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Social Networking Sites
By Jared | March 6, 2008
According to an Associated Press article posted at Newsmax.com, Facebook has hired Google’s vice president of global online sales and operations to be their Chief Operating Officer. The article mentioned that Facebook, with 66 million users, has become the internet’s most populous social network.
As always, when Facebook is mentioned the whole specter of social networking sites and what they mean for society rises in my mind.
On a purely qualitative level, I like Facebook far better than any of the other sites I’ve looked at (MySpace, Xanga, Bebo, etc.) It has security and anti-spam features that I very much appreciate. I do not want just anyone to be able to see details I put up for my friends (contact info, for instance), and my MySpace account (which I only check once every two months) has gotten 30 times more spam messages than either “comments” or actual messages. Facebook lets me keep in touch with people I would otherwise never talk to without trying to keep track of a massive email list, and it’s mostly hands-free.
When it comes to social networking sites in general, deeper issues are always just under the surface. The first is, of course, the spate of recent horror stories of internet predators befriending children over MySpace. Each case of this is, of course, terrible, but blaming social networking sites for it is unfair and it takes the focus from where it should rest—on parents.
Just in the little browsing of MySpace that I’ve done (looking at friends’ profiles, and those of their friends) I’ve seen entirely too many MySpace profiles of underage girls who advertise their age as “99” (to fool the age filters) then proceed to post questionable pictures of themselves. I have to ask myself, where are these girls’ parents? I know that during my growing-up, my own parents were quite interested (and almost always aware) of what I was doing with my time, and especially when I was online.
There is a one-hundred-percent effective solution to internet predators. Keep your children off social networking sites (or closely monitor them). To do otherwise is to ask for trouble.
Even more thought-provoking than this, however, is the question of how the internet is changing our society. With webcams, voice chat and social-networking sites, society is becoming more and more internet-based. Nothing can beat real, live conversation, but internet is so much easier and more convenient.
Topics: Current Affairs, Societal Problems |