用英语解释什么是社交网络

The social network is a theoretical construct useful in the social sciences to study relationships between individuals,groups,organizations,or even entire societies.The term is used to describe a social structure determined by such interactions.The ties through which any given social unit connects represent the convergence of the various social contacts of that unit.This theoretical approach is,necessarily,relational.An axiom of the social network approach to understanding social interaction is that social phenomena should be primarily conceived and investigated through the properties of relations between and within units,instead of the properties of these units themselves.Thus,one common criticism of social network theory is that individual agency is often ignored although this may not be the case in practice.Precisely because many different types of relations,singular or in combination,form these network configurations,network analytics are useful to a broad range of research enterprises.