Social Networking

In todays society, social networking is the big new media technology that allows people to stay in touch with friends, keep up with the news, follow the activities of their fav celebrities etc. Companies have even started using social media to hunt for job candidates. In the article Social Networking Technology Boosts Job Recruiting, Frank Langfitt states "Maureen Crawford-Hentz recruits for Osram Sylvania, the global lighting company. She says the new tools have changed her life...One of Crawford-Hentz's favorite sites is Linkedin, a network of 8 million professionals spread across the world." With Linkedin, employers and employees are able to connect with job opportunities, and keep in touch with one another. Barack Obama also used social media to his advantage during his campaign in 2008. "Like a lot of Web innovators, the Obama campaign did not invent anything completely new. Instead, by bolting together social networking applications under the banner of a movement, they created an unforeseen force to raise money, organize locally, fight smear campaigns and get out the vote that helped them topple the Clinton machine and then John McCain and the Republicans...All of the Obama supporters who traded their personal information for a ticket to a rally or an e-mail alert about the vice presidential choice, or opted in on Facebook or MyBarackObama can now be mass e-mailed at a cost of close to zero." says David Carr in his article How Obama Tapped Into Social Networks’ Power.

Social networking is very useful for allowing people to connect with and keep in touch with one another, spreading news and other information, and for promoting content. Todays presidential candidates constantly use Twitter to reach out to their supporters and promoting themselves and their ideas. News and weather companies have also embraced social networking as they realized how important it is for communicating and spreading information. "I believe the benefits provided by social network sites such as Facebook have made us better off as a society and as individuals, and that, as they continue to be adopted by more diverse populations, we will see an increase in their utility. Anecdotal evidence of positive outcomes from these technologies — such as political activities organized via Facebook or jobs found through LinkedIn — is well-known, but now a growing corpus of academic research on social networks sites supports this view as well." Nicole Ellison says in the article Is MySpace Good for Society? A Freakonomics Quorum.

Of course with all the pros social networking brings to the table, some cons are also present. With social media and networking, peope are able to put all sorts of info about themselves (or others) out there for anyone to see. With this, exploitation, blackmailing, identity theft, slandering, and more are possible by malicious parties. In Jeffrey R. Young's article They're Back, and They're Bad: Campus-Gossip Web Sites he talks about school social media gossip websites in which students were able to talk trash about one another anonymously. "A female student found her name posted on JuicyCampus in a message calling her a "slut," a "whore," and other, more colorful and sexually explicit names." Actions like these can destroy a person's reputation in only a few hours and can possibly follow them for the rest of their life.

Regarding the future, I don't really know how much social networking will evolve, but it would be crazy to see it evolve to the point that online voting is possible.