2. CONNECTED GENERATION

Why are young people Online Social Networking & how does it impact upon their wider activities and behaviour?

Introduction

We are, above all, social animals. Throughout the history of digital communication ordinary people have used or subverted digital technology to communicate and make connections, and will only adopt them when they meet such primary needs.⁴ Consider 1980s Minitel, the French pre-Internet service intended primarily as a telephone directory which rapidly developed an active “messageries roses” sub-culture (‘pink messages’, adult chat services), or the pressure from mobile phone users in South Africa whose continuous use of miss-calls to prompt the recipient to call back stimulated providers in 2008 to develop a free (with advertising) “‘call me” service. Chatrooms and bulletin boards from the 1990s prefigured contemporary global social network services (SNS) which began to appear in their current form around 2002 with Friendster. The success of modern SNS is largely due to the fact that they exist simply to cater to our sociability.

It is common to talk about activity in SNS as 'virtual communication' – but this should not lead us to think ‘virtual’ is the opposite of ‘real’. This is a crucial point for understanding the nature of behaviour in SNS and other forms of online communication media. The communication that takes place through SNS is generally very real to those directly involved in the communication. For many users, SNS communication is woven into their day-to-day lives, with conversations continuing seamlessly between face to face meetings, on mobile phones and SNS.

Where SNS have been adopted they can lead to significant impacts upon individual behaviour and patterns of behaviour within groups and wider society. We can also observe communicators responding to the growth of SNS and changing or adding to their communication strategies. In this chapter we look at phenomena that have been observed in areas where SNS are extremely widespread amongst the population, and, where available, research data and analysis helps highlight social trends emerging from this. Predominantly this will cover the UK and USA, with some evidence from additional European contexts. We compare and contrast the phenomena observed in these contexts with our case study evidence from Brazil, India, South Africa and Thailand. Through this we hope to throw some light on the extent to which, as access improves, patterns of SNS behaviour in developing markets could follow patterns from established markets – or the extent to which user behaviours and the social impacts of SNS are likely to be entirely or predominantly conditioned by highly country and region-specific phenomena.

SNS will impact upon the behaviours of their users to differing extents. It is not the intention of this chapter to provide a statistical overview of behaviour change – but rather to highlight behaviour change trends and to give a broad indication of their intensity based predominantly on case study observations.

How are people interacting with SNS?

SNS are becoming an entry point to the wider web and are adding a distinct social layer to users’ experience of the web. In many areas SNS are now second only to – or competing with - search engines as users’ first point of web access. A user's chosen SNS may be the first page loaded when they connect to the Internet – and many mobile handsets now come with one-click access to SNS (in preference to one-click access to a search engine for example). SNS offer the ability to search the web – all from within the network. Users increasingly stay with their social network site as they navigate the wider Internet.

For example, clicking a link within Facebook that has been sent to me by another user opens the relevant website, but with a Facebook menu bar across the top of the screen allowing the user to comment on the website, share it with their own Facebook network, or otherwise navigate the web socially rather than solely by search. Through the news-feed, news-reader and application/widget features increasingly integrated with SNS, users are able to access significant amounts of news, information and entertainment without ever leaving the social network (even though the content may be coming seamlessly from other areas of the web).

In some areas SNS are also ‘starter’ applications, in the sense of being the first online tool that people become used to. For example, “[in Brazil]…a significant percentage of Orkut users are relative newcomers to the Internet …Orkut provides a simple, immersive experience that allows users with a low level of Internet literacy to gradually integrate the Internet into their lives with a minimum of expertise and training. […] The result is that a significant percentage of the Brazilian user base relies on Orkut as an alternative to the larger Internet. [..] in the Brazilian context Orkut plays an essential role as an intermediary in the process of non-users transitioning from non-use to literate use of the Internet.”⁵

In India, on the other hand, it would be rare that an SNS is set as the homepage of a user. As has emerged from the social networking survey, most users access the Internet only from office or when they are on campus. This restrains the user to explicitly display his/her presence on an SNS however prolific a user he/she may be. However iGoogle is catching up fast. This allows the user to access different SNS like Orkut, Facebook or MySpace widgets from a single platform.

Relationships

Online social networking is changing the way people keep in touch, and who they keep in touch with. Young people have been described as part of a “constantly connected”⁶ generation. They are as likely, if not more so, to use SNS to carry on conversations with friends who they see every day face-to-face as they are to communicate with old friends or with acquaintances who they do not meet regularly. Through status updates, private messages, messages on profile walls and comments on shared media young people are using SNS to share and discuss day-to-day experiences and activities.⁷

SNS can act as an amplifier of everyday interactions – increasing the space for events and activities to be discussed, whilst at the same time simplifying the communications medium. Short status updates and text-based messages lack the inherent complexity and nuance of body language and do not require a similar investment of effort as an e-mail or letter may demand. This can increase the velocity at which messages and communications are exchanged – adding to the amplification potential of the social network. This said, users of SNS may spend significant effort in writing and posting text and image based messages, investing these messages with layers of meaning, and developing new linguistic and communication conventions.

Many SNS users will accumulate hundreds of friend-connections with friends and acquaintances from school, clubs and societies, university and work. These “persistent weak connections”⁸ allow SNS users to remain peripherally aware of the activities of people they formerly shared a year-group, workplace or club-membership with – and their SNS can act in place of an address book for finding how to contact members of their social network. Hogan (2009⁹) has highlighted how these persistent weak connections can act as a significant social capital resource for SNS users.

This is true, for example, in Brazil where the SNS Orkut has established itself as a platform used by the majority of the Internet-using population, across all levels of society. Brazilian Orkut users are chatting to friends and family across the country and keeping in touch with their communities. One user has explained: “I communicate with my birthplace, Bahia. Sometimes I follow the [political] parties there, (...) I was looking for information about politics there. I can be here and know what happens there.” For users keeping in touch with friends and family, the process of being connected and “in touch” can often somehow be more important than the content of the communication itself.¹⁰

This is mirrored in India. The India case study included an online micro-survey of Indian users of SNS. The main reason users gave for being on SNS was because their friends were there. In the event of SNS not being present, users explained that they would feel left out and disconnected. However, a majority of the interactions with SNS that users reported were primarily of a very light “Hiee-Hello-Wassup” form of communication (50% of survey respondents) – again showing the importance of SNS platforms as spaces for being in touch, not necessarily for extensive in depth conversations and dialogue.

However, for many SNS users in the UK, particularly young people, SNS have become a more significant messaging platform than e-mail – with users checking their SNS messaging inboxes daily, and e-mail far less frequently. In the UK in 2008 the growth in Internet traffic SNS for the first time exceeded email traffic growth, which in fact fell. Nielsen reported that in the countries it tracks¹¹, “social networks and blogs are now the fourth most popular online activity, ahead of personal email. Time spent on these sites is growing three times faster than overall Internet rate, and now accounts for almost 10 percent of all Internet time”¹².

Users are ‘hanging out’ through online social networking spaces. In many senses this can be seen simply as an extension into online media of “hanging out”: the use of free time to be around friends, to be entertained or play games, to spark random connections and conversations and to generally engage in unstructured activities. Whilst hanging out on SNS, users may be interacting with amateur-produced content, or they may be engaging with advertising and marketeer-produced media and content.

Studies have suggested young people in the UK can be spending upwards of two hours per night connected to SNS, at least part of this time being a virtual hanging out, often whilst consuming other media at the same time from TV, or being in touch with friends across a range of access devices such as mobile phone and instant messengers. SNS also play a part in face-to-face hanging out of friendship groups; when friends may help each other to create their SNS profiles, or a group may cluster around a shared computer monitor, logged in using the account of one of the group, to browse the people, content and media on the network.

Many Brazillian SNS users are accessing the sites through telecentres – shared Internet access venues with clusters of computers – so they can be both hanging out in an online shared space, whilst hanging out in a physical space also. However, telecentres amount to a small proportion of the use of Internet in public spaces. Private, usually run as small businesses, ‘LAN houses’ have a much bigger scale and often also act as informal meeting points. (Younger people especially meet in such spaces for gaming, meeting people and flirting.) This behaviour is mirrored in the Internet cafes in residential areas of Bangkok. Some really young children who may not have money to play online games will just hang out in the cafes to watch friends playing, or even wait to use the remaining online time left by some cafe customers. Similarly, twenty four percent of respondents to our survey in India were very active SNS users, browsing SNS to stay updated with regular happenings in their networks, playing games and using applications built into the SNS, and sharing or consuming photos, video and music content within their networks.

The patterns are repeated in South Africa, as illustrated in this extract from the focus group interviews. Users of mobile SNS and SNS-like services such as MxIT are turning to interaction with the online community through the mobile phones as a way to use dead time during the day, such as waiting around at work. Online hanging out again overlaps with and intermingles with offline hanging out.

In Thailand, the teens interviewed detailed their activities on SNS, which can be dissected with two dimensions. One is the kinds of activities and the other is the circle of friends of different distance. Clearly, SNS like Hi5 mixes friends and provides the mechanism for members to add as many friends as possible. For uses, even teens, there is a clear distinction between close real friends that keep substantial contact and acquaintances that are online only. Within the closest circle of friendship, the kinds of activities youngsters do with friends include: updating and being updated of status and certain topics, reading and leaving comments, uploading and viewing pictures and posting videos, chatting (gossip-style conversation).

With the farther friendship or acquaintances, the reasons given by Thai young people for using Hi5/SNS are mostly to make new friends. Some of them will accept everyone on the Internet, including classmates, schoolmates and any strangers found on the net. Girls are likely to add more acquaintances to friend lists than boys. Therefore some of them have accumulated 600-1,000 even 2000 friends. This is specifically on Hi5. This is like a social game with numbers. According to the active players, they keep adding friends on Hi5 in order to top the popularity list. The meter of popularity doesn't mean much to them in terms of friendship. Facebook or Myspace that is synergized with MSN are for closer friend circles but on Hi5 two different circles of friends are together, but to youngsters they don't get confused with these two circles.

Online social networking can change the scope, nature of friendship and relationship formation and how friendships and relationships operate. Imagine the following illustrative scenario:

Joanna meets James at a party. She wants to get to know him better. Before online social networking she may have asked mutual friends to tell her more about James, and she may have waited until future social occasions to develop the relationship. With Social Network Sites, Joanna is able to search for Jame's profile and find out about him from the public information and media he has shared. She is able to make an SNS friend-request, possibly even from her mobile-phone at the party, as a way of keeping in touch and developing conversations and potentially a relationship without waiting for future parties or events they are both attending.

Joanna and James initially converse on the SNS via public profile-wall message board, and comment on photos of the party that have been uploaded to the social network. They then use private messaging to arrange to meet up. After a date they both update their relationship status on the network – which informs their friends on the network that they are in a relationship. When Joanne and James’ relationship ends their friends find out initially through the status update on the social network. Friends comment on the status updates as a way of offering sympathy to Joanne or James.

The impact of SNS on relationship formation and conduct illustrated above is not limited to romantic relationships, and SNS users may accumulate a significant network of contacts met once or twice at social or work events. Creating connections with people met only online (for example, by browsing and searching profiles, or linking to friends of friends) occurs on most SNS platforms. It is also becoming increasingly common on SNS like Twitter which are open by default, in contrast to many SNS. This enlarges the number of people who view the update as does the fact that Twitter do not enforce reciprocal relationships (so you can link your profile to someone else, without them linking back).

This mixing of relationship types within SNS is a common feature in all the countries we looked at. In India, for example, while most people are on SNS for friends, dating through SNS is also becoming common. There are Indian sites like Fropper that have been positioned as a dating platform. But even then dating via SNS mostly happens in subtle ways and largely in urban areas only. On the other hand, matrimonial sites are doing quite well (as here the user is a member exclusively for the purpose of seeking a marriage alliance). Some examples are bharatmatrimony.com, shaadi.com, simplymarry.com, and jeevansaathi.com. In Brazil, there are cases of people who maintain separate profiles, depending on their interests. A common situation is having one profile for family, friends and work and another only for dating.

In South Africa participants in our girls focus group reported that they didn't talk to strangers, but that they might get to know an acquaintance better, as is illustrated below:

SNS are becoming major media publishing and consumption spaces. SNS users are taking advantage of the content publishing features that the platforms provide and are actively sharing media through the platforms: whether photos from events with family and friends, or their own creative works of music and video. In the UK, for example, as use of the web (upwards of 12 hours a week online) by young people overtakes time spent watching television¹³, SNS have become major platforms for media consumption. MySpace is particularly recognised as a platform for both signed and unsigned bands to promote their music, and all the major UK networks are increasingly rich in video content. This includes re-packaged mainstream media such as clips from TV shows, or specifically created online content (such as the Kate Modern micro-soap opera created for Bebo and funded almost entirely by product placement¹⁴). These exist alongside User Generated Content (UGC) and amateur-created video clips.

This is a noticeable trend in India where many SNS very actively seek to be entertainment and media spaces. They are particularly vibrant in their appearance and attempts to give a local flavour to the network, blending socializing with entertainment, drawing particularly on Bollywood influences. Indian SNS platforms often include features such as downloadable ring tones, wallpapers, screensavers, film music and videos. Some sites like BigAdda and Ibibo have tried to act as quasi-blogging platforms using celebrity bloggers like film star Amitabh Bachchan and cricketer Ravi Shastri to drive traffic. Ibibo has also developed in-site talent contests.

Brazilian users have been active in newer SNS almost since they emerged and a more diverse picture has emerged. Brazilian cultures of media appropriation and remixing provide a basis for media creation and consumption in the SNS space. Media consumption is related to SNS basically in two different forms:

• Indirectly, SNS act as commentary to other media, in which people learn about new features through their networks,
• Directly, through direct consumption of media in SNS (very often recorded mainstream media such as TV shows, and on a very small scale the consumption of independent, properly open-licensed media).

Note that bandwidth in telecentres or LAN houses in Brazil varies a lot, according to the local availability of access providers. Usually, flash videos can be watched with a little patience.

Social Network Sites and the media available through them are becoming key spaces of identity exploration and self-expression. Through the profile creation and sharing features of SNS, people become curators of their own content paces, storing, sharing, mixing and remixing media and media playlists. The group features of SNS, for example, have been widely appropriated as tools for users to express their views on particular issues, with users joining groups to show that they are fans of particular sports or music, or to show support for particular causes or issues. A user's group memberships are usually displayed on their public profile.

In the UK, many (younger) teenagers invest considerable time in crafting their SNS profiles as a means of exploring their own identities and expressing facets of their identity to their social network. This can include sharing revelations about risky behaviours¹⁵ or about affiliations and support for brands, bands and social causes. For older SNS users profiles continue to be a form of self-expression and a means of “writing oneself into being” ' online. Young people's concepts of private and public information are being influenced by SNS. Business focussed networks such as Linked In are increasingly used by young professionals as spaces to share their career records and work interests. In the example overleaf from South Africa we see how young people may use multiple profiles to explore different possible identities.

Snapshot 01: MxIT Identities.

Simphiwe, 20, completed grade 11 at school, currently working, lives with his grandmother in Orange farm. He got his first Cellphone in 1998, and currently owns 2 Cellphones and has 4 SIM cards. His preferred network is the one that offers him the most “freebies”. He is the only one at home with a phone, and doesn't like to share his phone.

He uses Facebook too, when he goes to the Grow Bacha office weekly. He is very good friends with Tshepo Tamae who works at Grow Bacha.

He is a dedicated MxIT user – sometimes spending all day (and all night) MxIT-ing. He is described as a MxIT 'boffin' and 'well connected' by his friends.

Simphiwe drew two social networks, one of which is for his alter-ego – 'Snake'. On one social network map, you will find his friends, - best friends, female friends, Facebook friends – all by name. On this other map 'Snake' is friends with “cruel friends, the Assassins, the naughties” and Alcoholics”. Simphiwe’s use of MXit is full of bravado and macho rhetoric - he created another personality that is braver, more confident and more of a risk taker than he might be in real life. Another participant's comment about MXit - “you can lie and no one will be able to see you” is true for him.

He said: “MxIT is safe, you can chat while you are in your room. Lock the doors and chat and chat and no one will get you.” He did not site MxIT as a source for information, for that he said, he would go to his best friend.

Simphiwe is typical of 'high risk' youth – he is 20, has not completed his schooling, and lives with a grandparent (with no parental involvement). His communication is typical of the male Grow Bacha youth – full of bravado- though he must at times feel vulnerable and concerned for his future.

SNS users are becoming skilled in using a variety of media and forms to communicate and interact. Private objects that become social objects are the social lubricant within SNS, including, for example, photos, published, tagged and commented on; links to interesting, funny, trend-setting content; event notifications, invitations and reports. Users appropriate the many features of SNS for their own purposes. For example, using events and group features to ask friends to share their mobile phone numbers.

The short status update (‘What’s on your mind?’) has become a communication short-form, especially with its extension into microblogging sites such as Twitter.¬ As new media, however, SNS add in a more public dimension: depending on individual settings my status can be of interest to friends of friends who want to meet or talk to me (or avoid me). I can identify other people responding in the same way as me to events and ideas that move me. I can publically declare solidarity with political movements or campaigns and, if I am that way inclined, try to recruit my friends.

Activity in SNS often reinforces and enriches physical connections. Contrary to the stereotype that time spent online isolates individuals, groups of people arrange parties, events and gatherings through SNS. The more pervasive the connection, as people link SNS, phones and Twitter-like services, and the more connected the population, the more likely that people will seize opportunities to meet up corporeally. People linger in SNS for the same reasons they spend time in cafes or bars; to have fun, meet people and enrich their social lives. They also exploit the medium for more specific purposes such as political gatherings, coming together in flash mobs, connecting for random sexual encounters or playing artificial reality games”¹⁶

Social networking spaces can be spaces for gaming and play. The culture in SNS, as quintessential web 2.0 properties, is light, funny, quirky and casual. Games such as Scrabulous are popular. People exchange funny songs and stories, tell jokes and tease each other. They negotiate identities and relationships, define themselves through their reactions to and comments on issues, fashions, celebrities and events. They delight in playing with and influencing the development of Internet memes¹⁷ (a catchphrase or concept that spreads quickly from person to person via the Internet), contributing, adapting and sharing quizzes and competitions¹⁸). Pass-timing of this kind has always engaged social groups, but the specific added value of SNS is that they link people and groups to the global flow of ideas and trends, as well as to other groups with similar interests.

Social Network Sites have facilitated the organising of large real-world gatherings, from political protests to 'just- for-fun' flash mobs. Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ mrlerone/CC BY-NC-SA

Social networks are being used functionally, to organise events, activities and campaigns or to manage professional networking. On the Feb 6, 2009 more than 7,000 people joined a flash-mob in Liverpool Street Station, London, taking part in a mock re-enactment of a recent TV advert.The event had been organised entirely in a very-short period of time through a group on the SNS Facebook, started by an individual who just thought the idea of the flashmob would be fun.

SNS tools have the power to rapidly spread information about events, activities and causes. Less dramatically, but of arguably greater significance, SNS are becoming key tools in many people's day-to-day organisation of both their social lives, and their wider engagement with groups and associations. The event organising features of SNS are used to coordinate personal events such as birthday parties, or meetings of social or campaigning groups.

In India women's networks have recently used SNS groups to organise a creative mass protest against the Hindu Nationalist Party’s’ call for restrictions on public displays of affection. The irrereverent call for women to send knickers to the HQ of the lead right-wing organisation on Valentines Day (http://tinyurl.com/aaqssc) was smart marketing and the campaign went viral, not only attracting more than 2,000 members to the group but global publicity.¹⁹

Rede Humaniza Sus, a national health humanization programme led by the SUS Brazilian public healthcare institution, has made use of a custom SNS that aims to ‘humanise’ Brazilian Health services, making them more accessible and sympatheitc to people’s situations, has made use of a custom SNS built for them to connect and facilitate collaboration and knowledge sharing between professionals working on health humanization. The network has grown since early 2008 to have over 2500 registered members. Network members have commented on the power of media sharing and informal conversation features within this network for facilitating dialogue: “If my colleague has a camera and in her everyday, in work, she does a snapshot of life, put it in the network and we get to talk about it, that can help us using that space not in a much formal fashion that enforces us to formal replies,”

SNS are becoming more connected to the world of work. Some sites like Plaxo and LinkedIn identify themselves specifically as professional networking tools. Organisations, commercial and non-profit, with presences on SNS use them to advertise vacancies. Organisations are having to come to terms with newer employees used to engaging with their personal networks to advertise and support each other through finding work, daily work issues and moving on. These people want to stay in touch during the day, sparking debates about whether people should be allowed to access SNS at work, raising issues particularly for security-minded IT managers.

SNS users are creating, joining and engaging with groups and communities within the SNS to access and share information. A search on any of the major SNS of the term World AIDS Day is likely to turn up a number of groups or events posted to the site, often with many members. Many of these groups have been created by individuals operating independently of any campaigns or communication organisations, and contain messages and discussions between SNS users about issues connected to HIV/AIDS. SNS contain a myriad of groups on just about any topic, and SNS users may turn to the groups and user-contributed knowledge within the networks rather than to search engines and official information sources to help them explore an issue.

An informal survey of AIDS-related communities in the Brazillian Orkut discovered a number of groups, some of them with thousands of users: “Aids, DST ... Conscientização” (4,523 users); “HIV/AIDS – BR” (5,320 users); “Prevenção às DST/Aids e Drogas” (3,594 users, with focus on hearing impaired people). These communities feature a lot of forum discussions, with people offering help and useful information to each other. But their attendance is usually restricted to gay public, and out of prejudice the heterosexual public tend to avoid these communities.

Special interest groups and marginalised groups are using spaces within SNS platforms, and are creating their own social network sites/services. Individuals and groups are making use of hosted SNS platforms such as Ning.com, and readily available open source tools to create niche social networks. These may be topic based, or for particular groups who do not wish to host their discussions and networking within wider SNS – possibly due to social stigma. For example, a recently launched SNS for young people from Gypsy and Traveller communities in the UK, built on top of the hosted SNS platform Ning.com, has grown to more than 1,000 active users and has created a space for otherwise marginalised and isolated young people to come together, socialise and to then join some discussions about issues that matter to them.²⁰

SNS have become a central place for constructing, negotiating and mediating group norms. The stereotypical image of a young person alone in front of a screen, isolated and anti-social is in reality more typical of the previous generation of technology users -- TV addicts -- than young people active in SNS. The power of friendship groups, critical to the development and growth of young people’s identities and equally important in adult life for support and feedback is amplified in SNS. The regular constant interaction and feedback can be as constraining as it is supportive. But from the point of view of AIDS communication it offers a powerful vector for exploring sexuality and behaviour, as well as places for marginalised or stigmatised groups to find support.

Some SNS users are putting themselves at risk through their social networking activities. Through revealing personal information in public spaces, linking with strangers, and using commercial features in SNS without taking security precautions (e.g. setting secure passwords) users can put themselves at risk through their use of SNS. The UK Children Go Online project²¹ has categorised online risks into a matrix of types: “Commercial, Aggressive, Sexual, Values” and forms: “Content” where the individual is recipient of inappropriate, offensive or misleading content; “Contact” where the individual is directly involved in potential harms, which can include being bullied, groomed or physically abused as a result of online contact; and “Conduct” where the individual is involved as an actor – engaging as a bully, or in illegal activity through online tools. There are also suggestions that the desire to access SNS is linked in some areas to commercial sexual activity in order to obtain mobile access airtime.

In this chapter we have explored a range of ways users are engaging with SNS and the impacts it is having on their behaviours. In the following chapter we will explore how communicators are already responding, and we will draw together a series of principles for social network aware communicators, based on both this chapter and the next. In our recommendations we will return to the theme of risk, to set out a framework for addressing potential risks to individuals and organisations from engaging with SNS.

Snapshot 02: volunteer led social networking in Thailand

This example from Thailand illustrates how young volunteers with the Openmind Projects have naturally adopted SNS as a platform for promoting the opportunities it offers, how SNS has kept volunteers connected with the organisation, and how it has impacted upon the movement of people, money and resources.

'Websites and the Internet are the only available marketing tools for small organizations,'' asserted by Sven Mauléon, the Director of Openmind Projects (OMP). Their targeted audience are those who want to come to Southeast Asia to experience different cultures by volunteering to teach in rural communities in Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Nepal. Since beginning three projects in 2001, they've found all their volunteers, or vice versa, from their own websites and social network site Facebook. Now it has grown to approximately 60 educational and eco projects in the four countries²². Currently their three active 'recruiting windows' are their official site (.org), own interactive networking site (.net), and more than one Facebook accounts and pages created by volunteers.

The differentiating point is that their several SNS, the most popular with 560 'friends', were created by their volunteers. The messages and images on the pages are about the training and the life volunteers had had in the poorer North Eastern part of Thailand. Messages are volunteers' reflection of their experience in Southeast Asia and increase interest in volunteering for OMP. The networking effect, since their delivery of a speech at Asian Institute of Technology in 2002, boosted by SNS like Facebook, has taken the organization to a new sphere of work. Starting with the focus of bringing information technologies to rural villages in Thailand²³, with the incremental inflow of international volunteers, OMP has cracked into a very competitive 'voluntourism' sector. The increase of volunteer number and income has enabled them to open more service sites in other South-eastern and Southern Asian countries. Volunteers are becoming more and more important to OMP. They are both the paying customers and the human capital for their organizational objectives of rural development.

The organizational development of OMP is tied with information communication technology and has been transformed and accelerated by social-network-function sites. As they reiterated their learning-by-doing experience, some old volunteers have given their hearts and become OMP's satellites in different countries around the world to outreach to more volunteers and/or represent OMP. Some volunteers come back to Southeast Asia to plan and do more work for OMP, for rural communities, and for themselves.

The testimonies of substance travel in both real and virtual world and reinforced each other. The 'friends' marketing' has never been planned by organizations like OMP. Ideas come from all sides and are pooled. Openmind implemented some and volunteers did others. From the example of Openmind Projects, we can see a cause of a local community development has triggered the movement of people, money and more potential resources via social network technology. Few people's whole-body-and-mind experience is transmittable with words and images and further to influence others in their network, real or virtual.

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