Проект на английском языке "Popular American and Russian social networks"

ДЕПАРТАМЕНТ ОБРАЗОВАНИЯ И СОЦИАЛЬНО-ПРАВОВОЙ ЗАЩИТЫ ДЕТСТВА АДМИНИСТРАЦИИ ГОРОДА НИЖНЕГО НОВГОРОДА

МУНИЦИПАЛЬНОЕ БЮДЖЕТНОЕ ОБРАЗОВАТЕЛЬНОЕ УЧРЕЖДЕНИЕ

ШКОЛА №15

603083, Нижний Новгород, ул.Автомеханическая, д. 12, тел. 256-87-53

Научное общество учащихся

Social networks

Выполнила:

Андреева Анна

9 Д класс МБОУ «Школа № 15»

Руководитель:

Кузнецова А.В

учитель английского языка

МБОУ «Школа №15»

г. Н. Новгород

2016г.

Contents

Page

Introduction..................................................................................................           3

CHAPTER 1. Concept "social network"...............................................          4

CHAPTER 2. History of social networks..............................................          5                

2.1 Overview.........................................................................................          7

CHAPTER 3. Types of social networks................................................          8  

CHAPTER 4. Practical part...................................................................         11

CHAPTER 5. "Social networks are my virtual world"................................           15

Conclusion.............................................................................................         17

The list of the used sources and literature..............................................         18

Introduction

        Nowadays our interest of social networks continue to increase. In this work I will tell about the importance and actuality of social networks. Recently this type of the sites has gained a big distribution in the West and in Russia and Ukraine. Investments into similar projects reach hundreds of millions and even billions of dollars. In Ukraine these sums passed for some million dollars and continue to grow. It shows the growing popularity and confidence of investors in return of the investments and also their enhancement.

        Nowadays more than two thirds of online audience visits social networks. It is a popular online category, who advances even e-mail. It is more popular audience than search portals, information portals and the software.

        The results of numerous researches testify that our social networks captured more than a half of all Internet users. In Russia and Ukraine this indicator is lower than in the West, but it is growing.

        The aim of my work is a research of historical origin of social networks and their influence on the teenagers.

        According to the aim the following tasks were set:

- To study and analyze the historical origin of social networks;

- To study their specifics;

- To identify the most popular social networks;

- To conduct sociological survey of pupils at the age of 11-15 (fifth and ninth classes);

- To analyze the results of my survey.

        We can use this project for school lessons (English and Information Technology). This project allows to understand the structure of social networks and the importance of it in details.

CHAPTER 1. Concept "social network"

        Social network — the social structure made of a number of social actors (such as people or the organizations), sets of two-element communications and other social interactions between actors.

        The social network consists of group of knots which social actors, and communications between them (social interactions) concerning an exchange of resources are. Thus, within a social network social actors are grouped on the basis of similarity of the taken positions, communications and as the resources circulating between these positions.

        The actor — the acting subject (individual or collective); the individual, social group, the organization, institute, a community of the people making the actions directed on others.

        Social networks and their analysis — it is integral interdisciplinary academic area which appeared from social psychology, sociology, statistics and the theory of counts. George Zimmel created early structural theories in sociology, having emphasized dynamics of triads and "a web of accession of group". These approaches were mathematically formalized in the 1950th both theories, and methods of social networks became extending in social sciences and a behaviorism to the 1980th. The social network analysis — one of the main paradigms in modern sociology and also is used now in many other social and formal sciences. Together with other difficult networks, it is part of the arising area of network science.

        A social networking service is a platform to build social networks or social relations among people who share similar interests, activities, backgrounds or real-life connections. A social network service consists of a representation of each user (often a profile), his or her social links, and a variety of additional services such as career services. Social network sites are web-based services that allow individuals to create a public profile, create a list of users with whom to share connections, and view and cross the connections within the system.

        Most social network services are web-based and provide means for users to interact over the Internet, such as e-mail and instant messaging. Social network sites are varied and they incorporate new information and communication tools such as mobile connectivity, photo/video/sharing and blogging. Online community services are sometimes considered a social network service, though in a broader sense, social network service usually means an individual-centered service whereas online community services are group-centered. Social networking sites allow users to share ideas, pictures, posts, activities, events, and interests with people in their network.

        According to the Oxford Dictionary, a "social network" is a dedicated website or other application that enables users to communicate with each other by posting information, comments, messages, images, etc. The main types of social networking services are those that contain category places (such as former school year or classmates), means to connect with friends (usually with self-description pages), and a recommendation system linked to trust.

        Social network services can be split into three types: socializing social network services are primarily for socializing with existing friends; networking social network services are primarily for non-social interpersonal communication; and social navigation social network services are primarily for helping users to find specific information or resource.

CHAPTER 2. History of social networks

        The term "social network" was entered in 1954 by the sociologist from "The Manchester school" James Barnes in work "Classes and meetings in the Norwegian island arrival" which was included into the collection "Human Relations". It developed and added the approach to research of interrelations invented in the 30th years between people with the help sociograms, that is visual charts in which individuals are presented in the form of points, and communication between them — in the form of lines.

        However idea of a social network as structures which elements are characters (individuals or the organizations), scientists anticipated still in the late eighties – the French sociologist David Emile Durkheim and his German colleague Ferdinand Tönnies practically described the nature of this phenomenon in the theories and researches of social groups.

        Web applications and guest books were the first predecessors of modern social networks. The Internet meant existence of some interactivity, communication between users, leaving of responses for owners of resources and other. The forums and blogs providing closer interaction of users became the following step. Especially it concerned forums where everyone (from among the registered users) could answer in a subject interesting to it.

        Mass development of IRC chats, and also voice ways of communication became the following stage. However on the present of big mass character it was difficult to achieve, the Internet still remained expensive and available not for all the decision.

        Gradual development and integration of various resources also I caused emergence of full-fledged social networks. Today, but separate signs everyone has their uncountable set: requirement of registration, indication of the biographical particulars, control of a privacy for visit of the page, viewing of photos, etc. The user has the right to choose itself, with what circle of people he wants to communicate to whom wants to give access to the page. If to look at it under technical aspect, present social networks represent the real high technologies in the field of communication and communication, the interactive sites filled by users.

        The potential for computer networking to facilitate newly improved forms of computer-mediated social interaction was suggested early on. Efforts to support social networks via computer-mediated communication were made in many early online services. Many prototypical features of social networking sites were also present in online services.

        Early social networking on the World Wide Web began in the form of generalized online communities such asTheglobe.com (1995), Geocities (1994) and Tripod.com (1995). Many of these early communities focused on bringing people together to interact with each other through chat rooms, and encouraged users to share personal information and ideas via personal web pages by providing easy-to-use publishing tools and free or inexpensive webspace. Some communities – such as Classmates.com – took a different approach by simply having people link to each other via email addresses.

        In the late 1990s, user profiles became a central feature of social networking sites, allowing users to compile lists of "friends" and search for other users with similar interests. New social networking methods were developed by the end of the 1990s, and many sites began to develop more advanced features for users to find and manage friends. This newer generation of social networking sites began to flourish with the emergence of SixDegrees.com in 1997, followed by Makeoutclub in 2000, Hub Culture and Friendster in 2002, and soon became part of the Internet mainstream. However, thanks to the nation's high internet penetration rate, the first mass social networking site was the South Korean service, Cyworld, launched as a blog-based site in 1999 and social networking features added in 2001. It also became one of the first companies to profit from the sale of virtual goods.

        Friendster was followed by MySpace and LinkedIn a year later, and eventually Bebo. Friendster became very popular in the Pacific Islands. Orkut became the first popular social networking service in Brazil (although most of its very first users were from the United States) and quickly grew in popularity in India (Madhavan, 2007). Attesting to the rapid increase in social networking sites' popularity, by 2005, it was reported that Myspace was getting more page views than Google. Facebook,  launched in 2004, became the largest social networking site in the world in early 2009. Facebook was first introduced (in 2004) as a Harvard social networking site, expanding to other universities and eventually, anyone.

2.1 Overview

        The social network is the theoretical design useful in social sciences to study human relations, groups, the organizations or even all societies. The term is used to describe the social structure determined by such interactions. Communications through which any this social unit connects, represent convergence of various social contacts of that unit. This theoretical approach is, necessarily, relational.

        An axiom of the social network approach to understanding social interaction is that social phenomena should be primarily conceived and investigated through the properties of relations between and within units, instead of the properties of these units themselves. Thus, one common criticism of social network theory is that individual agency is often ignored although this may not be the case in practice. Precisely because many different types of relations, singular or in combination, form these network configurations, network analytics are useful to a broad range of research enterprises. In social science, these fields of study include, but are not limited to anthropology, biology, communication studies, economics, geography, information science, organizational studies, social psychology, sociology, and sociolinguistics.

CHAPTER 3. Types of social networks

Facebook

        Facebook — one of the largest social networks in the world. It was based on February 4, 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg and his roommates during training at Harvard university — Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskowitz and Chris Hughes.

        Originally the website was called Thefacebook and was available only to students of Harvard university, then registration opened for other universities of Boston, and then and for students of any educational institutions of the USA having an e-mail address in the .edu domain.

        Since September, 2006 the site is available to all Internet users aged from 16 years having the e-mail address.

        Facebook allows to create a profile with the photo and information on itself, to invite friends, to communicate with them, to change the status, to leave messages on personal and others' "walls", to load photos and videos, to create groups (communities on interests).

        The user can control the level of access to information published in its profile and define who has access to this or that part of the page.

        Facebook belongs to the five of the most visited websites of the world. On August 24, 2015 the number of visitors of the social network Facebook for the first time made one billion people.

Twitter

        Twitter — service of an interactive social network which allows users to send and read the short 140-symbolical messages called "tweets". The publication of short notes in a format of the blog received the name "micro blogging". Use of service free. Use by means of the SMS is rated by the operator according to a tariff plan of the user.

        The registered users can read and publish tweets, but the unregistered users can read them only. The user access the Twitter is available via the interface of the website, the SMS or the application of the mobile device. Twitter Inc. is based in San Francisco and has more than 25 offices around the world.

        Created by Jack Dorsey in 2006, "Twitter" soon won popularity around the world. Since May, 2015 at the Twitter is more than 500 million users from whom it is more than 302 million — active users.

        In 2013 the Twitter was one of ten most visited websites and was described as "the SMS of the Internet".

Instagram

        Instagram — the free application for an exchange of photos and videos with elements of a social network allowing to make photos and video which maximum length makes 15 seconds, to use to them filters, and also to extend them through the service and some other social networks. Instagram takes the picture of a square form — as cameras of the snapshot Polaroid, Kodak Instamatic and sredneformatny chambers 6×6 (the majority of mobile photos of appendices uses a ratio of the parties 3:2). Since August 26, 2015 Instagram was entered by opportunity to add a photo and video with landscape and portrait orientation, without trimming to a square form.

        Instagram was created by Kevin Sistrom and Mike Krieger, and begun in October, 2010 as a free mobile application. Service quickly won popularity with more than 100 million active users in April, 2012 and more than 300 million since December, 2014.

Tumblr

        Tumblr (the tambler is said) — the micro blog service including a set of pictures, articles, video and gif-images on different subjects and allowing users to publish posts in them tumblelog. The user can follow for blogs of other users then their records will appear on its news line. Service characterizes itself as "The easiest way to blog". The CEO of Tumblr is David Karp.

        In total for November, 2015 in Tumblr more than 260 million blogs are registered the Main office of the company is in New York.

VK

        VK (originally VKontakte) is the biggest European social network based in St. Petersburg. The network is available in several languages, but VKontakte is especially popular among Russian-speaking users.

        The set of opportunities, characteristic for many social networks, is available to users of "VKontakte": creation of a profile with information on itself, production and distribution of content, flexible management of access settings, interaction with other users privately (through personal messages) and publicly (by means of records on "wall", and also via the mechanism of groups and meetings), tracking through a news line activity of friends and communities.

        Except opportunity to write messages, the user can leave comments under already published content. It is possible "to attach" photos to the messages, audio recordings and videos (including feature films), documents and polls.

        In January, 2014 the daily audience of "VKontakte" made about 60 million people, and in January, 2015 — 70 million people a day. By data for July 15, 2015, the average daily audience makes about 65 million visitors.

        "VKontakte" is the site, the first in popularity, in Russia and in Ukraine, the 6th — in the world.

LinkedIn

        LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking service. Founded in December 2002 and launched on May 5, 2003, it is mainly used for professional networking.         As of 2015, most of the site's revenue comes from selling access to information about its users to recruiters and sales professionals.

        In 2006, LinkedIn increased to 20 million members. As of October 2015, LinkedIn reports more than 400 million acquired users in more than 200 countries and territories.

        The site is available in 24 languages. LinkedIn is headquartered in Mountain View, California, with offices in Omaha, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Washington, London, Dublin, Amsterdam, Milan, Munich, Madrid, Stockholm, Singapore, Hong Kong, China, Japan, Australia, Canada, India and Dubai.

        LinkedIn has more than 7,600 full-time employees with offices in 30 cities around the world. LinkedIn started off 2012 with about 2,100 full-time employees worldwide, up from around 1,000 at the beginning of 2011 and about 500 at the beginning of 2010.

Flickr

        Flickr (pronounced "flicker") is an image hosting and video hosting website, and web services suite that was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and acquired by Yahoo in 2005. In addition to being a popular website for users to share and embed personal photographs, and effectively an online community, the service is widely used by photo researchers and by bloggers to host images that they embed in blogs and social media.

        The Verge reported in March 2013 that Flickr had a total of 87 million registered members and more than 3.5 million new images uploaded daily. In August 2011 the site reported that it was hosting more than 6 billion images and this number continues to grow steadily according to reporting sources. Photos and videos can be accessed from Flickr without the need to register an account but an account must be made in order to upload content onto the website. Registering an account also allows users to create a profile page containing photos and videos that the user has uploaded and also grants the ability to add another Flickr user as a contact.

        Flickr offers three types of account: Free, Ad Free and Doublr. The free option includes one terabyte of storage limited to 200 MB per photo and 1 GB per video with maximum length 3 minutes. The Ad Free option allows subscribers to avoid advertisements for an annual fee. The Doublr account includes twice the storage of a free account. In May 2011, Flickr added an option to easily reverse an account termination, motivated by the accidental deletion of a Flickr user's account, and public reporting of its protracted restoration. Flickr may delete accounts without giving any reason or warning to the account's owner.

        Before May 2013, Flickr offered two types of accounts, Free and Pro. Free accounts were limited in data storage, accessibility, and interaction. Pro accounts received unlimited bandwidth and storage, and allowed users to upload an unlimited number of images and videos every month. New Pro accounts are no longer offered, but old ones remain active, with no plans to retire them.

Myspace

        Myspace is a social networking website offering an interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music, and videos. It is headquartered in Beverly Hills, California.

        From 2005 until 2008, Myspace was the largest social networking site in the world, and in June 2006 surpassed Google as the most visited website in the United States. In April 2008, Myspace was overtaken by Facebook in the number of unique worldwide visitors, and was surpassed in the number of unique U.S. visitors in May 2009, though Myspace generated $800 million in revenue during the 2008 fiscal year. Since then, the number of Myspace users has declined steadily in spite of several redesigns. As of May 2014, Myspace was ranked 982 by total web traffic, and 392 in the United States. As of February 2015 the ranks were 1594 and 1296, correspondingly.

        Myspace had a significant influence on pop culture and music and created a gaming platform that launched the successes ofZynga and RockYou, among others. The site also started the trend of creating unique URLs for companies and artists.

        Bulletins are posts that are posted on to a "bulletin board" for everyone on a Myspace user's friends list to see. Bulletins can be useful for contacting an entire friends list without resorting to messaging users individually. They have also become the primary attack point for phishing. Bulletins are deleted after ten days.

        Myspace had a "Groups" feature that allowed a group of users to share a common page and message board. Groups could be created by anybody, and the moderator of the group could choose for anyone to join, or to approve or deny requests to join. In November 2010, the group feature was turned off.

        Originally, Myspace allowed users to customize their user profile pages by entering HTML (but not JavaScript) into such areas as "About Me", "I'd Like to Meet", and "Interests". Videos and flash-based content can be included this way. Users also had the option to add music to their profile pages via Myspace Music, a service that allows bands to post songs for use on Myspace. These two features were very controversial as profiles would often look unprofessional and music would auto play without the end user requesting it.

        Today, profiles still offer much more promotional space than competing music services (the market that Myspace is competing in) Spotify and Pandora. The newest version of Myspace allows a full screen cover image with an innovative horizontal tablet friendly scrollbar, a profile default image, space for links to other online presences, a biography section, top 8 connections and other promotional tools available through the navigation rail.

ASKfm

        ASKfm is a global social networking site where users create profiles and can send each other questions.

        The site was founded in Latvia and launched on June 16, 2010 as a rival to Formspring. It has since overtaken the latter in terms of worldwide traffic generated with 150 million monthly unique users as of March 2015.

        The site was purchased by Ask.com in August 2014 with the intention to "focus on turning around the philosophy of the company and putting trust and safety first."

CHAPTER 4. Practical part

        After my analysis and summing up my work I made an experimentally - practical part. The main purpose of my practical survey is:

         - To conduct survey of pupils and to investigate value of social networks at children of school age (11-15 years).

        The main objectives of this research were to find out:

1. Purposes of use of social networks;
2. The most popular social network;
3. Teenagers dependence on social networks;
4. Teenagers preferences at the age of 11-15 years;
5. Popularity of networks.

According to the objectives one questionnaire was set up:

        During the questioning which is in the presentation of the paper the following results were received (results of questioning are given in charts):

        Using the results of these above schemes I can make a conclusion that children nowadays become more dependent on the Internet and social networks. Children spend 8 hours in the Internet. They use the networks according to the different purposes. The main two purposes are communication with their friends,  their self - realization . But according to the age their interests can change and using of the elementary installed applications on gadgets won't be actual for teenagers. They will get used and it will be boring for them and soon usual VK can be replaced by other advanced social networks, for example Instagram, Twitter.

After this questionnaires I made a comparison of several popular networks. I created special criteria and compared three social networks. They are:

1. Convenience of the interface and management

2. Information content

3. Entertaining opportunities

4. Earnings on social networks

5. Mobile opportunities

6. Convenient search

        From my point of view the best social network is Vkontakte. It's more convenient, more specific, more achievable than other networks, for example Twitter. Instagram is more specific than Twitter but it has weak entertaining opportunities.  We  can see that VK and Instagram are more popular than other social networks. In my opinion they have got all necessary functions and criteria. It also proves the first questionnaires of teenagers at the age of 11-15 years. It means that VK is the most popular and demanded social network and also more available for the Internet of users.

        After this comparison of social networks I wanted to express my own opinion social networks and that's way I decided to write my composition "Social Networks are My Virtual World".        

CHAPTER 5. "Social networks are my virtual world"

        We don`t imagine our lives without Internet. We can find all necessary information there. We use popular services and sources every day. One of the most popular sources is social nets. A social network is a very useful invention of the 21st century. Nowadays millions of people use social networks. It is an Internet site that gives us a chance to support various contacts, keep friendly relationships with classmates, acquaintances. More functional social nets allow watching photos and video films, to listen to music and so on. There is a possibility to enter different interesting groups. There exist social nets connecting people according to a general interest, for example, computer games players are combined into a social net.

        People have got used to surfing on the Internet because it is quick and very easy to discover any wish. You don`t need to think of suggestions and ideas. At least what you need is to be able to type correctly. I think social networks help disabled and lonely people very much. They can create an account and start communicating with other identical partners. Most of social networks are used by people to meet friends with similar interests and hobbies. Very often close - minded persons find each other on the Internet. Although people live far away from one another any network can unite them.

        As for me, I prefer to use social networks as a place for self-expression and finding interesting interlocutors. It is more suitable for me because I like to communicate with people from different places of our huge planet. I can communicate with friends by means of a social network and it is simply cheerful to spend time on it. I spend a lot of time on social networks. Approximately on eight - ten hours in day.

        My sister uses the Internet too. It is very important for us because many uncertain people try to raise their self-confidence using social networks. It can be said that on the internet, namely on social networking sites you can never be certain of who is "listening". I believe networks can be used by adult people and children at the age of fourteen and up. As for me, I use social networks with great pleasure as they give me a helping hand with my self-education and communication.

Conclusion

        Social networks have made huge races over the past few years. Now thanks to Internet resources the number of their participants exceeds millions. All people communicate, people of any age and a social status, all of them unite in social networks for communication, entertainment, acquaintances, personal benefit and a set of other reasons.

        Social networks unite people of any social groups, provide them communication and access to various entertainments, such as music, games, video, etc., they also attract with it people - they are convenient and satisfy to needs of the person and for this reason they also are a basis of modern society.

        Children nowadays become more dependent on the Internet and social networks. Children spend 8 hours in the Internet. They use the networks according to the different purposes. The main two purposes are communication with their friends, their self - realization. But according to the age their interests can change and using of the elementary installed applications on gadgets won't be actual for teenagers. They will get used and it will be boring for them and soon usual VK can be replaced by other advanced social networks, for example Instagram, Twitter.

        From my point of view the best social network is Vkontakte. It's more convenient, more specific and more achievable than other networks, for example Twitter. Instagram is more specific than Twitter but it has weak entertaining opportunities.  We can see that VK and Instagram are more popular than other social networks. In my opinion they have got all necessary functions and criteria. It also proves the first questionnaires of teenagers at the age of 11-15 years. It means that VK is the most popular and demanded social network and also more available for the Internet of users

Social networks provided us huge potential for development of the relations, provided access to a huge number of information in the world seeking for deleting of all imaginable borders.

        What will social networks bring us in the future? How will they change our life further? What problems are behind the appeared phenomenon "virtual I"? Only our scientific deep learning of this sphere and time can show the solution of these questions.

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