What do you think about social network?

I am very negative and annoying when it comes to other people so social networks are not my thing

Twitter is good for 'special interests' like writing or photography or whatever. I follow and I'm followed by other writers, photographer, poets, artists - those types.

These social networks are legitimate.they dont posses an inherent quality of disrupting anything be it the privacy of a person or his peace of mind.it is the user who is illegitimate if he or she commits the various cybercrimes that we read in the newspapers.its is a great way to learn about cultures of people of different places on the globe and most importantly stay in touch with our close ones .though these sites promote the showing off culture but its totally dependent on the user.seeing the unprecednt growth in the use of these sites cyber ethics is smthing that should be included in the skul curriculum.

Twitter, and social networks in general, are increasingly becoming a target of attack from high profile, serious novelists.

For instance, I've just read "The Circle" by Dave Eggers, an engrossing read. In it he tries to imagine what might happen if an all encompassing internet company becomes increasingly powerful and increasingly intrusive. The Circle becomes a combination of Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, PayPal... and Litnet :)... and every other significant internet company. The Circle destroys anonymity on the net. For instance, it takes all the information from all information sources, combines them and creates a "Facebook page" containing all the information about you for everyone to see. It encourages people to put all the analogue information they have into digital space - photos, videos, security camera records, history books - in fact, *every record in existence* into digital space for *everyone* to see and cross correlate.

The Circle produces cheap, easily hidden, cameras which people start to put everywhere. And all security camera feeds are diverted into The Circle. So if you do anything slightly "off limits" (drunk with traffic cone on the head?) your boss, parents, millions on utube, get to know about it the next day and you end up fired, grounded, and laughed at by everybody in the street.

The heroine of the novel is the first to become "transparent", which means she carries a camera on her chest so everything she sees & hears is streamed to The Circle. The company then puts pressure on all politicians to become transparent, so that we can see that they aren't "up to something". Of course the public put pressure on this to happen(!) Politicians opposing the advance of The Circle are investigated by The Circle until something that destroys them is found, even if they are squeaky clean (e.g., if the politician is a blue blood descendent from the Mayflower their ancestors involvement in the slave trade might be published in full detail, or a really nasty, immoral act might have been committed by their parents and caught on someone's video camera - The Circle identifies the unknown figures caught on camera as the politician's parents and, voilà, everyone gets to see the camera shots the next day. Goodbye politician.)

And there's Jonathan Franzen, of course:

"Twitter is unspeakably irritating. Twitter stands for everything I oppose... It's hard to cite facts or create an argument in 140 characters … It's like if Kafka had decided to make a video semaphoring The Metamorphosis. Or it's like writing a novel without the letter 'P'… It's the ultimate irresponsible medium. People I care about are readers … particularly serious readers and writers, these are my people. And we do not like to yak about ourselves."

"[On Facebook] we star in our own movies, we photograph ourselves incessantly, we click the mouse and a machine confirms our sense of mastery. And, since our technology is really just an extension of ourselves, we don't have to have contempt for its manipulability in the way we might with actual people. It's all one big endless loop. We like the mirror and the mirror likes us. To friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors."

http://www.theguardian.com/books/201...-irresponsible

hmm sounds like a book after my own heart. The insistence on real name use and increasing erosion into our privacy is worrying. I personally dislike social media, mostly because I get tired of seeing what people had for lunch, but also because I preserve my privacy against an increasing flood of ways the internet and governments want to erode it.