Cross-sectional
Starting from the theory of the six degrees of separation exposed in 1929 by Frigyes Karinthy in his short story Láncszemek, Watts (2003) highlights how any citizen is connected with another person through no more than five intermediaries or six links and how the number of individuals with whom a person relates increases as the number of links in the chain increases, giving way to an extensive multi-sectorial production that approaches the phenomenon from a very diverse perspective, ranging from its contribution to the creation of a peculiar scenario of links between individuals in the medium and long term (Liben-Nowell and Kleinberg, 2007) to its role as a formula for alleviating individual isolation in an environment such as the COVID-19 pandemic (Kunelius, 2020; Luengo and García Marín, 2020), passing through specific aspects such as educational (Kezar, 2014; Imlawi, Gregg, and Karimi, 2015; Mishra, 2020), health-related (Luceri, Braun, and Giordano, 2019; Wegmann and Brand, 2019; Smith et al., 2020) or occupational (Bailey et al., 2018; Zivnuska et al., 2019; Acquisti and Fong, 2020), among others.
Sometimes it is alluded to their capacity for the dissemination of antisocial messages or hate speech (Chetty and Alathur, 2018; Alkiviadou, 2019; Bartal, Pliskin, and Ravid, 2019), on other occasions their role as enablers and sustainers of a novel social warp different from the traditional one is highlighted (Kaur et al., 2018; Church, Thambusamy, and Nemati, 2020) and even in certain cases their growing impact on citizens' sexual habits is emphasized (Traeen et al., 2018).
No lesser, neither in quantity nor in relevance, is the flow of works referring to the insertion of social networks in an environment such as Web 2.0 or that underline the increase in their transcendence as a consequence of the consolidation of the prosumer of all types of content or that highlight their imbrication in the phenomenon of digital transformation. The first of these approaches is reinforced by the consolidation of the manual semantic web, considered not only as a strategic way of showing how the network to which users were accustomed is being transformed both in its interfaces and in the visualization of its contents (DiNucci, 1999) but also as its changing as a great agora where Internet users from all over the world establish a conversation on a global scale in which they share all kinds of contents including journalistic ones (O'Reilly, 2005), with contributions referring to the use of social networks as marketing tools placed at the service of specific productive sectors (Gibreel, Al Otaibi, and Altmann, 2018) but also with those that delve into their dimension as collaborative learning platforms (Nasrir Ansari, and Khan, 2020) or as creators of certain states of opinion that influence electoral consultations in democratic societies (Kahne and Bowyer, 2018).
These proposals are also outlined through the figure of the prosumer in its aspect of producer and creator of content (Toffler, 1980; Kotler, 1986; Ritzer and Jurgenson, 2010) highlighting subjects such as the capacity to generate topics of the most varied nature (Bird, 2011), segmentation according to population groups (Olin-Scheller and Wikström, 2010; Martínez-Sala, Segarra, and Monserrat, 2018), the influencer phenomenon (Garibay et al., 2019; Hughes, Swaminathan, and Brooks, 2019; Zhuang, Li, and Zhuang, 2021) or everything that has to do with the implementation of crowdfunding projects (Fanea-Ivanovici, 2019; Clauss et al. 2020).
In the case of digital transformation, understood as a new conception of a multisectoral and disruptive nature that goes beyond the merely technological and affects all vital areas of people and organizations and modifies traditional work procedures, leisure habits, personal interrelationships or business models (Barland, 2013; Guo and Volz, 2019) we notice a wide range of analyses on aspects that correspond to its use by public authorities as an element of social control (Chen and Grossklags, 2022) as well as those focused on its contribution to the disruption of business models (Kotarba, 2018) and the promotion of practices related to entrepreneurship (Bican and Brem, 2020).
Information industry
Similarly, the scientific literature pays considerable attention to the particular case of the information industry, with five main lines of research, often combined and interconnected with each other: the influence of social networks in the information ecosystem; their repercussion on the set of processes that take part of the productive structure of the mass media; the specific impact they have on the information professionals who work in these media; their incidence on the audiences who consume journalistic contents; and their use for channeling all kinds of hoaxes and false contents by national and supranational institutions, local and multinational private corporations and lobbying groups operating on a national and transnational scale.
The first of these is addressed in works that emphasize their facet as platforms on which the ecosystem of the information industry is based (Campos et al., 2016) or in their capacity to influence journalistic deontology (Singer, 2012) and even by institutions that highlight their ability to influence younger audiences, which makes them abandon the habit of consulting the media to access news (European Commission, 2020), and their contribution to undermine the moral authority of the media in the eyes of public opinion (UNESCO, 2020) or corporate entities pointing out the unreliability of much of the content circulating through them (International Federation of Journalists, 2021) as well as their contribution to the spread of populisms (Reuters Institute, 2019) and to the process of media disintermediation (World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers, 2022).
In the same sense, the inputs that have to do with its nature as a competitor of the information industry are relevant, both in its side of contributing to a modification of the tempo of the information flow (Hermida et al., 2012) as well as in that related to its capacity to gradually undermine the influence of the media on public opinion (Meraz, 2011; Choi, 2016) or in that which has to do with rivalry in the search for revenue from advertisers (Franklin, 2012; Tomyuk and Avdeeva, 2022) or even from investment funds (Weber, Fulk, and Monge, 2016).
The area of research on the impact of social networks on the productive structure of the media is approached taking into account factors such as their contribution to the changes in the model itself that involves the promotion of practices like hyperlinking and cyber-banning (Costera Meijer and Groot Kormelink, 2015), those referring to their effects on sponsored content (Serazio, 2020) or those that impact their role in prolonging the traditional news production cycle (Goode 2009; Anderson 2013).
Also noteworthy are works that have to do with their effects on specific media or media groups (Zimmerly and Badillo, 2016; Colussi and Rocha, 2020) or on the media in specific countries (Newman, Dutton, and Blank, 2012; Bosch, 2014; Ju, Jeong, and Chyi, 2014; Tous et al., 2015; Shao and Wang, 2017; Undurraga, 2017; Goyanes, López-López, and Demeter, 2021).
The third line of research focuses on the specific impact that social networks have on information professionals working in the media, focusing on aspects such as their gradual use as sources of information even by the most prestigious journalists (Krüger, 2015), which contrasts with the distrust with which these same reporters view them (Varona and Sánchez, 2016), in areas such as the guidelines for maintaining a conversation with receivers that breaks with their work routines (Whibey, Joseph, and Lazer, 2019), in location-based monitoring or the detection of possible informatively relevant events that require extreme caution (Thurman, 2018) and even underlining the possibility of the journalist becoming a global celebrity through its use (Newman, 2009).
Additionally, their effects on the journalistic task are examined in terms of the typology of specific networks such as Twitter (Vergeer, 2015; Brems et al., 2017; Molyneux and McGregor, 2021), Facebook (Welbers and Opgenhaffen, 2019; Meese and Hurcombe, 2021; Lamot 2022), Instagram (Vázquez, Direito, and López-García, 2019; Bainotti, Caliandro, and Gandini, 2021; Sormanen, Reinikainen, and Wilska, 2022) or YouTube (Borah, Fowler, and Ridout, 2018; Jaakkola, 2018; Lichtenstein, Herbers, and Bause, 2021).
Analyses focused on audiences include contributions on how their multinational nature allows them to influence local media markets (Heidemann, Klier, and Probst, 2012) and how they erode levels of data privacy (Tucker, 2013), as well as works that highlight how giving their users previously unknown possibilities of interaction and generation of their own content forces the media to take them into consideration (Haythornthwaite, 2005; Loosen and Schmidt, 2012) or that focus on how they establish new counterweights between media and audiences (Fu, 2016) or address the case of younger population groups that over the last decades the media have had difficulties in accessing and building loyalty (Clark and Marchi, 2017).
We also find their consideration as elements that contribute to question the maintenance of the quality levels of the contents generated by the journalistic editorial staff in the face of the invasion of messages of inane nature (Marchionni, 2013; Denisova, 2022) or that cause the rupture of the binomial formed by media and receivers sponsoring the process of disintermediation of the information industry (Picard, 2014; Moreno and Sepúlveda, 2021).
The last of these research lines refers to the consideration of social networks as strategic instruments for the promotion and dissemination of all kinds of hoaxes and false contents with contributions that focus on their relevance for the irruption of the post-truth phenomenon (Carrera, 2018; De Blasio and Selva, 2021), in the facet to exercise as distorting elements of reality through the presentation of biased content (Rapp and Salovich, 2018; Tsang, 2021) or in their role as reinforcers of prejudices by means of the repetition of messages (Britt et al., 2019; Rhodes, 2022).
This fact is accelerated since October 2019 with the emergence and expansion of the COVID-19 global pandemic. Experience to date highlights the extent to which they have become resonance loudspeakers that promote the dissemination of a wide range of hoaxes about this disease (Salaverría et al., 2020; Papadopoulou and Maniou, 2021), contribute to a deterioration in the credibility of the media, which on many occasions echo their contents without the necessary verification (Apuke and Omar, 2021; Ceron et al., 2021) and, for some authors, even lay the foundations for a process of information warfare of a global and hybrid nature (Gaber and Fisher, 2022).