Social Networking Essay

Jonathan Strahs

9.16.2014

Mrs. Calloway

CIT 355

          The internet is a marvelous thing. You can do nearly anything now a days with the power of the web. You can take a quick trip to see the Eiffel tower, order a pizza, and go to the movies all without having to leave your house. You can even catch up with your friends and see how their doing. With the advent of social networking sites, it’s never been easier for you to keep up with the increasingly quick lives of your friends. And it’s not just limited to your close friends. With their approval, you can even stay up to date with business partners and acquaintances. But it does have its downsides. And to me the downsides of such websites are more prominent than their “supposed” benefits. They promise increased closeness with people who you’ve “friended” and increased friend network sizes, but more often than not this not the case.

          There are a couple reasons I say that social networks are more of a burden than a benefit. I’ve had a couple of instances where I have been talking to a person and that person takes something I said the wrong way. It’s happened with close friends and mere acquaintances alike. It’s beginning to become quite the nuisance. The reason why this happens is because in ordinary human conversation there is a language that is completely silent. Facial expressions and body language serve as a universal communicator between two or more parties. There’s a reason why it’s called face to face communication and not text to text communication. It is through this silent language that we convey emotion and feeling. It separates an angry message from a sarcastic joke. But on the web, there is no such thing as body language. There is only the text on the page for the reader to interpret, and occasionally, there are transcription errors. Someone might take a joke the wrong way, or say something that might tick someone off in some way without the person even realizing that they made a mistake.

          And occasionally, the messages sent are intended to be mean and hurtful. I’m talking about the infamous example of cyber bullying, aka bullying over the web. The web has a mystical property to it. It can mask the identity of all its users simultaneously and to the point of near anonymity among the mobs of users. This causes some interesting results. It is said that only with the mask of anonymity does humanity show its true colors. In the case of Jessica Logan, it became too much for her to bear. It initially started when she sent nude pictures of herself to her boyfriend at the time. Eventually they broke up and then that was when it all hit the fan. The nudes made their rounds throughout her high school, and eventually even wiggled their way into 7 other Cincinnati high schools nearby. She tried everything to stop it, going to resource counselors, teachers and even local prosecutors. Nothing was done. She began getting threatening and downright scary text messages and she even got Facebook messages with similar content. On July third, she was found hanging from the clothes rod in her closet, by her parents. This is one instance where Social Networking meant the downfall of a young girl with her entire life ahead of her. Had it not been for social networking, her photo never would’ve gotten as far as it did. Nor would her phone number had been available for public use.

          Jessica’s phone number was available for public use because she put it there, but perhaps it was the lack of privacy that lent to its misuse. That is one major problem with social networks. It is that nearly anyone can view and access your profile, if given the right tools and passcodes. I for one know how easy it is to track people down just by googling their name, and if you can find their Facebook then it is practically game over. Recently there was a big scandal involving the NSA, and that they were buying profile information from Facebook. Essentially, Mark Zuckerberg was selling people’s profiles for large sums of money. If someone were to get a hold of the information obtained by the NSA, the results would be disastrous. Government agencies can gain access to supposedly private messages and even Snapchat are fair game, so long as they are unopened. And if a regular user were to hack into someones Facebook, chances are they would be able to obtain the password to almost every other account that person had. I would know because I have experience in this field. I’m not going to explain further because of self-incrimination, but all I can say is that it’s incredibly easy to fool someone into giving you their password.

          All I can say is that it seems that social networking sites have more burdens than benefits. Yeah, you can make new friends but that rarely happens, and when someone new messages me on anything, I usually just assume it is someone who is just trying to scam me because there really isn’t any good reason to meet a new person over the web. And not only that, but generally it’s harder to communicate effectively over the web as opposed to real life. Often times, cyber bullying happens on a social network where that person might not have complete control of all of what they see, so it’s incredibly easy for assailants to send hurtful messages and also for people to get information that they might not necessarily want someone to get. All in all, it’s just a recipe for disaster. But I will not say that it doesn’t have its benefits. It’s very easy to catch up with friends if you haven’t talked in a long time and also it’s good for strengthening new relationships.