Blog Assignment #4

            While “New Media” continues to shape the lives of its users in positive ways, there are some negatives attached that are often not thought of.  One of these negatives is the prevalence of online predators.  It is one of the biggest issues concerning “New Media” users today but a greater awareness could help prevent any further problems.

            With websites like Facebook and other various social networking sites, online predators are using this as an easy way to find their next victims.  Social networking websites provides lots of information on people.  Predators can easily find out information on where someone lives, what their interests are, etc. just by viewing someone’s profile.  Also, people can easily create a fake account on these websites, allowing older predators to act as if they are of the same age as their victim.  This is one of the most commonly used methods for predators to begin speaking to their victims.  Its scary how easy predators can come in contact with kids by doing this and the outcome can often be horrendous.  Many times the predator will convince their victim to send them sexual images of themselves or even set up a meeting in person.

            One example comes out of Missouri.  A 61-year-old man convinced an eleven-year-old girl to send him explicit images and videos of herself to him.  He later used those videos to threaten her, saying he would post them online if she did not continue to send him more (Child Sex Predator Kai Lundstroem Pedersen gets 30 Years For Terroizing Missouri Girl).  Eventually the man got arrested and put in jail for what he had done.

            Although it is a tough battle to fight, just a general awareness to online predators is important and could help in the future.  The more people understand how it works, the better they can combat it.  Parents need to be aware their child’s activity online, as well as the child having an understanding of what they could be getting into.

Blog Project

            As the Internet continues to shape are lives more and more each coming year, there are things people must be aware of in order to not only have a safe experience but also the best experience they can while using this new source of media. In its short life span the Internet has already played a big role in the lives of many people, both positively and negatively, so taking a look at what it has done so far can give you an idea of where it’s heading.  The following list has ten of the most important things people must be aware of while using the Internet.

1.     The Internet and Research

The Internet is quite possibly the biggest tool being used right now when it comes to research.  An overwhelming majority of students, 85 percent in fact, first turn to the Internet when faced with a research based assignment in class (Internet Has Changed the Way Student’s Do Today’s Research). Today’s search engines, like Google, are much faster than running to the library and looking through textbooks.  But instead of many schools fearing this some, like Bexley High School are adapting and getting eBook versions of their textbooks for their students (Internet Has Changed the Way Student’s Do Today’s Research).

2.     Misinformation

Although the Internet can help with studies, if a student isn’t careful it cold also ruin their research. Common sites like Wikipedia, where everyone can edit material get a bad name for being inaccurate at times.  The important thing to focus on when doing online research is to always check your sources. There are also a high number of unreliable or fake websites to be found. One instance of this is the amount of parodies there are for whitehouse.gov. There is whitehouse.com, whitehouse.net, whitehouse.org, and none of them are at all affiliated with the real white house itself (Piper, Better Read That Again; Web Hoaxes and Misinformation). This great amount of misinformation can cause alarm when it comes to other things people are searching for like health information.  There are around 50 million people who use the Internet to find out health information and more than 70,000 different websites all with varying answers (Cline/Haynes, Consumer Health Information Seeking on the Internet; the State of the Art).

3.     The News

The Internet has changed the way people get their news on a daily basis. Instead of having to wait until the local news channel came on in the evening, people can constantly get updates on unfolding stories at any point in the day. This keeps people informed and makes it easier for more people to get the information they need to know. Another development that has come out of the Internet in regards to the news is “citizen journalism.” This is when anyone at anytime can break the news, not just a professional journalist. This helps get rid of biased editors or important stories not getting the coverage they need. According to YouTube, 7,000 hours of news footage is uploaded daily (Browne, Citizen Journalism in 2012). Over 40,000 hours of footage of Hurricane Sandy was uploaded to the site during the time it struck the east coast (Browne, Citizen Journalism in 2012).

4.     Twitter

Newcomers to social media sites might not know much about Twitter but it has an impressive track record and has proven to be one of the most important websites created yet. With around 645,750,000 users daily, it provides the average person with a greater voice than before (Twitter Statistics). Twitter has also been important in the development of citizen journalism. The first big story that started on Twitter was the plane crash in the Hudson River. A man on his way to work witnessed the crash, took a picture, and posted it to Twitter. Soon after his initial tweet it was retweeted so many times that eventually mainstream news channels caught on (Lodico, Hudson River Plane Crash Demonstrates Power of Twitter).

5.     Online Petitions

The Internet has found several ways to close the gap between the people and the government. One of the ways the Internet has done this is through online petitions.  The website Change.org allows people to start their own petitions and makes it a lot easier for other people to hear about and sign the petitions they believe in. A good amount of these petitions have passed as well. One of the most important ones is a petition to fight the discrimination of homosexuals in The Boy Scouts of America. Lucien Tessier made the petition after his brother was no longer allowed in the scouts after coming out but after many signatures he was allowed back into the troop and earned eagle scout status soon after (Tessier, Petition / Boy Scouts: Vote to End Your Anti-Gay Policy so My Brother Can Earn His Eagle Award).

6.     E-mail

E-mails are extremely important for being part of the newly emerging Internet community. It is a quick and easy way for people to connect with those who live far away, and it’s free! It’s especially important for businesses and how they can connect with their customers. You can put yourself on a online mailing list to get coupons and it saves money for the business and paper. Businesses consistently list e-mail as their number one best marketing tool (Grahl, Four Reasons Why Your Email List is Your Most Important Asset).

7.     Skype

Skype is a web-caming website that allows people to see each other and talk to each other live when they are both in separate locations. People use it for business conferences, lectures in school, or just staying connected with friends and family who live far away. There are some amazing stories that have come out people using Skype. One interesting one is about a man in Bulgaria who was not allowed to be in the room with his wife as she gave birth to their new child. In order to get around the issue she Skyped him and he was able to meet his newborn earlier than he would have without the website (Larson, Man Meets Newborn Son on Skype – While in Taxi). In one day Skype users spend 2 billion minutes on the website talking with others (Steele, Thanks For Making Skype Part of Your Daily Lives—7 Billion Minutes a Day).

8.     A Waste of Time

It’s easy for people to get a-little lost on the Internet. People often spend a lot of time on websites like YouTube or Facebook, and other sites, and often when they’re not supposed to. 29% of employees are wasting one to two hours away on the Internet while at work (Connor, Who Wastes the Most Time at Work?). Workplaces are always trying to find new ways to implement Internet policies to prevent their workers from wasting their time.

9.     Online Predators

With all of the new social networking websites it can be easy for people to find a lot of information about anyone they want to. This is especially true when it comes to online predators. Around 65% of online predators found out the location of their victims homes from social networking websites (Predator Statistics). Some very disturbing stories have come out this. Elliot McDermott was a 19 year-old man who found information about three girls online and used that information to talk to them and eventually rape them. The police soon caught him, but what he has done has impacted the girl’s lives greatly (Internet Predator, 19, who raped girls is ‘ever parents worst nightmare). Things like this can be prevented by careful use of these websites.

10. Cyber-bullying

Over half of adolescents that are on social networking sites have experienced some type of cyber-bullying (Cyber-Bullying Statistics). Social websites give bullies new ways to hurt the feelings of others and sometime easier ways too. They also can help people hide their true identity giving them more confidence to make fun of other people. New laws and plans have been coming out to make changes to this. Stories like the one Tyler Clementi scare parents from allowing their children accounts on these websites. Someone secretly filmed him having sex with someone and they put it on a live stream online without him knowing. After more bullying soon after he jumped off a bridge to end his life. (Tyler Clementi, 1992 – 2010). Hopefully soon there will be a solution to this problem, which seems to get more and more difficult as time goes on.

The Internet has a lot to offer but one needs to know a lot about it before having a truly great experience on it. Knowing the good and the bad help you understand how you want to use the Internet and how it can work into your daily life.

The Advantages and Disadvantages of Facebook

            With more than 500 million users on Facebook it is important to know both the good and bad things that can come out of having an account.  But since the website has been around for so long and has so many users its easy to find examples of how it has done positive things and also negative things.

Positives:

·      Connecting with friends and family

A study in 2011 by IBM showed that around 70% of people who use Facebook use it primarily to connect with their friends and family (Solis, “People Use Social Networks to Connect with Friends and Family, Sometimes Brands”). Facebook provides people with a way to speak to old friends you otherwise might have forgotten about, or to keep up to date with those who live far away.  Studies have also shown that around 40% of teens even want their grandparents to have a Facebook so that they can stay connected with them (Meredith, Teens Get Grandparents on Facebook for Family Bonding).

·      Making New Friends

Many people using Facebook end up making new friends with people they have never met before and even sometimes a new lover.  There are many stories of people starting relationships due to Facebook like the one Kristin and Matt.  They both met through a mutual friend they had on the website while Matt was stationed in Iraq.  As soon as he got back from his tour the two got engaged (Caroline, The Ten Most Romantic Facebook Love Stories).

Negatives:

           

·      Cyber-Bullying

There are countless stories of kids being bullied online mostly through Facebook.  One story comes out of Ontario about a kid named David Knight. People created an entire Facebook page so that with the intention of making fun of David.  People would call him gay and a pedophile, and also send him emails taunting him.  Luckily David did not physically harm himself like many other kids have, but none the less his situation is still quite awful (Real Life Examples of Cyber-Bullying).  Statistics show that around 33% of all youth have experienced some sort of cyber-bullying and that girls are twice as likely to get cyber-bullied than boys (Statistics – Cease-Cyber Bullying).

·      A Distraction

It seems that many people can so easily get lost on Facebook.  Most people are devoting so much of their time to Facebook and other social networking sites that the amount of time people spend focusing on other things is getting smaller and smaller.  Facebook is often considered the easiest of social networking sites to really spend a lot of time on mostly because there is just so much to be done on it. A study done in 2011 showed that 9 out of 10 college students check Facebook once an hour (Paton, Social Media Networks and Distracting Students). This includes the time when these students are in class.  So Facebook is taking away time from being able to pay attention to lectures and working on their homework later.

            Personally I think that Facebook isn’t necessarily the best social networking site the Internet has to offer.  The positives above are both great things but they can also easily be done on other sites that attract less of the negatives.  Websites like Twitter also offer a better format for the news and more important things while you can still connect with all of your friends and family.  I have also seen a lot less cyber-bullying on Twitter compared to Facebook.  I think that people should be free to use the websites they want to use, but to me, the negatives outweigh the positives when it comes to Facebook and feel that there are better alternatives out there.

The Advantages and Disadvantages of the Internet

As the Internet evolves and evolves it is important for people to know the gravity its use.  For most people the Internet has become part of their daily lives so understanding the Internet is now absolutely critical.  Understanding that its can be both good and bad is what is important.  This post will look at some of the good, and also, some of the bad, to create a base idea of what people need to be aware of while using the Internet.

The Good:

·      Information Readily Available:

The days of running to the library to do your research are long gone as people have access to much of the same information much quicker right on their computer.  This not only affects students writing essays and research papers but people who just want to learn.  Anyone at anytime can search something and learn all they want on almost any subject they can think of.

·      The News:

Instead of waiting for your local news channel to come on at night, people have access to the news at any time of the day.  It is much easier to find out the newest developments now, and people also have a larger influence on what news they get.  People can get the news from more sources than ever allowing them to see more sides of the story, which allows them to come to their own thoughts and conclusions about what is happening.  This has also lead to a movement called citizen journalism. Which by the website, Howstuffworks.com’s definition is, “…any type of news gathering and reporting -- writing and publishing articles about a newsworthy topic, or posting photographs or video of a newsworthy event -- that is done by members of the general public rather than the professional news agencies commonly referred to as ‘mainstream media.’”

·      A Variety of Opinions:

There certainly are a lot of blog websites and message boards on the Internet.  Now everyone has the ability to state their own opinion to a larger amount of people than ever and in turn people can have a larger understanding of the others around them. 

The Bad:

·      A Waste of Time:

A lot of people can get a little “lost” in the Internet.  It is easy to get caught in the ads or the side links during your time of research and often it is easy to loose your track of time.  It is worse for some people than for others but it does happen a lot and can cause people to be less productive in their daily activities.

·      The Wrong Information:

With so much information available it can be hard to tell which information is really correct.  Websites like Wikipedia allow all users to edit the content and in turn this can cause a lot of inaccuracies.  Those sites should only serve as a base for someone’s research so that then the user can know where to look further for more credible information.

·      It’s a Distraction

The Internet and the combination of a smartphone can really impact a person’s life.  With the Internet now in your pocket it can be easy to turn away from what you are really doing and get lost in your Twitter feed.

            The Internet has definitely changed our lives but it is really what you make of it.  It’s the human error that creates the negatives.  Understanding that and what the negatives are can help you use the Internet effectively to get the fullest out of its many capabilities.