Social Networking (Required Blog)
Here are the links to the two articles I chose:
Innovative Educator: Banned
Innovative Educator: Social Networking in Education
Since, I chose these two articles, it is obvious my opinion on the subject of social networking in society. It, like anything else we use daily, has its pros and cons but does it mean we should treat it like its something wrong? It is a success for a reason: people enjoy it.
Facebook is the biggest social networking site today and it seems absurd if someone doesn't have a Facebook. In today's society, the most impoverished will have a mobile phone and/or access to internet so it has no doubt affected the way we view importance.
Facebook has caused everyone know everything about anyone now. It use to be strange for a customer to tell me that something I posted on Facebook was funny--then I changed my privacy settings. Facebook has also increased our selfishness. Narcissistic tendencies (as well as face-to-face anti-social behavior) have bloomed in part of this. How many pictures of just you do you have? I have 20 albums on Facebook and inside those 20 albums are 1725 photos (including Cover Pages, etc.). Of those 1725 photos, 325 of them have me tagged in them. that's 18% of my photos that are of me. The average Facebook user has 85% of their photos of themselves. If that isn't narcissism then I do not know what is.
But there are also positives to social networking. Social Networking has great advantages as well. It isn't going anytime soon and almost everyone has one so why not utilize something that we use everyday? There are more liberal schools that are more lenient with their parental controls and it helps students use it for assignments. The first article has a YOUTUBE video about how their school experienced a higher parental control and most of them couldn't even bring up their projects because of the programs they used. Imagine doing research but are only allowed to use only one page of the required book. That is what they felt when their computer usage was restricted.
This brings a good point to how we sometimes hinder the learning process by attempting to keep the "bad" parts out.
