharing between friends on many social networks. Photo sharing on social networks makes it easy for friends to collaboratively create shared photo albums of the same or different events, then people who have access to the photos can leave comments for others to read and respond to. Transferring the photos from a digital camera, then to a computer and then uploading them online can be a challenging technical and user experience. Though a number of applications for Apple's iPhone are available that simplify the whole process; simply take a photo and its automatically uploaded online [17].

Social Gaming

Social networks also feature many casual games, such as Scrabble, Poker and Bridge. Playing against friends and with friends is easy because friends are easily contactable via the game interfaces that are extensions of the SNS interfaces.

Integration With Other Elder Services (Everything Network)

Numerous elder services could be integrated into social networks, e.g. household billing, security, independent living, pensions, etc. By integrating them into social networks an elder would have a single point of coordination for many different resources. For example an elder could receive information on a pension update, then they elder could choose to share the update in their profile while seeking advice from their friend network.

Online Social Networking Products

Currently there are a number of venture capital funded commercial players in the social networking market. Often their products are classified as social media. To date the largest commercial purchase of a social media company was MySpace for more than $580 million by News Corp. Also of note is that Facebook received a $240 million investment from Microsoft for a small share of the company, approx. 1.6%.

Commercial Social Networking Products

Follow this link for a full treatment of Commercial Social Networking Products

Social Networks Popular in Europe

Noteworthy Rest of World Social Networks

Miscellaneous Social Networks

Academic Social Networks Projects

Technical and Non-Technical Issues Surrounding Social Networks

This section looks at the issues brought up by Social Networks bring. These can be technical and include data encryption and security to non-techncial such as privacy, profiling of citizens and government policies.

A full treatment is given by following the link Technical and Non-Technical Issues Surrounding Social Networks

References

  1. ↑ Dara-Abrams, B. "Toward a Model for Collaborative Gerontechnology: Connecting Elders and Their Caregivers",
  2. ↑ boyd, danah. Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Learning - Youth, Identity, and Digital Media Volume (ed. David Buckingham). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
  3. ↑ Eons.com, http://www.eons.com
  4. ↑ LinkedIn, http://www.linkedin.com
  5. ↑ boyd, d. m., & Ellison, N. B. (2007). Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), article 11. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html
  6. ↑ Glass, T.A., Mendes deLeon, C., Marotta, R.A., and Berkman, L.F. Population-based study of social and productive activities as predictors of survival among elderly Americans. British Medial Journal (1999), 319:478-483
  7. ↑ Hyyppa, M.T. and Maki, J. Social participation and health in a community rich in stock of social capital. Health Education Research (2003), 18(6):770-779.
  8. ↑ Lindlay, S., Harper, R., and Sellen, Ab. Designing for Elders: Exploring the Complexity of Relationships in Later Life, HCI2008, Liverpool
  9. ↑ http://www.pipl.com/statistics
  10. ↑ http://www.oxyweb.co.uk/blog/socialnetworkmapoftheworld.php
  11. ↑ boyd, danah. Bibliography of Research on Social Network Sites, http://www.danah.org/SNSResearch.html
  12. ↑ http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=2396
  13. ↑ U.K. Social Networking Site Usage Highest in Europe, http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=1801
  14. ↑ http://www.argn.com
  15. ↑ Farrugia, M. and Quigley, A., Visual data exploration of temporal graph data, Conference on Visualization and Data Analysis 2009, Part of IS&T/SPIE's International Symposium on Electronic Imaging 2009, 18-22 January 2009, San Jose, California, USA
  16. ↑ Ethics of e-Inclusion of older people, Discussion paper for the Workshop on Ethics and e-Inclusion, Bled, May 2008
  17. ↑ FaceBook, http://www.facebook.com

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