Report of Social Networks

  “Social network is any site or service that allows people to connect with each other, to inform others about events and activities, and to share news, photos, videos and items of interest.” (P.171) In my opinion, social networks such as Facebook, microblogs, and the circle of friends in Wechat are platforms that could be used for personal presentation of normal lives and interest sharing and communication.

  As we all know, Facebook is the most popular and useful social network around the world that people can post their status and look thought other friends’ status, make new friends according to their interests or hobbies, check the notification of newest update and use other plug-in modules for particular purpose to make life colorfully. Unfortunately, the State council of China prohibits the usage of Facebook based on the consideration of country’s security, so many similar social networks such as microblogs and the circle of friends in Wechat are established by different Internet companies in China. Absolutely, they are all visibly ‘community’ focused.

  In order to make people find matched friends conveniently and communicate with friends authentically, social network service providers always need people provide their feature profiles such as name, birthday, gender, hometown, a brief description of interests, hobbies and political views. The more information people give out about themselves, the more likely they are to find people they know, connect with others, and generally have a rich and personalized experience on the network. Of course, people need to agree with the usage protocol which include privacy policy first to enjoy the entire service of social networks.

  Social networks encourage people to give away information about themselves through mechanisms such as profiles and status updates so that their friends can know what are they doing recently and join in their lives to make it more vivid. People can communicate with their friends directly by embedded procedures on social network, and they can also push praise, forward or comment on their friends’ status individually in the dedicated discussion forum which is visible for all the friends of a person who shared his or her status. It’s really interesting that people can make an encounter if they posted the similar status in the same place from the social networks. But sometimes it will be a problem when you share one of your friends’ status in your own social network inadvertently without his or her permission, because he or she may don’t want others know their real-time status. So how to explain to your friend if his father knows what he is doing without his permission by looking through your network? It must be embarrassed.

  The same embarrassed issue appears in educational network that most students don’t want to share their real-time status with their parents, relatives or teachers because the fear of revelation of their own secrets which could only be shared with peers although they can use the fundamental functions expertly and are similar to other features of educational networks like Ning already. They usually have two different accounts on their social network and educational network to solve this big deal.

  Most adults can easily concentrate on doing something in a complex environment full of temptations, but it’s really hard for nonage students to do that. They may be misled by negative information such as illegal advertisements and distracted by various temptations when teachers make them focused on performing a collaborate activity on social network. And the most important issue that current social networks perform not so good on protecting students’ privacy, many parents cannot persuade themselves to allow their children to use social network for educational purpose actually according to some happened disadvantaged instance.

  So I think it’s not so good to implement social network on nonage students’ education,

It still does more harm than goodness at present.