About My Term Research Paper

For my term paper, I used many ways to do the research. I did a research on the database from Baruch library website. There are three different websites from the database that I think are very useful. They are JSTOR, SSRN and Alt-Press Watch. JSTOR and SSRN are good websites to look for scholarly articles and Alt-Press Watch is more like news paper. Another way to look for scholarly articles is from scholar.google.com. Also, I took the advantage from our course, since professors posted so many articles about social networking. I pick some of articles from our reading assignment to support my point. Also use Google website to find some information that I need for my topic.

In my research, loss of privacy on social networking sites is one of issue that people concern the most, and people start taking some actions such as provide rules and law enforcement to better protect users. Every year, there is a large amount of people participate in social networking sites. And social networking sites are no longer just for communication, it also contain entertainment such as they provide different games online.

I choose Social Networking as my topic because first, it is one of the most popular media in today’s society, and loss of privacy on social networking sites is a very hot issue nowadays. Second, I am a Facebook user. I am like many other social networking users: post photos, make comments, chat online. Therefore, doing the research on it, I can know more about social networking sites.

My major findings/conclusion is social networking can be use as different tools in different areas and benefit society from different perspectives. However, if you gain something, it means you will lose some thing. Same as social networking, people gain benefits from social networking, at the same time they also suffer loss of privacy and other disadvantage. In my research, I even found out that people are agree to take risk of loss their privacy from social networking sites in exchange benefit that they gain from it, because we are human being, and it is human nature for us to share, connect and communicate with other people.

Social networking is one of popular example of “new media.” It includes all five different characteristics that new media have which are Communication, Collaboration, Community, Creativity, and Convergence. Social networking allows people to communicate one another, send out messages, make change on their profiles work together as a group.