Social Networking

Social networking plays an important role in today’s society. Many individuals participate on those social networking sites, same as clubs, business, non-profit organizations, civic groups and political organizations as well. It not just improves our communication from each other also economic. 

It is easy to create a social networking account such as Facebook, Myspace and Twitter online. You can post your information, photos, and videos on your account and share with their friends. You also can view other people’s profiles and leave comments. It is very convenience for you to access the account at anytime and anywhere with digital device and internet. Even your friends or family members live far away from you, you can still have close communication with them through these social networking sites. According to the interview make by Stephen J. Dubner, the result shows with the people participate on Facebook, it helped them “maintain or strengthen relationships: they used the site to look up old high school acquaintances, to find out information about people in their classes or dorms that might be used to strike up a conversation, to get contact information for friends, and many other activities.”

Social networking also brings benefit to companies. Many companies are “using the service to keep their customers and anyone interested in the company, informed in real time about a crisis” (Reardon Marguerite 2009).  AT&T is one of company using Twitter to communicate with its customers and update information about the company, such as in the case that happened at Silicon Valley and the San Francisco, AT&T had updated the information through Twitter to its customers about the outage. These online resources provide companies the ability to interact with customers and build up relationship with them. Another example from IBM, it has created “Beehive” (Dubner, Stephen J. 2008) – an internal social network site which to improve workers’ communication and build up the relationship between teams. Social networking sites also are good platforms for business to gather information from people and do the advertising for their business. 

 However, there is also some “dark side” of these social networking sites. There is risk for people to loss their privacy from those sites. People have to be very careful when they post their information or photos because there are some people trying to take the advantage of those sites to use for wrong or illegal purpose. It is easy for them to create a fake account and pretend someone else. Also many Employers view their employees’ information on social networking sites. There are some cases people not get hire or get fire because the information or photos that they post on those sites. Companies are also collect customers’ information by visit people’s site without their permission. Social networking has improved communication online, but also makes people feels less interested in face-to-face communication. There is high percentage of teens communicated through electronic medium and they feel they can talk more freely online. 

In the future, I believe those social networking sites will become even popular because those sites really bring much convenience to people’s life and they have already spread in many areas. I believe they will become one of major tool in education and business. Even there are some risks and disadvantages people wouldn’t stop using them because they still believe “the benefits we receive as a society provided by these tools far outweigh the risks” (Dubner, Stephen J. 2008) which I agree too. On other hand we can take some control, such as think before when we try to post information or photos, is it fine for everybody to see it. There are also some organizations and sites have put some effort to provide more safety place to user, such as Myspace joints Attomeys General together to make agreement on social networking to better protect children online. It is a good staring, and I believe there would be more rules coming out to better regulate the sites.

Citation:

Is MySpace Good for Society? A Freakonomics Quorum by Stephen J. Dubner. NYT Feb 15, 2008

"AT&T uses Twitter during service outage" by Marguerite Reardon, cnet News, April 9, 2009.