Hello all.
For your final prompt please find a news story about Facebook or other social networking websites. Report on the blog what this story is all about and how it relates to something we have discussed in class. (Please include a link to the story. If you have taken the story from a hard copy print source, please bring a copy to class.)
We will spend Monday (Nov 30) discussing your news stories, final projects, and wrapping up class.
Have a wonderful Thanksgiving break!
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I read The Buddy System: The Secret to Health and Happiness? Healthy and Happy Friends from the October issue of WIRED magazine. It was really interesting and surprisingly accurate.
The article is split up into 3 main headings: the first is about obesity and the effects that your social network can have on your weight; the second was centered around the idea of "bosom buddies" and how many friends people can have has changed over the years; the final heading was about happiness and smoking.
Obesity
The whole article starts with the story of two men ( Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler) and their research. They utilized an old Framingham Heart Study and realized that everyone connected to the main patients was listed in the reports. They did a follow up with the patients and their children, and their children's children. As they were compiling all this data they started to see some trends. They first looked at Obesity; they saw that obesity spread like a virus. "Having an obese spouse raised the risk of becoming obese by 37%. If a friend became obese, the risk skyrocketed by 171%" said Fowler. The data exposed not only the contagious nature of obesity, but also the power of social networks to influence behavior. "Your friends that live far away have just as big an influence as the friends that live next door" (Fowler).
Social Networking
The next section talks about how changing forms of communication are leading to new types of friends and anxiety. Communication technology has always been evolving from simple talking in the beginning to telegraph, and not skyping and instant messaging (I'm doing it right now). For the first time in history we as a world can keep track of hundreds of people at once! In what seems like prehistoric surveys it was found that the average person has around 7 bosom buddies, or really close friends; a recent study done with college student's facebooks found that the average college student has 6.6 bosom buddies. This hasn't changed, but the other friends (as we called them in class dairy friends), the number has increased significantly! "Because the cost of information transmission is so low, we end up staying in touch with more acquaintances. But that doesn't mean we have more friends" (Fowler).
Happiness/Smoking
Christakis and Fowler since having studied social networks have published several papers on the network's influence on smoking cigarettes to happiness. They found that if a friend of a friend of a friend quits smoking we are also significantly more likely to quit smoking. However long distance relationships unlike the obesity statistic will have no effect on smoking. Social networks also transfer everything from happiness to HIV, "Your friends make you sick and cause you to gain weight, but they're a source of tremendous happiness. When it comes to social networks, the positives outweigh the negatives" (Christakis). People, in others words, need people. We are the glue that hold us together.
The article that grabbed my attention , and made me chuckle, was an article entitled "Canadian woman loses benefits over Facebook photo." This article speaks for itself in the sesne that it was all about a Canadian woman named Nathalie Blanchard who was put on medical leave by her employer on the account that she was suffering from "major depression." Yet, she was caught in pictures on Facbeook displaying that she was "having a good time." The insurance agency ( the people who found said pictures, then began to dwindfle down her insurance checks and when she inquired as to why they were becoming so little they told her "it's evidence she is no longer depressed" and "she was available to work" It didn't really detail everything but the article did give a brief summary about how I feel this issue relates to at least one thing we had a discussion about in class, and that is how empployers view potential employees' facebooks or any membership they may have in relation to social networking sites. In class we discussed and voiced our opinions on how we all felt about companies viewing employers facebooks and things of that nature. This relates to the class on account that an employer wasn't the one that did this, yet it was an insurance agency, this just shows that even people who give money on account that people have disabilites want to make sure those disabilities are legit.
This also relates to the privacy class that was held. I believe that this is an invasion of one's privacy on the account that they went snooping in hopes to find incrminating evidence and found it, yet they did this without her permission. Yeah, the constituition allows for freedom of almost every unalienable rightr , but I'm pretty sure it doesnt give one the right to go snooping throough someone elses business and information if they haven't done anything wrong.
This article was a huge eye opener for me. You all shoulld check it out because it may help you to rethink how you choose to show yourself in a cyber-optic world such as ours.
**Article Link** http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091122/ap_on_re_ca/cn_canada_facebook_insurance
I read "The Boundaries of a Breakup" on the New York Times Website. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/fashion/22love.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1
This article discusses how a man, Charles, broke up with his girlfriend after dating her for five years. They broke up simply because they fell out of love. After his breakup, he felt pretty lonely and sad. He decided that he could keep up with her by checking up on her facebook from time to time. One day, he noticed new photos of her posted. He saw another man that surprisingly looked just like him with her. He was immediately jealous and decided that he already hated him. Afterwards, he noticed that he had a friend request from his grandfather. He accepted and saw that his grandfather was also friends with his ex-girlfriend. He told his grandfather that he felt betrayed and that he shouldn't be friends with his ex-girlfriend. His grandfather thought that it was no big deal at first but later he decided that it was wrong and that facebook was not for him. So then his grandfather deactivated his facebook. Charles felt bad about it and realized that he should have been the one unfriending his exgirlfriend for checking up on her. His grandfather was not doing anything wrong.
This article relates to privacy. Charles had been checking up on his ex girlfriend from time to time because he felt lonely. This is fine, but it made him suffer from pretty strong emotions. Also, if Charles was an outrageously jealous boyfriend, his ex's boyfriend might have had to face some serious issues. Charles should have improved himself emotionally by de-friending his ex and just moving on instead of stalking her.
I read The High-Stakes Fight for Your Friends, which was a very misleading title. I assumed that it was going to talk about the balkinazation effect that we had previously talked about in class. Instead it was talking about how facebook is trying to target your ads to you. They talked about the issue that a lot of companies are facing, which is people blocking out advertising that used to work. People have trained themselves to block out the annoying flashing banner at the top of the page. So facebook posts ads on your page that relate to things that you have previously searched in an attempt to be useful! This article also talked about the competition that google is trying to start with Facebook. Right now it appears like Google is no competition for Facebook because they already have a very solid ad campaign where as Google is still developing there's. However, Facebook might be met with some harsh critics that call their ad campaign the equivalent of spamming your friends. But, so far their new campaign works, it will start the revolution of advertising.
http://money.cnn.com/2007/11/12/technology/online_ad_wars.fortune/index.htm
I read "Troubling Rise of Facebook's Top Game Company," which is Zynga, the company that makes FarmVille, YoVille, Cafe World, and Mafia Wars. Zynga operates over half of the top ten most popular Facebook games as of October, and it is continuing to grow. Zynga makes money primarily through advertising--in class, we have discussed how Facebook applications collect personal information about their users and their users' friends.
However, as this article points out, Zynga games have also been making money through product offers which are often sketchy and almost like scams. In order to earn virtual money (like Farm Cash) in Zynga games, users can sign up for trial versions of various companies' services. But these offers can be very shady: for instance, people have been entering their cell phone numbers on these pages and unbeknownst to them, without seeing any notices, they have been signed up for a $9.99/month SMS service that they didn't want and later find difficult to cancel. Parents have been finding these mysterious charges on their phone bills after children unwittingly signed up for these offers.
For now, Zynga has removed all of its product offers and is going to check each one before it appears again to prevent these scam-like offers from getting through. It just goes to show that people should be especially wary of applications, especially these Zynga games, that are out to make a huge profit and may employ shady tactics to do so.
I ended up reading two articles; the first was mostly about things we went over in class. It was about how employers and schools are checking up on workers and students. It talked about people getting divorces, getting fired, not getting a new job, all because of something that was posted on Facebook. The most interesting part of the article was that there are people who are trying to develop programs to so all the snooping for the company and organize all the information. It’s kind of a scary thing to think about the fact that with the push of a button a company can pull up categorized information on you instantly.
But because most of that article we had already discussed in class I found another one that worked well with the first. This one was about a man who was acquitted because of his Facebook status update. The man was accused of mugging someone at 1:50 am, he claimed that he had been at his father’s house. His father and step mother were at the house to confirm his story but his status update at 1:49 from the computer in his father’s house was the icing on the cake. Though in the article they do address the possibility of other people signing in for him, they said that it was doubtful. I think that option should probably be analyzed more. When I began reading the article that was my first thought, especially since the times were so close together, it seemed perfect. But it was nice to hear of how Facebook prevented someone from getting into trouble for once.
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/facebook-can-ruin-your-life-and-so-can-myspace-bebo-780521.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/12/nyregion/12facebook.html
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/07/military-may-ban-twitter-facebook-as-security-headaches/
(brendan m)
This Wired article is about how the US military considers social networking a security risk and a danger to operations.
Basically, the department of defense considers social networking like Facebook and Twitter a security risk because they are not designed to scan for malicious trojans or other viruses- A serviceman could download one and compromise the sensitive material on their PC. This is a major setback to the morale of troops, as it helps them stay connected with loved ones at home/overseas.
A while back in class, I brought up a event where a teen in a Wisconsin high school posed a girl online on Facebook to solicit and blackmail sex with around 30 innocent, underage males. I had originally read about the event in a very extensive and detailed article, about 7 pages in length, describing the personal accounts of both the victim and the criminal. Unfortunately, that original article has seemed to disappeared from the face of the internet, so for now I only have this dandy youtube video to show: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JU9EdliwwE0&feature=player_embedded.
The major conflict in this case though was not actually the entire fault of the individual, adolescent Facebook user. Literally it was an singular individual who took advantage of the anonymity of the internet to take advantage of innocent high school students. One must also remind their self that this wasn't some 50 year old man trying to relive John Wayne Gacy; this was a seemingly average teenager from good old suburban American. The internet had become so subversive with communication that not only anyone can pose as whoever they want, but they can also extract favors and acts as perverted as what occurred at the New Berlin High School. Through events like this really should make us realize how dire the control of personal identity really is online, and people, especially teenage adolescents need to be aware of the dangers that come from sending real and fake sexual images between themselves.
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/facebook-users-beware-1831448.html
We had talked a little bit in class about Facebook scams, and this article tells how Facebook users are believed to be the target for a 'huge increase' in scams and other internet crimes in the next year.
The article discusses the type of scams we talked about in class and how people are more likely to fall for FB scams than e-mail scams because it appears to come from someone they trust. It also mentions a scam where the person pretends to be your friend and stuck in London without money, which I remember one of my friends being hacked and asking us for money at the end of last semester. I also remember falling for a scam once about a year ago. It was a friend asking me to follow a link to a picture but when I got there it was a Facebook login page. I foolishly logged in but then immediately realized what I had done...so I changed my Facebook password ASAP and no one was able to access my account.
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