People seems to think that ``social network'' was a term thought up in Silicon Valley 5 years ago to describe Facebook or any other place on the internet where

People seems to think that ``social network'' was a term thought up in Silicon Valley 5 years ago to describe Facebook or any other place on the internet where people are social. In fact, it has nothing to do with either. It comes from sociology as a way to classify the relationships between individuals and groups in a society as well between societies themselves. It can be applied to ant colonies and bacteria cultures just as well as it is to humans. It's applied to what we call social networks online because they tend to be analogous, and perhaps the fact that the words have double meanings helped it catch on. Now whether you could call your favorite IRC channel a social network depends on how well you can classify the relationships between the groups and individuals in that room according to the model. If you compare an IRC channel where hackers collaborate on open source software to a corporate office, and of the server they share to community, then you could accurately describe Freenode as a social network. It would be difficult, however, to apply the term to IRC in general. It's easy to call Facebook and Twitter social networks because such a large portion of individuals, governments, corporate entities and subcultures have a presence there that they're almost like a snapshot of human society, albeit two-dimensional. A place like 4chan where you can't detect individuals at all doesn't fit the model. Whether a marriage of the two extremes could be considered a social network would probably depend on whether individuals have any identity whatsoever (pseudonymous).