Carol Williams's List: Social Networking Sites Research

• Students are socialized through their perception of the institution’s norms,  including peer norms, and their habitual participation in routine practices and  communal events.
• Understanding the influence of the campus climate is never a simple matter,  because culture, even within a single institution, is heterogeneous and dynamic.  Students experience many cultural currents, some of which may conflict with each  other. To add to the complexity, people pay attention to different things in  their environment and may understand the same experiences differently. For that  reason, many aspects of campus culture will have different meanings and salience  for different people.
• There are many ways that colleges and universities can create a vibrant sense of  mission and a distinctive culture that supports students’ civic understanding  and engagement.
• Academic integrity is one clear and essential expectation for higher education,  so it is worth paying special attention to how this norm is conveyed and  enforced. Strong honor codes and the kinds of conversations they stimulate not  only help deter academic dishonesty, they can also foster a climate of trust,  civility, self-restraint, and mutual respect. Creative attention to academic  integrity can also help foster an awareness of the critical place of integrity  and trust for communities more broadly.

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• (1) Internet use decreases social ties, (2) Internet use increases social ties,  and (3) Internet use neither decreases nor increases social ties (Wellman,  Haase, Witte, & Hampton, 2001).
• In other words, much like the telephone, the Internet is more useful for  maintaining existing ties than for creating new ones (Koku, Nazer, &  Wellman, 2001).
  
• Online activities can be grouped into two main types: (1) solitary activities  that do not involve direct contact with other people, e.g., web surfing and news  reading, and (2) social activities that involve direct contact with other  people, e.g., the use of email, listservs, bulletin boards, and chat rooms.  While online social activities may be conducive to the development and  maintenance of network ties, online solitary activities may detract from time  spent with others and, as a result, reduce social connectivity.
• The reasons people come to form relationships with others in everyday life are  varied. In some cases, it is because they want to; in other cases, it is because  they have to or happen to. Institutionally-based relationships are "involuntary"  (Goldstein & Warren, 2000) in the sense that the social ties are formed not  due to personal choice but because of the given institutional arrangement (e.g.,  characteristics of one's family or workplace); as such, the number of social  ties a person has may not reflect his or her level of sociability.  Voluntarily-based relationships, on the other hand, are social ties that are  formed on the individuals' own initiative according to mutual liking and common  interests. Such voluntary relationships are analogous to what Giddens (1991)  calls "pure relationships" in that "the connection with the other person is  valued for its own sake" (p. 90). It seems likely that the Internet has a  differential impact on the formation of these two types of social ties.

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