Social Networking

A Social network is an interaction between people through the use of Internet. Social networking affects young children, college students, and adults in both positive and negative ways. There are different types of social networking websites, each intended for different age groups and types of people. Some examples would be Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, Second Life, imeem, Twitter, and many more. These sites bring together people with common interest. For example: imeem allows music lovers to share songs and Second Life allows its members create “virtual communities” and be who they want to be. Many enjoy the idea of being someone else online; it gives them the opportunity to be someone they are not. However, these social networking sites also bring about a lot of issues.

Some of the dangers these sites are discussed in a video presentation “Growing Up Online.” This video discusses how children today are being negatively influenced by these sites. Children are spending most of their time online on these sites because they are very addictive. In this video, a fourteen year-old girl talks of how she was able to acquire a new identity on one of these sites as a model. She says that she was not very popular in school and therefore, the Internet opened up, for her, a world of opportunities. She began to like the person she turned into—a model. Very shortly after, she began posting partially nude pictures of herself online. This all was put to an end when a teacher from her school called her parents and informed them of what has been going on. There is another case of a young, elementary school boy committing suicide because he was verbally abused by his classmates, in school and, with the use of the Internet, at home. The boy got access to a great deal of information on how to commit suicide from a boy he spoke to online. Cases like this are not very rare. There are things that the kids do online which parents do not know about and have no access to because of their lack of knowledge on how to use computers. The current generation is one of the first to use the Internet for socializing so extensively. When asked to share their passwords with parents, they get very hesitant, and there is little parents can do about it because the kids know way more about computers than the kids do.

These sites can also have positive affects on their users. One example of that would be President Obama’s use of social networking to help support his campaign. On Obama’s website, people are able to create a MyBO account and through that, he was able to get any message across to hundreds of people just by the click of a button. In addition to that, he sent out text messages of different events that were taking place. Social networking is what really helped him get where he is now. Another way in which social networking is used to improve society is through “virtual communities” online at www.secondlife.com. People who have a hard time speaking because of certain disorders find it easier to express themselves online. These communities enable them to communicate with the outside world. In addition to that, in some universities, professors find that virtual communities are beneficial to students because of they give students an opportunity to express themselves in any way they like.

Just like everything else, social networking can be used to bring forth positive or negative effects. Social networking, when used in the correct manner, can be a very productive tool and can offer a lot of useful things to society.