Virtual Society

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ocial networking is never a new term; it is a general term which has a different meaning when done over the internet. The term brings the faces of many friends, websites which offer the service such as Orkut & Facebook, both of them have their own impact over the people especially the youth in general, due to the fact that the present world needs information and it is much easy to get information from the internet and one of the best place to search for information is social networking sites and even having a discussion over a particular issue over the website can even solve the problem. And as far as technology is concerned a social network is a social structure made up of individuals, who are called as nodes, connected with each other. The idea is being used for over a century to explain complex sets of relationship between members of social system at all scales from interpersonal to international. Humans always have the habit of making up societies and groups around him, and being a social animal he has no other way.

The 21^st century communication is also behind society, networking, social issues and all of these are over the internet, and it is now being connected via mobile phones and personal computers. The computer mediated social interactions was suggested early on, and it was made on many services such as Usenet, Arpanet and so on. And earlier social networking, as the web began in the form of generalised online communities such as the globe.com, geocities.com and tripod.com, these web sites basically offered some services like: bringing people together over the internet, provide chat rooms for interactions, and even to share information about the user and even share his ideas and thoughts via personal web pages by providing easy-to-use publishing tools and free or inexpensive hub space. And in the late 1990’s user profiles became a central feature of social networking, wherein these were profiles being created by the user according to his or her wish and he or she could visit many others profiles, communicate with them through the web site.

Now the time and technology has changed a lot than the earlier one, and even the change is very well seen in the social networking too, today social networking is being done by individuals around the globe 24x7, on cooking, golfing, gardening, developing friendship or professional alliances, finding employment, doing b2b (business to business) marketing, and even there are groups in the social networking sites sharing information about numerous social issues, now the topics are varied depending upon the interest of the users. Recent reports over the globe in the case of social networking over the internet states that there is a dramatic increase in the people who uses social networking sites, for example the Indian youth in the major cities devote around 2 hours daily for social networking alone. The websites that are accessed generally by the youth are Facebook, Twitter and Orkut, which are the three popular ones among a list of social networking sites.

“Social media” survey by Indiabiz News and Research Service (INRS) found that 30% of youth access websites for social networking from their mobile phone rather than PC’s, and it states technology has grown to a greater extent where man satisfies his need for socialisation from his fingertips at any time that he wish. The present studies states that Facebook has more than 8 million plus users in India, and another study states that 70% of social media users in India identify Orkut as their preferred social medium. Apart from social networking the websites are places of marketing now a days and the common and widely used marketing technique is the business to business marketing, due the reason that the feedback is much faster and spontaneous in the web sites than any other medium of communication. The websites which offer social networking are increasing day by day and now many of these websites are having accounts of celebrities in their websites and it has developed the publicity of the websites, and even there is social networking sites which got itself popularised due to media hype.

The present marketing world has value for everything and even the social networking has its share and marketers are behind this medium since many of the social networking sites are becoming the largest continent with millions in the website who are from all over the globe. Even we can see youth, who are so obsessed with their cell phones, and they never keep it down for a moment and they are losing their valuable time which they could have utilized in a better way. Even the marketers and the mobile phone companies are very specific about their customers and they have advertisements stating that “you are just one click away from ur friends”, ”click chat share and express” and many more, which are all motivating the youth to spent much of their time for social networking, than anything. Already the world is so fast moving that people have not even a single second to spent for his fellow being but here the social networking sites and the mobile phones have worked a lot, since it give a break for the user to connect to his friends in a better and easy way. And the next generation in the case of social networking is stated to be real-time networking and that too location based, which is similar to the television broadcasting. The time will explain how it would affect the next generation, and it is a fact that we all have developed a sort of media habit from the social networking which we didn’t even think of in the past.