As a single parent of a little girl I have alot of paranoia and concern about my daughters' privacy.
With social networking news feed's and profile's my daughter will have the option of 'airing' out her personal life for the world to see, and this is hard to be ok with. Of corse there are securities in allowing just anyone to view her page, however not EVERYONE is a CLOSE friend.
I read through several essays and cribs of livetalk seminars by Danah Boyd on the site provided and quickly realized how advanced these sites have become. The measures a parent takes to secure their childs' safety is astronomical, but the idea that even with all this effort we as parents are still vulnerable to the posibilty of our children engaging in unprotected conversations. However, aside from the nuturing issues parents like me have I do find there to be several good things about social networking as well.
Simple things like saving gas from a trip your daughter wants to her friends house to 'hangout', instead she prefers to Skype her friend and still gets the same sensation. Of corse nothing is like the real physical thing, but I'm sure alot of parents enjoy all the extra time to themselves. While off texting, facebooking, tweeting, and skyping, parents can enjoy the routine in which they've long forgotten. Believe me, its a blessing in disguise, a disguise we call social networking.
Mail is sent faster, communication is quicker, businesses skyrocket from performance, but personal interraction is gone, close friends grow distant, and manuel jobs are lost. Our world can run more efficiently on technology, however money is still the root of all evil and will forever be fought for. Warfare, weapons, intelligence, all things that our money hungry leaders of the World use technology for. Instead we as a people can be using these developed technologies to grow our foods better, connect with each other faster and SHARE what we learn with the rest of the world. If only we started with peace on earth there would be plenty of technology to go around and that is still yet undiscovered. One day soon maybe?
It is easy to understand why I would have mixed feelings about social networking. I feel like we are advancing to fast to keep up with ourselves. Although, I feel like we need to advance to help better ourselves as a people. In the end though, it is always going to be about safety, security, profit, and goals, and as far as I can see developers have done the most with what they have to ensure folks like me that we are heading in the right direction.
