Social networking

The presence of Facebook (Source: Geralt, goo.gl/CJH8f1, under CC0 Public Domain licence)

Social networking services (also known as social networking sites, both abbreviated as SNSs) are classic web 2.0 tools which foster sharing and interaction. Social networking services represent a fundamental shift away from the content-oriented web 1.0 (where webpages were usually about topics) to the person-oriented web (where webpages are about people). In this sense, they are effectively the model for PLNs, PLEs and e-portfolios. While social networking services offer a number of social and educational benefits, it has become clear in recent years that the problematic issues sometimes associated with web 2.0 may be particularly pronounced in social networking (see below).

All major social networking platforms have app versions for mobile devices, allowing them to be integrated into mobile learning, particularly in the form of geosocial networking. As far back as 2013, Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, the largest and best-known social networking service, stated that Facebook had become a mobile company; for many years now, more users have accessed it through the Facebook app on mobile devices than through a web browser on a laptop or desktop computer. This reflects the increasing migration of web 2.0 services into the mobile space.

For a light-hearted and clear explanation of social networking, see the CommonCraft video Social Networking in Plain English. Social networking services provide platforms where users can typically:

• • set up a personal profile page where they can post status updates in the form of text, images (including graphics interchange format files, or GIFs) and/or videos
  • keep up with their friends’ and contacts’ status updates through a newsfeed
  • communicate with their friends and contacts through a variety of interactive channels
  • assemble and display their interests in the form of links to pages or groups
  • set up their own public or private pages or groups
  • use third-party applications, such as gaming apps

Importantly, social networking services allow users to easily maintain contact with rich, diverse networks of people classified as weak ties (as distinct from the strong ties who provide close support in everyday life), whose collective intelligence and help may be drawn on in future educational, employment or other contexts.

With over 3 billion monthly active users as of late 2023, Facebook continues to dominate the field of social networking internationally, although recent reports suggest that younger users are making less use of it and/or are using it alongside a variety of alternative social networking and social sharing apps. Most previously popular general social networking services have either closed down or seen a dramatic decline in their user base: these include Bebo, Friendster, Google+, MySpace (which has reinvented itself as a specialised music platform), and Orkut, along with the Korean Cyworld (싸이월드), the Japanese Mixi (ミクシィ), and the Russian VK (ВКонтакте). The only real competition to Facebook is found in China, where Facebook is blocked, and where local services like Renren (人人网) and Qzone (QQ空间) were able to gain large user numbers, with Weixin (微信), known as WeChat internationally, having become especially popular, and offering a Moments (朋友圈) feature that constitutes a social feed.

For suggestions of social networking services, broadly defined, which may be of value for students and/or teachers, see Common Sense Education’s Social Networks for Students and Teachers. One highly successful international service with a specific professional networking focus is LinkedIn, which may be used both for self-education (through LinkedIn Learning) as well as for its original purposes of job seeking and conversation with colleagues.

In contexts where an institutional LMS is unavailable, including a number of settings in the Global South, a Facebook page or group may sometimes be used as a kind of mini-LMS, with class members meeting in a central online space but without the need for individuals to friend each other directly on the service. It is possible for students to use either their own existing profile pages, or separately created pages or groups, as the basis for PLEs or even e-portfolios, where they may display examples of work, present links to work on other sites, gather personal connections, and include links to social or educational networks. It is also possible to use the interactive channels on class pages or in class groups, or even on individual profile pages, as a way for students to collaborate with each other on group projects outside of class time; this might also be done via Facebook’s messaging app, Messenger. For guidelines on how to use Facebook in education, see The Edublogger’s Facebook Groups for Educators (updated in 2020), or Facebook’s own Meta for Education page (note that Facebook’s parent company changed its name to Meta in 2021, reflecting a vision of a future internet oriented more towards augmented reality and virtual reality).

In parts of the Global North, and in Western countries in particular, ministries of education, education departments and educational institutions (especially schools) often prefer not to use Facebook or other similar platforms for education, due largely to concerns over digital safety and privacy. In many such contexts, institutional LMSs are available as an alternative. Other popular alternative services with some similarity to Facebook in terms of appearance and functionality but designed as LMSs under educators’ administrative control have included Schoology (now part of PowerSchool) and Edmodo (discontinued in 2022). Another service, Ning, was formerly very popular with educators until the discontinuation of its free educational service in 2010.

Educators are seen as having a crucial role to play in offering students guidelines on how to protect themselves on social media, especially social networking services, by focusing on issues around safety, privacy and surveillance, reputation, and commercialisation; it is vital for students to develop the digital literacies to safety navigate such platforms. Some relatively old tools such as Fakebook and the Google Docs template Historical Facebook Lesson can be used as models to help students create Facebook-like profiles which are not connected in any way to Facebook itself; for instance, teachers might ask students to create fake profiles for fictional or historical characters as a way of encouraging them to think about digital identity management and digital safety. The newer Zeoob allows the creation of a range of fake social media posts – including for Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok – which could be used as examples by educators and students. It should be noted that the minimum age for users of Facebook, like most major social media services, is 13, due to the requirements of the US Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).

As noted at the start of this page, the problematic issues which have emerged in connection with web 2.0 – for example around misinformation, surveillance, and mental health – may be particularly pronounced for some users of social networking services. For more discussion on this topic, see the web 2.0 and digital safety and wellness pages of this website. For some well-known, wide-ranging critiques of social networking, you might like to check out the work of danah boyd (who writes her name in lower case) on collapsed contexts, Linda Stone on continuous partial attention, and Alice Marwick on self-entrepreneurship and self-marketing. For an overview of concerns with Facebook, you might also wish to look at Wikipedia’s regularly updated page, Criticism of Facebook.

Last update: February 2024.