The Achilles Heel of modern social networks

Still working like the early days

Social networks are still based on the principles of the early days. In these days social networks were created for fun. It was never thought that it will become such a massive pilar of the Internet.

Social networks penetrated everything

Social networks grew out of the fun projects and penetrated almost every aspect in our lives. It plays an important role in our personal lives as well as professional lifes.

Based on six degrees of separation

Today's social networks are based on the idea of six degrees of separation

The thought is that everybody is connected with everybody on the planet with only a few people between who act like a medium

Connections

The idea between today's social networks is to connect everybody on the planet with everybody. Users are forced/helped to create as many friends as possible by providing openness and features like suggestions to achieve the perfect network.

Connections are tied

Connections are tied and solid on these platforms.

Adding more features

Only adding friends is boring. Sharing possibilites were created with comment features. But it goes further with things like shares and likes on almost all platforms that are available today.

Numbers become important

The amount of friends, the amount of shares and the amount of likes were just small features but become very important in the society.

Creating a fake status

Users stopped with interaction. The platforms changed into publishing platforms. Everybody started publishing the most fun, the most crazy stuff to get more likes, shares and raise the amount of friends/followers to become stars

Platform status

The platform that gets used become the status of it's users. The users aren't there for themselves. They are there for the platform using it following the rules of the platform and it's users: to become more popular, to raise the numbers of shares, likes, friends, followers and so on.

tiredness

This leads to tiredness. Because people aren't what they are in the real world. They are acting on these platforms before all the eyes that accepted as friends or followers.

Getting worse: depressions

There are even studies that prove that using of certain platforms are causing depressions, declining the mood of people who use it. It's even so that how more people use it how further the mood declines. (http://guardianlv.com/2013/08/facebook-causes-depression-new-study-says/)

New fundement for social networking: Role Theory

Role theory is a perspective in (micro)sociology where there is much focus on social status and social roles.Social Status(ses)Refers to a structural position within the social system

Socal Role(s)are what the actors does in such a position

A person is nothing else than a bundle of statuses and roles

Lack of personality

The social personality of an individual is a synthesis of all the different roles he/she performs simultaneously or successively throughout the course of one's life. To get the personality in a social network, you must give focus on all the statuses and roles that a person have.

So instead of this:

We place this:

No roles without statuses

There are no roles without statuses or statuses without roles.

The status of an individual is the sum of all the statuses one occupies. Similarly the role represents the sum total of all the various roles of an individual and determines what one does for the society and what one may expect from it.

This isn't available on modern networks

Social networks of today only focus on the platform status. That's why people stop using it. They can't perform there other roles. Creating a social network based on the role theory will be a big solution for the lack of personality in modern social networks.

Thank you for reading