Editor in Chief: Moh. Reza Huwaida Thursday, March 28th, 2024

The Power of Social Networks

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The Power of  Social Networks

It would be surprising to know one-fifth of all the internet users, visit and use one or more of the online social networks. According to new research done, online social networks have about 1.2 billion users. Most of them are young people between the ages of 15 -25 years. Facebook and Twitter are the most popular social networks and have attracted about 55 percent of all the internet users from all over the world.

The online social networks now have important roles in global issues especially in some of the Arab countries in the Middle East. Internet and online social networks are now considered effective factors in cultural, economic and political affairs of most of the countries. Certainly, our country Afghanistan is not an exception to this fact. In order to understand how these social networks operate, we have to answer this question: what is the whole range of roles that social networks take on in our world?

The history of virtual social networks is related to the history of the internet. The creators of these virtual social networks, initially, did not know that a time will come when their creations would conquer the world. If we go back and refer to history, perhaps, the definition of a social network will be tied to that of small communities.

Social networks are not at all recent creations. They have existed, been established, destroyed and sustained over the course of history. Social networks always consist of nodes (people). These nodes are interconnected through dependencies and inter-relationships with each other.

This dependence and inter-relationship can be shared goals, aspirations, financial matters or religious issues. This kind of inter-dependence and inter-relationship relies on these nodes who are dependent on each other. The people as nodes enter this relationship and interact with each other.

The character and identity of an individual in the social network significantly affect the group relations. Each network has its own culture of inter-personal relations. This means they have chosen unique manners and languages of their own.

Sometimes we can find the social network has exactly imitated the culture of inter-personal relations in that social network. The character of every person becomes affected by the features and characteristics that are present within that particular social network. They include: collision of personalities, picking up the catchphrases and habitual words of that social network and special idioms, manner and behavior, appearance and various personality traits, etc.

When these social networks are created in an online platform then it is called a virtual social network. The main points in social networks are sharing the interests and activities. These interests and activities can be everything (social, cultural, political, and economic, etc).

For example, in some online social networks like Facebook, the users besides being members of this social network also take part in smaller groups and sub-networks. Each of these groups has its own inter-dependencies and also the culture of inter-personal relations that is present in the entire social network. So the person should change his culture of inter-personal relations, although this change of identity is temporary and limited to a certain time and place.

The roles of these online social networks are very clear in political and social issues in the world of today. In 2011, several important events occurred throughout the world. The Arab spring can be pointed out as one of the most significant of them. This revolution was going as a chain reaction and took over most of the Arab countries.

The Arab Spring started from Tunisia and then continued to Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria. Perhaps the Arab Spring was due to the fact that the numbers of online social network users has extremely increased in recent years.

At the moment, active users of Facebook are about 800 million. Using social networks like Facebook and Twitter for publishing news is one of the reasons for the growth of online social networks. In many cases, journalists can not record events but it is very easy for ordinary people to do so, especially youths to report them using internet and online social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. For example, during the Arab Spring, a lot of news was censored by the governments of Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria. It was through these online networks that news and information leaked out.

Nowadays, many people know about and learn E-commerce, so businessmen are trying to use some form of social networks for their commercial and business purposes. Small companies and business organizations can have and find more opportunities through trading using the online social networks such as Alibaba.com. Users of social networks such as Facebook can be potential consumers and buyers. These online environments are very good places for advertising and introducing new goods and services.

Online social networks such as Facebook are designed very intelligently and skillfully to maximize their impact and influence in the society. Social networks prepare the conditions for shaping the users' interests through exchanging of data. Social leaders use these features to promote their ideas and values. Online social networks are popular among Afghans. Many young Afghans are members of various social networks such as Facebook. For the past ten years, internet has been available in our country. Internet and social networks make freedom of expression possible in Afghanistan of today.

We can not exactly say about the future of social network. But considering the reasons that we saw in 2011, social networks on internet will increase and grow further. Competition between various companies like Google, MSN, Facebook, etc for capturing the market will be extremely hard.

Due to the increasing numbers of users of online social networks, the issue of security is a very important consideration. That will certainly improve in 2012. Cooperation among governments and countries around the world will help the IT companies deal with cyber attacks and other security-related challenges. Cyber attacks are today a very dangerous threat and can cause widespread damage and harm to people and countries and their physical infrastructure. 

Naeem Yaghoobi is the new emerging writer of Daily Outlook Afghanistan. He can be reached at outlookafghanistan@gmail.com

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