NET 34 - Personal Bio Task

Who am I? My name is Sheila and I'm a mum of four, an ex-bank officer/retail manager/receptionist/real estate property manager/playgroup treasurer/administration officer and child care worker, amongst other things! If I were to sum up my life in a quote I would use the following words from John Lennon - "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans". I actually planned to go to University 25 years ago, but life happened and here I am now - a "mature-aged" OUA student, working towards a Bachelor of Arts (Internet Communications) degree.

Net26 Mod 1: Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship

boyd, d. m., & Ellison, N. B. (2007). Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), article 11. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html

Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship

URL: http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html

I thought this extract describes SNS well:

What makes social network sites unique is not that they allow individuals to meet strangers, but rather that they enable users to articulate and make visible their social networks. This can result in connections between individuals that would not otherwise be made, but that is often not the goal, and these meetings are frequently between "latent ties" (Haythornthwaite, 2005) who share some offline connection. On many of the large SNSs, participants are not necessarily "networking" or looking to meet new people; instead, they are primarily communicating with people who are already a part of their extended social network. To emphasize this articulated social network as a critical organizing feature of these sites, we label them "social network sites."

This article describes the history of SNS, and a timeline.