For most people, using a social network is enjoyable and useful, however if the potential pitfalls are ignored, an individual could find themselves languishing in the negative effects of social networks such as; Facebook, twitter etc. The keys to having a successful experience on the network is to be attentive to the disadvantages, and educate and protect yourself by using the tools Facebook provides. Combining these with common sense can help mitigate some of the problematic issues generally associated with being a social network member. Sometimes we may think think that we are aware of the negative impacts of social networking, but maybe not as aware as we may like to think we are, as any of us can be the victims of:
- Identity theft/fraud
- Cyberbullying (Ex; threatening,harassing,humiliating,stalking,sexually exploiting a targeted person.)
- Breakdown of 'in person' relationships due to social networking.
- Misinterpretation of 'posts'
- Can be used as a way for illegal activity to commence( ie; Drug deals made, rioting etc.)
- Less time to do things in the real world
- Loss of privacy
- Addiction to checking your profile/s
The list of negatives is endless just as the positives are! But we are going to focus on the negatives as I am just in that kind of pessimistic mood.
This particular post has links or references to the negative impacts of social networking. All sources are reasonably reliable sources of information.
Mainly when people talk about the negative impacts of social networking they refer to cyberbullying, identify theft and computer viruses. But many do not mention how it impacts our daily interactions with other people or our 'in person' social network (referring to the previous post) which is what this article is centralised on.
http://rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/09/fighting-cyberbullies-with-laws-and-laughter/?ref=socialnetworking -New York Times
This particular newspaper article is interesting as it involves a case of a 45 year old woman being bullied online via a fake Facebook account created in her name portraying her as a paedophile and a Drug dealer. This article is interesting because tend to usually in the media hear of only young victims of cyberbullying whereas this article is written about an elder victim. This demonstrates that not only young people are perpetrators or victims of the negative impacts of social networking.
http://soulthinks.com/2011/05/16/social-networking/ -Soul thinks
Alike to the New York times article at the top, it mentions the unproductive health impacts of constant social networking usage, which is very interesting as it has several quotes included in the text.
Watch Charlie Chaplins speech. Although at first glance it doesn't seem relevant it does have some relation to technology today and is also quite poignant.
I found this graph below quite interesting as the results show that cyberbullying cases have actually decreased, which was opposite to what I thought it would be as I would have guessed that as the Internet has grown so would the cases of cyberbullying, but instead the results contradict that. These results show that in February 2010 the cases of cyberbullying have decreased by 19.8% from June 2004. And the even stranger part is in Feb 2010 they had a larger sample size of 4441 people compared to in June 2004 when they had a small sample size of 370 people. The reasons that these results could of been produced could be because either cyberbullying cases have actually gone done which is a great thing, or the people asked could of been giving untruthful answers as to whether they had experienced cyberbullying which could be a possibility as according to statistics by the i-SAFE foundation 'Well over half of young people do not tell their parents when cyber bullying occurs' and 'More than 1 in 3 young people have experienced cyberthreats online.'
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| Cyberbullying statistics dating from June 2004 to February 2010 |
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