 Have you ever played the game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon? The premise is pretty simple, one person names an actor, and you try to get to Bacon by naming individuals that they've been in movies together in as few steps as possible. So if I was to list John Boyega, you might say that Boyega was in The Circle with Tom Hanks who was in Apollo 13 with Kevin Bacon. The game stems from a more scientific framework of how people are connected. In 1969, Jeffrey Tavers and Stanley Milgram's letter experiment set out to discover, amongst other things, how interconnected Americans were. The experiment involved giving a few hundred people in Nebraska letters that were addressed to someone in Boston whom they did not know. Each participant in the study was asked to send a letter to someone they knew who was more likely to know the person in Boston, or at least more likely to know someone else who might. They tracked how many times it took for the letter to get to the person in Boston, and on average it took six steps, hence six degrees of separation. As a quick side note, the interest in this game has led to the rise of something called the Bacon Number, where people search obscure actors to find the highest Bacon Number. It's very difficult to find an actor who has a Bacon Number higher than two, but you should check it out. There's a link to the website in the doodly-doo. It seems like we've reached a time where it is impossible to meet someone who is not at least aware of social networking. Technologies like Facebook and Instagram have come to play major parts in our day-to-day lives. However, it is important to note that while these technologies might be the most dominant in our recognition, they are not the original conception of social networking. Today we're going to talk a little bit about what social networking is, and dive into some of the history and impact of social networking services. In their 2009 book, Connected, the surprising power of our social networks and how they shape our lives, authors Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler theorized that social networks are organized sets of people made up of two things, individuals and their connections. Each person in the network functions as a node to a larger network. What mediated communication studies scholars find of particular interest is how people are linked together in these networks. You see, when we talk about social networks from a theoretical sense, we're talking about a construct that can be used to study relationships between individuals, groups, organizations, or even entire societies. Social networks are structured in a variety of different ways. Christakis and Fowler point out that this could be modeled simply as a fire line where you pass an object from a person to person in order to get that object to the end of the line. In this metaphor, the object is a communicated idea. Each person is connected to the person, to their left and to their right, but no one else. In the modern communicative sense, networks are far more complicated with multiple levels of interconnectivity and overlap. This leads to a rich field of study where we can look at the different ways messaging spreads across networks. Recently, many scholars have invested efforts trying to understand why some ideas might go further or viral and why some messaging strategies seem to fail. In the field of mediated communication, when we talk about social networks, we tend to focus more on specific social networking services. Social networking service is an online platform that people can use to build social networks or social relations with other people who share similar personal or career interests, activities, backgrounds, or even real-life connections. In the modern day, there are a wide variety of social networking services and each vary in format and the number of features. As time has passed, these services have gotten more complex and incorporated a wide range of new information and communication tools and platforms. Early social networking services like Friendster were predominantly text-based, where current social networks have a high level of media richness. Think about how often video and images are shared on platforms like Facebook. In the last decade, social networking services, Facebook in particular, have had a large influence on how people communicate with other members of their social networks. In their 2007 article, mediated communication researchers Dana Boyd and Nicole Ellison defined social networking sites as web-based services that allow individuals to one, construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system. Two, articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection. And three, view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system. What is interesting about social networking services like Facebook is the amount of connections they allow us to access. This presents some interesting possibilities where users are able to find connections that they would not have normally interacted with in the course of their day-to-day lives. The structure of these services also makes connections more or less public knowledge. In the past, it was possible to go years without realizing that you and a colleague shared a mutual connection. Sites like Facebook are quick to point that shared node, individual, out. Use of social networking services has increased greatly over the last two decades with approximately half the humans on this planet actively engaging in at least one social networking site. Current research has thought to determine why so many people have turned to social networking sites. While this area of study is still unfolding, there are a few things that we can determine. First, by and large, users of social networking sites use the platforms to maintain their relationships. Data released by Pew shows that users of social networks tend to have more close ties and are about half as likely to feel socially isolated than individuals who avoid social media. Further, Pew data supports the finding that users of social networking services feel like they get far more social support than their unconnected counterparts. This has led several mediated communication researchers to reach the somewhat controversial conclusion that sites like Facebook help us accomplish our social goals and are not necessarily a detriment to our interpersonal relationships. Obviously, this is still a developing area of study and researchers continue to look more into the impacts as phenomena such as internet addiction, online cyberbullying, online stalking, and other problematic occurrences that are facilitated by these technologies. Today we discussed a bit of the theoretical foundations of social networks and looked at how social networking services are changing the way that we communicate. As a final side note, in 2006, I went on a whitewater rafting trip with actor Andy Dick who was in Zoolander 2 with Benedict Cumberbeck who was in the film Black Mass with Kevin Bacon. Thanks for watching and I'll see y'all next time. This video series is written and produced by me, Ryan Guy, with the help of a wide variety of scholarly research and open educational resources. For more information on the references and materials used, go ahead and see the description page on YouTube. This video is published under a Creative Commons license. Please feel free to share, use, and remix its content.