SNS etc.

Through all of these readings, only one point was made apparent to me, and that is that Social Network Sites are controversial. Today, there seems to be a conflict between various people on whether these sites are entertaining or evil, useful or a waste of time, or just an unstoppable phenomenon. The Boyd article did a great job of going over some of these differing standpoints about the uses and misuses of SNS's. Regarding myspace, the author commented on musicians and fans making connections that inevitably led to the sites emergence as one of the top social networking sites. I remember before facebook even came to UNI, using myspace to look up bands to hear the free tracks they provided on their profiles. Although I was not and still am not a member of myspace, I used its services, as I'm sure lots of others have. 

I thought another interesting part of the reading was the stuff on friendster. I didn't really have any idea what friendster was, but from the article, it sounded like they pretty much shot themselves in the foot, because of the way they restricted their users who were mainly looking for freedom of expression, which eventually led them to myspace. 

I have to say that out of all of the readings, I gained the most insight from the Marks article "Keep Out of Myspace". This article brought to my attention some interesting and somewhat frightening facts. The whole idea of making all of the data on these sites universally compatible and obtainable frightens the shit out of me, and although I wouldn't be very affected if such a thing was to happen, its still a strange thought to know that scary dudes in dark rooms somewhere are scouring countless peoples personal information to use for their own devices. However, Marks also points out that its up to mypsace's 80 million plus users to use discretion in what they put out there, and I agree with the thought that this is really the best privacy practice for using social network sites. One other interesting point from these readings comes from the study about kids safety on SNS being "overblown". The study referred to in the article suggests that tiny percentages of kids 9-17 have been contacted by a strange adult online or been cyberbullied. Cool. But, the study was put on by the people that want to keep your kids plugged into the SNS pipeline. Microsoft, News Corp. (the owner of myspace), and Verizon. I found it somewhat curious that these media giants would publish an article challenging the potential harm of these sites.