Social Networking

Social Networking has spread like wild fire. You can find your and old taking advantage of being able to share information, photos, music, and to maintain relationships. Classmates.com has been long standing and understood that people lose touch and sometimes people want to relive or reinvent their past. It is a great way to find people that might have been involved in their lives before the social networking craze really took off. At this point most younger participants in social networking are already knee deep in social networking. There are many different social networking sites now that give people a forum to communicate with friends, family and associates. Myspace, Facebook and twitter are some good examples. Social Networking sites have also simplified ways for people to share photos and current events. Peoples lives can no be fully followed online through status updates and a chronological display of photos. Personal use is always the most obvious but businesses have also jumped on the bandwagon and realized this is where people spend a chunk of their time daily. LinkedIn is a social networking site geared towards professionals that share correspondence and can share their concerns, accomplishments, and interests. Social Networking is their virtual world where at any time of the day they can escape and see what is transpiring with their friends or communities.

There is a dark side to social networking. Many get completely sucked into virtual communication and spend more time virtually social networking then actually socially networking. It also gives a chance for many people through blogs and social networking sites to spread opinions that might be harmful to human rights and morals. Social Networking is for the most part a unmonitored technology. Administrators will try and keep pornographic material off as this is a easy catch for the most part. But when it comes to judging content and harmful bias material its difficult to manage. Another big issue is privacy. Most people forget they are putting their personal business out there for all to see. Despite certain security restraints with only allowing friends, there really is no full control of keeping this material completely private, outside of not sharing this information in the first place. Tweets and photos are usually meant for an audience people believe they have control off. There have been cases of schools and organizations intruding on the believed privacy of individuals being on social networking sites and using racy and prerogative pictures against them. Another big issue of privacy is the big brother problem. Many social networking sites take privileges of their users memberships and take advantage of that to sell off to marketing and advertising parties. Personal information gathered on the members many times is shared with 3rd party as profit incentives. Many of the social networking sites are free to join so they need to look somewhere to make profit. Advertising is the backbone of their money making efforts. These companies wouldn't be able to operate without this effort. As more and more people react there are certain restrictions being placed to give the illusion of privacy but there is so much information out there being distributed that its hard to know for sure in whose hands it ends up in.