Facebook: Good or Bad???

Commonly used site among youngsters, companies and everyone else is the famous Facebook, a social networking website. Millions of people use Facebook everyday to keep up with friends, upload an unlimited number of photos, share links and videos, and learn more about the people they meet (Facebook, 2008). According to CNET news.com, facebook is overflowing with 120 million users from early July till now. Facebook relates to Naughton's theory of 'personalisation and interactivity' as it has become interactive among users.

I personally don't have facebook and may not know the difference between facebook and friendster or other social networking websites. Walsh (2006) states that internet sites combine with animation, graphics, hyperlinks, hot spots and etc allows users to nagivate multiple sites at a click of a mouse. And this can be also related to Naughton's (2006) concept of 'pull medium' - nothing comes to us unless we click it to pull it down to our computer. Facebook might be good but to what extent can facebook be trusted?




PRIVACY


We all that the internet is a powerful thing and publishing a blog or uploading photos to facebook profiles may or may not be seen by others. According to CNET news.com (2006), 'getting someone's user ID is easy; just hover over the name and the user ID is the first group of numbers buried in the coding at the bottom of the page'. Although this are not the only issues faced by users.

Another case is that in January 2008, 'a memorial group on Facebook posted the identity of murdered Toronto teenager Stefanie Rengel, whose family had not yet given the Toronto Police Servive their consent to release her name to the media, as well as the identities of her accused killers. This shows that the Facebook staff attempted to fulfill privacy regulations to delete the posting mentioning her name' (Wikipedia, 2008)

http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/1055.html

However, facebook gives the users option of privacy settings but as to what extent to knowing is there really someone out there who checks our profiles or how can we stop softwares that are uploaded to facebook enabling third parties or online predators knowing everything that is written at our profiles at Facebook. Therefore, we as adults and young adults should know the risk of creating profile sites such as friendster, myspace or facebook might be shown to online predators and be aware and responsible to prevent strangers from knowing who we are. So careful with what you type and show to the public.





References:

Facebook 2008, Facebook, viewed 11 November 2008, <http://www.facebook.com/facebook>

ZDNET Asia 2008, Facebook surges to 120 million users, viewed 11 November 2008, <http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/internet/0,39044908,62047943,00.htm>

Naughton J 2006, guardian.co.uk: The Observer 'The age of permanent net revolution', viewed 11 November 2008, <http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2006/mar/05/newmedia.broadcasting>

Walsh, M 2006, The 'textual shift': Examining the reading process with print and visual and multimodal texts, Australian Journal of Language and Literarcy, vol. 29, no. 1, p.24-37.

ZDNET Asia 2008, More Security plague for MySpace, possibly Facebook, viewed 11 November 2008, <http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/security/0,39044215,62045013,00.htm>

ZDNET Asia 2008, Facebook admits to increased attacks by spammers, viewed 11 November 2008, <http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/security/0,39044215,62040489,00.htm>

ZDNET Asia 2008, Facebook users need 'greater discretion', viewed 11 November 2008, <http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/security/0,39044215,62036271,00.htm>

Wikipedia 2008, Facebook, viewed 11 November 2008, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook>

CNET news.com 2008, Exclusive: The next Facebook privacy scandal, viewed 11 November 2008, <http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-9854409-2.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=Webware>