New Media created new ways of communication, entertainment, advertising, education, etc. Social Networking enables us to communicate with anyone and anywhere. People of all ages, races and classes, which have access to new media technology, are empowered to communicate with anyone they want. This instant and low cost communication also changed our society by simply making it global. Teenagers and children spend enormous amount of time on Internet, they learn a lot by communicating with others and at the same time miss out on real life communication. There is simply no need of real life interaction, since all of that is moved online.
Effects on society
- Positive
- Communication with anyone and anywhere in a much more timely fashion
- Meet new people, make new friends
- Join groups of same interest
- Increase of knowledge from communicating to other people
- Builds self-esteem
- The way for disabled to communicate
- Negative
- Purposeful loss of privacy
- Very small control over information flow that may affect your privacy
- Ability for someone to use the information about you that may have effect on you
- Increased movement of social interactions from the physical domain to the digital domain
- Unprotected communication which may harm individuals
From moral and Ethical perspective I believe we have to do more improvement in educating people. As of right now people don’t understand what impact they may do on others by using social networks. People create false identities or communicate anonymous and believe since no one knows who they are they can do anything they want. This may have a negative impact on others and this should be thought to children and teenagers.
From the sociological perspective social networks will have a positive effect on the society. It makes our society globalized since everyone who has connection to new media technology is able to communicate with anyone they want. This gives us an opportunity to learn about different cultures, religion and different societies.
Of course, all that information provided in social network is the information that we want people to know and there should be no debate over this since it is up to us to give it out. But what if the information we want our friends to know will be also viewed by your coworkers or classmates and the information you wanted to keep out is now available to them. Many people don’t like to combine work with personal life, but now it’s almost impossible with social networking sites like MySpace, face book or twitter. One of the important disadvantages is that these social networking sites may result in loss of your job or not being hired by a company. As we all know companies are beginning to research much information as possible about their employees or about people that apply for a job. Therefore, information that you thought will be viewed by your friends will be also available to others. And, the most important disadvantage is the inability to control communication of children and teenagers in these social network sites. This may result in use of social network by criminals, such as pedophiles, stalkers, etc.
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