Anthropology of Social Networking Websites Research Paper

Anthropology of Social Networking Websites - Research Paper Example Social networking websites provide many benefits to people, such as, developing kinship and other relationships, information sharing, social interaction with people from different societies, and facility to find old friends. Along with these considerable benefits, there also exist some big concerns regarding these websites. In this paper, we will talk about how social network websites influence privacy and relationships from anthropological point of view. What is Anthropology of Kinship? Talking from anthropological perspective, one can say that the system of kinship includes people who have blood relationship between them or those who are living as a family. People usually create their own definitions of family. They can make a decision on adding or not adding people to their social networks depending on whether they trust them or not. In this way, they usually do not define kinship as blood relationships and add such relationships to the definition of family that may influence thei r lives at some point of time without having any blood relationship with them. Therefore, we can say that social networking websites have changed the dimensions of actual anthropology of kinship in today’s world of digital media. People have forgotten that real life is different from what we feel it in internet’s social networks (Acar 63). ... For example, some people, especially children, make excessive use of social networking websites, which results in less face-to-face interactions between them and their family members living under the same roof. People usually send comments and messages to friends and ignore their actual relations. Such changes in behaviors of people decrease affection and care that people normally have for their closest family members living under the same roof. Anthropologists have a concern over this issue, as they believe that such behaviors harm the actual family structure and give rise to social isolation in an unobservable way. Privacy Concern Socio-cultural anthropologists seem to be worried about the social change that includes excessive and improper use of social networking websites. They believe that such websites harm the privacy of individuals and cause many problems for the society. If we observe people who make excessive use of such websites, we can find that some of them reveal very pe rsonal information to their internet friends with whom they do not have any direct relationship. We have also seen such cases in which people have cheated others to get their personal information pretending to be their relatives or close friends. The fact is that such websites are open to everyone and not every person is well skilled in setting highest level of privacy for his/her account. â€Å"Users of social network sites (SNS) often state that they are concerned about their privacy, yet they often disclose detailed personal information on their profiles† (Utz and Kramer 1). Even if someone has ensured maximum privacy, he/she can be deceived by someone who pretends to be his/her lover or a true friend. Adolescents are the main users of social websites (Subrahmanyam and Greenfield