What is a social network?

On Tuesday we had another great Fishbowl conversation which was much more interesting than it was last time. We had a discussion on social networks. What is a social network in general?
First of all, it was and still is really hard to give a precise definition of what a social network is because there are always two different meanings we all directly associate with the term social network.
On the one hand, the term social network defines a “new” network today we all know from the Internet. I mean social network websites like Facebook, MySpace or the German version of Facebook called StudiVZ/MeinVZ which are being used regularly by millions of people worldwide. These are all different types of social networks which focus on building online communities of people who for example share interests or other activities or who are interested in “spying on” someone’s interests or activities. ;)
These social networks are web based; they provide a variety of ways for users to interact, such as e-mail and instant messaging services and they of course have encouraged new ways to communicate and share information. These social networks provide lots of different advantages as well as disadvantages and people do not necessarily share opinions.
On the other hand, we came up with the term “biological network” which we defined to distinguish between the two “ideas” of the already above mentioned web based social network and the traditional social network based on social relationships which I am going to explain a bit more now.
Such a “biological” social network is something we could also call a social structure and it is based on social relationships in our “real lives”, for instance a friendship, a sports club or the simple relation in a neighborhood.
Interestingly, the creators of Facebook and MySpace or other Internet users invented the term social network to name a type of new media and thereby used a term we already had in our lives before, moreover they used an ambiguity, maybe to simplify the usage of such new tools or to familiarize the Internet users with them.
Incidentally, we compared such “biological” social networks to our biological fathers and furthermore, we compared the “web based” social network to a possible stepfather what I found very strange as well as funny and interesting.
Finally, we also said that a conversation on a web based social network is much more impersonal than a face-to-face conversation in reality and we came up with the thesis that today we all are pushed to be part of such a social network on the Internet. These are two points I will focus on in my “Moment of Zen” now.