The Effects of Social Networking

The PBS presentation looked at various ways that social networking has affected and altered the ways in which adolescents now grow up. An important change that stood out was the way that bullying now affects teens. Before the use of social media, if someone was being bullied in school, he could escape it at the end of the day when he went home. Now, bullying no longer has to take place in person with taunts to their face; bullies can post hateful messages online anonymously anytime, anywhere. As kids spends most of their time online, it would be difficult to escape bullying, as it now leaks outside of school. Another notable way that the internet and social networking has affected teens is the way it allows people to be their true selves, usually unknown to their parents and friends. One girl, Jessica, created an online persona that was completely different from herself, allowing her to receive compliments and adoration that she never received in real life. When her parents found out...

The success of Obama's campaign can be largely attributed to the use of social networking compared to his rivals and predecessors. By creating a social networking site, he was able to garner record-breaking donations. Through the site, users could print out a list of  of names, addresses and phone numbers of people near them to target those who should go out and vote and those who were still undecided. His site also made it very easy to donate and allowed individuals to create a personal donation goal or fund raise.  It encouraged individuals to host house parties, establishing new connections or reconnecting old friends and acquaintances to reach a common goal.  His campaign, run by the co-creator of Facebook Chris Hughes to help them develop tools on mutliple social media platforms to help them reach a greater audience. The use of text messaging, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, allowed the campaign to reach a wide audience and their message to be heard by more people when...

Eli Pariser's speech on the use of internet filter bubbles has shown that the internet has changed in the way it choose which information to show us in our search results based on our previous searches. Our previous search results, links we've clicked on, where we're located, all factor into what information we're shown. As a result, our beliefs and opinions, are being reaffirmed and we're not receiving any contrasting or uncomfortable information that challenge us. As written in the article, Google acts as a "curator", using an algorithm to determine which pages are top-ranked in our searches, telling us what is important; there is no longer one standard Google anymore. On the other side, the article written by Clive Thompson shows us that it may not be bad to rely on close friends to give us new information, based on their study of recruiters.They found that those with close ties received more novel information and produced higher revenue for their fir...