[MUSIC] Hello, in this video we are going to introduce which are the main processes that are present in the communication through social networks. They will help us to understand how social networking websites work. Moreover, they will help us to see how a communication policy for social networking is designed. Once again, the concept of interconnection appears as a key concept when we talk about social media. More modern processes, realities are complex. The modern science has discovered that many processes and realities are interconnected and are interdependent. We cannot understand processes and realities in an isolated way. The so called deep ecology considers for example that in an ecologic picture we cannot separate the humans from the nature that surrounds them. Human and nature are considered as a whole whole, interconnected. In other words, it is considered as a system in that social sciences and humanities, the French author Edgar Morin presented the system thought as a way of taking charge of the complexity of the realities of the current world. In fact, Edgar Morin and the theorists considered system and complexity as synonyms. Speaking of the system and complexity is taking distance of the mechanistic idea of the world associated with the mechanistic idea of the world. All the things work as a machine. The body is a machine and the solar system is a machine. Contrary to this approach that systemic aim to consider the things as a complex interdependent and interrelated reality. This concept of a system is not really new. In fact, the founder of the concept of system was Aristotle in his claim that whole is greater than the sum of the parts, is the seat of the modern concept of system and complexity. This is the essential idea that is behind the Internet, the Web and the social networking websites, an idea with more than 2,500 years of antiquity. In fact the consideration of social media as a system is in line with the consideration of the Internet, its architecture of the origins of the Web as a system, too. As we have explained in the previous video, the Internet and the Web are considered an element in which they are neither center nor periphery. The value of the net increases when new nodes, computers, and contents are incorporated to the Internet. Therefore I insist we will consider social networking sites as complex system. This will influence very much the proposal that we will present as it is a goal concept for us. Our concentration of the social media is in this sense ecologic, systemic as it considers different social media platforms as a part of a whole. We could not consider social media in an isolated way but related between then and related with the communication policy or a strategy of the organization as a whole. We will go into this issue in the following videos. Nowadays the economy of media is an attention economy. Why? We have to explore two fundamental issues. First of all, the economy deals with the management of the scarce resources and nowadays the attention is a scarce commodity, too. Different media are struggling to draw the attention of the audience because in traditional media, but overall, the Internet, the advertising is the main source of income. For instance, in the free area of television, which is funded by advertising, the more audience it gets, the more that it receives from advertisers. In this case, audience means attention. At the same time, the Internet economy is fundamentally an attention economy because it is mainly funded by advertising. The social networking websites such as Facebook have in comparison to other actors of the Internet. They maintain the audience attention during much more time than an email service, for example. This is crucial in order to get income to fund the business. The social media have a common characteristic that recommendation practices are usually present and become a key aspect. Recommendation practices are closely associated with the idea that the human beings reproduce an imitative behavior of the people who are influential in their social network. In other words, we copy from the others from our friends. In addition, we need to take into account that the human behavior can be predicted using mathematical models. This is another key concept behind recommendation policies, behind those policies. But it's the idea that we are in a certain way predictable to recommendation practices are present on Amazon when the system tell us that other people who have bought a particular book have also bought ones which Amazon recommend us. When Facebook recommend us friends who we may know, it is pertinent to practice those recommendation practices, too. To sum up, we have introduced the concept of system which is the essence of the Internet and the social networking sites. To talk about a system ecology, a complexity, we talk about a myriad group of element that are interconnected and are interdependent between them. We have highlighted, too, how the economy of the Internet is an attention economy essentially funded by advertising. Finally, we have explained how the concept of recommendation practices is fundamental of the social networking websites.
