Do social networks affect our lives?

Social networks play nowadays –whether we like it or not- a key role in our lives. Why? Because they are reshaping the way we interact and communicate with others.

As Manuel Castells exposed in Internet and autonomy building in the network social networks provide a groundbreaking communication model throughout the Internet, enhancing the social life of its users. Perhaps the most famous examples are Twitter, MySpace, Tuenti, LinkedIn or Flickr, but these just form part of a long list of networks. Through them users get to :create groups, upload photos, share blogs, find and meet new friends who have same interests, comment on their friends’ wall, chat with them, participate on discussions groups (on Studying Social Media, for instance) and many more things! By creating groups of friends, users can reach people in a quicker and easier way. Social networks are thereupon strengthening social relations, partly because they are helping us to bridge the distance and therefore, we are able to contact people from all around the world.

Social networks affect our identity too. People act differently when they are logged in a social network. On the one hand, relationships certainly become more virtual and impersonal. On the other hand, the idea of “group identity” can make us distinctly comfortable by feeling identified or endorsed within a community. Another advantage of social networks is that they can help us gain a professional reputation. You can easily become popular or famous if your profile receives lots of visits. This explains why social networks are becoming important tools for journalists.

Scholars have focused on debate on whether social networks strength or weak our social relations. The vision of Jan van Dijk is that social relations are getting weaker and weaker -not in an explicit way- due to the digital divide. The digital divide is the gap between those who do and those who do not access to new forms of information and technology. If we think of it, social networks are nothing without the Internet so the digital divide and the weakening of social relations are, in one way or another, linked. People that have Internet and social networks don’t care about the rest of the world. Nowadays if you don’t have a social network profile you are not part of the so-called information society, and by extension, of today’s world. In my opinion, social relationships are getting stronger thanks to social networks. They complete the original means of communication, such as telephony, handwritten letters and e-mails, and have become far more popular. In short, social networks are the result of the changing modern society, the era of information and communication.