Social Networking

Social Networking. It’s something most of us check on at least once a day. It’s also been in our lives now for sometime. To say the least, it’s a normal thing to us. It allows us to keep in contact with friends, display pictures of something we have done, play online video games, and much more.

It was interesting to hear about the history of Social Networking, seeing where it started in 1997 with the site sixdegrees.com, and watching it progress all the way to Facebook. Sixdeegres.com allowed users to create profiles and find their friends, most of the people on it did not have a broad range of friends. The site still exists, but is for members only. In 2002 there was Friendster, which allowed you to meet friends of friends. Now, going on the site, it’s mostly used for online gaming. In 2003 many other social networking sites began to spring up. Myspace was a very popular one, with 66 million users. Myspace allowed you to create and edit your own profile as if it were a website. There were several sites just dedicated to “layouts”. After Myspace came both Twitter and Facebook. Twitter started as a “dialog brainstorming session”, with the original name TWTR. Today the site has 190 million users, ranging from business executives to celebrities. Facebook was originated in Harvard, with the title of “TheFacebook”. According to their site, there are over 500 million active users, the average user has 130 friends, and people spend on average 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook. Social Networking, to say the least, has made a huge impact on our lives in several different ways.

I just saw the movie “Social Network” last week. This movie let me know more about this amazing website. Although Facebook is still blocked in China, there still are lot of people trying to visit Facebook or Twitter through proxy. It is reported that Facebook will officially come to China in near future. For me, I have an account on Facebook, but I rarely post anything. I do not check it very often because most of my friends in China do not use Facebook. Instead , I use another social website called RenRen.com, whose function is just like Facebook. I do the exact same things on RenRen that people here do on Facebook. When I use Facebook, I usually only accept those requests from my friends or at least people who I knew before. It is really weird that everyone online can see my photos and my phone number. My understanding of social network is that we can keep in touch with our friends on the Internet, and also meet some new friends through our current ones.

During two classes Aman Yadav introduced to us what is called "behind the scenes". It really is behind the scenes. Social Networking is a vital part of a modern life. People use it for several different purposes. People think Social Networking is created only for the purposes of socializing with others. However, the people are not aware of all hidden sides of Social Networking. As the lecturer mentioned, when people sign up for Facebook, they just skip over the "terms and conditions" part. This section contains a lot of details that can embarrass and exploit us. They can easily use our private information, own our photos, videos and etc. It seems to me that they use us to the same extent as we use their services. What really bothers me is that if a site like Facebook has so much access to our “secrets”, what about higher level organizations? Or governments? I am afraid even to imagine that.

One interesting thing that Dr. Yadav emphasized is that information is passed around the Internet in ways that people might not realize. Sure, you can control which of your friends can see which parts of your profile, but what about higher powers? According to Facebook’s terms of service, they reserve ownership of all content posted on the site by users, including photos and videos. The creators of apps can view your information and the information of your friends, unless they “uncheck” a difficult-to-find box in the privacy settings. On Twitter, all “tweets” are archived by the Library of Congress. While these sound frightening, they should not necessarily scare people away from social networking. Ultimately, the consequences of casual and careful use of social network sites are slim to none. They should, however, give people good reason to be cautious. The lesson is to be extremely careful about what information you share, educate yourself about the policies of specific social networking sites, pick your “friends” carefully, and above all else, remember that nothing anywhere on the Internet is one hundred percent “private.”