1. AIDS COMMUNICATION AND SOCIAL NETWORKING

Introduction

The remarkable growth of Social Network Sites/Services (SNS) such as Facebook, MySpace, Orkut and their many relatives across the world, is one of the clearest indications that digital technologies are changing radically the communications landscape. Many active users spend hours on the Internet working and socializing using SNS and they are perceived by some of these active users as a virtually indispensable form of communication. The principles of social networking are being woven increasingly into the very fabric of the Internet. While the current public debate around SNS is often dominated by concerns over their potential role in undermining privacy, or enabling bullying or predation, these platforms perform important roles in the lives of their active populations. There are many examples of how development and social change organisations are beginning to engage productively with these networks. This report therefore aims to gather learning from those experiments – and other relevant research – as a basis for forward-looking recommendations on their potential use in AIDS communication. The report is divided into three sections:

Section one - Social Network Services and their uses

This covers three topics:

• We introduce the subject matter and the methodology behind this report.
• We describe how young people are engaging with online social networking and the significant impact that social networking services are having on their users’ activity and behaviours.
• We describe a number of existing approaches that communicators and individuals are taking to use social networking to share messages about health and social change issues. We end chapter three with a series of principles for social network aware communicators.

Section two - Under the Bonnet

This looks at background issues in more detail:

• We survey the features of social networks in more depth, and offer an analysis of how the design of different social networks create a range of challenges and opportunities for communicators.
• We examine the take up of online social networking in different parts of the world in the context of the spread of digital technologies, including the impact of the mobile phone. Through this we offer insights into the different dynamics of online social networking in different countries and contexts.
• We lift our eyes to the horizon and describe possible futures, in terms of drivers for change and trends we can identify.

Section three - Conclusions and Recommendations

This section draws together the different strands in the report:

• We summarise the main findings
• We develop a series of recommendations for AIDS communicators on how they can use online social networking to engage with young people
• We suggest some specific next steps

Scope: a connected generation

The report focuses particularly, though not exclusively, on people aged 15-25 in 2009. This age cohort is far more likely to contain active users of Social Network Sites than older age cohorts. In many contexts across the world this generation have grown up with access to digital communication technologies and in societies conditioned by digital communication. Digital communication technologies have not been something they have adopted after learning about organisations, methods of communication and society, and after developing their own identities and friendship groups – but digital communication technologies have often been pervasive during their early years, during their formative experiences, and whilst they are making important life decisions. The differences between this “connected generation” (sometimes referred to as digital natives¹) and older generations are in some cases greater than conventional North-South digital divides.

'Although a great deal of respect is paid to the older generation in many developing countries, the newer generation of consumers are significantly younger than elsewhere. In the developed world, the average age of the population is 37.2 years, while in the developing world, it is just 24.1 years. The average age in Asia is 25.9 years and in Latin America it is 24.5 years - but in Africa it is just 18.2 years. Younger consumers tend to have different tastes to their parents and in the main to be more adventurous. There is a steady stream of anecdotal evidence from Africa suggesting that children and young adults in households have significant influence over media purchases like Pay TV channels. This sense of adventurousness is demonstrated in almost all of the 17 country surveys in Balancing Act’s African Broadcast and Film Markets (Balancing Act)’².

Definitions: online social networking, and social network services

In this report we use the term online social networking as shorthand for communication between groups of people mediated at some point by Internet technologies. This mediation often (but not exclusively) takes place through Social Network Services (SNS) such as Facebook or Orkut, accessed via computers or, increasingly, mobile phones. More and more SNS are not accessed only as destination websites, but the features of particular SNS are made available in “widgets” which can be embedded on different websites and in devices such as televisions, games consoles and other Internet access devices. We have this multi-platform nature of Social Network Services in mind when we consider them, and SNS should not be read as simply referring to a collection of websites.

We adopt an intentionally broad definition of online social networking to take account of the importance of the mobile phone in many emerging markets across the world. We pay particular attention to both the emergence of smart phones (often as powerful as high-end computers, and with high-speed mobile Internet access) as Internet access devices able to view access fully featured SNS platforms, and to social networking tools such as the popular South African platform MxIT, designed to provide tools for text-based social communication across far wider range of mobile handsets. We also include in our definition of online social networking communication which may start on non-Internet channels, but which at some point makes significant use of the Internet, such as mobile phone text-message based access to Twitter, or the Nigerian microblogging service, Naja-Pulse³.

Methodology: a global picture

This report is one component of the work being carried out by the Communication Working Group of the aids2031 initiative (www.aids2031.org/). The core question for the group is how social networking technology has changed and will change the way people communicate about issues and behaviours that impact on HIV vulnerability.

The research behind this report has been carried out by a group of people working in five countries in different regions of the world: Brazil, India, South Africa, Thailand and the United Kingdom. We have drawn upon an established literature on social networking and SNS from the UK, US and Europe, and sought to complement this with direct field research (including focus groups and one mini-survey), case studies and analysis from non-OECD countries to compare and contrast the way in which social networking is developing across a range of contexts. Throughout this report we have tried to establish general features and principles of online social networking, which have saliency across the countries we have explored, whilst offering insights from particular countries and contexts to show how local patterns of SNS use have subtle variations of interest to communicators.

Glossary of Terms

The diagram below illustrates some key terms used in the paper:

(click image to enlarge)

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