hai guyz i am back with our today’s wprld topic….. SOCIAL NETWORKIN. well tell me after reading the bellow given article, don’t we think that we are not socially contected??
Experts have been claiming for years that citizens could become so defenseless due to the electronic central state registers: our personality can be stolen, our acts can be traced, our thoughts can come to light. However, nowadays it is ourselves that provide these pieces of information to everybody and of our own free will. A well done online profile does not only reveal our personality, philosophy upon life, hobbies, family, friendship and workplace circumstances but in our blogs we also give such a detailed account of our everyday activity and thoughts that even the most adverse dictatorship would have never dreamt about.
Social networking is today’s most popular way of “ENTERTAINMENT”: it is essentially the place for getting together online communities. (I do not understand why it is common knowledge that technology disaffects people from one another.) Generally we talk about a web interface or application where registered users present their own personality and relationships. These can be completed by other supplementary services, for example blogs, photo albums, group creation, mailing or instant messaging (IM). Most of these web sites continually enrich their services since while costs increase degressively, income grows linearly as a function of the number of users. (Competition is intense since according to experts in a few years only one compatible network will be able to stay alive.)
The main service of community sites for the users is to provide the possibility to share information about themselves with the help of user profiles, based on which they can be found by others. Here every information that one gives about oneself can be found! The question: ‘What can users find out about us?’ is useless to address. Everything! Names, contacts, age, family status, schools, workplaces, fields of interest or anything that the owners of these sites can ask for. A curious user can get to know what are the fields one is interested in, the clubs one frequents, the people one meets. I have even found a club for the travelers of a specific bus line of the public transport company of Budapest. Even some details of our past can be studied with the help of old photos.
Nowadays numerous specialized community portals are available on the Web. There are ones for business life or ones for finding old schoolmates and even for one particular hobby or field of interest.
Social networking has become so popular that the business sphere also wants to get hold of it. It is enough to think about the purchase of the Hungarian iwiw for a record price or about the battle between Google and Microsoft to get hold of Facebook, in which the latter won (Microsoft gave 240 million USD for 1.6% of Facebook, and in this way the total price of Facebook became 15 billion USD. The total sum speaks for itself.) On community sites one can find personalized advertisements – these ad surfaces are far the most expensive and the most precious ones. Community sites are also preferred by HR consultants to enlarge their potential clientele: one often finds job advertisements or direct contacts from companies on these sites. There are special companies that aim at directly these communities: for example to sell avatars (the little icon next to our contributions to forums), special skins, background music, etc. Of course companies operating these sites would also like to benefit from the business by selling advertisement surfaces or even our data and activities. According to estimations, the income related to community site services was above 500 million USD in 2007.
Social networking is not only the playground of businessmen or good-intentioned people. The information accumulated on these sites (myspace has 110 million, facebook 80 million, linkedin 22 million and even the Hungarian iwiw has 1.7 million registered users) are also made use of those who like to fish in troubled water.
Nowadays it has become difficult to separate social networking from social engineering. Community services are used every day by HR employees of companies for ’tracing’ the applicants. This way they can easily and quickly screen the non-welcome experts, even if they had an attractive CV. The applicant may also find help if (s)he maps the hobbies, contacts, schools of his/her possible new boss.
Community sites not only help those who want to find a job but also those who attack people as they can prepare a more accurate, customized attack. Assault can be addressed to only company managers (whaling) meaning that it is only a few hundred messages instead of the few hundred million deceptive mails distributed in the conventional way.
The important question arises: What can be done against social networking as a safety risk at company level?! Prohibition is not a solution as the greatest risk is not that that the employee uses iwiw during work time but that (s)he shares his/her personal data. However, this is privacy. All that we can do is to circulate recommendations and instructive stories in the company network, since information sharing and safety education are the most efficient preventive measures.
One of the most interesting developments in the new millennium has been the explosion of activity on so-called “social networking” sites.
Social networking is not entirely new. As early as 1995 websites were attempting to use the model of connecting people for profit. The first real social networking success was myspace.com. In 2007, MySpace was reportedly getting more views than Google.
One of the most obvious arguments against social networking is how available it makes users’ information to third parties. “MySpace stalkers” can find out almost everything about a person. Information such as pictures, name, age, and even address can be shared with a click of the mouse. The only thing we can do to protect ourselves is by choosing not to share information. However, with more young -users logging on, the risk of theft or abuse of personal data becomes greater and greater.
Another serious risk imposed by social networking is increased access to children by sexual predators. With the advent of social networking websites younger children are publishing not only pictures, but personal information. This creates an environment where a sexual predator can “shop around,” looking at pictures and information to determine the best target. Nobody likes the implications of these possibilities, but once again the only way a child would be protected from a potential predator is by parental oversight and discretion in which information to publish.
One more criticism of social networking sites is the impact that they have on social interactions. In some cases, viewing a person’s profile becomes an alternative to real, natural interactions. Some would say that this makes forming social connections easier and more efficient, but I present the following argument; most people who use social networking sites grew up in a society without them. How people act or react to one another is a very important part of an individual forming a unique social identity. The problem with social networking websites is they have the potential to take that interaction and substitute it with something artificial. When typing and staring at a screen becomes more comfortable than getting out there and interacting with real people then the problem becomes clear. If social interactions were widely replaced by online, artificial, interactions then users of such a system would be without the benefits of social learning.
Overall, social networking sites are not “evil” or “bad.” However, it is my argument that they are, or have the potential to be, harmful. Exposing information to the countless eyes of the internet presents some very real risks to personal security. The increased use of social networking by children has increased the ease by which a pedophile could take advantage of children. Social networking sites have the potential to replace real social development with an artificial substitute that will hinder the social development of the user. A person without viable social skills is at a disadvantage when attempting to be successful in society.
By
Arpit Mahadev Chhaya
