المصدر
The Second International Conference of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Sultan Qaboos University, v.1, p. 361-378.
الملخص الإنجليزي
The growth of Social networking technology has been exponential in the past few years. Social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter have attracted millions of users who incorporated the use of this technology as part of their normal daily routine. Social networking sites focus on building social relations among people by allowing them to share information, photos or videos, share interests and activities, use blogging to express their views and so on. Social networking sites allow users to create personal profile pages in which they can express their ideas and views and also add friends to their lists. Moreover, some sites allow users to enhance their profiles by adding multimedia content or modifying their profile's look and feel while others, such as Facebook, allow users to add applications that allow them to accomplish additional useful tasks. Once you are granted access to a social networking site you can begin to socialize by reading the profile pages of others and possibly contacting them and start a new friendship. There are several social networking sites that users can choose from based on their preferences. For example, about 63 per cent of children are more likely to use Bebo, while 62 per cent of adults are most likely have a Facebook profile. In addition, 42 per cent of teenagers are using social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook. A study by Joseph and Califano found that 70 per cent of teenagers usually spending most of their time on social networking sites compared to 30 per cent of teenagers who do not. This high percentage of daily time spent by teenagers on social networking sites is very likely to affect them in different ways.
