Social networking

         Since social networking service became so popular in our society, this service has been used in various ways. One of the examples is that professional job recruiters can find qualified candidates on the social networking services. 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. Linkedin says users include executives from all of the Fortune 500 companies. Typing keywords into a search engine, she can scrape the entire network to dig out high-quality candidates that she can't find elsewhere. (Langfitt)

There are more benefits of the social networking technologies. People can get informed the latest news by Twitter or Facebook. There was a gun-shooting accident in garden city, long island recently. All streets were blocked by police and people who were near there were trapped for a few hours and they kept posting what happened and how the situation goes around on Twitter. Like we see in this case, social networking service became the fastest way to inform people about what is going on around us.

However, this advanced technology has dark sides as well. The biggest problem is loss of privacy. Anyone can find someone’s personal information just by searching his or her name on Facebook. Even if the person makes his privacy setting strictly, random people still can see his profile picture or get personal information such as his education status or mutual friends. If you have mutual friends with the person who you try to know about, you can get more information about him or her.

Some people say that young generation does not really care about this loss of privacy. But there is a research which shows that that is not true. The researchers, Danah Boyd and Eszter Hargittai, report that most Facebook users modified their privacy settings at least once in 2009 and that “engagement with privacy settings increased significantly” between 2009 and 2010. (Parry) As we can see from this research, people including young generation care about the loss of privacy and they take this issue seriously.

Social networking service gives us a lot of benefits in modern society. However, it causes some negative issues too as I mentioned above. If these issues can be solved in the future while the benefits are growing, the technologies will make our lives better.

Citation

Langfitt, Frank. “Social Networking Technology Boosts Job Recruiting.” NPR, March 16, 2008.

Parry, Marc, "Who Cares About Facebook Privacy? Students Do" NY Times, July 29, 2010