What do you think about social network?

Nowaday, social network is developing rapidly and become popular in every countries. Some famous social network that we can mention are facebook, twiter, myspace… We can easily realize the benefit of them. For example, with a computer, a person in Indonesia can make friend with a American, who live far from him about thousand kilometer. They even can see each other, what they do in one day, their images, their notes… Seem like it’s so convinient. However, some people concern about the usage of social network in life. Personaly, I think that beside the advantage, social network have a lot of harm that we should consider.
First of all,because social network is so attractive, people can be easily stuck in it. Here is one common example. A pupil need to turn on his computer for doing homework, but as his habit, after enter the internet, he goes in to facebook first and stay in it for 3 hours. After that, he move to find his home works, but at that time, it’s too late and he need to go to sleep. Obviously, he lose three hours and the home works aren’t finished. We can see that social net work, if doesn’t be used in proper way, it will destroy people’s time by keeping them in it. At this aspect, social network is not only time-consuming but also harmful for health. We clearly know that staying in front of the computer for a long time can led to a lot of disease such as wirst-numbed, headache or make blood can’t circulated…That what we need to be careful when using social network.
Second, a person who use social network so much can get into something like “illusion”. Social network is just as a vitural world, where everyone can be very socialble. They can make friend with many people that they never ever met and don’t know much about them. Thay often share everything as they are close friend (but actually not)Therefore, when they meet each other in real life, some people become disappointed because their friend is not as perfect as what they imagined. For instance, my cousin made friend with a cute girl who’s the same age at him through facebook. He really likes this girl and want to meet her. They quickly set an appointment. But in the end, my cousin’sdream is break because his “girl friend” is so big and really ugly. At that time he just point out that the avatar in facebook of her is fake, just for attracting people. Sometimes, people event get into dangerous things when their “social network friend” is a robber or a deceiver.
Finally, social network can let to the leak of information. Everyone know that we need to update our info when come to social network. (Of course there is some private information that isn’t public.) However, if a curious hacker want to steal some information about you, it can be a serious problem, especially when that information influent your life dangerously or have a comercial value. The hacker can sell that infor for some one like your opponent, your boss, your wife and so on. Otherwise, he can make a big scandal to destroy your reputation. My brother be fired just because of a silly photo on facebook and it’s a unforgetable experience for him. Normally, people event steal your note, your photo, your clip through social network and repost as they own these data. The drane of information is really dangerous and annoying! Therefore, don’t be careless in protect your information in social network.
In brief, social network is a good environment for people to express themselves and connect to everyone around the world. However, there are still many gaps that we need to be careful and don’t be capture in it.

Nobody even has the brain to conceive of cell-phone address books as the world's most advanced social network, despite the fact that is the most common and useful. The nonsense posting crap on face book has already died out, as with the hype over pictures. We live in a text-message world, as everyone who bought Facebook stocks found out the hard way.

I am in China, all these social media are isolated. Rather than connect the world, the use of social media has been to further violate privacy and spread propaganda, both consumerist and political. Chinese social media deliberately isolates the world, and spreads jingoist propaganda.

There is no solution to the bad side of social network. The only thing you can do is to be very careful and also contribute morally by denouncing the bad possibilities and make people aware of the traps. Armed with that knowledge, an individual could benefit greatly from the actual social aspects. Be careful.

I've found Facebook very useful for keeping in touch with my family. I can chat to my son in Japan and my sister 100 miles away. It's very useful. e also share photos etc.

If people want to engage in the crap, then that's up to them. I find the banter between family/friends is often very funny, but I avoid the "stuff".

I also find my kids are, and have been, well versed in internet protocol for years and know what to look out for. For example earlier in the year there was a huge hooha about a site ostensibly for kids but where these journalists found evidence of paedophies, bad language, people masquerading as others etc. It was on the news, it was a shock horror story, and so I asked my daughter about it when she came in. "Oh that" - she said, (not knowing it had been on the news). "It's full of paedophiles don't go on there." On questioning her further - she's 17 now - I asked when she realised what i was like. "Oh when I was about 12 when I first went on".

What was interesting was that this was big news for an evening, with lots of warnings for parents. On reflection, they were very pushed to come up with any significant event that had traumatised someone - maybe the headline aspect where a girl met someone from there. But considering the traffic of kids who had been there, it barely registered as a threat, mainly, I suspect, due to the savvy techie kids we have on the whole today.

Twitter has got me politicised and engaged. before I was one of the "don't knows" (or "couldn't care lesses" more like) Now I feel informed and think my opinions are more informed. Twitter has so many people scrutunizing, watching and commenting on our glorious leaders that they have to be a little more honest at least.

As long as you are sensible and wise in them, it is being a good and great way of connecting people to each other. But nowadays some people just use it to show off!

For many younger people, social networks seem to be a platform of performance. Through statuses, posts, and photos they can present a version of themselves that they want their friends to believe is who they are. It's a distorted reality.

As a whole, while they interest me very little, I have no problem with social networks. EXCEPT, it escapes me how users being hateful on Twitter is always newsworthy. These days it seems that every time a few cretins write some ****ty comments directed towards a celebrity, regarding their appearance, ethnicity, ect, it's all over the news, as if this idiocy deserves in anyway to be validated by being talked about.

I was able to look up my friend again through facebook, as through the phone book, so it's nothing new, and I commend it.

Nice thread bump, Whosis!

Goes to show how much changes in two years.

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Originally Posted by JBI

The nonsense posting crap on face book has already died out, as with the hype over pictures. We live in a text-message world, as everyone who bought Facebook stocks found out the hard way.

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50% above list price; it couldn't be said to have died out just yet.

Quite an odd evolution from teen drama to housewives buying billions of dollars of goods. Zuckerberg is delighted, so I hear - swapping 300 million spend-nothing teens for the best demographic there is for consumer products.

social networking? it is a network whether it is social is another thing.

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Originally Posted by cacian

social networking? it is a network whether it is social is another thing.

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That depends upon how you use it. My wife and I both use social media to keep in touch with family, friends and engage in discussions about our interests. I call that sociable. I'm now on twitter as well and enjoying it very much.

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Originally Posted by Paulclem

That depends upon how you use it. My wife and I both use social media to keep in touch with family, friends and engage in discussions about our interests. I call that sociable. I'm now on twitter as well and enjoying it very much.

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twitter? what is so good about it? is it not the same as facebook?

I have heard there are subtle differences. It is easier for a post to be visible on twitter, I've heard. However, I do not yet belong to it as I do to facebook.

I find facebook very efficient. For example I don't have to spend hours giving my mother details about every other event I go to. She just looks them up in my facebook events and has all the details. I don't have to explain to her who I am friends with because she is just looking into my likes and comments to figure that out. It saves so much energy and time. I also got requests from grandparents of some of my friends and I think its a good way for elderly who want to stay in human touch. It can also be very useful to find work and share about events or simply knowledge. There's always this privacy threat but I would say pros weigh over cons.

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Originally Posted by cacian

twitter? what is so good about it? is it not the same as facebook?

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No it's very different.

It's good at getting ideas and to see what is being discussed at the moment. What can you say in 140 characters? Quite a lot. And there's loads of societies you can follow and read and then drill down into if you want.

I'm currently trying out Twitter to write short poems. I'm enjoying it.

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.