Dangers of Social Media

     Hundreds of millions of people use social media and new media sites. Most of them go about their day checking their status updates or most recent tweet from one of the many people they follow. Everything seems great, that is until they notice that their bank account is suddenly drained dry. Most of us continue on with our day until something does happen to us, and that is when we finally realize that maybe these social media sites are not as safe as we once believed.

     Social media sites may seem harmless but in reality they are just another place for criminals to target their prey. So many people are clueless to what they may be putting up onto these sites, all the personal information they may be reveling. This is dangerous because a profile can easily be hacked, giving the hacker a lot of information about their target and they can easily fall victim to scams that damage both their computers and bank accounts. Nearly 81 percent of all internet crimes are somehow related to social media sites (Erin). With such a high volume of people using these sites it makes them easy targets.

     Not only is your information at risk from potential hackers but let’s not forgot about your physical well being. Say a potential burglar or rapist gains access to your information, they now have your whereabouts. 78 percent of burglars use social media platforms to find houses that may be empty for the taking. They do this by finding out your name and town that you live in from a social media site and then the internet can easily provide them with your address. With your address at their disposal and your status update about how excited you are to be on vacation at the beach, they know have the window and information they need to pull this heinous act off (Erin).

     What's even scarier is the fact that 33 percent of internet-initiated sex crimes happen through social media. In 50 percent of sex crime cases involving minors, the offender got the information about the victim through their social profiles (Erin). Many underage people post so much information without even realizing the information they put up on the sites can put them in danger.

     All in all there are a lot of dangers involving social media sites. The only sure fire way to avoid all these dangers is but just staying off social media all together. Just like abstinence and sex, we all know it’s the only way to avoids STD’s and child birth 100 percent, but let’s face it, we don’t care. So the next best step to take is to familiarize yourself with the social media sites that you are on. Learn about the security and privacy settings and use them to your advantage to minimize the chances of your information being leaked out. Think before you post, you don’t want to share with the whole world that you are going on vacation or going to be out of town for a couple of days. Lastly if you are a parent, make sure to keep an eye on what your kids may be sharing and posting. It is crucial that social media users of all ages protect themselves from the harm and danger that may be lurking out there (Erin).

Works Cited:

Erin, Adrienne. "Reality check: your social media use maybe putting you in danger." AL.com. N.p., 24 Mar. 2014. Web. . <http://www.al.com/living/index.ssf/2014/03/reality_check_your_social_medi.html>.

Death Be to MySpace

Believe it or not, there was a time where Facebook did not reign supreme in the world of social media. Those of us that were tech savvy and a part of the social media world remember a time before Facebook where we all had a MySpace. MySpace as we all know eventually died but why did it die and just why are we all okay with it being gone.

MySpace was a trail blazer but as in most cases it’s not who is first but instead who perfected it. Henry Ford didn't invent the first automobile but he did perfect it. MySpace may have made the first major platform for social media but Facebook came along and perfected it. MySpace laid the foundation but Facebook came along and organized it and made it more appealing to the masses, made it more user friendly for everyone to enjoy. MySpace has lost over forty million unique visitors per month, lost both co-founders, laid off the vast majority of its staff and more generally, has diminished to a cluttered afterthought of the power it once was (Lee).

Another one of MySpace’s failing points was it was unable to keep up with the ever evolving web. This is where Facebook excelled and gave the people what they wanted and left MySpace in the dust wondering how to catch up. MySpace was created by people in the entertainment industry and was music based at first as opposed to the founders of Facebook who were more tech savvy. It was easier for people to connect with friends via Facebook as it was MySpace. Also in my personal opinion Facebook was more genuine at first whereas MySpace was already flooded with fake profiles and internet creeps. MySpace began to get flooded with young high schoolers who as young high schoolers are were very immature. Facebook was a breath of fresh air to get away from the staleness that MySpace had become.

Once you fall behind it is only common that you will try and catch up. This catch up process is also what laid waste to MySpace. In a effort to catch up to Facebook and try and do something new that wasn’t done yet, MySpace tried to create every feature as opposed to focusing on a couple new features and doing them well. This is an admitted mistake by former founder Chris DeWolfe because of trying to accomplish so much and not focusing on the little things, a majority of these new features were buggy and dysfunctional (Lee).

The final down fall of MySpace was its lack of revenue building as compared to Facebook. I remember MySpace in my later years as a user that the site was just flooded with advertisements that didn’t pertain to anything. They just became an eye sore. Facebook has its advertisements but they organized them in a way where they did not take away from the product. They also were geared towards the user based on the pages and products the user would like. All in all researcher Danah Boyd compared user migration from MySpace to Facebook and began referring to MySpace as the “digital ghetto” as to where Facebook became a safe haven for more elite users (Lee).

With everything accounted for I believe that MySpace just became outdated. As brought up in the beginning normally the first to introduce something are not the ones that last but more the ones that come along later and perfect it as it was with Reddit and Digg. The reason why I believe we are better off without MySpace is because we already do have Facebook and so many other forums of social media such as Instagram and Twitter that there just isn’t room for MySpace anymore.  There isn’t any more telling of a fact than that MySpace originally sold for $580 million in 2009 and recently sold for $35 million -- $65 million less than what they were asking for and over $500 million less than what News Corp had originally paid. We can all thank MySpace for what they brought us with social media but I think it’s about time for them to bow out and exit stage left.

Works Cited:

Lee, Amy. MySpace Collapse: How The Social Network Fell Apart. Huffington Post. page<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/30/how-myspace-fell-apart_n_887853.html>. Web. 30 June 2011. 

Advantages and Disadvantages of Facebook

     One positive of Facebook as stated by muchtech.org’s article “What are the Advantages and Disadvantages of Facebook” is that “Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life.  You can connect and find your old school friends and college friends also you can connect with your relatives.” With that being said Facebook has over 1 billion users so the chances are the person you may be looking for is probably on Facebook, unless that is they have taken a sabbatical from life and just wants to remain off the grid. Facebook allows you to close the gap with friends and family no matter how far the distance as long as you have internet connection and let’s face it, it is probably harder to find a place with no internet than it is with.

     A second advantage of Facebook is that “Facebook is free and it's one of the best medium for communication.” (Tnvrstar). To me this very big advantage allows the masses to access facebook no matter what your financial situation is. It can be easy to overlook how many people do struggle financially on a daily basis because after all we are all in college so our lives cannot be that bad as compared to a person who is homeless or struggles to find a mean every day. With a communication service the size of facebook and the fact that it’s free, that allows large groups of people to have a voice and be part of progressive movement such as facebook. It also gives them a chance to stay in tune in what may be happening in the world today.

     As most of may know from firsthand experience Facebook can end up sucking up many hours of our day. Scientificera.com stated that one of the disadvantages of Facebook is that it is a waste of life. They would continue by stating “One of the biggest Facebook disadvantages is that it addictive or can become addictive easily.  Once you get connected with your Facebook friends you will realize how frequently you open Facebook and also spend so much time in commenting, viewing other’s pictures, playing games or doing other stuff. Many people know drawbacks of using Facebook but can’t stop using it.” I myself am guilty of this. I may log on because I am bored and have a minute or two but then the next thing I know it’s a half hour later and I am still digging through my news feed to see what interesting things I may come across. While it is great to kill time it can also lead to killing your productivity whether it be at work or while sitting at home and you should possibly be working on this blog…

     A very big disadvantage of Facebook is that it can ruin your professional career, or even worse, destroy it before it even has a chance to take off. Socialmedia.knoji.com would go on to write “You might be one of those millions of people who are unemployed and use Facebook to post offensive images of you and your friends. Though it is fun and provides humor for all your friends to see, it can be a major drawback when you apply for a job. Employers will want to know more about you and by searching on these social networking sites which contain your offensive content, employers may get distressed and could result in losing the job role that you applied for.” (Choudhury). While many of us may not agree with this type of background check our parents did not have to go through to get a good job but when you think about it do you blame companies? So even though it may seem innocent to you because it was just a couple drinks with some friends in a private area and you turn 21 in a couple months, companies can still see this and deem you unworthy of the position they are trying to fill. So next time you feel like kicking back with some friends and getting a little “weird” just remember, post it to your second facebook you have that you keep hidden so you can have a nice pristine and professional looking facebook that employers will be drooling over when they try and “spy” on you.

     There are many advantages and disadvantages to social media site such as Facebook but we have to ask ourselves the question that does the positives out weight the negatives. To me if you are smart about it and play your cards right you can use social media to your advantage while still having a blast with life. Start a second Facebook to help build yourself up and bolster your chances of grabbing that dream job. No one has to know that when you were 19 you and some buddies grabbed some Mike’s Hard Lemonade and got a little silly while drawing profanity on each other’s face one by one as you slowly all began to pass out at 10pm. Keep it your dirty little secret with your friends and your second Facebook which could be called Carlos Danger. I mean think about it, who is going to check to find your alternative ego under Carlos Danger besides your best friends who know you for stupider things than that anyways. So if you ask me I am all for social media and if you really don’t like the negatives just be a little smart about it and you can avoid just about all of them while still enjoying all the great things that come with social media sites such as Facebook. So I encourage you to go out there and share a kitten video but only after you go fancy yourself up some and create a kick-ass profile that makes you look like you are only trying to figure out how to make your second million dollars.

WORKS CITED

1)      http://www.muchtech.org/2013/06/what-are-the-advantages-and-disadvantages-of-facebook.html

2)      tnvrstar, . N.p.. Web. 3 Mar 2014. <http://tnvrstar.hubpages.com/hub/The-advantages-and-    disadvantages-of-using-Facebook>.

3)      http://scientificera.com/internet/50-internet/348-top-worst-disadvantages-of-facebook.html

4)      Choudhury, S. N.p., n. d. 3 Mar 2014. <http://socialmedia.knoji.com/4-disadvantages-of-using-                facebook/>.

Pros and Cons to the Internet

Advantages:

1)      One advantage to the internet is the spread of information and the speed in which one can receive it. The number of things that can be found on the internet is almost unlimited but the benefit to the speed that the internet is unrivaled in is that say there is an outbreak of some kind or even a natural disaster. With the internet this information is right at your fingertips and solutions to whatever problems may come from them.

2)      Another advantage would be social networking. With social networking a very shy or timid person now has a voice to the masses. Everyone can think of that one person from high school that never really talked or shied away from human interaction, but this person now has a way to go about expressing themselves whether it be with a simple facebook status or even creating a blog and emptying all their thoughts and ideas into it.

3)      Lastly I would like to bring up how much easier and cheaper it is to shop online. I am a huge user of eBay and use stores like Best Buy to go browse items I want to then go home and look for online. For example I was looking to buy new speakers for my room and went to Best Buy. Found a pair I liked and went home and searched them on eBay and found them for half the price with free shipping and a year warrantee. Even this laptop that I am not using to write all of this was purchased of eBay for only a fraction of what it cost in stores. Online shopping can give those who may be handicapped or even just plain old lazy a way to shop for the things they need and have them shipped right to their door involving little to no effort.

Disadvantages:

1)      I am going to play devil’s advocate and make a counter argument for all of the advantages. For one the spread of information what can be harmful here is the spread of false information. There are a lot of websites out there which are full of nonfactual information. One perfect example is how comfortable people are with Wikipedia when anyone can go on Wikipedia and change information. I had a history teacher go on and change dates to make a point not to study of Wikipedia. It takes one persons misinterpretation of something to spread to the masses as mentioned by Cornell University when they stated this about a false Martin Luther King Jr. quote that circulated the internet:” Notice that the quotation marks start after the first sentence. However, someone copied and pasted the entire post and for some reason removed the quotations. As a result, the first sentence became part of the MLK Jr.’s quote. Eventually, the fake quote was re-tweeted by Penn Jillette of Penn and Teller to his 1.6 million followers on Facebook. As a result, the quote went viral on Twitter.” The rest of that article can be found here: http://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2011/11/10/the-internet-and-the-spread-of-false-information/

2)      With social networking we can see the lack of human interaction. While yes one person can express their self in ways they normally wouldn’t, it also gives them a place to hide behind. Some people don’t find the need to go out and interact in the real world because they are too consumed by their social networking lives or even such MMO (Mass Multiplayer Online) games like World of Warcraft. I remember years back when I saw on a news article that a couple was married over World of Warcraft. I just asked myself what this world is coming to. So many people can hide behind their computer screens now. Some even take to attacking others which I refer to as “keyboard warriors.” They can act tough on the internet because they don’t have to deal with real world confrontation or real life ramifications because they can hide behind a user name.

3)      As great as online shopping is it shouldn’t go unnoticed that it isn’t the most secure thing in the world. There are many scammers out there that can fake a website as a way to get you to submit your credit card information and personal information than use that to go on a spending spree. Let’s not forgot also that as convenient as online shopping is the item which you could be shopping for may not actually be what you receive or it could come damaged. So while it may be great you should double check that you are shopping on a secure website otherwise you could wake up to a nice spending spree that someone else had on your behalf.  

What I Look To Gain

What I look most forward to gaining from this New Media Class is an advantage into today's world. Even though I may not be 100% sure what I want to accomplish in life what I do know is that it does not hurt to be at an technological advantage in today's world. Whether I start my own business and can use new media to help promote it or to even having a podcast to get my name out there. There are so many advantages (some of which I will discuss in a later blog) to knowing how to use new media and many of them can give you a foot up on life and help you accomplish and achieve goals in life.