Social Networking sites being used for the WRONG reasons.

Today in class we talked a lot about things that have gone wrong because of social networking sites. For example, students getting expelled for their Myspace pictures or events and parties getting cancelled because of teachers or deans finding the event on Facebook. I decided to do some of my own research about "things gone wrong" when using social networking websites. I found many different websites/blogs/postings about people getting in trouble from different social networking sites. However, after sorting through all of them I found 2 particular websites that really stuck out and surprised me.

Over the summer one of my co-workers told me that she was fighting with her husband because of something he saw on Facebook. My co-workers ex-boyfriend (from high school) was sending her private messages on Facebook asking her to meet up and talk to him. My co-worker never responded to the messages but never the less her husband was upset by what he saw. She explained to me that since her husband is not an avid Facebook user he did not understand that Facebook is used for keeping in touch and getting back in touch with old friends. I found this website which claims that 1 in 5 divorces is blamed on Facebook these days. The author of this article said that "Divorce Online" did a study which is where they are getting these horrifying results. Kennan, the person who headed the study, claims that sexual and inappropriate Facebook chats were the most common reason for these Facebook divorces. Another interesting fact I learned from this website was that divorce lawyers now check the Facebook of the other spouse to see if they can use any evidence from their Facebook during the court hearing.

This next website I found really freaked me out. I had seen something on TV about this case but I never really knew the details of it. This case involves a mother creating a Myspace hoax to hurt the feelings of a 13 year old girl (her daughters friend). This mom tricked the young girl into thinking an older boy, named "Josh", liked her and then eventually broke her heart. This insecure 13 year old committed suicide because she was unable to deal with this heartbreak and loss of friendship. I could not believe that a parent, who had a daughter the same age, would ever do that to a young insecure girl dealing with depression. Here is the link to this CNN story.

Both of these situations have a common factor...they both involve adults. I want to point this out because I can not tell you the amount of times I have heard a teacher, parents, ect. say that young teens do not know how to handle social networking sites. In the two above examples, grown adults clearly do not know how to handle social networking sites. This just goes to show that age does not matter when it comes to social networking sites...a 14 year old has to hide their facebook when they may just be using facebook to meet new friends going into high school...where as a 40 year old adult should be the one thats regulated when they are using social networking sites to cheat on their spouse or making a fake Myspace account. I think the stereotype of young people doing "bad things" on social networking sites should disappear and we should start to examine why people of all ages are using social networking sites.

The "like" button is causing controversy.

We have been talking a lot about social networking websites in class the past few weeks so I decided to write my blog on one of the most popular social networking sites...Facebook. One of my friends had told me they heard something on the news about controversy with the "Like" button on facebook. I decided to look more into this and I was surprised to find that many legitimate websites talking about the "Like" button. I never really thought twice about using the "Like" button. In my eyes it was just an easier way to comment on a picture or post without really commenting. For example, instead of writing "cute picture" I would just hit the "Like" button. I never really "Liked" pages or celebrity fan sites, even thought I get tons of people inviting me to "Like" pages they "Like." Here are two of the most interesting websites I found on controversy, and even lawsuits, surrounded around the "Like" button.

This first case deals with minors using the "Like" button. This article discusses David Cohen v. Facebook. Cohen says that there are been millions of cases where Facebook has "misappropriated a minors name or likeness for profit." Naturally, Facebook fights back and releases this statement, "We believe this suit is completely without merit and we will fight it vigorously. The complaint misunderstands the law, it’s intent and the way Facebook works. For example, plaintiffs assert that minors are marketing Facebook through search engines but we do not allow minors to include their profiles in search engines,” said Andrew Noyes, Facebook’s manager of public policy communications. Cohen says he was fighting for all Facebook users, especially minors, who have been "used" by Facebook and other advertising companies. Here is the link to the article; http://mashable.com/2010/08/27/facebook-class-action-suit/.

The second article I found was on CNN's website. This article discusses how the "Like" button is a security issue. Since the "Like" button is now linked to other Webpages, it tracks all of the sites that are viewed by a particular user. According to this article, the Facebook Chief Executive said this like to other webpages makes Facebook and its users more "social." I never really considered that this was a security issue until I read this CNN site. I think after learning more about the "Like" button I have learned to be much more careful when using it. Here is the link to the CNN article; http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/social.media/06/02/cnet.facebook.privacy.like/index.html

Racism Online; Kanye West.

Today in class we discussed the Jessie Daniels article about cyberacism and propaganda. I never really knew much about racism online until I read this article and until we had a discussion about about it during class. I looked up some more information about cyber racism and came up with a few interesting recent issues of cyber racism. We all remember the Taylor Swift/Kanye West incident at the MTV video music awards. If you dont remember, here is a video of what happened. Kanye took the microphone from Taylor and gave a shout out to Beyonce. Obviously, many people were upset by this and felt really bad for Taylor Swift. It is a shame however that this incident turned into a race issue. Not only were people blogging/facebooking/twittering ect. about this incident no stop but it soon turned into a race war. People were saying crazy racist remarks (especially on Twitter) for all the world to see.

I found a link to this website. Someone actually hacked into Wikipedia and changed Kanyes biography. His edited Wikipedia page was full of racist remarks. It is sad that someone would go that out of their way over an incident at the VMA's, even Taylor said she was over it once he said he was sorry. The website asks people to share their thoughts on the updated Wikipedia page, mostly everyone that commented disagreed with what the hacker had done, thankfully! I also found another website that talks more about the racist comments left about Kanye on Twitter. Some of these are even worse than the Wikipedia page..and thats pretty bad. I was shocked when I read all about this racism that Kanye was dealing with online because it probably makes him, and a lot of other people, feel so hopeless. There is really nothing they can do to get these comments offline, because like it says on the website, there is freedom of speech and people can think and act as they want online. This can relate back to what we discussed today in class about propaganda websites. There is really nothing anyone can do about them, unless they violate copyright issues or something like that. We discussed how a political career can be ruined by a simple facebook page that is created with false facts. It is sad that the world has come to this but it is something we must be aware of. We do not want to fall into the trap of propaganda.

Child Safety Online

We have been talking about online bullying for a while now, it comes up almost every time we discuss online security. I decided to write my blog on this because I was just talking with my parents last night and they just had to go to a "Cyber Bullying Information Session" for my brothers grade school. My brother is in 8th grade and apparently the have been having some issues in his school with cyber bullying. My parents are both pretty good with the computer and are usually pretty up on current events but they were shocked after this information session. They had no idea that any of this was going on, they were shocked that kids could be this mean to each other via the Internet. They also told me that during the meeting they talked about Skype and how it is becoming a problem because now kids are torturing other kids face-to-face. I was even shocked to hear this because I had no idea that people are using Skype for all the wrong reasons. The teachers and administrators giving the information session suggested that each parent limit their child's internet use to one hour per day and that they should have to sit in a common room of the house, not up in their rooms where they could be up to no good.

I decided to do some of my own research about how parents can keep their children safe online and keep them away from bullies or internet predators. I found this website. It is a link off of Microsoft's website and it is very helpful for parents who are trying to protect their kids. It basically goes through and gives age groups and how strict/not strict a parent should be with their child (when it comes to the Internet) at each child's particular age. For example, at age 11-14 parents should make sure that they talk to their teens and let them know what is acceptable and what is not, like what websites they are allowed on and what they aren't. Microsoft also suggests that all teens should have to keep their computers in a common room, not just in their bedrooms..which is the same thing they told my parents at their information session.

Overall, I think parents just need to watch closely what kids are doing. Parents, like my own, are always shocked when topics like this come up. Parents should do their best to stay up to date on what is going on with their child's age group. Even if it starts a fight with the child there should be controlled online use, there is no need for a child to stay online for 6 hours a day, they should be outside playing with friends or hanging out with family. All that time online at such a young age can never be a good thing.

Personalization Throughout the Years

We have discussed personalization many times throughout the semester but one thing I was curious about was how is has changed since the Internet has been active. For as long as I can remember I have been able to "personalize" my computer and internet choices. Now I can pretty much narrow every website I look at to be the way that I want it and to show the information that I want to see. For example, if I am on Facebook I can click "Hide Jen" if I do not want to read information about my friend Jen. I know many of my friends have used this method to get over ex boyfriends... although I am not sure how much "hiding" them will help the situation.

Since I was not really able to find information online about how personalization has changed throughout the years I decided to do some personal interviews with friends and family members who range from ages 35-60. I first explained to them what personalization was and then I asked them if they use it in their everyday Internet lives, I also asked them if personalization was popular when they were my age. Here are the responses I got...

"I use it everyday, especially with the news websites, some mornings I just want happy news and I don't want to read the depressing stories. I just recently discovered that personalization existed and just started personalizing the things I read about 2 months ago."

-Lori, age 36.

"I do not use personalization, maybe I am old school. I think that you should see and read as much as you can, even if it doesn't interest you. I never used it growing up either, I was always encouraged to read and study as much as I could..no matter what topic it was on."

-Tom, age 48.

"I am not that great with the computer but I think I personalize when I am reading magazines and the newspaper. I usually only read the sections that interest me."

-Felicia, age 60.

I found this mini survey to be very interesting. It seems that everyone still feels so different on the issue of personalization. I also realized that just because some people are not on the computer everyday that does not mean they do not personalize, even though the computer makes it extra easy to do. You can personalize your newspapers and magazines and even books. I agree that people should have a little knowledge on every topic so that they can know how to communicate with others, and have the "common experience" like Sunstein thinks we should have. Sunstein makes some great points about personalization and he has the power to really make you think about how diverse/not diverse the life you are living is.

CDA Cases Throughout the Years

Last night when I was reading the article by Goldsmith and Wu I found one topic that stood out to me, the CDA. As we discussed today in class CDA stands for the "Communications Decency Act," this act came about in 1996 and it basically went after inappropriate or indecent sexual internet and videos online. The CDA concentrated on images and videos that contained minors under the age of 18.

I decided to do more research on the CDA since I found it to be interesting and figured there would be a lot of information on it. I was right...there were tons of websites on the CDA and blogs with people expressing their opinions on it. However, I was able to find one website that went into different cases that the CDA enforced this rule on. This cyber-rights website goes into detail about certain cases in the US where judges used/did not use the CDA. I was shocked to read about some of these cases and found most of them to be very disturbing. One case talks about the US postal authorities shutting down a porn network that had children as young as 7 years old work for them and being active participants in videos. I honestly can not imagine what parent would ever want their child to be involved in something like that...I am sure that it is a big money maker though.

This website also discusses several teachers who were arrested for pretending to be child psychologist in online chat rooms. The case about the teachers reminded me of what we discussed today in class about the solidarity and accountability online. Whenever a person is online they need to be safe, it is so easy for people to make up websites and change their identity. I know even my own Grandmother was fooled by an online stock trade website, she ended up getting about $1000 stolen from her bank account. I realize some people (like my Grandmother) are naive to the way people can act and the fraud that can go on online. I think people just need to think twice before they make any type of online purchase or even chat with a stranger in a chat room.

Public Forum Doctrine

Hello!

Tonight while studying for my midterm I realized that there is one topic I really wanted to discuss in my blogs but haven't had the chance to address, this topic is the public forum doctrine. When we first read about this in Sunstein's article I thought it was really interesting. The first thing that came to my mind was when my friends, they go to school at a small university in Connecticut, I took them into Chinatown for dinner and they were SHOCKED when they saw all the people walking around holding flyers and chanting religious bible verses. They said they had never seen anything like that before, they were confused about why they were allowed to stand outside the metro saying these things and I really didn't have an answer for them. However, after learning about the public forum doctrine I now realize why people are allowed to stand on the sidewalks of public places and share information with the people around them.
I think that free speech and the public forum doctrine are great inventions. I admit at times I get very frustrated with people on the streets trying to get me to take their packets of information or tell me about their organization. In the end I feel that it is important to listen to what others have to say. I am one of those people who only reads/hears what I want, if they are talking about something on the news that I am not interested in, I would probably turn it off. I think learning about personalization has helped me to realize how much I limit myself. I need to become more open to ideas and news, even if I do not find it interesting. I plan on studying abroad and I think that I need to stop limiting myself if I want to have a good experience abroad. Sunstein brings up many good points in his article about why we should stop personalizing our lives. The one that stuck out to me the most was that it will stop us from being connected to other people because if we feel we have nothing in common with them, we probably will not try to mingle with them. As a Media Studies major, I plan on getting into the Public Relations world and I think I need to become more open to ideas and stay exposed to a wide range of topics so that I am able to communicate with my co-workers and clients.

-Liz