SOCIAL NETWORKS, MEDIA AND ONLINE ECOMMERCE

Social networks are online platforms and communities through which users interact, communicate, and build social or professional connections with one another. While in-person social networks amongst individuals have always existed, the advent of the internet, mobile technology, and more recently social media have enabled social networking to occur at mass global scale.

Prominent examples of large social networks include platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok and emerging metaverse spaces. While their features vary, social networks allow users to create personal profiles, publicly articulate opinions and share content, form relationships by specifying other users as contacts or followers, interact through messaging or commenting capabilities, and join groups or communities based on interests or demographics.

These public or semi-public exchanges of information, media and communication on social networks yield incredibly valuable social engagement and validation for users. Networks apply algorithmic curation to show users the content most likely to interest them, leveraging the resultant behavioral data to serve targeted advertisements that underwrite the platforms’ operations. Some social networks like LinkedIn also facilitate professional networking, job seeking and recruitment. Others like Strava emerge around shared lifestyle activities like fitness.

Social networks harness leading technological advances underpinning the social web – fast connectivity, smartphones with media capabilities, inexpensive photo/video storage and software that provides user-friendly, feature-rich experiences. Their immense scales also now power advanced artificial intelligence like facial/voice recognition and machine translations.

But concerns exist regarding privacy, security, hate speech and misinformation enabled by such vast public forums. Still, social technologies seem poised to expand as virtual and augmented reality enable even deeper modeled social spaces within metaverse environments blending digital and physical worlds. The average user spends nearly 2.5 hours daily on social networks – a figure likely to only grow as the technology allows ever more ways for humans to connect, commune and create community.