[MUSIC]. Hello, what are the social networking websites? Which are their distinguishing characteristics? The social networking websites emerge in the second part of the first decade of the 2000s when the web was already consolidated as an important media. The most important social networking websites, like Facebook, are basically personal profiles, personal websites with personal data that users decide to share voluntarily with some people of their network of friends. Through those personal profiles, people share texts, images, and videos and they are able to see the publication of their friends. Every user is able to select and control, particularly on Facebook, with whom do they share a particular content. Which are the characteristics of a communication on social networking websites? On social networking websites, every user potentially becomes a media, able of communicating with all the people connected to the network. This is the first time in history that it happens. Before the internet there were two kinds of barriers for creating a media, as I have pointed out. The first reason was economical. For creating newspaper, or radio station, or a television station 20 years ago, you would have needed several thousand Euros. Secondly, another key barrier when it comes to the creation of television station, was that in a great majority of countries there is a supervision by the government, as a consequence of two issues: the scarcity of the radio-electric space and the wish to control the communication space, or the need to achieve a situation of plurality in the broadcasting. When you become into media, the only requirement for obtaining large masses of followers is to offer interesting content or being famous in the real life. Thus there is transference of influence from the real life to the virtual life. Those who are very famous in the real life, athletes, actors, and actresses, have a great number of followers and fans on the social networking websites. It is an automatic process. They do not need to promote themselves on social networks. The two key words when it comes to the social networking essence of communication are influence and connection. The social networking websites are a digital reproduction of the social networks that exist since the human being is human, since the existence of humanity. Given that we join social networks for surviving reasons. In some cases, social networking sites are an extension of the social networks in the real life. We are influenced by our friends, and we influence our friends. Human beings are more easily influenced than we believed, by the other members of their networks, according to Christakis and Fowler in their book, Connected. Decisions like losing weight or having a new child are, in many cases, fruit of the influence of our social network. In this sense we have a major capacity of influence in other people depending on the role we have in our social networks. If we are in a central place in our social network, we will have a major capacity of influence. How can we be located in a central place and be able to influence the people of our social network? The key for influencing in a social network is to be the person who introduces an important number of the members of their social network. Those who introduce two friends who have not met before are located in the central place of the social network. Therefore, they are able to influence more in that social network than other people who are located in the periphery. At the same time, the capacity to influence on social networks is so strong that our capacity of influence is likely to increase. In other words, we are likely to influence people that we don't know, people that are not directly connected to us but are friends of our friends. We can influence people connected to us in a three-degree relationship, that is, the friends of our friends who are not directly our friends. Another issue that highlights the importance of the connection in the social networks is the so-called six degrees of separation theory. This theory underlies that everybody is connected with a six degree separation maximum of anyone in the world. In other words, everyone and everything is six or fewer steps away, by a way of introduction, from any other person in the world. Therefore, a chain of friend of a friend statements can be made to connect any two people in a maximum of six steps. The changes that social networks have made to the communication world, together with novelties that the internet and the web have introduced, have lead to the emergence of a new communication register. The new communication paradigm where everyone can be a media have lead to a shift in the way of communicating. The Cluetrain Manifesto published very few years after the launching of the world wide web claims that markets right now are a conversation because the public, the client, can speak among them. They can quickly compare prices and qualities, because the internet has increased the communication speed and has enhanced the possibilities of interconnection between people. According to the Cluetrain Manifesto, networked markets are beginning to self-organize faster than the companies that have traditionally served them. Thanks to the web, markets are becoming better informed, smarter, and more demanding of qualities missing from most business organizations. Therefore communication on the social networking websites run by sports organizations, corporation, or the Olympic family have a new register, more sincere, closer to the public, more gentle. In this new way of communication we avoid the old culture of the press release. The messages of social networking websites must be written in a simple and direct language, because on social networking website hierarchies have disappeared, given that everyone has become a media. Therefore, great corporations in old media do not have the monopoly of the communication flow as we have previously explained. To sum up this video and the previous one, we would like to highlight the following stages in the internet evolution. The first stage on the internet evolution, which started with the ARPANET project, allowed the connection between computers. It started in 1969 and finished in 1993. The advent of the world wide web in 1993 started a new era of interconnection of content through the hypertext, links and the multimedia content. The third stage in this evolution started approximately in 2007 with the emergence of the social networking websites. This is an epoch of interconnection between people. This third stage acumulates the advances of the two previous stages and a new one: people play a central role in the creation, modification, distribution and sharing of content. [BLANK_AUDIO]
